By Hideaway: Energy and Electricity

Mirage

Today’s guest post by Hideaway reviews our ‘plan’ to transition off fossil energy, and shows it is in fact a mirage.

Hideaway is a new force active at un-Denial and other sites that discuss energy and overshoot. He focusses on the feasibility of transitioning our energy system, and brings a data-backed, reality-based, adult conversation into a space that is more often than not filled with ignorance, hope, and denial.

As I was writing a post about EROEI, I came across data for energy production and consumption from Our World in Data. It’s all very professionally made and ‘free’ for anyone to use in their energy discussions.

I spotted one problem though, the data presented has a caveat, they use the substitution method for non-fossil fuel generated electricity, and in the fine print this is explained as… “ Substituted primary energy, which converts non-fossil electricity into their ‘input equivalents’: The amount of primary energy that would be needed if they had the same inefficiencies as fossil fuels. This ‘substitution method’ is adopted by the Energy Institute’s Statistical Review of World Energy, when all data is compared in exajoules.”

OK, how do they convert non-fossil energy into fossil fuel equivalents??

This chart provides the conversion factor.

An efficiency factor of 0.4 means that nuclear, hydro, solar, wind, biofuels and other renewables are made to look much larger than they really are by a factor of 2.5 in the following chart.

It suggests we are making good progress at replacing fossil with renewable energy, and that with a bit more effort we can convert all fossil energy to renewable electricity.

As is common in energy discussions today, reality differs from what is presented. The following chart shows electricity production by source.

Notice that total world electricity consumption for 2022, which of course must equal production, is 28,660Twh. Yet the above chart for energy consumption by source shows that nuclear, hydro, solar, wind and other renewables are by themselves 11,100Twh. 

If we divide non-fossil electricity consumed by the 2.5 efficiency factor we get 11,740Twh which is close to the correct amount of non-fossil electricity produced. I say close because the energy from non-fossil sources adds up to 641Twh more than that shown on the electricity production chart, so this extra energy must be used for some other purpose, but has still been treated as 2.5 times more efficient.

From the above chart we see 10,212Twh of electricity from coal and 6,443Twh of electricity from gas, and we can calculate how much of the total oil and gas production was used for electricity by multiplying by 2.5.

From the 44,854Twh of total world coal consumption we used 25,525Twh for electricity, and 19,329Twh for other purposes. Likewise for the 39,412Twh of total world gas consumption we used 16,107Twh for electricity and 23,305Twh for other purposes.

With oil we only produced 904Twh of electricity. Assuming the same 40% efficiency for oil as coal and gas, then only 2,260Twh of oil was used for electricty and 50,710Twh was used for other purposes.

We can now complete the following table and use it for assessing how our energy transition is going.

Total primary energy production is 134,313Twh of which wind and solar contribute 3,408Twh or 2.5%.

Electricity is 21.3% of total energy, and fossil fuels produces 61.3% of electricity.

Only 8.2% of total energy comes from nuclear, hydro, solar, wind, and other renewables, and the remaining 91.8% comes from fossil fuels and traditional biomass.

The following chart illustrates this graphically. Blue is all non-electricity energy, orange is electricity from fossil fuels, and grey is electricity from all other sources.

The world is currently trying to replace fossil fuel produced electricity (orange) with electricity from nuclear, hydro, solar, wind and other ‘sustainable’ methods (grey). It is not possible to manufacture, install, or maintain more ‘sustainable’ energy (grey) without fossil fuels. Even the newest mines and factories require fossil fuels in many forms.

There is no plan for the non-electricity portion of energy (blue).

Let’s now consider how fossil fuel and traditional biomass use has changed over time. Are we getting anywhere?

Traditional Biomass was 100% of energy used, according to Our World in Data (OWiD), until coal started to be used in the year 1800 at 1.7% of total energy. Interestingly, they attribute no energy to water power, wind (sails), or animals, perhaps because they were too small or hard to measure.

Fossil Fuels (FF) and Traditional Biomass (TB) contributed 100% of total energy until 1920 when Hydro contributed 1%.

The contribution of FF and TB to total energy changed as follows:

  • <1920 100%
  • 1920 99%
  • 1940 99.2%
  • 1960 98.4%
  • 1980 97.6%
  • 1990 95.2%
  • 2000 94.4%
  • 2010 94.3%
  • 2020 92.1%
  • 2022 91.8%

Most energy analyses lump TB in the mix without paying much attention to the size of its contribution. At 11,111Twh, as measured by OWiD, TB is a larger source of energy than nuclear, hydro, wind, solar and biofuels combined! TB is not going to be replaced by any other type of energy. Most energy analyses place TB on the other side of the ledger from FF, when in fact TB should be added to the FF side, as it is burnt and adds to greenhouse gasses.

The following chart shows the total contribution of energy from non-FF or TB, with columns 1-4 representing the period 1990-2020, and column 5 is what is ‘expected’ to happen by 2050.

We can see how little decarbonization progress we have made over the last 30 years, and the extraordinary progress we expect to make over the next 26 years, towards achieving our climate goals.

Now let’s consider fossil energy used as feedstock for products, and high heat applications.

There are around 1,100 million tonnes of coking coal mined, 700 million tonnes of oil products, plus vast quantities of gas (I couldn’t find the quantity of gas used as feedstock for products or high heat applications) to make 430 million tonnes of plastics, 240 million tonnes of ammonia (fertilizer), 160 million tonnes of asphalt, plus huge amounts of high end heat for cement and steel production, and hundreds of other products and high heat applications.

OWiD does not provide data on energy used for product feedstocks, or high heat, or normal heating, or transportation, or agriculture, or mining. It’s a huge weakness in all energy calculations.

Product feedstocks, by themselves, are a huge gap in our plan for an electricity only future. A world based on renewables would have to make these products from captured carbon, because there is no unused biomass, and we cannot increase our use of biomass without causing significant further damage to the natural world that sustains us. Only if we were willing to decimate remaining forests could we replace fossil fuel products with biomass, especially as world food demand is expected to go up by 60-70% by 2050 according to the FAO.

The only example of using renewable energy to create synthetic fuel, which is the base for all fossil fuel products, is the Haru Oni plant in Southern Chile. It has a 3.4Mw Siemens Gamesa wind turbine with an expected 70% capacity factor producing an expected 20,848Mwh of electricity per year. The first ‘commercial’ (sic) shipment of e-fuels was just sent 11 months after beginning operation, and 8 months after declaring commercial operations, of 24,600 litres. That is a process efficiency of only 1.77%, assuming an annual production of 36,900 litres, without considering the energy expended in the capital ($US75M), or operating and maintenance costs (unknown or not released).

Assuming we had to make ‘products’ from this process, replacing the Coking Coal 1.1Bt = roughly 7,700Twh, plus approximately 10% of a barrel of oil (using all liquids), another 6,205Twh, the raw energy needed from renewables to do this at a 1.77% efficiency rate would be 785,000Twh, or nearly 5 times current annual energy production from all sources!!

This is before adding the energy needed to mine, process, manufacture, and transport the materials required to build it all!!

It’s a ridiculous idea.

Considering I didn’t include the products from natural gas, or any capital, operating, or maintenance costs, and even assuming significant improvements in efficiency, it’s not even close to being possible.

One final calculation to further expose the mirage.

To make the products from renewable energy, with a Haru Oni type efficiency, would require over 1.8B tonnes of copper for the energy production side of the operation, based on 5 tonnes per Mwh of a solar power plant, and over 5 hrs/day of sunshine. This would consume 100% of our current copper production for about 80 years.

Modern civilization is a complex system. It has systems within systems, and a complexity far too high for anyone to understand as a whole. Our discussions and plans for continuing modern civilization after changing from fossil to renewable energy usually concentrate on one minor part of the overall system. It’s the only way to get an answer that looks plausible.

When multiple feedback loops are considered, it becomes obvious that we do not have the energy nor materials to keep modern civilization going for all. Unless of course, the real plan is to retain modern civilization for only a very small portion of humanity, much smaller than present…

February 15, 2024

Rob here, there are many interesting comments by Hideaway below that expand on his energy and materials analysis.

I found one comment particularly interesting because it introduced Hideaway’s background and the life path that led him to his current clear-eyed view of our overshoot predicament.

I’ve copied that comment here for better visibility.

I first learnt about limits to growth in 1975 in my first year of an Environmental Studies course. I’ve been studying and researching everything about energy and resources for decades. My wife and I moved to the country 40 years ago onto a block of land and started farming.

I was the state secretary of an organic farming group and on the certifying committee over 30 years ago. Virtually all organic, biodynamic, permaculture, regenerative properties I came across had similar characteristics. The profitable ones used lots of off property resources, which I argued was unsustainable, because of diesel use etc. I left the organic movement, also decades ago, because there was nothing really sustainable about it.

I was a believer in a renewable future for decades, always believing it was only a matter of time until they became better and cheaper than fossil fuels, which were clearly depleting. I had an accident 15 years ago, and since then have had way more time to do research than just about anyone. I really got stuck into working out how mines could go ‘green’ until I just couldn’t make the numbers work. (BTW I also had some economics and geology in my tertiary studies, but have learnt way more on both subjects in the last 15 years).

Eventually I reluctantly did my own calculations on EROEI because I just couldn’t find anything with an unbiased approach that came close to making sense. I’ve been against nuclear for decades, mainly because of humanities failure to deal with wastes and the nuclear bombs we create, so I very reluctantly calculated the EROEI using my method and was stunned at the results.

I use to be a believer in the 100:1 EROEI that everyone in favor of nuclear constantly states (before I worked it out for myself). The reality is nothing like that, it’s pitiful worse than solar and wind, which instantly made me realise that modern civilization is not sustainable any any way, shape or form.

I also kept checking the numbers I calculated for Saudi oil and a small gas project in WA. Sure enough these came to the rough numbers we need for modernity, but of course fossil fuels are leaving us due to depletion, they are a dead end anyway, even before we consider climate issues.

All my work, over years, has given me a point of reference for when the world as we know it is in real trouble. It’s when the oil extraction decline accelerates to the downside. Everything runs on oil, especially farming and mining and heavy transport. The world falls to pieces without any of these, once they struggle to get the diesel/bunker fuel they need, collapse is baked in. A date of when? no idea, but suspect we will know by higher oil prices and a failure to respond with greater oil production, then the next year a further decline in oil production, while oil prices remain high etc.

Not even coal can save modernity, the EROEI is too low. Even if we went on a massive Coal to Liquids campaign, the energy return for the cost is way too low. When coal was last king we had approximately a 70% rural population even in the west, now we have multiples of the overall population, mostly in cities, and badly degraded agricultural land.

727 thoughts on “By Hideaway: Energy and Electricity”

        1. I knew that the U.S. had some ulterior motives to expanding NATO. I thought it was merely to expand its sphere of influence. I was also being a little bit facetious.

          Liked by 1 person

  1. Dr. Joe Lee with an overview of his story and a brutal take-down of the big ego morons in denial on both sides of the vaccine “debate”.

    https://substack.com/inbox/post/141568091

    @Evermoredetroit @BaffledDoctors @kalashnikity @buddy_franky @TDBSubstack @FringeViews @MakisMD who in their right mind would EVER want to be an anti-vaxxer? the way the DUMB pediatricians made out an anti-vaxxer to be so STUPID?

    so, WHO was an anti-vaxxer before COVID? only the parents whose child was severely vax injured. and the pediatricians make FUN of them?

    and before I arrived on twitter, which of the hypocrite anti covid vax leaders were antivax? NONE.

    they were all DEATHLY afraid to be called an antivaxxer.

    because NONE of them had ANY science. I wasn’t an antivaxxer until made all my discoveries.

    now even STEVE Kirsch is realizing. Damn, this guy is on to something. And he’s making it about something MUCH bigger than JUST the COVID mRNA vaccine. He’s making it about ALL vaccines.

    yes, steve. remember when you wouldn’t let me answer a question?

    pompously telling me YES OR NO, and I kept explaining, it is NOT a yes or no question steve. and when I REFUSED to answer yes or no, he KICKED ME OFF his space. when he’s NOT even a SCIENTIST. that’s the level of science these anti-vax leaders had. oh, lest I forget

    FLEMING is a RESPECTED scientist in the hypocrite anti-covid vax leader world. the complete moron is RESPECTED in this world. So, yes, if a parrot brain word salad idiot is RESPECTED, I guess JJ is a shining star.

    and remember. I do NOT think anti-vaxxers are STUPID. I think they are CORRECT and they are from all walks of life and what they have in common? they KNOW that there was a temporal correlation between the vax and their child being INJURED.

    and the anti-vaxxers NEVER had good scientists represent them, EVER.

    IDIOTS like Nasty Nass who is as CLUELESS as you can possibly be as a physician.

    the anti-vaxxer parents deserved INFINITELY better representation than they EVER had.

    and then I come along and bring some INCREDIBLE science? and the FAKE anti vax hypocrite leaders? Kind of sense that I have something, but they do NOT want to share ANY of their social media fame with me. because THEY want to be the ones to take down the COVID vaccine.

    these UCKERS would RATHER children like “answers for sean” DIE rather than END the COVID vaccine with science that didn’t come from THEM.

    because those who are out and out antivax prior to COVID? A HUGE portion of the population. What parent was EVER happy with vaccines?

    did my kids get all their vaccines? when they were little? yes. was I EVER happy about it? NO. But I was busy as are most young parents and I had NO TIME to take on this fight and didn’t even know what a big deal it actually was.

    @Evermoredetroit @BaffledDoctors @kalashnikity @buddy_franky @TDBSubstack @FringeViews @MakisMD and look at that situation. I question EVERYTHING. and even I didn’t really QUESTION vaccines because the pediatricians REALLY stamped the S for STUPID on antivaxxers.

    but, once COVID came and I started making these bizarre discoveries? In my mind, I smelled the BROKENESS

    and in the winter of 2020, it hit me. Holy shit. you mean this paper, that showed that the measles vaccine was only what, 50% effective in some city in Africa, maybe it was because the vaccine was NEVER effective. but black skin? hides RED DOTS.

    and that’s where my hypothesis for why the decrease in the incidence of measles came from.

    you visualize red dots. you isolate. why would that NOT drastically decrease the incidence of measles?

    but, that would NOT work with dark skin. oh. wow. the measles vax NEVER worked

    so, I brought all this incredible science to RFKjr. AUGUST 2022. and he rejected it all, in spite of even HIS consultants, Dr. Paul Alexander saying in the email that he thinks I’m a 100% correct.

    because the hypocrite antivax fake leader world? they’re a bunch of DUMMIES

    and the antivaxxer moms deserve INFINITELY better representation than these IDIOTS.

    So, I’m trying to make up for how LONG antivaxxer parents have been made fun of.

    So, it’s my DUTY to call 67,000 pediatricians DUMB and explain to them VERY carefully why that’s TRUE.

    So, I go everywhere and make fun of vaccine scientists. I even make a point of explaining extremely carefully how they can NEVER tell anyone they’re smart. Because if they do, I make them EVIL and INTENTIONAL baby killers.

    I carefully spell it all out so they will want to ONLY tell their friends how DUMB they are.

    I KNOW the STRING mechanism will destroy half the vaccines on earth, and the other half will be DRAGGED down and the vaccine straggler that isn’t destroyed by that? 156 pges.

    and the jj coueys of this DARK anti vax hypocrite leader world? he could have been somebody. But, he chose to be with RFKjr. and he PISSED all over me to kiss up to RFKjr and told me that the String Mechanism was OVERLY SIMPLISTIC. but RFKjr STILL fired the dummy.

    and not ONLY am I going to get the pediatricians BACK for all the BELITTLING they did to these poor suffering antivax moms whose children were vax injured, the STRING MECHANISM will bring the antivax moms their COMPLETE VALIDATION that they were CORRECT-

    there isn’t a PHYSICIAN in the world that doesn’t worry about their “malpractice insurance.” sometimes, they wake up in a sweat, worried that they forgot to PAY their malpractice carrier.

    A physician may have their car insurance lapse. or homeowners they may not even know .

    but, there isn’t a physician in the US that ever lets their malpractice insurance lapse. EVER. okay, there’s always that ONE dummy.

    that’s how IMPORTANT their malpractice insurance is for them. so, the REASON why the AAPeds and texas children’s lets me MOUTH OFF to them?

    they are DEATHLY afraid to lose their MALPRACTICE insurance and I, like a WILEY COYOTE, put them in a TERRIBLE TRAP where, an accidental BLOCKING of me would cause them their VACCINE LEGAL IMMUNITY.

    Do I REALLY believe that Texas Children’s Hospital lets me make all those negative comments about DUMB pediatricians because they CARE ABOUT the safety and health of children?? NOT FOR A MOMENT do I believe that.

    They don’t want to lose their VACCINE LEGAL IMMUNITY.

    Like

  2. If you enjoy scathing criticism about colonialism, capitalism, and our meat industry, this video is for you. (you dont need to have seen the movie to appreciate his analysis)

    Like

  3. Half the comments on Peak Prosperity’s latest video are idiots ineloquently trying to talk about ‘abiogenic petroleum origin’ theory. They go on about fuel not being made from fossils. LMFAO these people are dumber than flat-earthers, or at least on the same level… (see what I did there)
    How on this round earth did Chris Martenson develop such a following of muppets? LOL

    Liked by 1 person

        1. If I hear someone described as “Malthusian”, I automatically know they have at least some understanding of how the world works. I actually view the term “Malthusian” as a complement.

          Liked by 2 people

    1. He probably managed it by giving them a large dollop of the nonsense they yearn for. Views makes money on You Tube and maybe adds a few more Peak Prosperity paying members at $30 per month. A nice little earner for Chris.

      Liked by 1 person

    2. Minerals like copper are also abiotic, but that does not make them renewable.
      https://www.resilience.org/stories/2004-10-03/abiotic-oil-science-or-politics/
      Abiotic oil theories are just wishful thinking.

      So, the abiotic oil theory is irrelevant to the debate about peak oil and it would not be worth discussing were it not for its political aspects. If people start with the intention of demonstrating that the concept of “peak oil” was created by a “Zionist conspiracy” or something like that, anything goes. In this case, however, the debate is no longer a scientific one. Fortunately, as Colin Campbell said, “Oil is ultimately controlled by events in the geological past which are immune to politics.”

      Liked by 1 person

      1. These people just make shit up, they think it can renew at any speed that we need. LOL I’ve tried debating with them, they got no idea. They don’t even understand the definitions of the words they’re using

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  4. B today explains entropy and why reuse is much better than recycling.

    https://thehonestsorcerer.substack.com/p/the-arrow-of-time

    So, can recycling and “renewables” save the day, the economy, or at least the climate? Those who paid attention so far are now shouting at the top of their lungs: no! Of course not. Viewed through the lens of physics, recycling is just another material transformation, inevitably increasing entropy and thus the pollution load of the environment, by releasing toxic fumes, contaminated waste water, and using up a tremendous amount of energy — only to turn all of it into waste heat. Besides, it also uses a limited resource: the amount of stuff already in circulation. Something, which could only shrink with every round of recycling.

    You see, entropy is the reason why it is a much better idea to reuse and repurpose a product instead of recycling it, and why the idea of a circular economy powered by “renewables” directly violates the second law of thermodynamics. Since according to this law, overall entropy must increase with every round of recycling, we will always lose a certain percentage of the material (much like “the devil’s cut”), and a tremendous amount of energy in the process — none of which can be replaced by using “renewable” energy. Thus the only question remaining is this: ‘Which one will run out first: the high quality energy needed to do recycling, or the material left to be recycled?’ Based on the data I see, my strong sense is, that we will run out of the necessary high quality energy first, and more than 90% of our material wealth will be left to rust in place. Taken to its logical conclusion, and fast forward a million years, the relentless increase in entropy will eventually turn all our high tech infrastructure into a thin sliver of rock strata, covered with an immense amount of sediment. But let’s not get ahead of ourselves.

    We are living in truly pivotal times. A sea change in material and energy use is coming, something, which will wash away our current lifestyle completely, yet it will take decades to fully unfold. Combined with all the negative side effects of increased entropy, like an accelerating climate change, the accumulation of toxic chemicals, or a rapid degradation of our ecosystems, humanity is facing its biggest challenge yet. And what do we get? Magical thinking and proclamations, flying face-first against the laws of thermodynamics.

    Like

  5. If you’re hoping Israel pays a price for genocide, today’s essay by Indrajit Samarajiva might provide some short-term hope, however in the long-term, everyone loses.

    https://indi.ca/120-days-of-resistance/

    ‘Israel’ is fighting on at least six fronts. Basically a perfect cube of fucked. To the north, against Hezbollah. To the east, against Iraq, Syria, and Iran. Then to the south, against Yemen. Within Palestine, the Resistance is literally underground, and the malevolent presence of Iran is all around. And this is just one battle in a hundred-year war of liberation. Time is not on ‘Israel’s’ side. In every cardinal direction and in every dimension of spacetime, ‘Israel’ is fucked. They are winning the genocide and losing the war.

    Then, within each front, ‘Israel’ is under attack from multiple armies. So take six fronts and multiply it into one-hundred armies. That’s the number of combatants, by ‘Israeli’ design. Because they assassinate so many leaders, the Resistance is massively decentralized. ‘Israel’ absolutely not just fighting Hamas, they’re fighting the whole Jihadi Premier League in Palestine, and the Jihadi Champions League across the region.

    The Al Aqsa Mosque in Al Quds—the at the center of the six-front infographic above—is the spiritual heart of this struggle. It’s why Hamas called the battle the Al Aqsa Flood. The Carbon Crusaders defile this (and honestly, all) holy sites in Islam, but this can’t go on forever. Because ‘Israel’s’ six front war is just part of a six-front world war that its parent empire (America) is fighting, and losing. ‘Israel’s six-front ‘cube of fucked’ is contained in a higher dimensional cube of even greater fuckery, the collapse of American (ie, White) Empire on multiple fronts. And that cube is contained in an even higher-dimension, the collapse of the entire ecosystem, because of all the carbon crusading! There are wheels within wheels, and they’re all broken.

    As the higher cubes collapse so do the lower, or is it the other way round? It’s hard to tell with collapse, causes and effects get all mixed up. The collapse of America both accelerates the ‘Israeli’ collapse, which accelerates American collapse in a feedback loop. That’s the nature of collapse, I guess. There’s a million ways for things to be in a ‘disordered’ state and very few for it to be ‘ordered’. The higher process at work here is entropy, and that’s inexorable. You can’t just kill your way out of this process—projecting entropy onto the children and the poor—as much as Empire is trying. You can fight politics, you can fight ethics, but you can’t fight physics. Things fall apart.

    The Carbon Colony of ‘Israel’ is simply collapsing on six-fronts, as the White Empire is collapsing on at least six-fronts, while the planet itself is infinitely fucked. Empire has the power to make things worse, but they can’t make things better. At best they can leave a razed Gaza, a radioactive planet, and a ravaged Earth, but they can’t save themselves. There are too many historical, physical, and geological processes going on. As big as Empire is, they’re small in comparison to the gods, and all the Gods—old and new—are furious. How do you fight against the gods? You just condemn yourselves. That’s all this wretched White Empire is doing. We’ll see how their global empire is falling apart in the next episode, followed by the climate they’re leaving in ruins. It’d be a proud victory over great evil were it not so Pyrrhic in the end. Allah be with the victims.

    Liked by 1 person

    1. Although Tucker can be wrong on some things, like climate change, he is the only person out there in the MSM that has any humility and can admit when he’s wrong. It’s so refreshing and sad.
      AJ

      Like

      1. There’s been zero mainstream discussion of the content of the Putin interview. If they disagree, they should reply with fact based substance to show he is wrong. Instead they behave like children and call him names. How do journalists sleep at night? Same way doctors sleep I guess. Integrity is very scarce today.

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        1. Personally, I want nothing to do with Putin and wouldn’t trust him at all. Not much different from other politicians I guess but the way he’s ensured that no-one who might take more than 5% of the vote gets to stand against him. They are either jailed or get tangled in paperwork. It’s incredible that a potential candidate needs 100,000 signatures to even start to fill in the paperwork to stand in the election. Almost everyone who’s tried has failed to get past the election commission, even something as minor as spelling mistakes in the paperwork can invalidate a potential candidate. People need a choice. Putin ensures they don’t get one.

          Just my two cents worth.

          Like

          1. As usual showing that your thinking is very limited in fact I would say that it is not even worth 2 cents.

            I wonder where you get your info from, probably the same sources telling you vaccines are safe and effective. Just take it to get along.

            Putin is no doubt a tough dictator/president but he has made Russia a very strong country again for which I am sure the citizens are thankful. He has the strongest approval rating – polled by the same companies that do polling in western politics.

            One thing that most people don’t take into account is that the west has been constantly trying to break Russia up to steal its resources. Practically most of the opposition to Putin are West sponsored. He knows (and his political allies) that once they get in they will dismantle Russia through FREE TRADE which screws every country involved.

            Keep the change.

            Like

            1. Think what you want, Niko. If Putin is so confident in his position, he wouldn’t need to ensure that no half-serious candidate stands against him. I don’t think any of your comments on candidates is specific to Russia. Didn’t I say that most politicians aren’t much different?

              I’m amazed that some people think that they are the ones to have access to full and accurate information about the subject at hand.

              Like

              1. I think that he is confident in his position because they stop western puppets right from the get go. The pattern from the west causing revolutions and then installing their guy is very obvious.

                Again if Russians are better off in practically every way since Putin has taken the presidency, what is the problem? “He doesn’t let our piece of shite get a standing so that we can run the country”.

                You seem to fail to realise that Russia has been on a war footing due to the west’s encroachment for the last 20 years. You don’t hand over the reins to weak hands while in this position.

                I would rather a Putin in OZ than the intestinal worms we’ve had since Paul Keating (1996) left the prime minister position. Let’s not get started on the pathetic arse dribblings that Canada and NZ have leading their countries.

                I imagine many will keep saying how bad Putin is when they are sitting at home shivering in the dark with the power out, trying hard to forget that Russia will still have all those fossil fuels to keep burning.

                Like

                1. OK. Seems like an argument for any actions Putin takes but that’s your prerogative. I said “personally” in my top comment and, personally, I can’t support dictators, apparently benign or not.

                  As regards fossil fuels, they will eventually become uneconomical to extract. So it doesn’t really matter if some countries can keep going longer. Ultimately, we’re all in the same boat as regards the polycrisis.

                  Like

  6. Dear Charles, Rob, Chris, Monk & Stellarwind72.

    thank you for your replies and insight.
    I feel like my past usual-self for the first time in months, words are powerful.

    Charles,

    I can only cherish and embrace your kind words, they radiate warmth and gentleness.
    
I hope you radiate such tenderness to others and they appreciate it in return.
    

I do agree, what’s the point in suffering mentally over things which are out of control. 

    Cheers, to life without fear. 



    ”Those who defeat others are strong, those who defeat themselves are mighty.” 
- Lao Tzu


    In regards to sharing deeper reflections, I cannot promise something which I cannot keep. 
However, if such a time ever arrives when I do share, I’ll do so gladly and I hope Charles it will be to your liking. 



    Rob,

    health is indeed wealth, a simple fact often overlooked. 

    Routine & prepping provides a sense of ”control” which is key for mental wellness (physical too if need arises).
    Choice of profession will be fascinating, mixed emotions on that front… 


    Chris,

    Catton & Meadows might have arrived to similar conclusions which Charles mentioned. 

    ”Stupid is as stupid does” – Forrest Gump

Regarding the predicament.
    * H.Sapiens is tenacious, adaptive & innovative.
    * 99.99% less than todays 8 billion means ~800 000.
    * Only time will tell.

    Being alive is a miracle in itself, engaging in mindfulness and appreciating the moments is a wonderful practice. 
Closing your eyes for a deep breath, to appreciate the earth and allowing yourself to enjoy a delicious meal is superb.

    Monk,

    

I live in Finland, Helsinki.

    

Price regarding land and sustenance, I can relate.
    
- I am not fond at all when it comes on extended periods of darkness & cold. 



    Did/do you have some country/location in mind in your fantasies?
    – Excluding the financial side of things, New Zealand seems otherwise splendid with natural beauty (seems to be comfortable weather year round, if I’m not mistaken?)


    
Importance of relatives is 100%, as long as the capability for critical thinking is included.

    – Unfortunately, I cannot relate… 



    Stellarwind72,

    being young was supposed to be easy, I guess we can’t have everything after all.
    Take care, we got a long way to go!

    Warm & kind regards,

    

ABC


    Liked by 3 people

    1. We joke in NZ that Finland is the New Zealand of Europe. Your winters are tough the weather is definitely much better here. Cold in winter, but no snow. You would definitely like it here, it is very green and blue.
      As I understand, Finland has high rates of mental illness and a rather tough social environment. Is that true?
      Your relatives will likely never get it, but they are still important as long as they are safe to be around.
      Do you think NATO/Russia puts Finland at risk? It is scary times for that part of the world

      Like

    1. Dear Rob,

      

I hope you’re well.

      
I’d like to hear your thoughts regarding this matter (and everyone else’s too).

      

An entity by the name;
      Eclipse Now

      commented on Andrii Zvorygin videos (links below).


      – Claiming that Dr.Simon Michaux presents matters which are not entirely up to date and/or are in fact incorrect, whilst presenting countering perspectives on the matter regarding energy and resources. 



      Eclipse Now’s website:

      https://eclipsenow.wordpress.com

      Can’t wait to get a more insight from all of you,

      Kind regards, 



      ABC




      Like

      1. I did a quick skim of Eclipse’s site.

        If you are aware of our overshoot polycrisis and are seeking reasons for optimism I guess this is an above average site. He tries to find a positive spin for every issue.

        His prescription for climate change is revealing. It demonstrates he has zero understanding of our predicament and therefore we can safely ignore everything else he says.

        Action – what can you do?

        Climate change is the main environmental threat that weaponizes all the others. Here are a list of the primary things we can do.

        First – protect your money

        Please – divest your superannuation from fossil fuel funds. This will stop your investments funding the problem, while protecting your retirement fund from tanking! Fossil fuels are fast becoming stranded assets and losing value.

        Then – especially given the higher energy costs of 2020 – buy solar panels for your roof – if you can. They’ll pay for themselves in just a few years.

        Second – don’t start a blog – start a conversation with family and friends

        The last thing the world needs is another environmental blog! But what it does need is people who read the latest environmental papers – or at least watch quality Youtubers – and shares them with friends. The world has too many blogs. But it is lacking in conversations with friends and family about this stuff that matters. Be polite. Listen to their concerns. Say you’ll think about it and send them something short (if you’re not up to a whole presentation yourself without getting flustered.) And engage. Don’t shout. Do listen. And sum up with something positive – like – “I think all the clean energy tech is there. And yes – we need to make sure farmers are compensated fairly when we build powerlines through their property. But this whole thing will pay for itself in lower healthcare bills when it is finished!” Then send them a short youtube video later on.

        Third – join a group

        Finally – join a local activist group. You will get to know your own neighbourhood, city and state better, make new friends, and make an impact. Use this UN reference for tips on what to do. There’s bound to be something if you just google your city and “climate action” – or check Facebook groups for your area. If not, try the international groups below. Also – write letters and raise awareness of how our governments give tax breaks and subsidies to the very industries that increasingly poison us, change the climate, destroy ecosystems and leave us vulnerable to the whims of Vladmir Putin and other Petro-Dictators!

        Liked by 1 person

        1. There is also this bit from that page …. “But unlike oil and gas and coal, every mineral we mine for wind and solar and batteries can be recycled forever.”

          OK, so what do we recycle 100% of?? Nothing, and often lose a percentage of whatever during the recycling process. Plus of course most recycling these days involves downcycling, the recycled material is not used again for the original purpose.

          I wish that just one of the people that propose recycling as the answer for materials, would do a full energy calculation on the collection, sorting and separation of components, then transport and energy used in making all the equipment needed for the recycling and the final process itself. No-one ever does this, recycling is just another hand wave of what we can do.

          Like everything else in the world, if it was energy saving and cheaper (both are really the same!!), then it would already be happening on massive scales as those doing it would have an economic advantage. Just because it works with steel and copper, doesn’t mean it will work with everything else.

          It is so easy to pull apart the arguments of cornucopians. Why? because it’s mostly make believe..

          Liked by 2 people

  7. Apparently, Vladimir Putin thinks that Poland is responsible for starting WWII.
    https://notesfrompoland.com/2019/12/23/putin-blames-poland-for-ww2-and-says-soviet-occupation-saved-lives/
    https://www.theguardian.com/world/2019/dec/30/polish-pm-furious-at-putin-rewriting-history-of-second-world-war

    Also, Donald Trump apparently told a NATO member to pay its share or he’d ‘encourage’ Russia to do what it wanted
    https://apnews.com/article/trump-nato-foreign-aid-russia-2b8054a9fe185eec34c2c541cece655d
    Trump doesn’t know when to keep his mouth shut.

    Liked by 2 people

  8. Good overview of the Eurodollar system and its history which underpins the US reserve currency, and why the Chinese yuan will never replace it.

    Jeff Snider thinks a digital currency is the only possible replacement candidate. Which I think means when extreme debt causes the US dollar to hyperinflate, causing the real economy and it’s grids to collapse, there will be no replacement, and global trade will drop to a fraction of today.

    Like

    1. https://bitcoinmagazine.com/business/tokenized-inc-blackrocks-plan-to-own-the-fractionalized-world-

      TOKENIZED, INC: BLACKROCK’S PLAN TO OWN THE FRACTIONALIZED WORLD
      In the aftermath of the recent Bitcoin ETF approvals, BlackRock’s Larry Fink revealed that soon everything will be “ETF’d” and tokenized, threatening to fractionalize not just existing assets and commodities, but the natural world, reducing most living things into Wall Street financial products to be traded on a single, universal ledger.

      Saludos

      el mar

      Liked by 1 person

  9. Dear Monk,

    How cold and for how long does it last in NZ? (Celsius)

    New Zealand seems stunning with its landscapes.
    I can see how NZ thinks that, in a way I suppose it is similar.

    In the decades or century to come, it is very likely that Sweden & Finland will become very popular when things start to crumble.
    – Plenty of water, forests, arable land (plenty of forests which can be cleared for land), small & educated population, minerals and other resources.
    – Governments which are supposedly “least corrupt in the world” for now…
    – ”Liberal and open” (until those values are not appreciated)
    – Immigration causes strain in Sweden (Europe overall) due to integration issues will likely increase in the future. 


    Finnish people are suffering because of:
    – The weather
    – The economy
    – Alcohol consumption
    – A sort of backwater recently developed culture which is shy and introverted yet prideful which fails to express this in a healthy way. Hidden and myopic arrogance (world class ranks etc.)
    – Forgot it’s history and “roots” (part of Sweden & Russia before etc.)
    – Thinks everything is alright when not.
    – Politicians talk same nonsense as all the rest.
    – A relative of mine just became the president (not joking). Don’t ask me what I think about all of it…


    People in Finland are more open to discuss ideas perhaps than most (at least when foreigners say them), yet the cultural brainwashing and domestic broadcasted discussion going on here is “postmodernism and woke” and rather pathetic and myopic at best.
    – Covid was a prime example.
    – Simon Michaux has mentioned that he’s presented government officials his findings, they supposedly seem to be at least somewhat willing to engage in some form of talk about the problems. 


    I have had unfortunate experiences regarding people.
    – My trust has been betrayed many times by family, friends & government.
    – (I forgive all of humanity and all of them intellectually because of biology, determinism and lack of free will etc.) yet the level of denial is so overwhelming (in my family at least, presumably a majority of all people) that it mostly is just as effective to talk to a wall.
    – I also do not share strong bonds of affection towards my immediate relatives, if they’d cease to exist my life would be magnitudes less complicated for multiple reasons.
    – I don’t know what to think of all that as of yet in the larger picture of things, human relations are wildly entropic to say the least.

    NATO.
    I cannot make any sort of reasonable assumption regarding that front.
    (Who really can anyway?)

    Saw a poster of anti-nato military base.
    – If they construct one, that will be extremely disheartening…

    Finland fears Russia, has done so for a long time, “understandably so.”
    – Yet seems to forget the plausibility of “soft power interference” which might seep in through foreign influences (EU & NATO)
    – Finland is not led to with actual domestic interest in mind, hasn’t been for decades.

    From my limited ignorant perspective Finland is not and hasn’t been a problem for Russia.
    – No hostility towards Russia, only defence based measures. (NATO on the other hand is a different matter entirely.)
    – Russia also has its hands full, (try to govern such a large nation).
    – Arctic sea hydrocarbons on the other hand, that will be intense.

    

I hope this clarified some aspects.



    Kind regards,



    ABC


    Liked by 2 people

        1. But I guess that would be -4°C at night. Average daily highs, apart from mountainous areas, range from about 9 or 10°C in the deep south to about 15°C in the far north, in the worst winter months. Of course, there are colder snaps, especially in the south. It’s fairly mild most of the year, not too hot, not too cold. Usually. In my experience, anyway. And, yes, many areas do seem to get quite windy fairly often. The odd tropical storm, or its remnants, hits us.

          Liked by 1 person

  10. Dr. Tom Murphy today.

    https://dothemath.ucsd.edu/2024/02/sustainable-timescales/

    EVENT TIME
    Big Bang 13.8 Gyr
    Sun/Earth Formation 4.6 Gyr
    First Biology 3.7–4.2 Gyr
    Cambrian Explosion 540 Myr
    Last Mass Extinction 65 Myr
    First Apes 20 Myr
    Homo Genus (Humans) 2.5 Myr
    Homo Sapiens 300 kyr
    Anatomically Modern Humans 150 kyr
    Agricultural Revolution 10 kyr
    Writing, Cities 5 kyr
    Modern Science 400 yr
    Fossil Fuels 150 yr
    Bulk of Ecological Destruction 50 yr

    Unsustainable outcomes can be accomplished arbitrarily quickly—think: global nuclear warfare. Sustainability, on the other hand, necessarily concerns itself with far-future outcomes. No species has ever had to deliberately consider such distant time horizons, but no other species has had the capacity to enact such rapid and grossly unsustainable practices as we witness today. Will our intelligence prove to be too much of a “good” thing and turn us into evolution’s deadliest blunder, or will at least some of us learn to tuck back into our family, no longer hubristic enough to play at being gods?

    Liked by 1 person

  11. I did some basic energy and water calculations on the scary AMOC study (1) that’s making headlines, so you don’t have to.

    It’s quite simple, so please don’t let the orders of magnitude scare you off.

    This is a Big F*cking Deal (BFD)!

    First, what are we talking about here?

    What is the Atlantic Meridional Overturning Circulation?

    It’s a shitload of water transporting a shit ton of heat energy North, through the Atlantic Ocean!

    The study starts with an AMOC strength of about 15 sverdrups, or 15,000,000 cubic meters of ocean water per second.

    This transports about 1 PW (1 petawatt = 1*10^15 watt) of heat North from the Southern Hemisphere and the tropics.

    That’s about 32 ZJ (32 zettajoules = 32*10^21 joules) of heat per year.

    When the AMOC tips, most of this ocean heat transport stops.

    The obvious question people are asking is “could this happen any time soon and how?”

    The study (as have others, for example @DrJamesEHansen et al. (2016) (2), which is not referenced for some reason) shows that a lot of fresh water input from rainfall and Greenland ice melt could shut this thing down this century.

    The more fresh water is added, the slower the AMOC becomes.

    The tipping in the model happens at about 0.5 sverdrups (0.5 Sv, 500,000 m³ per second) of fresh water input.

    There is a lot of fresh water waiting to add those 0.5 Sv, if only there was enough heat available to melt the ice sheet of Greenland.

    0.5 Sv is 1.6*10^13 m³ of water per year.

    Greenland holds 2.85*10^15 m³ of ice, which could provide about 170 years of 0.5 sverdrups of fresh water (after which global sea levels would be over 7 meters higher).

    To melt 0.5 sverdrups worth of ice for a year takes 5.3 ZJ of heat.

    Since 1970, our greenhouse gases have caused about 450 ZJ of additional heat to accumulate in the Earth system. ~90% of that warmed the oceans.

    Aerosols, notably from coal plants and ships burning sulfur rich fuels, have reduced that heat accumulation.

    Now that we are reducing aerosols, more heat is accumulating.

    The larger North Atlantic Ocean region shows a spike in how much sunlight is being absorbed over recent years, while higher temperatures cause more heat radiation to space.

    The net effect is a spike of over 2.4 W/m² above the 2000-2009 average. This spike added 4 ZJ of heat over 12-months:

    The record high global energy imbalance is now (2023) about 1.8 W/m², which adds 29 ZJ of heat to the Earth system over a year.

    To make a long story short, the heat is there to melt enough Greenland ice to shut the AMOC down.

    And we don’t need all that heat to be directed to the melting of ice, as more precipitation also contributes.

    And of course, we are only making the climate forcing and Earth’s Energy Imbalance worse by rapidly increasing greenhouse gas concentrations while decreasing aerosols.

    Sorry I couldn’t make this more hopeful.
    But numbers don’t lie.

    Liked by 1 person

  12. Today’s interview of Dr. Bret Weinstein by Joe Rogan is good with a nice recap of the covid and mRNA evils, and how someday soon we must stop the cabal that is controlling our governments.

    The problem is that both Rogan and Weinstein are blind to overshoot and therefore have no ability to connect the dots on probable motivations of the cabal.

    After reading Weinstein’s book twice I was pretty sure he was overshoot aware but in this interview he questions the reality of a climate emergency and joins Rogan at deriding population reduction initiatives.

    Liked by 1 person

  13. Excellent new one today from the great Sid Smith looking at the magnitude of human overshoot and its impacts.

    He starts with a tale reminiscent of the late great Dr. Albert Bartlet, then provides a superb description of industrial agriculture, and concludes with a few wise words of advice.

    Like the bunnies we live a finite meadow we call earth, unlike the bunnies there are no counterparts to coyotes for us.

    Humans are behaving no different than any other species would in the same situation.

    From nature’s perspective, overshoot is not a bug but a feature.

    Humans are a different species today than we were a few thousand years ago. We are now detritivores that sustain ourselves by consuming the organic waste of dead plants and animals.

    The green revolution changed our primary dependence from current photosynthesis to past photosynthesis.

    Malthus was not wrong, but his theory addressed human omnivores, not human detritivores.

    Switching to renewable energy does nothing to solve our resource depletion problem. You can’t use electricity to fertilize the fields or to replenish the aquifers.

    If you listen, you can already here Malthus knocking at the door.

    When viewed in the rear view mirror, industrial agriculture looks less and less like a great achievement, and more and more like a great tragedy.

    Liked by 2 people

    1. Accurate, but again, depressing reality of our more extreme overshoot condition and how both civilization and population will collapse soon. Almost make me want to have a drink, but I’m trying to limit the alcohol 🤐. Too bad most of humanity is in deep denial – if we weren’t maybe we could lessen the suffering that is to come and the damage that we are doing to the ecosphere. MPP and denial till the end and collapse.
      AJ

      Liked by 1 person

      1. Why does a species block the use of safe and effective drugs, to coerce billions to be injected with an inadequately tested novel gene therapy technology, and then denies that clots and other side-effects killed millions?

        What kind of species is this?

        Is there any similar behavior in any other species on this planet?

        Like

        1. I don’t know. Other species haven’t built the kinds of complex societies that even make such a behaviour possible. And human societies will become increasingly less complex in time. Regardless of the internal societal squabbles, the environmental predicaments we face are entirely consistent with a clever tool using species. Which is what Sid Smith was essentially saying.

          Liked by 1 person

    2. I’m a huge fan of Sid Smith’s work. Yet like every other message of how stuffed humanity really is, it just gets ignored.
      Mind you the “How to enjoy” bit really should be ‘Try to enjoy the lead up to’ TEOTW, but it’s probably too many letters..
      TTETLUTTEOTW….

      Like

  14. A new video released today by the widow of Michael Dowd.

    Michael Dowd delivered this online sermon August 2021 for Community Unitarian Universalists of Brighton, Michigan. Following Michael’s death in October 2023, the service leader of that sermon (Terry Sharik) and I (Michael’s widow, Connie Barlow) decided in 2024 to edit and post this sermon as a legacy piece.

    As video editor, I extracted the sermon from the full church service video — and lo and behold discovered that I myself told a Story for All Ages during the service. So that is included too. The story was titled “Helping Forests Walk”, and I moved it from near the beginning of the service to the end of this video. So it is Michael’s sermon that begins right away.

    For a well-organized and linked list of all of Michael Dowd’s videos during the last half of the 18 years he and I lived on the road, visit the archival webpage I created for exactly that purpose. Its title: “Michael Dowd: Postdoom Pastor”: https://thegreatstory.org/michaeldowd

    And absolutely do visit the Postdoom.com website that Michael founded in 2019. The new leadership since Michael’s death have been greatly improving the website graphics, accessibility, and resources for serving the community for which it was designed. Bravo!
    https://postdoom.com/

    Liked by 3 people

    1. Hi Rob,

      Thank you so much for sharing that uplifting posthumous sermon which resonates so clearly with me at this time. What a fitting offering to our new young friend ABC (and all the rest of us in the alphabet soup!) as a perspective striving for peace and acceptance in these days allotted to us. Each day is a complete universe, suffice in itself with beginning, choices, and closing. Our lives are still our own story to write and enact, and that is a privilege and grace unfathomable.

      I trust everyone is finding and sharing beauty, contentment and goodwill in every day.

      Namaste, friends.

      Liked by 2 people

  15. Almost none of the influential covid dissidents have embraced string theory, nor have they explained why it is wrong.

    Are they all blocked by big egos and Lee’s abrasive personality?

    Or could it be the dissidents don’t want to kill mRNA if that means traditional vaccines will also have to be withdrawn?

    Before covid I remember being certain that anti-vaxxers were crazy people and wanted nothing to do with them.

    Then I learned that everything our leaders and health professionals said about covid and mRNA was exactly opposite of correct, and they killed and harmed millions of people with unethical and unscientific policies.

    Now I don’t believe a word they say about anything, including that traditional vaccines are safe and effective.

    I say burn it all down and start over with new people that have good ethics and sound scientific skills.

    Here is the latest interview with Dr. Joe Lee from a few days ago.

    https://jamesroguski.substack.com/p/precipitins

    Precipitins

    What if this hypothesis is proven to be correct?

    This article is a discussion of a hypothesis that MAY explain a number of previously unexplained phenomena.

    It is a fundamental principle of immunology that when antibodies (Ab) are in the presence of antigens (Ag), the antibody-antigen complex can form cross-links and become large enough to precipitate out of solution.

    These are commonly referred to as “precipitins.”

    Is it possible that immune complexes (spike protein + antibodies) can form on the lining of arteries? Is it likely? Is it almost a certainty?

    Is it possible that these immune complexes can trigger a cascade of events involving platelets, fibrin (and possibly amyloid protein) that results in the creation of the white, elastic structures that embalmers have been finding in 20-30% of the bodies of the deceased ever since the COVID-19 jabs started to be administered?

    Is it possible that smaller “precipitins” can form throughout the body and cause a multitude of diseases?

    The scientific method demands scrutiny and discussion of this phenomena and the hypothesis that may explain it.

    Post your ideas, opinions, constructive criticisms and/or supportive evidence in the comment section below…

    Please watch the entire video below…
    (Yes, I know that the video is 2 hours long. Please watch it anyway, it’s important!)

    https://rumble.com/v4cdtsx-precipitins.html

    Much more detail on Dr. Lee’s string theory is provided at the above link.

    Like

    1. Dr. Joe Lee suspects RFK Jr. has told the dissidents to ignore string theory, and they respect RFK Jr. enough to do as asked.

      Why would RFK Jr. want to block string theory?

      Maybe because if he was associated with killing most vaccines he’d have no chance of being elected.

      So being elected is more important than stopping harm to children?

      Like

      1. Like

        1. Like

          1. Like

            1. Liked by 1 person

    2. Fascinating – you can produce empirical data in the lab to support test this hypothesis. This is helpful rather than relying on clinical trials run by the vaccine manufacturers. I need to spend some time getting my head around his argument – but heaps to learn as I don’t have a chemistry background argh

      Like

      1. In case you or anyone else missed it, string theory is only one piece of Dr. Joe Lee’s take-down of vaccines.

        Clots explained by string theory is the easiest piece to understand and evokes the most emotion to stop the shots.

        A bigger and probably more important piece of Lee’s theory is that the whole premise of vaccines is wrong: antibodies do not protect us from viruses.

        I do not understand this latter piece well enough yet to defend it, but it smells correct to me.

        If he’s right, the entire medical profession is composed of idiots.

        Liked by 1 person

          1. Thanks! The immune system is so complicated my old brain struggles to retain the details. My take-away is that mRNA breaks the immune system and vaccinated people will continue to get sicker.

            A kinder person than me might forgive mistakes made by doctors in the early days of a global panic. There is no forgiveness for continuing to push mRNA today. Doctors are evil morons.

            This essay by Rintrah and the discussion in the comments are a must read.

            We simply have too many people dying again, compared to what you would expect during this time of the year. The rest of Europe has the same problem.

            Am I supposed to just keep my mouth shut and move on, when people are dying, after they were threatened with social ostracism if they did not sign up for an experimental vaccine? These are just the people dying, I have also personally met people who began to develop autoimmune nerve conditions, within weeks of receiving the third shot. Again, am I supposed to just ignore it, as the problem steadily grows worse?

            So what’s going to happen now?

            In the weeks ahead, we’re going to see versions of SARS2 spread that have improved their ability to establish chronic infections. There are multiple routes for this. The BA.2.86 versions can take the backbone of the other versions. But equally important, there’s a very easy path to improve the Furin cleavage site (S:679R), thereby making it easier to spread from one cell to another.

            These increasingly chronic infections are hard to test for and they’re associated with other secondary viral and bacterial infections. A lot of the observed pneumonia in people right now is SARS2 that’s simply going unrecognized.

            Eventually, we will see the same thing as we recently saw in South Africa: These persistent infections will end up with shorter loops in the N-Terminal Domain, turning this virus into something more similar to the original SARS. You will see deletions emerge in these regions: 14-26 (N1), 141-156 (N3) and 246-260 (N5).

            You may also see mutations of amino acids to Serine or Threonine, either within these regions, or around them. Once you see this happen, you can expect a rapid increase in virulence. It will be impossible to deny something is seriously wrong. An awful lot of people will get very sick simultaneously.

            Once we reach this point, there will be no places left where antibodies can bind and neutralize the Spike protein, because the whole RBD either looks similar to our own amino acids, or is shielded by the glycans. Binding to the glycans seems to be insufficient to neutralize the Spike protein, but causes autoimmune problems, as these antibodies also bind to your own cells glycans.

            Because people’s immune systems have spent the past three years, devoting more and more of their limited capacity to this adaptive immune response of antibodies and T cells, proliferating these cells at the cost of the innate immune system’s ability to do its job, now treating this Spike protein as if it were a kind of strange new bee venom or pollen that is continually showing up in our lungs somehow, the loss of these immunogenic regions of the N-Terminal Domain would suddenly leave most people in highly vaccinated Western countries with no protection.

            The immune system would likely resort to antibodies against the glycan shield (something already being observed in severe cases), which results in acute autoimmune problems and generally fails to neutralize the Spike protein.

            It’s hard to see how that could result in anything other than a sudden outbreak of severe disease in most of the population.

            On the other hand, among people with natural immunity, the innate immune system would continue to do its job:

            -NK cells have proliferated, adjusted their receptor repertoire and know when to strike.

            -Plasmacytoid dendritic cells have proliferated and are not told to shut down by IgG4 antibodies.

            This is my warning. And as the unexplained deaths continue to pile up, as the children have record levels of pneumonia, as more people every week go to the doctor with coughs and respiratory infections that don’t seem to go away, I hope people will take it seriously. The problems you caused take time to reveal themselves, but they are now becoming undeniable.

            Like

                1. But I shouldn’t be super healthy, should I? And this would need to apply to all of the other people I know who’ve had vaxes. There is perhaps only one person I know who is less healthy now than before vaccinations but that is not because of infections, just bodily failures.

                  I was a bit worried for a while after seeing that my booster was probably worse than useless and that so many contrarians seemed to think mRNA vax would lead to untold misery down the line. But the longer my, and others’, health lasts, the less I see any validity in those claims. Of course, I could be wrong and there is a ticking time-bomb inside of me.

                  Like

  16. https://live-production.wcms.abc-cdn.net.au/c4e04c709eff5c8bf5907057e35b8e4e

    https://peakoilbarrel.com/open-thread-non-petroleum-feb-10-2023/#comment-770238

    Comment by Hideaway

    We had a storm go through yesterday that greatly affected the states power supply. This is the damage that was done to a couple of transmission lines.

    They will be repaired/replaced by diesel driven trucks and cranes, made with steel made from coking coal in China, from Iron ore transported to China in bulk ore carriers run on bunker fuel, then after the steel is made brought back to Australia in ships using bunker fuel, but no-one bothers to consider all that with our ‘renewable’ future…

    In the attempt to have a lot more renewables, the ‘authority’ in charge of the transmission lines wants to build a lot more of these transmission lines and towers all over the place, despite the knowledge that climate change is going to make the storms stronger.

    It’s too expensive to go underground according to Ausnet, so more transmission lines and towers it is, trampling upon the rights of those that own the land underneath these new lines.

    Do you think they could be bothered to make the transmission more robust to withstand much higher level storms?? Nope, that would also be too expensive, so we will just build more of the same and expect everything to be alright, or perhaps just go wrong after those currently in charge retire and it’s someone else’s problem..

    So despite the current world average temperature being around 1.5 degrees above pre industrial times, (or is that 1960-1990 levels?) already, and obviously going higher with the increasing CO2 and methane levels still rising, we are only prepared to build assuming we keep the temperature below the 1.5 degrees..

    It’s the stupidity and hubris of humanity that will bring our downfall, denying bad outcomes, believing in fairytales….

    Liked by 3 people

    1. Thanks for posting this. The storms and fires were well away from us, yet the stupidity of what people think the future will look like is just beyond comprehension. One aspect I did find out during the storms was the maximum power our grid can import from interstate, after all it is a ‘national’ (east coast) grid. It was 1.6Gw, imported from interstate when the price of wholesale power went up to $16,600/Mwh.

      A lot of talk of an all renewables future is about how the Southern areas can import power from sunny Queensland (up North) during the winter. A cloudy, windless period during winter can cover most of South Australia, all Victoria and the Southern part of NSW, leaving up to 15- 20Gw supply needed (all before we all go to heat pumps and EVs!!). There are no plans for this type of transmission from North to South, so blackouts it will be when they close the coal power stations, with the last remnants of heavy industry moving to where they can get cheap reliable power, elsewhere in the world.

      The one aspect I keep coming back to is how one dimensional the thinking is by just about everyone. They see a major problem, grab onto the cheapest and easiest solution, with no thought for all the ramifications of that solution on a gigantic world wide scale. Nor do they bother to work out if anything is possible on a world wide scale. If it appears to work on a small scale, then that’s the solution for the world.

      People put their lives at stake for their own god/gods/religion all the time, they have done so for thousands of years, when realistically they have been conned by another human with some made up story, about life after death, and it is worth dying for (religion of all types).

      So I shouldn’t be surprised that people treat solutions to overshoot with simplistic beliefs about these solutions, so they can go on happily living in denial, thinking how they have done their little bit by buying an EV and purchasing some solar panels for the roof of their house, while continuing to believe that all those fossil fuel companies and supporters are evil humans.

      Putting the transmission cables underground is the best solution, especially if larger storms are expected in the future, yet it’s way too expensive to do, plus uses too much copper. A quick calculation of the copper needed for about 13Gw of underground HVDC transmission lines, the ones necessary to bring power from outback Queensland to Southern Victoria, about 3000km distance, would need 1.8 million tonnes of copper, excluding the copper in the substations, conversion stations from AC to DC and back, and excluding the copper needed for the ‘renewable’ generating facilities.
      It’s a total nonsense. Most people don’t want to worry themselves about these minor details, if it sounds like a good idea, providing their own power bill doesn’t go up.

      Of course the cost of power will go up without cheap coal and gas power stations close to population centres, yet the religious belief of renewables permeates our society, because people have been conned that renewables are cheaper, when they are clearly not cheaper, on any grounds, on a like for like basis.

      Liked by 1 person

      1. I share your amazement at how we can be so blind to something so obvious and so important.

        There are very few people like you and Dr. Michaux that do original research on resource requirements, availability, and affordability for our “plans”.

        Keep up the good work.

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  17. Sorry if this is kind of off topic but I was wondering if Gaia or anyone else here with expertise could help me understand whether the vaccine related clots could lead to bowel ischemia. Thank you in advance.

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    1. Hello there Kira,

      Hope you and your family are going well. I am not a practising doctor and certainly do not claim any expertise but I have a mind trained to look at the over-all picture and give credence to what is the most logical reason behind an outcome. It is highly likely if not outright proven that the mRNA therapy causes various clotting scenarios throughout the body, both on the micro (small vessels) and macroscopic (larger diameter) level, therefore it is a viable mechanism for ischemia (which means reduced blood flow causing damage) in any tissue or end organ.

      Bowel ischemia can be caused by direct clot formation inside the lumen of the blood vessels, this can be acute or occur through critical narrowing of the supply blood vessels, both which are the same mechanisms which lead to heart attack and stroke, or the twisting or involution of the bowel which can pinch the vessels, cutting off supply of blood. Cells in that organ (small or large bowel) can be damaged and die just like heart and brain cells cut off from blood supply. Usually there are many collateral vessels that can bypass the occlusion but if the clot is in a larger vessel that supplies a bigger part of the bowel, then more severe damage can occur. This is a life-threatening emergency as dead bowel tissue can easily perforate and then you have rip-roaring peritonitis (infection and inflammation of the abdomen cavity).

      I hope that explanation helps and even more so hoping that all in your circle are healthy and this has been an academic query, not a situational one.

      All the best to you,
      Gaia

      Liked by 1 person

      1. I might add with much less expertise than Gaia that clots are not guaranteed for all mRNA injections due to:

        1) Poor manufacturing quality control resulting in wide variability of shot strengths.
        2) Poor storage & shipping quality control due to temperature variation and RNase contamination.
        3) Injection method was more dangerous if health care workers followed required procedures however some ethical souls probably injected mRNA the correct way to avoid spreading mRNA throughout the body.

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        1. Hi Rob,
          Very good to point that out, thank you. The mRNA therapy shots have the potential to cause novel clotting. Yes, everything has been variable and it is only the trend results we see, and that cannot determine individual events. One thing that really gets me (and you) is the insistence on booster shots knowing the cumulative risks and non-existent benefit. I am still hearing of deaths and newly diagnosed advanced cancers from all quarters. One of my husband’s colleagues (who is an academic medical doctor) just lost both her mother and her father-in-law in the same week and they were only in their late 60s. Another good friend told me as an aside that the craft group she attends is no longer gathering due to so many members dying over the past few years. This has become our new normal but it is definitely not natural. Hope you’re keeping steady and looking forward to Spring just around the corner.

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          1. Thanks Gaia, I’m in a bit of a low right now. Angry and procrastinating what I should be doing in my life. On a more positive note, I’m keeping my carbs down, back to walking 6 km every day, and my hip/back problem seems to have completely healed.

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            1. Hello Rob,

              I feel for your angst and frustration which I know all of us share here in some degree.

              I think you are underestimating yourself because what you have begun here so many years ago has helped more people than you can know and continues to be an oasis in the desert. Since that is what you have accomplished consistently through your own volition, it must be what you should be doing in your life and not a procrastination at all because every day you can, you share valuable information to which we can add in discussion, And on the days you do not, we hope that is because you are enjoying walking and camping in the wilderness, communing with Nature, the source of all acceptance and comfort. And you can do that with agility and facility because you have taken good care of your physical health as is your right and responsibility, so you should be commended highly. That’s great news about your hip/back issues resolving completely, well done.

              So by this erstwhile doctor’s diagnosis of well-being, I pronounce you exceedingly fit for our times and keep on going and doing what you have been!

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              1. Thanks for the kind words Gaia.

                I need to part company with a bunch of my past papers, books, and souvenirs, plus a bunch of my mother’s, and I’m struggling to make progress. This is turn blocks me from progress on other tasks. Procrastination has been a lifetime defect of mine.

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                1. Hi Rob,

                  I can understand the task ahead of you as I have just gone through a massive clearing out project on behalf of my mother who is still living, which turned out to be an extremely stressful exercise. Do you think the main cause of your angst is the sheer volume of items needing to be processed or the emotional energy in letting go of them? Most likely it is a combination but it can be very helpful to identify the source of blockage and then step back and ask, well, why do I feel that I need to do this at this time? If you actually have the space and organisation for these items (as in it doesn’t take over your living quarters and become a health hazard in the case of my mother’s house) then there is no real hurry to attend to them, and if you are emotionally not ready, then that is the answer, too.

                  I think it is actually a very reasonable decision to delay this sort of task given what we are facing in the world, firstly it’s a psychological carry-over comfort from a past that we knew and secondly, because our time is so limited and precious now, we want to be doing other things that we enjoy. Finishing the cleaning out may satisfy what we think is expected of us, our duty, responsibility and such, but actually there is no real external pressure except for what we place upon ourselves. There is no “have to” or “must do” if we choose, just what works best to get us to the real goals we have. Perhaps the main source of frustration comes from self-judgment, and acceptance of what one deems as insufficiencies is the real lesson and task, and in this I speak for myself as much as generally.

                  Your life is uniquely your own and cannot be compared to any thing else ever having existed or will ever exist in this universe. That’s a mind-blowing thought and if your make-up comes with a penchant for self-identified procrastination, then that is just how it is. By the way, I believe your idea of procrastination is very different from what is the norm, you would not have accomplished all that you have in your life if truly it were a cardinal attribute in you.

                  Anyway, that’s just me waffling on in the airy-fairy ether where I do levitate from time to time as you know!

                  All the best to you and I think I speak for everyone here how proud we are of you and how much we appreciate the community you have fostered.

                  Liked by 1 person

                  1. 🙂
                    Passing by… Just wanted to say I liked this last comment of yours and the one just before (as many other I don’t necessarily reply to).
                    Good to hear you overcome the purification project (I like to call it that way) that was bestowed upon you.

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      2. Thank you so much Gaia for that detailed answer, your explanations are always very easy to understand and a joy to read.

        I hope you and your family are doing well and in good health. I truly wish this was merely an academic inquiry but unfortunately it is not. One of my cousins recently lost his father and the COD was septic shock which lead to low blood pressure. Before that the family was informed that there was necrosis, peritonitis and full body infection (possibly from stomach contents leaking out into blood stream).
        All of this perfectly aligns with everything that you said.

        All of this happened so suddenly that the family barely had time to process it before he was gone. I know that this is not an isolated case and these stories are playing out everywhere these poisons were injected but experiencing it up close makes it very different. I tried to explain to him about the dangers of these untested substances but he trusts his family doctor who keeps telling him that these things are perfectly safe and that this was an unfortunate case unrelated to vaccine.

        Thank you again for your valuable expertise, we are fortunate to have someone like you on this site to help us make sense of things in these difficult times.

        Liked by 1 person

        1. Hello Kira,

          I am sorry to hear that your family has suffered through a sudden loss. Although I could help you understand a possible reason for your family member’s unexpected rapid decline, I am as hopeless as all of us in trying to accept that so many people have experienced grief through what has been unleashed upon us. Several times I have been directly asked by family members who had a loved one die if the vaccine contributed to their death and I can honestly say that I don’t know and it can’t be known (especially since an autopsy is never done) because each individual circumstance is different and that is the comforting response they are ready and wanting to hear. At some point at their own timing, a few have come around to their own decision that the injections led to the declining health of their family, whilst others staunchly believe what the medical narrative tells them. Humans seem to balance between both anger and denial in order to navigate through these turbulent times.

          Thank you for your warm thoughts for me and my family, we are well in all ways that matter, starting with having our basic needs more than met which seems at once so banal yet it is the only and often unreachable goal for most of our beleaguered species. Every day I need less and less reason to remind myself of our incredible fortune.

          All the best to you and your family, and thank you for being there for them in whatever way you can.

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          1. Thank you so much for your kind and comforting words Gaia. You are right about being grateful for the present even more so when we can see what is coming in the future. If there was ever any doubt about how the polycrisis will be handled the COVID handling put that to rest.

            You are right about denial and anger. When I first came across the truth about mRNA on this site I was in denial and didn’t believe it because I didn’t think that something so sinister can be allowed even by warmongering and imperial governments of west. But after seeing evidence both statistical and anecdotal that denial has turned to anger. And the anger cannot be directed at anyone because the people responsible are beyond the reach of consequences.

            I am also concerned about my family and dear ones and needed your guidance. If we operate with the assumption that there may be clots in the bodies of people injected with the vaccines then can clot busting substances help protect them from the worst. Since none of my family believes the truth about mRNA and taking clot busting medications regularly is not feasible I was wondering if achieving the same effect is possible through natural substances .
            Ginger,turmeric,garlic,cayenne,cinnamon,vitamin E all have blood thinning effect and it would be easy to recommend them because they are quite beneficial to overall health without ever mentioning vaccines. If these are taken everyday for months can they have same protective properties as clot busting medications?

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            1. I asked Dr. Lee your question.

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              1. Fasting for a few days may be beneficial.

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                1. Dr. Lee is an angry prick but I like his integrity. When people try to exaggerate covid threats without sound science like shedding, synthetic spike, DNA contamination, passing on altered genes to offspring, etc. he aggressively tells them they are wrong.

                  Lee cleanly sticks to only the threats he is certain are real.

                  I think we can trust him.

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                    1. I may have triggered Dr. Lee’s denial circuit. Lee’s kids are mRNA’d. Don’t think he was aware of Radagast’s work. He’s gone silent. Maybe he’s just digesting. Hoping he comes back and says it’s bunk.

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                    2. Just saying, could be wrong but Lee comes across as a full on Narcissist. I don’t find any of his arguments convincing because they are always wrapped in self aggrandizing.

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                    3. He does think a lot of himself, and he can be dificult to understand. I don’t like him.

                      I am looking for someone that can do serious harm to the pharma complex. I was hoping he had the weapons.

                      Give me the reason you think string theory is wrong and I will challenge him with it.

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                    4. nikoB, you seem to be a better judge of character than me.

                      Lee responded to my question with a strange stream of babble that I do not understand. I told him I was disappointed with his response. He replied with more babble but did say he’d have a closer look at Radagast’s work.

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                  1. Thanks, that is reassuring to know. Does Dr.Lee have a hypothesis as to why people are dying from heart attacks and strokes years after being injected with the vaccine. Is it because some people’s bodies have more difficulty breaking down the clots than others and they are more vulnerable?

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                    1. I have not heard Dr. Lee speak to that. He is focused on the clot threat he identified and is closed-minded to any other threat.

                      The best description of the cause of heart attacks and strokes I’ve heard is by Dr. Bret Weinstein. He explains:
                      1) We were told mRNA would stay localized to the injection site. This is untrue, in part because they told nurses to override the historic safer injection procedure, with the goal of minimizing pain to reduce “vaccine hesitancy”, which created a much higher risk that mRNA would circulate throughout the entire body.
                      2) We were told mRNA has a very short lifetime in our body. This is untrue, mRNA remains (if I recall correctly) for at least 6 weeks, after which they stopped the test so we don’t know how long it persists. In conflict with their claim that mRNA has a short lifetime, the Nobel prize awarded for mRNA was related to extending its lifetime in the body.
                      3) mRNA works by causing cells to manufacture proteins foreign to our body.
                      4) Our immune system kills cells with foreign proteins.
                      5) Some organs can repair damage from killed cells.
                      6) The heart does not repair damaged cells, so scars and permanently reduced heart capacity can result.

                      There are other issues:
                      – The only people who maybe benefited from the vaccine were elderly and obese. The vaccine does not stop transmission so there was no reason to vaccinate others.
                      – Children have zero risk from the covid. The CDC still recommends children be injected with mRNA.
                      – The small benefit from mRNA in elderly & obese may have resulted from the body’s response to other ingredients in the mRNA, and had nothing to do with the claimed mechanism.
                      – We discarded a hundred years of vaccine knowledge by deciding to vaccinate billions of people with a non-sterilizing vaccine in the middle of a pandemic, thus preventing herd immunity and causing a proliferation of variants that may someday turn lethal to vaccinated people with now damaged immune systems.
                      – They aggressivley blocked proven safe and effective drugs that would have made any vaccine unnecesssary for this particular disease.
                      – They fomented panic with misleading PCR tests and medical procedures that killed people.
                      – They ignored clear safety signals and are not collecting the data that a regulator concerned with maximizing public health would monitor.
                      – They employed the biggest psychological warfare and censorship operation in history to persuade people to inject mRNA.
                      – France just passed a law that makes it a crime to oppose mRNA.

                      There are other very troubling issues that may prove to be true but I’m not yet confident in defending them so won’t list them.

                      Most citizens are blind to all of the above.

                      How is this possible?

                      The criminals are getting away with it and the majority does not care.

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            2. Hello Kira,

              I am very touched by your deep concern for and wanting to help your loved ones through any health issues that may arise from these injections. Time and again, it is through challenges to our very sense of self and rightness that brings out the highest and best that was always ready and waiting within us.

              Clotting as a mechanism of dysfunction is understandably high on your radar and it does seem to cause the most overt poor outcomes but as we have learned over these several years, there are other processes in play, notably the “dumbing down” of the immune system as evidenced by repeated infections. You are absolutely spot on that only lasting way to help our body evolve to deal with this new distortion is to support it with the correct building blocks that maximise its physical structure and function, and no less importantly, that generate feelings of wholeness and joy. By this, I mean nutrients from wholesome real food, clean water, air, restful sleep, sunshine, meaningful work and enjoyable play, a sense of belonging and continuity in community, all those ideals that seem so elusive in today’s world. Once we appreciate our true health to be much more than just absence of disease, then we fully have the tools to achieve wellness and deeper healing. Drawing upon all the foundations of wellness is important in helping the body recover from illness and regenerate a more resilient version of itself that is long lasting.

              All the foods you listed are known for their healthful properties and taken as whole food and not supplement form is probably the best way to allow the body to choose what compound or nutrient it needs to maintain balance. I have found the best way to encourage family members or friends to better health habits is to lead by example, and be ready to offer advice (and especially recipes and even better, pre-made meals, invitations to joining you on walks, trying new activities) when asked or most satisfyingly, when they notice the extra sparkle in your eyes, spring in your step, and rosy glow. Just presenting a list of things to eat, even in the name of better choices for general health, often loses persuasion if one doesn’t have the ability or motivation to stick to a concerted change. As the saying goes, the road to hell is paved with good intentions. Another way to help your family is to in effect ask them to help you, try suggesting that you would like to kick-start a healthier lifestyle and would really appreciate a buddy-system where you can support each other as you explore together how to make changes and try new things.

              I really hope something here resonates with you as I know how determined you are to make a positive change out of your kind and compassionate heart (and strong sense of justice and righteousness!) and that is so courageous and admirable. Your family is very fortunate to have you as an advocate and one they can trust. I feel very privileged to be able to render some advice which may be of assistance to anyone here, and I am humbled to have earned your trust. Please free to ask me anytime if I can do anything to help and I will joyfully do my best. You can always ask Rob for my email if I happen to miss any posts.

              Namaste, friends.

              Liked by 1 person

              1. You are absolutely right when you say that clean water, clean air, nutritious food, meaningful work and being part of mother nature’s community all seem to be things of the past. Even though lifespan has risen, healthspan which is far more important has been falling dramatically. I think you hit the nail on the head with the line – Health is not just the absence of disease (it is also the presence of life and vitality).

                I agree that no amount of supplements can come close to replicating the benefits of real food that mother nature has provided us with. Also some of the things like antioxidants cannot even be supplemented and must be consumed as real food.
                I also think that the best way to implement long lasting changes is by involving people around us when we make them. I love cooking as it is one of the only activities that allows the engagement of all five senses and I have been involving friends and family lately to make it more enjoyable.

                The pleasure and privilege is mine to be able to interact and gain some wisdom and knowledge from people such as yourself. Thank you so much for your concern and I feel happy and reassured to know that I can count on you for your advice.

                Namaste.

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  18. Chris Martenson thinks we are under attack on multiple fronts:

    1) Encourage a flood of unfriendly immigrants.
    2) Drain the SPR.
    3) Blow up Nord Stream pipeline and take down ability to make nitrogen fertilizer.
    4) Over print money.
    5) Compromise health care workers and weaken the health of citizens by forcing them to inject people multiple times with mRNA.

    Not too impressed with Michael Yon although he has seen a lot more of world than I have. He uses measles as an example of the cabal trying to associate a valuable vaccine with dangerous mRNA. I guess Yon hasn’t seen this graph:

    P.S. Martenson is still not brave enough to discuss Dr. Joe Lee’s theories.

    Skip ahead to 52:05.

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  19. They are trying to scare us into sending more money to kill more Ukrainians and Russians. The US views both as worthless expendable “slav” cultures.

    ZeroHedge said it best: “It’s freaking Russian space sharks with freaking laser beams attached to their heads.”

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    1. Ever since practicing with “safe & effective” they’ve perfected coordinated messages. We are being played like violins.

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  20. I’m back to my blame game and just wanted to comment about it here so that maybe someone can talk some sense into me if I am totally misguided.

    I’ve been hung up on sustainable cultures lately, especially with pre-columbus America. In my crazy head, if they are never “discovered”, or better yet, if it’s the only land on earth, the Native Americans are going to exist for a while. I’m thinking a couple hundred thousand years. Just feels like they have a chance to make it because of their wisdom (seventh generation thinking, etc). Of course, “it only takes one” is always gonna be a threat. But they have a huge advantage of never running into the white man. And I think that single advantage would allow them to make a long run in the history books.

    Somehow this took me down an unexpected path of researching white skin. And I was quite surprised at what I found. The “collapse” people I follow have never touched on this. Maybe because the evidence is lacking or the topic is too taboo, or maybe I am just reaching here and its pure nonsense. My findings (not much, because I could not find much) tell me that this creamy white skin does not start showing up until 7,000 years ago in Europe. If this is true, that is some hell-a-weird timing. Most of the people I follow date when the real evil started (or when we fell off the path for good) between 5k-10k years ago.

    I’m certainly not implying that white skin is the reason we went down this evil path of agriculture and civilization. I’ve invested a decent amount of time in studying human history and I am fairly convinced that skin color is not super dangerous until we get to the 15th/16th century. That’s when some creamy white skinned European males began devoting time and energy into crazy ideas like scientific racism. (if this type of thinking started 500 years ago, I bet it had been brewing for a couple hundred years prior, but just a guess).

    What I think I am implying is that white skin seems like a heck of a trick played out by evolution. 300,000 years of homo sapiens and this skin color does not show up till 7kya? Almost feels like mother earth knew what a plague humans were becoming and decided to add in something that would eventually tear this plague apart.

    My anger will always be at the way our story played out. The 1% who control the world. If its all about money, then men take the prize here. Majority of millionaires & billionaires in the world are white American males. And yet out of eight billion people, maybe only 10% are white. And now I learn that the skin color of the majority of the people spearheading our full steam ahead drive over the cliff, did not show up on this planet until 7,000 yrs ago. That is one hell of a story. It needs to be in the mythology of our next religion that Tom Murphy is working on.

    Thanks for listening,
    Chris

    (p.s. Rob, if this is too ugly or just too stupid of a topic in your view…. then please delete my entire comment)

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    1. I’m not an expert on this topic but I would suggest a good path for research would connect the following dots:

      1) Skin color is determined by UV intensity of a region and elapsed time since migrating to the region.
      2) UV intensity is determined by latitude and climate.
      3) Migrations are usually driven by climate change and/or resource availability.
      4) Agriculture underpins human overshoot, damage to ecosystems, and hierachical cultures.
      5) Agricultural lifestyles began simultaneously in mutiple locations on the planet about 10,000 years ago and were enabled by a change in climate.
      6) All 8 billion of us descended from 1 small tribe in east Africa about 200,000 years ago, so we are all basically the same.

      Liked by 3 people

    2. Hello Chris,

      Hope you are going well. Thank you for opening an enlightening topic (and yes, I just typed that without realising the pun!) I have had the pleasure of reading your posts but as much as I have wanted to comment my appreciation and support, I did not due to severe time constraints as of late. In reading through your latest I had several thoughts pop into my head and wanted to jot them down at least in outline form (and this is very difficult for me, just ask Rob!) before my life that is not quite my own at this time takes over again! It would be very interesting to follow this rabbit hole (a white rabbit, of course!) and I would think that at the end analysis, the white dominance culture is a product of multiple intertwined factors, some of which happened at a critical time in our overall human development which in conjunction with behaviour paradigms like MPP (and MORT!) steered us conclusively down a certain path, as one possibility out of others which were not chosen. We shall never quite know now how the world would have played out if white man didn’t traverse the seven seas and continents as creator and destroyer.

      Thoughts (these are my own rambling ones) :

      –Homo Sapiens began in central Africa, an equatorial continent, meaning higher UV strength. The first genetic modification in skin was not so much colour but presence of fur, which we mostly lost. All other animals under the African sun are protected by fur or thick hide, our ingenuity allowed us to forego that protection as we could use the hide of other animals or create/seek shelter. Our closest primate relations the great apes have darker pigmented bare skin, this may have been because of the protection from intense UV and/or have been the evolved balance of ideal melanin concentration for necessary Vit D/hormonal production. Early Homo sapiens probably expressed darker skin colouring for the same purpose.

      –when migration from Africa began as a result of resource depletion, those humans that found their way north would have had an evolutionary advantage if they could maximise the benefit of reduced UV due to the higher latitude–these would be lighter skinned variants as they need less exposure to the sun to produce the required Vit D levels whereas darker skinned humans would be lacking Vit D production for many months of the year and have compromised health (as has been demonstrated for migrants today from equatorial countries to the colder and darker latitudes) which would severely reduce fitness for survival. So over time, the ascendancy of lighter skinned humans in the cooler climates prevailed and these were the climates where agriculture and feudal living flourished, cementing the dominance of this culture type rather than the nomadic style of earlier hunter/gatherer societies which matched well with the grassland/savannah fauna of equatorial Africa. Once agriculture took hold, that led to the permanence of the ruling class which had both leisure and power over the serfs, and once the military force to control the underlings was established, the imbalance was irrevocable. Science and technological advances led to discovery of more robust metallurgy and weaponry, which culminated in the invention of guns and now whole swathes of humans could be mowed down from a distance. It was whitish skinned people who had the skills and resources building ships to sail, growing food to feed horse and army, and eventually holding the guns that pointed at darkish skinned ones who were “re-discovered” all around the world, and the rest is also history.

      –it probably didn’t help matters that humans in varied cultures came to the same conclusion of conferring higher status to those whiter variants amongst the group, probably because that meant they didn’t have to work slaving under the hot sun and therefore were of a wealthier, more powerful class. Darker skinned people were viewed as little more than a two-legged form of beasts of burden, that is probably why it was so easy to enslave them and/or wholesale exterminate them when their presence became inconvenient. Adjunctly, religion furthered this notion as the deities were transfigured into the image of the ruling class, Jesus being blonde-haired, blue-eyed and white a notable example, even though his ancestry was decidedly Middle-Eastern descent. Asian cultures have this carry-over that whiter is preferable to present day, facial lightener creams are extremely popular.

      Thank you for indulging my little exploration. I myself am a honey-browned skinned person who knows first hand of the detrimental health issues when not being able to receive enough UV light in the winter months. It’s amazing the difference I feel when exposed to proper levels of sun for my constitution, it’s literally like a battery being re-charged. I would have been hopeless for lack of energy and strength if I had to live in higher latitude climes, so evolutionarily my genes would not have persisted in such locales. But, give me a good day’s work outside under the sun with hands even darker from the soil and I am as happy as a pig in mud.

      I do heartily recommend supplementation of Vit D (5000U) daily throughout the winter months for all those living in such latitudes. Nothing beats naturally derived Vit D made from your own skin, so be sure to super-charge yourself when you can in the summer months. Those who are lighter skinned only require 10 minutes of 50% body surface exposure to max out daily, but the darker skinned one is, the more time required (up to 2 hours daily), build up to it or divide in distinct sessions throughout the day. And it’s not enough to just expose your face and forearms, we weren’t evolved with clothing. It would be preferable to expose larger surfaces like the back and abdomen for some time, too. As for skin cancer risk, my take is that if you are eating a truly nutritious diet overflowing with antioxidants (fruit and veg), that should go a long way to counter damage, also enough water, sleep, no harmful substances, you know the drill. As you can see now, it is virtually impossible for our modern Western living style to achieve this ideal, staying indoors nearly all the hours of the day as most do and then frying ourselves to a crisp on our weeklong holiday to the beach with virgin skin never having seen the sun all year, not to mention our very depleted nutritional status. We are just so far from our evolved natural state, how can we truly achieve health? Sigh.

      Hope everyone is finding their own melanin/UV balance amongst everything else.

      Namaste, friends.

      Liked by 1 person

      1. Thanks Gaia!! That was absolutely beautiful. And this quote is already doing wonders for me:

        “So over time, the ascendancy of lighter skinned humans in the cooler climates prevailed and these were the climates where agriculture and feudal living flourished, cementing the dominance of this culture type rather than the nomadic style of earlier hunter/gatherer societies which matched well with the grassland/savannah fauna of equatorial Africa.”

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    3. Dear Chris,

      a speculative matter of complexity.

      Some speculative questions:

      A). Do fair skinned h.sapiens posses higher probability biologically for psychopathy, sociopathy, narcissism, autism, cognitive impairments etc.?

      B). Could lack of vitamin D + other factors increase a variation for such tendencies to occur?

      C). With the seasonal weather which requires “prepping” to survive the winter.
      Competition increases, due to scarcity the most dominant behavioural patterns emerge, combined with A & B could that pose an effect?

      7th generation thinking.
      Haudenosaunee (Iroquois confederacy) & Oren Lyons.
      Chief Lyons said it: ”Natural Law shows no mercy.”

      Nice mention Chris, indigenous tribes were/are not perfect as William Rees has said. Yet compared to “western ideology” they sure know what’s up.

      Kind regards,

      ABC

      Liked by 1 person

  21. Hideaway would add to Berman’s analysis that nuclear is even more expensive than wind & solar.

    https://www.artberman.com/blog/renewables-are-not-the-cheapest-form-of-power/

    Germany provides a case history as the western country that has most aggressively pursued wind and solar capacity. Renewable energy cost for German producers and consumers has steadily increased as electric power market share has expanded.

    Some might argue that the price increase in 2022 in Figure 2 was because of the Russian invasion of Ukraine and reduced natural gas supply to Europe as a result. That is true but it’s also the way that energy markets work. Higher marginal costs along the energy supply chain increase prices for the entire system. That also will get worse with greater renewable market penetration.

    Nuclear die-hards will now predictably begin their Greek chorus that more atomic energy is the only answer. That’s a reality-blind dream because nuclear plants cannot be scaled fast enough to move the needle.

    Total nuclear generation is expected to increase from 2,682 TWh (Terrawatt hours) in 2022 to 4,353 TWh by 2050 (Figure 3). That’s an 8% drop in bucket compared to the 54,000 TWh of projected electric power generation in 2050.

    Doubling the number of plants completed in 2022 every year for the next 27 years would increase nuclear to only 16% of total electric power generation. That’s unlikely to happen.

    The unavoidable intermittency of electric power supply from wind and solar cannot be overcome without increasing cost. Backup and storage expenses must necessarily grow as renewable market penetration increases.

    It seems that Patrick Pouyanné may be right. Renewables are not the cheapest form of electric power. The renewable transition will probably mean higher—not lower—energy prices.

    Everything has a price. The idea that we can reverse climate change and planetary overshoot without some trauma for society is just magical thinking.

    Like

    1. A lot of the LCOE as done by Lazard is junk, because of the assumptions they make. Solar ‘storage’ is 1, 2 or 4 hours, in other words not even lasting the night. It’s not proper storage so that near 100% capacity factor could be reached.
      They also use a 30 year life for utility scale solar, in an era where the panels made 12-15 years ago are failing way too often and being replace in this country. These had 25 year warranties. The ‘new’ panels made of thinner materials like the silicon wafers come with 12-15 warranties and are expected to have a 30 year life.

      The lifetime of coal, gas and nuclear is given as 40 years in their assumptions even though 60 years would be more realistic for what history has shown.
      They also give the maximum possible capacity factor for solar and wind, while cutting back the actual capacity of coal, gas and nuclear.
      Then the biggie, they have a ‘cost’ for coal and gas, even though they are just as free to humanity as wind and solar, so they are not comparing like for like.

      If you make all the assumptions even, like a reasonable period for storage of solar and wind, accounting for seasonal variation, and extra transmission lines from various areas for solar and wind, the difference is multiples.

      The same applies to the cost of solar, wind, coal, and gas, they are all free, just the cost to mine and move coal or gas should be included. Most coal power plants in this country sit right next to the mine, and have the ‘right’ to mine and use the coal. Applying a high market price for coal is nonsense if you are trying to show a genuine difference in costs.

      CCS is a cost included for coal and gas, yet it’s not a cost of energy in a report that is meant to be comparing economic costs. OK, if you want to add the environment costs to burning coal and gas, then also add the environment costs of damage done in all the extra mining for solar, nuclear, wind and batteries, plus add the CCS for all the fossil fuels burnt in their manufacture.

      These type of LCOE reports are out to prove a point and adjust all the assumptions to make the report ‘prove’ their belief is correct. Way too many people believe this stuff, we don’t want to be honest with our comparisons which is why we are headed to a fast collapse of modern civilization, once the oil extraction is declining rapidly. At that point all the attempts to fool ourselves and each other will be very obvious.

      Here are some sums I worked out for costs to produce 1 TWh of energy from different existing producers.
      Saudi oil (refined to products) $1.7M/TWh
      Walyering gas $1.7M/TWh
      NESF (solar) $35.6M/TWh
      Mt Gellibrand Wind Farm $34.3M/TWh
      Kogan Creek power plant (coal) $9.1M/TWh
      Hinkley PC (nuclear) $66M/TWh

      There is no CCS included for anything, nor is there any storage or extra transmission lines for solar and wind. All capacity factors and lifetimes are ‘actual expected’ by the operators and backed up by history in the case of coal, gas and nuclear.
      The difference when you take the biases out of Lazard’s assumptions is multiples of what even Art has come up with.
      Also no-one seems to be capable of recognising that the huge dollar cost of nuclear is directly related to the energy input in building and operating these monstrosities.

      Liked by 2 people

    1. The problem the west has is it operates from an agenda. That is, the west is superior to any other civilization; 1. Because we have a liberal “democracy” and 2. We have capitalism. But what we really have is a kleptocracy with a veneer of democracy that only serves the interest of an entrenched power /money elite.
      AJ

      Liked by 1 person

  22. I’ve been wondering recently why people with deeply held religious beliefs are not at least a little happy that their recently deceased loved one is now in a place where they have eternal joy.

    Like

    1. I think it is because at the very back of everyone’s mind is a big dose of doubt that it is all true. Having grown up in a very religious background I noticed no one was keen to go.

      Liked by 1 person

    2. God and heaven are stories we constructed to elaborate our genetic denial of mortality that emerged with behaviorally modern humans.

      The core belief is that souls continue to exist after death.

      Our loved ones are still gone from our lives so we are naturally sad despite denying mortality.

      Like

      1. Oh yes, I realise that there will always be sadness that one has to live without a loved one, but that sadness never seems to be tinged with some happiness “knowing” where that loved one now is.

        Like

  23. Rintrah’s thinking that one thing we could do at scale to reduce mRNA damage to immune systems is to use Cannabinoids.

    https://www.rintrah.nl/why-people-are-now-constantly-sick-all-the-time/#comment-11566

    Michael:

    My paranoia saved my ass. I am grateful for guys like you. The outlook is grim.

    What can be done besides B-Cell removal? Is broad band CBD an option?

    Rintrah:

    I’ve been thinking in the same direction.

    So far, I have seen just one option, that seems like a suitable candidate that could help repair the balance of lymphocyte populations in the lungs: Vaporized cannabis. THC is known to stimulate apoptosis of T cells and prevents dendritic cells from stimulating their proliferation. Cannabis is effectively used in the treatment of multiple sclerosis, as well as experimentally induced autoimmune encephalitis, by shutting down the activity of B cells and T cells and preventing migration of T cells into the brain.

    Importantly, we know that cannabinoids reduce NK cell activity too, without killing them. However we also see that the terpenes found in cannabis, like alpha-Pinene, actually stimulate the NK cells to do their job, in addition to being directly antiviral themselves.

    Cannabinoids are part of a natural immune modulation therapy, discouraging excessive activity by the adaptive immune system, while the terpenes in cannabis simultaneously fill the hole left by shutting down the activity of the adaptive immune system. We have known for a long time that the cannabis plant is very effective in helping to treat numerous autoimmune disorders.

    It’s really the only thing I can think of that could be implemented at scale.

    Like

  24. Another exchange from yesterday’s Rintrah essay:

    https://www.rintrah.nl/why-people-are-now-constantly-sick-all-the-time/#comment-11604

    LSWM Lives Matter:

    “The bright side is that after such a big wave, we should finally see herd immunity emerge.”

    Yes, balance will be restored by Nature. Heaven knows what the final toll will be in terms of human life lost. In his recent interview with Steve Kirsch, Dr. GVB speculated that around one third of the population in highly vaccinated countries may sadly succumb, if I remember correctly.

    And heaven knows what life will be like for the survivors. You yourself previously wrote:

    “I think humanity has made the biggest mistake in the history of civilization, by vaccinating during a SARS pandemic. I think this will result in highly virulent SARS variants that will depopulate the developed nations of the world. The survivors will mainly be children, teenagers and some of the young adults who were unvaccinated, resulting in the sort of demographic unable to rebuild civilization.”

    “The survivors of the cataclysm will have much shorter life expectancies, human beings will spend most of their existence as children from now on.”

    “People will have to live as nomads in tent camps. Sufficiently rapid depopulation should allow survivors to adjust using our food buffers.”

    https://www.rintrah.nl/two-options/

    Rintrah:

    Yeah, that’s basically it.

    I didn’t always think of it like this, people who want can go back and read everything I wrote.

    For me the big wake-up call was really just the genetic evidence of a historical coronavirus pandemic that left a genetic imprint over many human generations. That just made it very clear to me this virus will culminate in something awful.

    It won’t take as long as it did back then, because there are now billions of Petri dishes now giving birth to every possible variant and spreading those variants around the world in days.

    Like

  25. Dr. Joe Lee is speaking live now.

    https://twitter.com/i/spaces/1OyKAWbmZwrJb?s=20

    I’m fed up with these average doctors who don’t know anything like Dr. McCullough that are grifting their social media fame.

    RFK Jr. is using children to meet his political goals and ambitions.

    My conspiracy theory is China created a big problem with its one child policy. They don’t have enough young people today to support their elderly. China decided to release a virus to kill their elderly. A secondary objective was to cause lock-downs in the US so ballots could be stuffed to elect Biden who supports China.

    Hmmm.. If true, why export young males via the Darien gap? One-child policy created too many males?

    Lots of crazies on the call. Covid is a magnet to crazies. Guess that explains why I used to think anti-vaxxers were crazy.

    Lee is brutal with crazy/dim people. Doesn’t let them speak.

    Call descended into left/right political bullshit.

    Liked by 1 person

  26. James today.

    Have a nice day at work.

    Very basically life can be defined as the flow of energy from higher to lower density through specialized structures intended for that purpose. Both biological/cellular entities and technological/cellular entities qualify as life. The structure/organization of complex dissipative structures are determined by their effectiveness in releasing trapped energy to a lower energy or colder environments like space. All of biological and technological activity is nothing more in essence than the manifestation of otherwise unlikely arrangements of matter through which energy may be converted into a less concentrated form. Organism release trapped energy from the bodies of other organisms while technological, cellular entities or businesses release trapped energy from the non-living fossil fuel gradients in addition to hydrological dissipative structures like dams, nuclear power plants for the harder to tap but more potent energy of the atom’s nucleus, wind turbines to extract a fraction of other natural dissipative currents like wind and solar panels for harvesting radiation and the creation of energy gradients in batteries for later release (much like plants do with chlorophyll and glucose).

    Humans sometimes get tired of going to work and making things happen but must continue to maintain the flow of energy through their bodies from ecological sources and through the corpus of their technological creation just to maintain its structure and functionality which doesn’t exist for any particular purpose other than to release energy from gradients and radiate heat to a cold sink. Interfaces with the cool environment are essential so that heat doesn’t build-up and destroy the various structures. Variations on a theme of dissipative structures, like the many unique humans, will actually compete to obtain the gradient energy to continue their existences and are more or less captive to the process and without free will. The organizations of atoms and molecules that are not very effective at releasing energy from gradients and reproducing themselves tend to go extinct as other more successful ones persist. Humans may laud success at releasing energy from gradients and proudly display their large families and very energy hungry dissipative homes, cars, jets and boats but in essence these people are only useful and unwitting tools in a thermodynamic phenomenon.

    Have a nice day at “work” dissipating energy. Your cells, your body, your children, your employer, your nation, the universe is counting on you. When the gradient is gone and equilibrium is restored there will be no need for dissipative structures and you may rest in peace.

    Like

  27. Indrajit Samarajiva today.

    https://indi.ca/collapse/

    We’ve discussed the 6 fronts of ‘Israel’s’ war and the 6 wars America is losing. Now we’ll discuss 6 ways the climate is collapsing. 666. Now we finally meet the final boss. The climate collapse that all other collapses are contained within. The sphere that crushes all cubes into meaninglessness.

    The big question is, even if ‘Israel’ manages to win its six-front war, even if ‘America’ manages to win its world war, then what? The whole climate is still collapsing, and even they live in the climate. ‘Israel’s scorched earth policy in Gaza is just a sign of the coming times for everyone, when the whole Earth will scorch.

    The meta-crisis is really an entropy crisis which we experience as pollution. Warfare is just the worst sort of pollution, the sort that kills you instantly. In just 120 days, ‘Israel’ and America have produced nearly 300,000 kilotons of carbon unproducing 30,000 people. The full climate impact is likely 7-8x higher, equivalent to a dozen countries just chilling. Millions of tons of metal and other resources have been shipped from all over the world in order to be dumped on children in Palestine. The Gaza Genocide is an absolute orgy of emissions and waste in a climate that simply can’t take anymore.

    This grotesque genocide is just the culmination of 400 years of colonialism. It’s no coincidence that the greater White Empire (America, Britain, fuck ’em all) is by far the worst polluter in history. It’s no coincidence that the US military is the single worst polluter now. It’s causal. Colonialism was the cancer that gave corporations private rights to something that isn’t even public. The sun, the land, the animals, the plants; they don’t belong to us. They belong to the gods. They are the gods. The gods of sun, the gods of trees, and the new, apocalyptic, gods who clearly said that the end was coming. You don’t even have to believe the signs anymore. We’re at the destination.

    The important but mind-bendy thing to understand is that this isn’t a human problem, with human solutions. We’re not the relevant species here. Natural life (which includes us) is being killed by artificial life (which we are merely included in). We’re just the bacteria inside the guts of higher beings we call corporations or even countries. It is this species of artificial life which is killing the natural world, and we’re just along for the ride, until we get shit out. I call these creatures godlike because just look at the power they have over us. They can kill, cage, and harness us like so much chattel, but there’s one thing they can’t control. That’s the weather. Those are the elder, greater, gods, and they’re not too happy about the upstart idols.

    Ever since the first IPO in 1602—ever since corporations were given the right to enslave entire lands, peoples, and skin the animals alive—we have been living a deal with the devil. That’s all corporations are, incarnated devils who give us lots of trinkets and let us take the credit for the the ‘innovation’. Over the last century, all we have really done is take a one-time inheritance from higher beings (the photosynthetic life that became ‘fossil’ fuels) and blow it all on dumb shit. It was always a deal with the devil, and the devil always gets his due in the end. And so it’s ending. As Satan said in The Devil’s Advocate, ‘awfully hot in that boardroom, isn’t it?’

    But what does this mean when guns and then gas run out? At some point, they’ll run out of both oil to fight over and oil to fight with. Then what? They’ll lose by default. This final thrashing about is just making the end come faster. The tragic fact is that everyone in the Middle East would just sell America oil, America doesn’t even need the oil (for now), and they’re supposed to be quitting anyways! They could die comfortably in reduced condition but, no, they want to kill everyone else on the way out. Empire doesn’t even know what the fuck it’s doing anymore, it’s just beating people out of pure muscle memory. They ‘came up’ on beating natives to death for their land and they’ll be damned if they change now. So damned they are.

    The End of the World

    White Empire is not long for the world, because the world is not long for the world. Even if it survives the rebellions of men, it cannot escape the judgement of the gods. If the whole climate is collapses, everything else necessarily collapses too. Like castles in the sand. In a few decades (at best), Empire’s scorched earth policy in Gaza becomes redundant. Any Empire that exists will run out of gas and catch on fire at the same time. Empire loses by default. A victory for no one.

    At that point, the land will return to the people that actually care about it, stripped of resources, littered with shrapnel, increasingly underwater and uninhabitable. God said the meek will inherit the earth, but he didn’t say what condition it would be in. Mother Earth herself will be a martyr in this war. The best her living family can hope for is a decent burial.

    Like

    1. You got me checking out indi.ca’s website. I like the emotional/angry tone of it. Problem is the site is very hard on my eyes and gives me headaches (font or color scheme?). Ahhh, the joys of getting older.

      Like

  28. Maybe Gates does lead the cabal. I don’t know.

    I do know he is overshoot aware, energy depletion aware, and understands we must get our population down.

    He started by funding fusion research. Then when fusion didn’t work he switched to vaccines. Could be a clue.

    Could also mean he’s simply trying to grow his wealth. My guess though is that he really is trying to save the world. That doesn’t mean I agree with what he’s doing, nor does it means he’s being honest with himself. Denial as we know is an extremely powerful force.

    P.S. I’ve never seen anyone draw a link between vaccines and population reduction and then say it is a good thing if no one suffers or is killed.

    Like

  29. Hideaway’s still fighting the morons in denial at POB. I used to do some of that when I was younger. Then I learned it is impossible to use logic to break through genetic denial. Hunger might eventually work.

    I only copied Hideaway’s work, not the posts he was responding to. If you’d like evidence for genetic denial go check them out.

    https://peakoilbarrel.com/open-thread-non-petroleum-feb-10-2023/#comment-770229

    Dennis, “As I said the process will be gradual, there is no need to build anything with no fossil fuels, they will continue to be used in smaller and smaller proportions”

    That’s one of my main points, where you are totally wrong. Fossil fuels are not being used in smaller and smaller proportions, their use is growing. There is no transition, all that’s happening is that renewables are being added to total energy used to the detriment of the environment.

    In the last 20 years total fossil fuel use rose 10 times the amount added by renewables. Building more renewables means using more fossil fuels to do so.

    More renewables and of course the batteries to overcome the intermittency issue, means digging up more of the natural environment to gain access to the lower grades of ores we have to use to get the metals required to build the renewables. It’s done almost entirely with fossil fuels, with a growing rate of use..

    More renewables means more fossil fuel use!! The environment wont remain in the Holocene type stable climate with the continued burning of fossil fuels, yet you and Hickory think burning more, digging up more, further destroying the natural environment is OK.

    Renewables cost about 20 times as much to produce a terawatt hour of energy as the cheap oil and gas energy supplies. That 20 times cost represents 20 times as much energy in gaining the terawatt of energy, and it’s only electricity that doesn’t supply products.

    With a hand wave, and never any energy calculations you claim we can fertilize the world using sewerage repurposed. Do you really think in a falling energy environment, coming ‘soon’ when we are past peak oil, with an accelerating decline in oil availability, humanity will have ‘spare’ energy to build such things??

    It’s not happening now on any type of scale while we have overall energy increases from fossil fuels, so what will change?? Even in places like the UK where entropy is taking it’s usual toll on the human built world, raw sewerage is being pumped into the sea because we just don’t have the money (energy) to treat it properly.

    Green concrete instead of asphalt? To produce the hydrogen needed, and all the new smelters needed (different design to using coke), all the metals to do so, will either magically appear out of thin air, or a lot more mining using fossil fuels will be necessary, especially oil, which is about to become much harder to obtain.

    Everything hydrogen based needs massive amounts of Molybdenum, something that is mostly produced as a byproduct of copper mining in the ppm range. Do you have any energy calculations showing how this is possible?? Or is it just another hand wave of what’s ‘possible’ without regard to energy, environment and resource limits??

    Dennis, what you propose is more of the same as we have been doing over the last 20 years, which has lead to increasing fossil fuel use and a more unstable climate, all while we clearly recognise that material limits mean this increase can’t continue indefinitely.
    Only around 15% of humanity made it to a modern lifestyle, like all of us who post on these threads, despite the damage we are doing to the environment while using up all the high grade minerals.

    Continuing to do the same thing in the next 20 years as we have done in the last 20 years and expecting a different result, is the very definition of insanity.

    I wonder if you can see the stupidity in what’s happening in the world. My first solar panel, now over 39 years old was made solidly and can still generate electricity. The panels made 12-15 years ago are often being replaced because they were made of thinner materials, seem to be failing much more often, and the lifetime seems to be shorter than the very old ones, despite the 25 year warranties they came with.

    The newest ones come with claims from the companies that make them, that they will have longer lives (yet shorter warranty periods), even though they are made with thinner silicon wafers, have thinner connecting pastes, use thinner glass, with greater surface area, all while being exposed to an environment of stronger storms, greater variations of temperatures and larger hail stones.

    The math and physics of replacing fossil fuel use with renewables doesn’t go close to adding up. We can’t replace the system we have with one that costs 20 times more in both energy and money to build, despite magicking up money (debt) to do it. We can magic the money, but not the resources.

    Forget the hand wave of things we will do instead of using fossil fuels, do the math and resource availability instead, for a change.

    Alimbiquated … “When an industry stops being profitable, it declines rapidly, because profit is the lifeblood of every industry. The extreme fall in price of renewables are already depriving the industry of irreplaceable revenue.”

    I agree entirely, yet despite renewables getting much cheaper, they still need subsidies and grants, plus beneficial market rules to get built. Why is that??

    Currently a terawatt hour of energy from a Saudi oil well or a gas project in WA is costing $US1.7M while a terawatt of electricity from utility scale wind and solar in Australia is costing $US35M (after subsidies!!), while electricity from an existing coal fired power station is costing $US9M. So tell me exactly which forms of energy are cheapest?

    In the AEMO market in Australia, renewables are certainly putting coal, gas and hydro power stations out of business, but they are also stopping further development in solar and wind as well. There is no money to be made despite the current subsidies to build more.

    So what will happen over the longer term when more coal power closes down, blackouts and brownouts across the country as the grid reliability collapses. Those that can afford their own batteries to back-up their own use of electricity will do well, as the grid prices have risen massively over the last couple of years..

    What happens to Industry, especially heavy industry, is it leaves for wherever they can get consistent cheap power/energy.

    I’m sure it’s just a coincidence (NOT!!) that the Aluminium smelter in Western Australia is closing down at the same time the grid closes down the last coal fired power station.

    Please don’t tell us you believe this claptrap…

    ” Every year, about 15 billion tons of fossil fuels are mined and extracted. That’s about 535 times more mining than a clean energy economy would require in 2040.”

    Where are the pure 100% deposits of copper, lithium, nickel, molybdenum, rare earths, tin, silver, etc, etc, that are going to be mined??

    Or is it more likely the copper grade currently around 0.5% on average will continue to get lower?? 0.5% means around 220 tonnes of ore are needed to be mined and processed for 1 tonne of copper (recovery is often around 90% for low grades, 92-93% for high grades, plus there is dilution of ore mined by the diggers including waste in nearly every bucket of thinner seams of ore), plus of course all the overburden waste mined just to gain access to the ore bodies of open cut mines, that has to be blasted then removed by diesel powered dump trucks.

    Only 4 times as much?? Did anyone bother to go look at the assumptions in the annexes?? Often from papers 12-15 years old, based on much less energy than we currently use, assuming the ore grades are as high as they were back then.

    Every one of these types of reports makes simple assumptions without consideration of lower grades of everything and unlimited energy availability to do it.

    We are using lower and lower grades of fossil fuels to gain access to lower and lower grades of ores, all while an increasing proportion of an overpopulated world wish to use more resources. It’s only possible while we mine more and more fossil fuels to make it happen, which means more damage to climate and environment, which is most likely already past many tipping points. Feedback loops affecting everything, something never looked at in these simplistic articles.

    Yet because people ‘want’ to believe it’s all possible, they jump on every piece of rubbish like this article.

    Nick, I’ve never argued that burning all that fossil fuels is ‘good’, in fact I keep saying that we don’t have a future doing it for both depletion and environment problems, but that doesn’t mean renewables nor nuclear can replace them.

    The only sure way to save what’s left of the natural environment is to massively power down and massively reduce population, which we should have started decades ago. Instead we get simple thinkers stating we can solve all the problems by just doing ‘xxxxxxx’, as if there was unlimited energy and resources to do whatever ‘xxxxxxxx’ is.

    Every ‘more renewable argument’, means more destruction of the environment while burning more fossil fuels to do it. We are just chasing our own tails by trying to attempt it. Currently the money and energy inputs for renewables are 20 times the rate of fossil fuels to produce the same amount of energy. That’s today, despite all the improvements over the last few decades. It also doesn’t allow for overcoming the intermittency issue, nor does it replace the products supplied by fossil fuels.

    The numbers are proof that all we are doing is digging a deeper hole for humanity and all other life on this planet.

    I keep challenging you to come up with the numbers to show that a renewable future is possible, but you never do. Instead you point to other people’s work that I have easily picked up all the flaws in.

    So how about you do the work, show the numbers of how it is possible, instead of this incessant ‘there is no alternative’. Remember it’s a system, if you think hydrogen is viable, show the numbers of how much, and how we make all the high grade stainless steel, including the mining given current and falling ore grades etc.

    It’s a lot of work, but just ‘believing’ it’s possible as you do, means you gloss over the massive overshoot we really are in and miss most of the energy inputs needed to build what you envisage.

    Nick .. LOL. I’m not in favor of drill baby drill, nor is there any post suggesting I’ve ever indicated that’s a good idea. In fact if you read my posts, you can see I’m against all the burning because of the damage to both climate and environment.

    We are in deep overshoot, changing our climate way too fast for natural processes to catch up, killed off most Ocean life, reduced insect numbers by an estimated 70% since 1970, reduced wild mammals not part of our farming to just 4% of total world mammals by weight.

    It’s humans that are destroying our own environment just like yeast in a vat of sugar water, using up every resource available while polluting the living surrounds until we kill ourselves off.

    The concept of building more, faster (of anything !!!), is totally self defeating because the numbers don’t go close to adding up.

    You showed your own ignorance of the situation above in your comment about mining ….. “The material that has to be processed in order to extract something like copper is not itself extracted. It may be processed and may be disturbed, but it’s not extracted.”

    That’s a load of rubbish. Most copper is mined in open pits, like the giant Escondida mine in Chile. This is how 90% of the world’s copper is mined..

    https://www.google.com/maps/place/BHP Minera Escondida/@-24.2782718,-69.0750117,9516m/data=!3m1!1e3!4m6!3m5!1s0x96a5f98787b698d9:0x6f12b4f3fe321ffa!8m2!3d-24.270757!4d-69.0718966!16s/m/0vpxb9w?entry=ttu

    Have a good look at the waste dumps that are separate from the tailings dams. The waste dumps are where the rock that surrounds the ore body goes to. It is blasted, dug, then moved.

    All this to gain access to the ore body that is also then blasted, moved to stockpile, moved again to ROM pad, crushed, then ground, then has chemicals added like potassium amyl xanthate a highly toxic organosulphur compound that makes the copper sulphide ‘float’ (made mostly from dimethyl sulphide, where the carbon and sulphur comes from fossil fuels). The copper concentrate from the floatation, often 25-35% copper and the rest of the waste gets transported to a smelter.

    The remaining ore grade at Escondida, the largest copper mine in the world, is around 0.59% for the massive sulphide ore body, the largest in the world. The strip ratio is 1.7:1 at Escondida.

    BHP and Rio Tinto the major owners of Escondida have been high grading the mine for decades, the actual grade of ore they have been mining is around 0.9-1% copper. Of course using up the higher grade at present, means the average grade left declines.

    They, like everyone else leaves the lower grade stuff for later, which will take much more energy to bring the same quantity of copper to the market.

    No Nick, it’s not me that is the troll on the peakoilbarrel webpages, it is you who keep dreaming of a bright green future, or nuclear future all based on zero evidence that any of it is possible. All with no understanding the carnage that will happen to our civilization when oil extraction goes into an exponential decline. Mines like Escondida will be abandoned when we don’t have the oil available to extract the copper. The remaining oil will be needed just to try and feed the world’s population during the massive decline as those in charge prioritise trying to keep the masses at bay, instead of bright green lies..

    Drill baby drill is of no help to anyone, all it would do is make the collapse happen from a higher level, with a worse climate and ecosphere. If you want any part of modernity to have a chance of surviving then SOMETHING like Jack Alpert’s plan is the only way possible. It’s a plan that gets rejected as totally unacceptable by people like yourself that believe in fairytales..

    https://skil.org/position_papers_folder/PlanForUnwindingThePredicament.html

    WP … “It is unclear where the author got all the information from that led to the conclusion that non FF’s can save 535x of what we are currently using.”

    The 535 times is the 28M tonnes of ‘materials needed’ times 535 to get to 14.98B, close enough to the 15B claimed for fossil fuels use.

    The 28 million tonnes doesn’t even go close to the sniff test in being all the materials needed either. Just the concrete bases of all the wind turbines in Australia would go well past the 28 million tonnes mark.

    For the whole planet we would need in excess of 28 million tonnes of just copper per annum. Mining an average grade of just 0.4% (we are talking about the future), would need about 270 tonnes of ore. Even with a low strip ratio of 2:1 this would mean blasting, digging and removal of 540 tonnes of material to gain 1 tonne of copper, meaning total material moved of over 15B tonnes just to get access to the copper, let alone everything else.

    Going to this document from IEA shows mineral intensity needed for their scenarios.
    https://www.iea.org/reports/the-role-of-critical-minerals-in-clean-energy-transitions/mineral-requirements-for-clean-energy-transitions

    Scroll down and the part on copper shows 2 methodologies where the mineral intensity relative to 2020 is mentioned for 2040. Copper is around 1.7- 2.7 times 2020 levels, or up to 54M tonnes per annum. How much material would we humans need to blast, dig, and move to gain access to this 54Mt? Just under 30B tonnes, or well in excess of double today, meaning much more energy used to do it. (assuming we can get access to all this copper at a 0.4% grade, it might be lower!!)

    What’s actually happening is that we are using lower EROEI fossil fuels to gain access to lower grade metal ores, that are often deeper and have a higher ore hardness index, meaning there is an exponential rise in the energy used to gain the same quantity of metals out of the ground, let alone keep increasing the rate of metal extraction.

    The newer mines are on average in more remote locations, meaning higher cost to get equipment to these locations, which is why they were left until last to mine, as they are more expensive, due to higher energy costs. Because they are in remote locations, they totally rely upon fossil fuels, diesel in particular for every aspect of their existence.

    The scale of mining needed for the bright green future many people believe in, all of much lower ore grades, increasingly in remote locations, with an exponential rise in the energy needed to do it, all before considering the massive negative effect on the natural environment in these areas, appears to be a blind spot in the thinking.

    It’s also not a one off event. At the same time we need to feed a growing population using industrial agricultural methods that also use vast quantities of fossil fuels, all in a world where the very use of fossil fuels is causing massive disruption to the climate which is only going to get a lot worse.

    Up thread Nick G accuses me of being drill baby drill, whereas it’s those promoting the bright green future that are in favor of drill baby drill, they just don’t realise it’s what they are promoting, as they have no idea about mining.

    I’m in favor, because it’s what the numbers show what we must do, of powering DOWN, less building of everything. We needed massive population control decades ago, we need to rewild a lot of agricultural land, to have an environment we humans are able to live in. We have ignored all the warnings for decades, or centuries if we go back as far as Malthus. We have a belief that technology will save everything, totally blind to the reality it was cheap easy to access energy in the form of fossil fuels that built our modern civilization. Fossil fuels are leaving us, we have mined all the easy to get high quality resources, leaving much lower EROEI resources. Using more energy to gain energy to build renewables is a fool’s errand, making the situation much worse, distracting people from the real problem of massive overshoot.

    WEEKENDPEAK … “What would happen though in the theoretical case where all energy required to extract / process the various metals and minerals were provided by renewables?”

    Going back a few years I was one of the largest shareholders in a company that owned the rights to the West Musgrave mineral deposit, one of the last known major undeveloped Nickel/Copper deposits in Western Australia. Around the time I was a believer in the green renewable future. As a large shareholder I had access to all the information I could possibly want about the deposit plus all the local wind and solar characteristics of the area from the companies own weather station.

    The area of the mine is extremely remote, more than 1,600km from the nearest grid, with only dirt/gravel roads for hundreds of kilometers. It’s very much desert out there, which is precisely why it hasn’t been developed yet.

    Try as much as I could, The cost of renewables with the appropriate backup batteries for power, didn’t come close to being economic. You need all the diesel generators no matter how much solar and wind. In fact the current plan (PFS) for the mine is for solar power to operate as much as possible so that the diesel generators use less fuel, but trying to replace the diesel generators with just renewables and batteries makes the mine nowhere near economic.

    Without diesel generators, it’s just not economically possible, as these mines run 24/7 all year round. You can’t have expensive fly in fly out staff sitting idle being paid big money, which is an important consideration, just because the wind is not blowing and sun not shining.

    At the time solar and wind were being touted as comparable to coal in costs, yet no allowance is ever considered for the intermittency factor. Overcoming the intermittency is the huge cost. I even halved the renewables and battery costs to allow for future price reductions and still couldn’t make the numbers go close to working for the whole mine.

    Fully electric dump trucks working off a catenary system doesn’t work on a mine site, as the trucks are changing where they will be going all the time. If it’s waste rock, it goes to location A, until that location gets filled, then the next area is used for waste and so on. If it’s ore it can go to the stockpiles, but it depends on exactly the grade of that truckload of ore, for which stockpile the load goes to.

    An ore body is not just one big homogenous body, there are seams of lower and higher grade all over the place. What is mined gets placed into the appropriate grade stockpile, then when the processing happens it is a consistent mix of these different grades, so that the chemical mix of xanthates (floatation chemicals) is appropriate for the exact grade of ore being processed, so maximum recovery for cheapest cost can happen.

    If you notice any mine that has some catenary wires for electric trucks, it is the main route up out of the pit only, not beyond. These trucks then switch to diesel for most of trip to wherever, once out of the pit. It saves on fuel if there is a cheap power supply. They are always diesel electric trucks, not ever fully electric dump trucks.
    Even with the West Musgrave mine, I was only considering the processing plant, but the numbers just don’t work once batteries are included.

    It should be easier than the grid as remote mines use diesel power for everything, which is much more expensive than coal and gas fired power, plus the cost of getting diesel to the remote site greatly increases it’s cost, yet the upfront capital cost of a lot of solar, wind and batteries can more than double the overall capital cost of the entire mine, turning something with a cap cost of a few hundred million into over a billion dollars, just for the processing plant’s electricity requirements. The cost of money then comes into the equation.

    Solar on remote mines is used to save a bit of diesel, especially when the government throws in some incentives to do so, plus it looks good for the ESG requirements. However it adds complexity to the operation of the whole system with the diesel generators still running while solar or wind are providing power, in case the output suddenly drops because of clouds etc. A 22Mw ball mill running on suddenly lower power is likely to cause massive heating and damage to expensive equipment, so instant back up power is needed.

    My suspicion is most mine managers would prefer to operate without the token solar or wind input that head office demands these days, because of the extra complexity added by another set of machines and connections.

    Most people do not have a clue how a mine operates (as in Nick G’s comment up thread), because they have never been to one, nor studied the detail of the operation, so claim with a wave of the hand how easy it is done with renewables, even though there are precisely zero examples of mines running fully off renewables with batteries.

    The people running and paying for mining operations are not stupid. If the operation was in any way cheaper to run from renewables and batteries then they would all be doing it.

    Weekendpeak, the answer to this question is not as simple as it seems…

    “To me the choice is obvious hence my favorite somewhat rhetorical question of “is it better to use a certain quantity of resources to make a F-150 or a stack of solar panels?” The question to that answer in my mind is quite clear.”

    The 2 ‘builds’ have different resource and energy requirements to build, so it’s not a matter of one or the other.

    Let’s say your answer is build the solar panels. How good is that choice if there is no copper wire? Likewise for the F150, how good is that choice if there’s no fuel or roads?

    Everything we build relies upon the rest of the system of modern civilization to operate normally so whatever is built is useful.

    What happens if you have your solar panels and find wire after the collapse, but there are no inverters to change the electricity into a form useful for whatever equipment you have to run off electricity?

    My answer would be to build neither, save a little of the fossil fuels you would burn to make either, and hopefully the ecosphere is just a tiny little bit better off.

    As far as humanity as a whole goes, the most likely scenario is we will burn the fossil fuels to make more of both, but in the long term it wont matter one iota which one was made, as neither will be of any value to anyone in 100 years time.

    Humans wont do what’s necessary for the long term survival of some modernity, this being strong population control, like a lottery to have any children, power down to save whatever resources we still have as much as possible, while sending billions of people back to the country for a simple life based on as much self sufficiency as possible, while rewilding as much agricultural land as is possible while the population rapidly declines. (plus a whole lot of other drastic actions)

    Because humanity as a whole refuses to look at the massive overshoot predicament we are in, it will be pedal to the metal until it all falls apart, that’s where we are heading. It doesn’t matter what we build with the resources, the burning of fossil fuels to make ‘stuff’ using lower and lower grades of metals, is the predicament we have got ourselves into.

    Many decades ago it was a problem that with drastic action we could have solved, but instead we (collectively) chose to go flat out with as much industrialization as possible, until recently when the multitude of predicaments have raised their ugly heads as was always going to happen. Climate, resource depletion, ecosphere damage, massive reduction of insects and wild mammals, ocean fish devastation, pollution etc, take your pick which one has highest priority.

    Using resources to build either F150’s or solar panels means your stuck in the mindset that modern civilization will go on in some form or another so all the bits to make either ‘work’, are always available, which means more and more stuff.

    We, as in humanity, have been ‘building more’ for over 200 years, none of us can possibly understand a world of ‘less’, it’s beyond our capability of thinking as we, since we were children have always known the world of ‘more’, just like our parents and grandparents, just go to the shop and buy whatever to make the solar panels or F150 ‘work’. Try to think of when there is no ‘stuff to buy” to make either work, what is your choice then??

    Another aspect is that so called world reserves of copper by groups like the USGS are often highly inflated. For instance about 66% of Australia’s copper reserves, simply don’t exist. The USGS included all the lower grade resources from the Olympic Dam mine as reserves, when they will never be economical to mine.

    OD has over 10B tonnes of copper ore at an average grade of 0.57%, all located between 350m to 1300m deep. What they are mining is the 810Mt of higher grade 1.55% ore with an underground mine. The mined grade has been close to 2% over recent years, but even with this high grading they have continuously lost money on the operation over the last 15 years.
    There is no way any of the low grade ore will ever be mined as it’s too energy expensive, and the USGS counting it as a ‘reserve’, is just a joke on humanity. It makes me wonder how much of the rest of the ‘reserves’ claimed for the world are similar junk..

    Interesting how there are no comments about these ‘official’ reserve numbers from any of the usual cornucopians.

    What it really means is that the amount of energy needed to extract the copper, there are billions of tonnes of very low grade copper, is way higher than most believe. We could probably use all the remaining fossil fuels just to mine copper, and still not have enough bring a modern lifestyle to all of humanity with renewables or nuclear.

    We don’t have the minerals nor the useable energy to continue with our current modern lifestyle of the golden billion, for much longer, let alone drag the rest of humanity up to our ‘standards’. (not that there is any real attempt to do so by the ‘west’)

    Because people refuse to acknowledge the reality of our predicament, the collective we will just continue ignoring reality until it all falls apart.

    Liked by 1 person

    1. lol… Hideaway is great. I actually think he/she is Art Berman, Simon Michaux or someone like that. I have a hard time with energy (which is why I love Sid Smith), but Hideaway is like an energy oracle.

      Liked by 2 people

      1. paqnation … I can assure you I am not any one of those people. I’m a nobody, that first learnt about limits to growth in 1975 in my first year of an Environmental Studies course. I’ve been studying and researching everything about energy and resources for decades. My wife and I moved to the country 40 years ago onto a block of land and started farming.

        I was the state secretary of an organic farming group and on the certifying committee over 30 years ago. Virtually all organic, biodynamic, permaculture, regenerative properties I came across had similar characteristics. The profitable ones used lots of off property resources, which I argued was unsustainable, because of diesel use etc. I left the organic movement, also decades ago, because there was nothing really sustainable about it.

        I was a believer in a renewable future for decades, always believing it was only a matter of time until they became better and cheaper than fossil fuels, which were clearly depleting. I had an accident 15 years ago, and since then have had way more time to do research than just about anyone. I really got stuck into working out how mines could go ‘green’ until I just couldn’t make the numbers work. (BTW I also had some economics and geology in my tertiary studies, but have learnt way more on both subjects in the last 15 years).

        Eventually I reluctantly did my own calculations on EROEI because I just couldn’t find anything with an unbiased approach that came close to making sense. I’ve been against nuclear for decades, mainly because of humanities failure to deal with wastes and the nuclear bombs we create, so I very reluctantly calculated the EROEI using my method and was stunned at the results.

        I use to be a believer in the 100:1 EROEI that everyone in favor of nuclear constantly states (before I worked it out for myself). The reality is nothing like that, it’s pitiful worse than solar and wind, which instantly made me realise that modern civilization is not sustainable any any way, shape or form.

        I also kept checking the numbers I calculated for Saudi oil and a small gas project in WA. Sure enough these came to the rough numbers we need for modernity, but of course fossil fuels are leaving us due to depletion, they are a dead end anyway, even before we consider climate issues.

        All my work, over years, has given me a point of reference for when the world as we know it is in real trouble. It’s when the oil extraction decline accelerates to the downside. Everything runs on oil, especially farming and mining and heavy transport. The world falls to pieces without any of these, once they struggle to get the diesel/bunker fuel they need, collapse is baked in. A date of when? no idea, but suspect we will know by higher oil prices and a failure to respond with greater oil production, then the next year a further decline in oil production, while oil prices remain high etc.

        Not even coal can save modernity, the EROEI is too low. Even if we went on a massive Coal to liquids campaign, the energy return for the cost is way too low. When coal was last king we had approximately a 70% rural population even in the west, now we have multiples of the overall population, mostly in cities, and badly degraded agricultural land.

        One last aspect on Simon Michaux’s work. I’ve always noticed he didn’t include all the extra energy needed to dig out all the resources he rightly claimed we didn’t have. He based his numbers on total world energy use in 2018. He was and is well aware of the lack of energy available to mine the much lower grades of ores from deeper underground, but never added that to his energy calculations. I have been wondering if he was keeping this up his sleeve for sometime later, or perhaps just used it in quiet conversations with politicians who questioned his ‘public’ work, so he could say he was giving the rosy picture as reality was way worse..

        Anyway, thanks for the kind words above, greatly appreciated..

        Liked by 1 person

        1. Thanks for the background Hideaway, very interesting. My ability to guess the age and living of participants here is terrible. I was off by a mile on you.

          I too am a disillusioned farmer. The organic farm I assist is completely unsustainable and I often disagree with how precious resources are deployed on “green” initiatives.

          I’ve appended an edited version of this comment to your essay above because I think future readers will appreciate learning a bit about you. Send me an email if you want any edits.

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          1. I’m not surprised the organic farm you work on is not really sustainable, none really are. Some claim they are importing nothing, which means they are just mining the soil and ‘something’ will eventually ‘give’.

            I listen carefully to people who claim they have a sustainable property these days, and occasionally point out one or two things that are not sustainable. The usual reply is ‘well mostly sustainable’.

            I’ve come to the conclusion that farming and agriculture are just unsustainable in the long term (after farming for 40 years). Liebig’s law of the minimum will eventually decrease yields no matter how good the husbandry, unless you import every mineral that goes out via markets, plus add back what gets washed downstream by rain. Some mineral shortage will eventually show up as increases in pests and diseases, decimating whatever crop you are trying to grow. That usually happens before any outward signs of shortages in plants themselves. Animals are just extensions of the quality of inputs for the plants.

            As the collection and transport of all wastes from cities back to farms is very energy intensive, it’s not possible when oil is gone and it’s not happening while we have a lot of oil either.

            The real problem of anyone trying to be just self sufficient on their property, is that our modern civilization demands that you pay taxes for the privilege of ‘owning’ property (sole occupying realistically, when we die we own or have nothing, the land owns us, not the other way around). To pay the taxes, you have to make money, so are forced into the modern world. Every person that claims they are going to be self sufficient overlooks this simple reality. Possibly the enjoyment of being young and naive.

            Like most ‘aware’ people I’m in the older part of life at 67. I suspect we all need the wisdom of age that tells/shows us how unsustainable and temporary modern civilization really is.

            Like

            1. I love your fine understanding of these topics: energy and agriculture.

              Correct me if I didn’t understand well.
              Reading your comment did not lead me “to the conclusion that farming and agriculture are just unsustainable in the long term”.
              Rather, it seems to me exportation of the produce (more precisely the minerals contained) to the city is the unsustainable part (taking without replacing).

              Which goes back to the notion that civilization (life in cities) is unsustainable. To be more precise, it seems to me a certain level of concentration (of people, minerals, power…) is unsustainable because flows must redistribute and they require energy.

              Like

        2. Thanks for that reply Hideaway. I love to hear life journeys of people who “get it”. And maybe you’re not Art or Simon, but I think you should be a guest on Nate Hagens channel.

          (p.s. Thats a nightmare scenario for me by the way. Becoming an expert at something and then content creators seeking me out for interviews. I dont have the self-confidence, I get easily flustered, and my anger usually gets the best of me. It would have to be audio only, and I’d probably still end up telling Nate to “fu*k off” on a live broadcast. haha)

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  30. Here is a classic example of how most (all?) covid dissidents have other wacky beliefs grounded in denial.

    The hubristic error committed by those who believe in Gain of Function Efficacy—the notion that mad scientists can manipulate genomes to achieve global pathogenic ends—is in the same category of error committed by those who believe that:

    – climate is dictated by a single molecule
    – complex systems can be reflected in models with predictive competence
    – we’re running out of resources
    – the earth’s rights trump human rights
    – global crises admit only global solutions

    Like

    1. Definately some tension between them. My guess is Berman does not respect Kunstler’s knowledge of the energy space and does not want to be associated with a doomer message. Berman does back flips trying to explain that a coming decline in oil supply will not be a big deal. Kunstler thinks Berman is spinning hopium.

      Like

    2. I made it to 28 minutes and had to abandon the podcast. Berman states the Natural Gas pipeline (Nordstream) that was blown up “never had gas flowing through it” and yet we all saw video of enormous quantities of gas (under massive pressure) able to make it to the sea surface.

      Berman obviously understands the relationship between production-rate and market-price but seems lost by geopolitics.

      Liked by 1 person

  31. It’s not just Fauci. It’s western world insanity and it’s getting worse rather than better.

    Like

    1. Passed into law with no debate.

      This is something that has been deeply troubling me since the start of covid. There has been zero substantive political opposition on any of the issues. There is no one to vote for that will ban mRNA and put Fauci in prison.

      Why?

      It could mean that most citizens agree with what we are doing. That’s even more troubling given the science and evidence.

      Perhaps the tribe senses scarcity and conflict on the horizon and is saying “get in line and follow the rules”.

      https://soniaelijah.substack.com/p/frances-pfizer-amendment-could-turn

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      1. I think she means there was no public debate. (I myself wasn’t aware and am just discovering now about this law)

        However, from what is explained here (https://lcp.fr/actualites/derives-sectaires-l-assemblee-adopte-le-projet-de-loi-en-retablissant-la-creation-d-un), it seems the law still seemed difficult to pass precisely because of article 4.
        The article was rejected a first time (116 against 108) https://www2.assemblee-nationale.fr/scrutins/detail/(legislature)/16/(num)/3365, then presented a second time with a new version and passed (182 against 137) https://www2.assemblee-nationale.fr/scrutins/detail/(legislature)/16/(num)/3367
        Then the whole law was passed (151 to 73) https://www2.assemblee-nationale.fr/scrutins/detail/(legislature)/16/(num)/3368

        No, I don’t think all citizens agree with what is happening. On the contrary. But, there is a disproportionate power play: some (the “they” pulling the strings in the dark 🙂 own most medias, are able to corrupt many politicians, lobby institutions, buy many scientists, put pressure on the rest of them…
        The whole system is rigged from top to bottom.
        It’s probably too late for it to be renovated and, in the middle term, I see only two outcomes: tyranny or collapse (or the gong show as you like to call it). And I think it is going to be an increasingly impotent tyranny within a collapsing system.

        Like

        1. Thanks Charles for giving us the view from your home in France.

          Although it’s all predictable I find it very distressing. We have more than enough biophysical problems to worry about without also having to worry about unethical/evil leaders.

          Like

  32. Here’s another good deep conversation about how the US and Europe have lost their political and institutional wisdom and intelligence.

    The participants are I believe overshoot blind. I would love to hear equally competent people discuss world affairs in the context of resource scarcity and looming economic collapse.

    Like

  33. Big things are shifting in the middle east.

    All regular Arab citizens now agree Israel must be obliterated and want war. Previously unfriendly countries are aligning against Israel. US likely to be pushed out of the region. This is the most dangerous point in the region for hundreds of years. Col. Macgregor is worried Israel won’t survive.

    Like

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