By Steve Carrow: What would a wise community do?

Today’s guest post by Steve Carrow compliments an essay I wrote 8 years ago on what would a wise society do about overshoot.

Steve takes a local perspective and discusses what a wise community and individual might do to become more self-reliant and resilient, and to prepare for the collapse of our high tech, energy intensive society.

My premise is that at the global, nation-state, or even state level, the current hierarchical system is not capable of climbing down from overshoot, or anticipating and preparing for a lower energy, lower consumption future. Any efforts to prepare must be done at the personal, and then small, local level, where like minded people can coalesce and work as a cooperative community to make the needed transition in lifestyle.

Local self-reliance is foremost about the basics: food, water and shelter. There are abundant resources online and printed that range from the Foxfire Book series, which captured lore from Appalachian settlers, to the most up to date beans and bullets prepper website. Local self-reliance is not about saving the knowledge we humans have accumulated, or western culture (god forbid), and it is not even a solution. It is simply a greater than zero chance to get some humans through the bottleneck.

Collecting books is NOT enough. Sure, learn from others, to avoid newbie mistakes, but actual hands on doing is needed, even if the first step is just growing a tomato plant on your balcony or patio. Don’t be afraid of small failures. More is learned from mistakes than successes.

A short time frame response to collapse is the solitary prepper, for those with the means to do so. But a longer term and more resilient response to collapse and the coming new arrangement is a collective effort. Our forebearers survived the African veldt, and then went on to overrun the world, because of group cooperation. Any success at surviving the coming bottleneck will be a small, local, group effort. Think Dunbar’s number or smaller.

Cooperation is not an easy thing to accomplish, humans being a fractious, conniving species, with a hard-wired dark side permanently bound to our empathetic, benevolent side. Recall the back to the land hippie commune movement of the 60’s and 70’s, when environmental awareness and cultural turmoil drove many to try intentional communities. Virtually every one failed. In part due to ignorance of the earthly details of self-reliance and provisioning through human labor, but also due to governance and group cooperation dysfunction. Most intentional communities were ideology driven (Vietnam, civil rights, etc.), but few had long-term sustainability as their central purpose. And it’s damn hard work.

https://www.forbes.com/sites/russellflannery/2021/04/11/what-happened-to-americas-communes/

Somewhere between 2,000 and 3,000 communes existed in the U.S. in the 1960s and ‘70s with about 75 in the small state of Vermont, making it one of the epicenters of the experiment.

Describing what a sustainable small community would look like is fairly straightforward for the physical needs dimensions of food, water, and shelter, however the social dimensions of hierarchy, communal agreements, security, and governance are the difficult puzzles to solve.

The Amish are an example of a culture that has chosen to be very intentional about what technology they adopt. In general, farming and practical avocations that provide the essentials for rural life are the center of their economy. The size of Amish communities is constrained by a reasonable trip by horse to conduct business and socializing. There is, however, a tradeoff. Their rigid social structure is paternal and religion based, but has shown staying power, with many examples of effective cooperation, such as barn raising. Full religious commitment, and submitting to rigid community rules, will not be acceptable to many modern humans.

That said, even Amish are not long term sustainable, but a model to consider as a step down from where we are, and a kind of “training wheels” for adjusting to the next step down towards living within the local carrying capacity.

Being set in their ways, Amish will likely suffer like everyone else when flexibility in fast changing conditions is required, but they will at least already have strong social connections and a tradition of group effort.

Before cooperating at the level of a barn raising or similar large group efforts, and after simply being a good neighbor, is the level where barter and more involved trading favors need to be navigated.

I am still trying to figure out barter, and trading more substantial favors with neighbors takes time to develop trust and some sort of shared value system that is not denominated in dollars.

How many eggs is a bale of hay worth? What if you have too many eggs right now, but will need the hay next winter. Maybe eggs are free in the spring, but quite dear in winter, when hens have stopped laying. This is just one example of the myriad components of a truly local economy.

How does one remember all these transactions to make sure you are being a fair trading partner? Money turns out to be real handy unless it gets too concentrated and unleashes the dysfunctional side of capitalism or is welded by the more sociopathic among us.

The point is, it will take time to achieve a sophisticated level of cooperation, and is not something that will go smoothly if it has to happen immediately after a crisis ends BAU.

All future self-reliant communities will consist of collections of self-reliant households. Therefore developing self-reliant skills is important for all possible futures. It is time to simplify, reduce consumption, and prioritize. As John Michael Greer has said for years, “collapse now and avoid the rush.” Work on becoming a potential positive contributor to a “collapse community” should one emerge.

Here is a little on my background and personal journey towards self-reliance.

I was raised on a farm in Indiana, and left the farm as many did during the Earl Butz era, to work as an engineer for the same company my entire career. I was a small cog in the industry that builds extractive infrastructure for oil companies. Sigh.

After becoming aware it took me a long time to get off the treadmill. I was very lucky to have a wife who shares my world view.

I am now doing what little I can to pay restitution for my past. We are transitioning 40 acres (17 hectares) to a permaculture based system with food plants that are native or fill the same ecological role. I am learning skills and taking incremental steps to becoming more self-reliant.

We have quite a large garden and grow about 30 types of vegetables. We dehydrate, can, freeze, and ferment, including hard cider! We seed save many vegetables, and are working on saving more.

We have planted a dozen apple trees, ten cherry trees, eight pear trees, six mulberry, and hundreds of hazelnut and chestnut trees. The hazels are now 11 years old and in full production, the chestnuts are slower and are just coming on.

Our wooded areas were pasture until about 30 years ago, so are in transition, mostly brush and brambles. We have cut in trails, and have planted oak and hard maple to speed succession a bit.

We heat with wood in a Russian furnace, which is a type of masonry stove. We are not yet off grid, and it will be a huge lifestyle change when that happens, but we have two PV arrays, and capture rain water off the pole barn for watering trees and the garden. A cistern for water storage is in the works. Many more projects are planned to increase self-reliance, and to be contributors to whatever local community emerges.

We are slowly engaging neighbors in joint efforts. We share the cost and upkeep of a small tractor with two neighbors. I own a cider press that I share with the neighbors. A neighbor had some logging done, but the tops and branches left by the loggers were more than he could ever get to, so he let me harvest firewood.

Here are some tips for increasing self-reliance that I have learned, in no particular order of importance:

  • Eat the elephant one bite at a time – it’s overwhelming to think about doing all the things needed to be maximally self-reliant, or to create a local community. Just do one small thing, then another, rinse and repeat. (Although a bit of urgency is warranted given world affairs.)
  • If at all possible, move to a place with access to land to grow food. However you slice it, getting out of urban centers and figuring out how to be part of growing food, or learning a craft, or both, will be better than collapsing in place.
  • Grow food with priority to calories like potatoes and beans, not lettuce; perennials like fruit trees; and chickens- just a couple layers will help with kitchen scraps and learning husbandry.
  • Preserve food- can it, dehydrate it, ferment it, and freeze it while you can.
  • Reduce energy use- by whatever means you can afford/accomplish.
  • Build redundancy- more than one way to get water, more than one way to heat the house, etc.
  • Learn to repair things- house, car, clothes, appliances, etc.
  • Make things- clothes, chicken coops, root cellar, flour, beer, etc.
  • Security- think about how you might protect yourself, or be part of a collective security arrangement. Depending on location and how things play out, increased violence is very likely.

I have scores of bookmarked sites about homesteading, gardening and permaculture, and three book shelves full in our library, but these tend to focus on improving the skills of an individual.

Here are a few resources relevent to building community strategies and skills that I have found useful:

  • I volunteer at a local folk school. It’s a good way to acquire skills, and maybe link up with like minded people.
  • A book I found helpful for imagining a transition path to self-reliance is Sharon Astyk’s Depletion and Abundance.
  • Chris Smaje has written extensively about what a small farm economy might look like, and his book A Small Farm Future argues for a reversal of urbanization back to individual farms, and identifies local governance issues that need to be worked out.
  • John Michael Greer in his book The Ecotechnic Future has a several chapters relevant to what a wise community might do, as does Eric Brende’s book Better Off: Flipping the Switch on Technology.
  • The Living Energy Farm has ideas for small scale community energy systems.
  • I do not follow the transition towns movement, as I hear little about them any more. They had quite the buzz for a while, but perhaps tried to do too much? Maybe someone here knows if transition towns offer any useful resources?

I hope others add to this list of resources in the comments.

Rob here: If a substantial list of resources emerges I will copy and organize them somewhere for easy reference.

367 thoughts on “By Steve Carrow: What would a wise community do?”

  1. I have given thought to the winning survival strategy of a group that prepares for a down slope that does not contain nuclear or biological culling.

    That is why I think of presently unacceptable social contracts as an alternative path forward. See http://www.skil.org, especially The plan for Unwinding the Human Predicament.

    Here is the personal survival plan I have morally rejected but I think will produce the last man standing.

    Think of a group that can harvest materials and human bodies for food. Think of the truck group in Cormac McCarthy’s The Road.

    They just moved around from productive homestead to productive homestead eating the harvests and people until everything is consumed and move on. Against this model prepping (food production and defense) is pretty much the creation of targets for these mobile preppers. No fixed location can hold out against the sweep and eat hungry hordes.

    When these roving bands are so far apart they have no targets of opportunity within the capacity of their remaining rations then they eat each other and die out or hunt and gather if they have the skills to hide from each other.

    People with wood lots and potatoes in the ground and a few chickens are humoring themselves. They don’t see themselves as food for any group that set itself up to move to eat people and whatever vegetables these people grew and stored.

    Chilling thoughts. Maybe they can motivate some serious outside the box paths forward that keeps more of the human abilities to advance wellbeing. See How the World Works, a 9 minute video.

    Jack Alpert
    http://www.skil.org
    Jack’s work 600 word summary

    Liked by 4 people

    Reply

    1. Hi Jack, thanks for stopping by. Hope you are well.

      I’m afraid your socially unacceptable survival plan is likely to be a winning strategy for the predators.

      As with all predator/prey systems, I expect some of the most fit and most lucky prey will also survive.

      I personally would like to find a way to preserve some of the best elements of our modern society in a system that has at least a small chance of long term survival.

      That’s why I support your plan which I believe is the only plan in existence that offers any hope for anything other than a return to the stone age or extinction.

      Liked by 1 person

      Reply

    2. Jack, how lamentable that your video has only 19k views in three years. It seems the vast majority do not want to accept that there is a dilemma. The ignorance of the public is profound.

      Cormac McCarthy’s The Road, is my stalwart answer for “how bad could it get”. The piecemeal cannibalism, to keep the food ‘fresh’, was as you say ‘chilling’.

      I agree with Rob, when he says “… some of the most fit and most lucky prey will also survive.”

      For a short period of time, maybe the first harvest, then winter and through to the following spring, there will be three types of people that persevere:
      – the lucky, and luck eventually fails.
      – the prepared, who eventually run out of preps.
      – the monsters, that become more experienced and cunning with every encounter.

      Liked by 2 people

      Reply

  2. Dr. Tom Murphy today recounts his experiments with AI generated images.

    https://dothemath.ucsd.edu/2024/03/cant-spell-fail-without-ai/

    I show all these examples so that you can live a similar experience and see how silly AI often is. Not to sell it too short: I am truly impressed that a visual representation can be created so quickly that would take me weeks to produce—if I even had the skill to do so at all. But it can’t tell stories.

    AI is good at placing objects in an image, dressing them up in funky costumes and rendering in various artistic styles. Just don’t try to specify how/where the elements are to be arranged. Images can also be accidentally evocative—but I suspect only because the training set had evocative imagery.

    What it consistently misses is relationships between elements—crucial for a story. It works in the realm of objects and detail, not in synthesis of a larger whole. Nouns and adjectives, but not verbs. If you’ve read Iain McGilchrist’s The Master and His Emissary, you’ll easily identify AI as an algorithmic left-hemisphere processor, lacking the qualities of the right hemisphere for understanding metaphor, narrative, relationships, and the whole. We need to be better than that.

    Like

    Reply

  4. Unlike clots formed via string theory, or myocarditis from auto-immune system heart tissue damage, which I can quickly explain in simple language, I am struggling to understand and explain the IgG4 class shift problem. If pressed I would simply say mRNA damages the immune system giving the virus a safe home to mutate into something more dangerous. I’m hoping that with time I will be able to properly explain the IgG4 problem.

    It’s hard to express how angry I feel given that despite me being a non-expert I am aware of both serious short term risks, and potentially more serious long term risks, with rising all-cause mortality signals confirming the risks, yet our “leaders” continue to push even more mRNA into people including children.

    https://www.rintrah.nl/millions-more-begin-to-show-the-igg4-class-shift/

    Natural infection doesn’t do this: When an infection is severe enough to require an IgG antibody response (not all infections require IgG antibodies), it creates a small number of IgG antibodies, against a small number of spots on the Spike protein, those spots are most often 7 to 9 amino acids in length. Those antibodies will target different spots from one person to another, so they’re hard to escape through evolution. Importantly, those antibodies also undergo affinity maturation: The immune system improves these antibodies over time, to make them bind more tightly.

    Once you’ve gone through this process, your body is playing the role in the human community it’s supposed to play: Stop virulent respiratory viruses from spreading themselves, while allowing milder ones to pass through and find new hosts. With sufficient exposure however, the unvaccinated are likely to turn into dead end hosts, prohibiting them from selecting against virulence by no longer passing on the virus altogether.

    They screwed all of this up and created an immune escape pandemic, of ever more infectious variants. You can not discriminate against virulent varieties, when your body is just desperately trying to keep this virus out with a cocktail of IgG4 antibodies against the whole Spike protein.

    Now you see the result. Your kid has brain damage since the summer of 2022? Well, BA.5 that spread in the middle of summer, evolved to infect the brain (where antibodies can’t reach). It has a selective advantage thanks to the boosted.

    All these low grade morons are telling you that it’s somehow normal for a new virus to emerge next to a Chinese lab, infect the whole human population within months, then reinfect everyone on a constant basis, constantly increasing the viral load seen in sewage (highest peak ever seen so far was in December 2023) and constantly increasing its fusogenicity with every new Omicron variant.

    Do me a favor, when you run into one of these morons, grab them by the neck and ask them: How come none of this ever happened with the previous four corona viruses that jumped into our species and established themselves? How come the hCov’s are not steadily increasing their virulence?

    Liked by 1 person

    Reply

    1. Two of my mRNA’d friends are sick AGAIN with a persistent “COLD”.
      Another friend’s health noticeably and worryingly declined after he ignored my warning not to get boosted.
      Another mRNA’d friend died unexpectedly watching TV. They didn’t do an autopsy so we’ll never know.

      Liked by 1 person

      Reply

      1. My two neighbours both in their early seventies are boostered numerous times after getting Astra Zeneca adenovirus vector injections have now developed aggressive cancers. He has prostate and she leukemia. Coincidence – most likely……………………………not.

        Liked by 3 people

        Reply

        1. Not only are we seeing an excess of deaths around the world but also an increase in chronic disease.

          Dr. John Campbell fact checks the UK health minister’s unscientific and incorrect response.

          Like

          Reply

              1. I realise that comment might have hit a nerve but, really, age-standardised mortality calculations are far more useful than raw numbers (though even just population size adjustments, for NZ, show no excess mortality, taking account of ageing gives a negative excess mortality). Before denying reality, lets get a solid grip on what reality is.

                Like

                Reply

            2. John Campbell mentioned the Office for Health Improvements and Disparities. They will be publishing a monthly report, which John didn’t mention. Here is there latest data which doesn’t show any excess deaths since the middle of last year, though I’m not sure there use age-standardised methods: https://app.powerbi.com/view?r=eyJrIjoiNDVjNjYyYTYtMWJmZC00MDVjLWJlN2UtNjMxYjk3NDM5NDI1IiwidCI6ImVlNGUxNDk5LTRhMzUtNGIyZS1hZDQ3LTVmM2NmOWRlODY2NiIsImMiOjh9

              Like

              Reply

                1. Right. So the data were fine before that, because they seemed to paint the picture you wanted, at least according to John Campbell? All government data should be taken with a good dollop of scepticism. All of it. All of the time.

                  Like

                  Reply

                    1. I’m a little confused here. Presumably you mean that they aren’t publishing data that you can be confident of? John Campbell seems to assume the data are sound and reports them, from which we form opinions. I agree that we could do with much more detailed data for COVID-19, and the lack of it is very suspicious indeed, but for all cause deaths, there are quite a lot of data. It needs to be analysed meaningfully, if it can be trusted. If it can’t be trusted, there is nothing we can say about deaths.

                      Like

                    2. I very much value and enjoy your overshoot insights but I don’t want to discuss covid with you anymore, and I’d prefer you expressed your covid opinions elsewhere.

                      Like

                    3. That’s a shame. I’ll have to consider whether I post here again. I’ve appreciated the generally serious discussions but I’ve loads to do here, so freeing up time for those things would be good.

                      Like

                    4. You’ve been a great contributor here and it would be wonderful if you would continue, just not on covid issues.

                      The uncertainty around the important elements of covid are now gone and it is settled science like peak oil and climate change. I would also object to someone frequently questioning whether oil is finite or CO2 causes warming.

                      Like

  5. Here is a promising alternate theory to Dr. AJit Varki’s MORT for explaining human behavior that appears to be denial of reality, when in fact the behavior is simply how our “intelligence” evolved.

    I plan to watch a few more times before commenting on whether I think Varki’s MORT is in jeopardy.

    Liked by 1 person

    Reply

    1. I’ve already quoted it here, but will do it again:

      “The philosophers have only interpreted the world, in various ways. The point, however, is to change it.”
      – Karl Marx

      We can change the reality! That is the main idea of our modern world. It has roots in Marx, Hegel … but it goes back to Plato and gnosticism.

      That’s why I think it’s crucial to study philosophy, because culture is more powerful than genetics/evolution.

      Like

      Reply

        1. Mainly energy/climate, resources/isolation, geography, religion/philosophy to name a few.
          Why traditional Japanese woodworking relies on sophisticated joinery instead of metal nails? Not because Japanese woodworkers are so brilliant, but because metal ores are rare in Japan. Simple as that.

          But my point is different. I don’t expect anything to change because the modern world is driven by the mind over reality ideology. We can change the world! Impossible is nothing! Just do it!

          The axiom is wrong, and you basically need denial to overcome consequences.

          Like

          Reply

          1. I think you may be saying something important but I do not understand it. I read over and over:

            The philosophers have only interpreted the world, in various ways. The point, however, is to change it.

            and I still do not understand what Marx is saying. It’s probably a defect in my brain which also does not understand poetry.

            Is there anyone else following this thread that can translate for me?

            Like

            Reply

            1. Let me try to extremely simplify it.

              Before the Enlightenment the dominant world view was that everything was created by Almighty God. Philosophers tried to describe what’s going on or “interpret the world, in various ways” by discovering the natural law, the laws of physics, etc.

              Then came the Enlightement / anthropocentrism / idealism. Now man holds the central position in the world and can define it “The point, however, is to change it”, because it’s cruel, unfair, etc. Man decides what’s moral, what’s wrong, what’s right. There is some higher, “ideal form” of reality that is only accessible to our minds.

              And today even logic is oppressive, as it slows our progress towards heaven on earth (ideal world), powered by clean energy from renewables, with no pollution, “No need for greed or hunger. A brotherhood of man”

              Like

              Reply

            2. In the subject/object (humanity/world, I/others) interpretation of existence, I think, this quote means that: we should focus on changing the world, acting upon it (that’s our positive culture), instead of being “passive” (contemplative, fatalists, accepting) observers/interpreters of the world (that’s, to Marx, the defunct philosophies of the past).

              The idea that the world changes/evolves is quite recent (Darwin and all). (to be compared with the religious interpretation of a static world created in 7 days by God and perfect). The idea that we are the main drivers of change, that the little “self” (rational mind) could conquer the world and “better” it, even more.

              To a religious person (depends on the religion, protestantism is quite secular), the idea that we could improve the creation of God may seem simply preposterous. (And to humble rational mind too: after all what do we know of the consequence of any of our actions. Do we even know what’s good for our own selves?)

              We have pushed this idea of change, that we are the ones, with our rationality, who are able and entitled to change the world for the better, to its extreme limits.

              We now see the consequences: “Limits to growth”, could be titled “Limits to human change” or “Limits to human whim” or “Limits to human supremacy”.

              This will lead/is leading to a profound cultural change (there is no escaping that, if survival is an option). I’d like to believe into a culture of co-existence for survival and living. It is not a negation of our ability to reason and act. But a recognition that action should be measured, done while knowing our place in service to the whole planetary life, that most of the time we should just abstain and do no harm, let the other some breathing space.

              Kind of a new Copernican revolution.

              (And then, there are the interpretations of the world not based on subject/object duality, with echoes in modern physics 🙂

              BTW, I like what Anonymous is saying 🙂

              Liked by 1 person

              Reply

  6. Very good peak oil discussion with Andrii Zvorygin, Simon Michaux, and Steve St. Angelo.
    – why is diesel consumption down?
    – bankers are trying to cancel Michaux
    – the elite won’t survive
    – we are behaving like Easter Islander’s
    – you can’t fix stupid (eg. Doomberg)
    – Michaux still plans on disappearing for 10 years and then returning with a solution
    – farm raised seafood is not fit to eat
    – the green transition is a PR exercise to convice us there is a plan
    – the people who get promoted in the mining industry are not competent
    – wind turbines will start to fail in the next 5 years
    – the mining industry use to plan forward 30 years, now hedge funds control 75% of mining capital and planning focusses on the next quarter with no resource stewardship
    – central banks will soon get into trouble
    – BitCoin mining destroys 90% of capital invested in 2 years
    – target grain size for grinding ore has decreased from 150um to 10-20um which has exponentially increased energy required, and this is in addition to declining ore concentration
    – speaking truth damaged Michaux’s career
    – truth seeking is not compatible with wealth maximization
    – Europe farmers are working 60 hours/week compared to 35 hours/week average and are not making enough to live which explains the protests
    – EU does not have enough energy to run Ukraine war
    – Michaux plans to release soon a 500 page report he did for Hawaii looking at realistic plans to get off fossil energy – says it will be the biggest smackdown of renewables ever published – looks like he is using a similar approach to Hideaway

    Liked by 4 people

    Reply

    2. This was an excellent discussion. Not much hopium for anything rescuing us from energy decline. All of this seemed not be acknowledging the problems with a non-stable climate/collapse of agriculture going forward. Civilization has so many problems going forward. I do agree that the “After Skool” video above is a gem that I will bookmark and watch multiple times. I think it’s argument that curiosity and humility are more important than intelligence (and education).
      AJ

      Like

      Reply

  7. Preptip:

    If forced to choose only one food to help survive being shipwrecked on an isolated island, peanut butter would be a good choice because:
    – dense source of calories (90 per tbsp)
    – good source of protein (3g per tbsp)
    – excellent shelf life
    – no refrigeration
    – ready to eat with no cooking
    – compatible with vegetarian companions
    – delicious

    The members only warehouse I shop at sells peanut butter at (by far) the best price in town. Every once in a rare while they put peanut butter on sale for an even better price.

    Today I scored 14 Kg at CDN$4.10/Kg.

    In the past I have discussed the importance of creating a spreadsheet to track your food inventory and consumption patterns. Here is another good reason to maintain such a spreadsheet.

    Peanut butter for some strange reason has a short best-by date, usually only 6 months beyond the date of purchase. Because of this in years past I would probably have only bought 1 container of peanut butter on sale for fear of it going bad.

    Thanks to several years of data in my spreadsheet I know that peanut butter is perfectly good at least 2-3 years beyond the best-by date, and I know I consume about 0.5-1.0 Kg per month. Therefore today I confidently bought 14 Kg knowing that nothing will be wasted and there will never be a better price.

    Liked by 1 person

    Reply

    1. I remember some study a few years ago looked at people who essentially lived on peanut butter sandwiches (extremely picky eaters). The researchers thought these people would be highly deficient in many essential nutrients. Surprisingly, they were doing pretty well. Go peanuts

      Liked by 1 person

      Reply

    2. Unfortunately, you can’t bury peanut butter in the ground and get more peanut butter…

      Not saying it’s a bad strategy, just that it is very time-limited.

      Like

      Reply

  8. Good essay Steve. You are going to be a valuable resource when the SHTF.

    I loved the Amish part. Once again just another group of people that I ignorantly mocked during my lifetime. Same as Native Indians. Or some indigenous tribe that would be in the press because they killed a journalist or something.

    So sick how our culture trains us to ridicule/despise the “good ones” and praise/worship the “evil ones”.

    Liked by 3 people

    Reply

        1. Who knows. Because if you take a case you are shunned from the community and your entire family forever. And it’s mostly women who’ll be putting a case forward – and they have no agency whatsoever in these communities. So we really have no idea how common it is.

          Like

          Reply

        2. When I’ve listened to testimonials from Amish women who’ve left, they often referencing other women who have been through similar abuse to themselves.

          Like

          Reply

  9. If at all possible, move to a place with access to land to grow food. However you slice it, getting out of urban centers and figuring out how to be part of growing food, or learning a craft, or both, will be better than collapsing in place.

    What are we going to do about the the billions of people living in urban areas. Maybe a 1 child policy for couples living in urban/suburban areas?

    Liked by 2 people

    Reply

    2. As I mention at the start of the post, I think there is unlikely to be a global or national “we” that will cause a useful response to overshoot. I acknowledge that I am very fortunate to be where I am, but everyone, rural or urban, will have to assume the cavalry is not coming, and do what they can. Billions will suffer, and any lifeboat or trolley problem ethical dilemmas will be very local in nature.

      Like

      Reply

    3. “… 1 child policy …”

      When politicians attempt to make changes, they invariably fail to understand that abrupt change is often worse (in the short term) than no change. Prime Minister Liz Truss and her Chancellor of the Exchequer (Akwasi Kwarteng) discovered this very quickly.

      Getting population under control should have been completed decades ago. The name “one child policy” is itself wrong. What about people like myself that have zero children and my taxes are taken from me and (in part) are used to encourage teenage pregnancy and getting to the front of the social housing queue.

      Governments everywhere need to send a clear message – having fewer children, preferably none, will be rewarded via lower taxes. If people want lots of children, then it has to be without the current social subsidies.

      Reckless parenting should be rewarded with “snip, snip”.

      Liked by 1 person

      Reply

      1. Here’s your clear message- The House just passed a strongly bipartisan bill increasing the child tax credit. Still stalled in the Senate at this time. Many states are piling on as well. The millions of new residents was not enough. As Dave Cohen over at Decline of the Empire used to say, before he just gave up- “Jesus wept”.

        Liked by 1 person

        Reply

        1. Laugh, weep, seethe – there is no response that is rational, legal, reasonable.

          Maybe we could all write strongly worded letters – LOL.

          I do not want to witness the trauma that is inevitable – but there is no real choice. If I ever have to turn away people seeking help, I will offer them my thoughts and prayers – that seems to be the solution to all calamities from the shit stains in Washington DC and state capitals. Followed by vowing!

          Liked by 1 person

          Reply

    1. I think a lot of what he writes is hyperbole. When it comes to what NATO is going to do and how Russia is going to respond, I think he puts way too much stock in NATO. Individual countries in NATO contributing 10-20,000 troops that have difficulty communicating because of languages and have never fought together are a recipe for disaster. Andrei Martyanov has far superior analysis of what Russia is capable of than Canadian pepper. IMHO.
      AJ

      Like

      Reply

      1. Agree, lots of chaff to sift from Canadian Prepper’s wheat. I frequently watch Martyanov but it feels like he too sometimes exaggerates the capabilities of Russia’s new weapons.

        Like

        Reply

        1. I disagree. Most pundits in the west, even the military ones don’t have the rigorous education in STEM the Russia requires of it military officers (like Martyanov). Hence, most western pundits are captive of the meme that Russia is the old USSR and has second rate weapons when the West’s assets are overpriced crap made by the military industrial defense congress cartel. Better to prepare for every contingency is the path Russia appears to be taking whereas the west just doubles down on propaganda and messaging.
          AJ

          Like

          Reply

          1. I agree with your points. I was talking about a few times I’ve heard Martyanov talk about gee whiz star wars type technology that seemed very unrealistic. Most of the time he is very good.

            Like

            Reply

          2. the West’s assets are overpriced crap

            The West’s response to Yemen throwing a lawnmower-with-wings at a ship, is a half million dollar surface to air missile. Add in myocarditis and numerous other maladies. Season with ‘woke’ and an inability to avoid collisions.

            The west richly deserves whatever fate awaits.

            Liked by 1 person

            Reply

  11. Great article Steve. I can so relate. I grew up on an off-grid farm. Have worked for 10 years professionally in the cities before moving back to live in the country. Despite my upbring of raising animals, veges, and living off grid, I still find country living quite challenging – in terms of the time and skills needed to do it successfully. Starting with small steps is indeed good advice.

    Liked by 1 person

    Reply

  13. I left the following comment:

    “Interesting but you missed the most important point. None of the climate change solutions being proposed will help. Therefore using a doomer message won’t make a difference to the outcome.

    To make the future less bad we need to shrink the economy and population and I’ll bet we’d need a seriously doomy message to have any chance of getting people on board for that prescription.”

    https://www.resilience.org/stories/2024-03-19/how-to-talk-about-climate-change-and-the-problem-with-doomerism/

    If we are all doomed, maybe it doesn’t matter if I skip my vaccination, buy a Hummer, and lie on my couch on election day. I’ll just post catastrophic memes for clicks on social media as the world burns around me. At least I’ll get a few dopamine hits before it’s all gone.

    In fact, this is pretty much what we found in a massive new study that we published in Science Advances this month! To help figure out the precise impact of climate doomerism and compare it with alternative messages, we recently completed one of the largest experiments ever conducted on climate change behavior.

    Our findings revealed that doom and gloom messaging was highly effective for stimulating climate change information sharing, like posting on the internet or social media, where negativity reigns. As you can see in our figure below, doomerism (ie negative emotions) was the single most effective strategy for increasing social media sharing.

    However, doom and gloom messaging was the absolute worst for motivating action and among the worst for changing climate change beliefs or support for climate change policies. In fact, negative emotions backfired on effortful behavior—making people significantly less likely to take action for the environment compared to a neutral control condition.

    Liked by 3 people

    Reply

    1. I support Jack Alpert’s plan so I guess I’m in favor of not overloading the lifeboats provided that a fair random lottery is used to decide who gets a seat in the lifeboat.

      Assuming we don’t implement Alpert’s plan then I’m in favor of helping the poor countires provided that they first implement a plan to reduce their birthrates to below replacement.

      Liked by 1 person

      Reply

    1. I clicked to see the headlines around 4:15 PM CDT. There was news about Wall Street, celebrity gossip, a mother who left her baby home alone for ten days. The only remotely climate related thing was about Biden strengthening tailpipe emissions regulations. They did have something about settler colonialism and Gaza, but nothing about Ukraine or mRNA vaccines.

      Liked by 3 people

      Reply

    1. Hi Folks,

      In 1982 I lived four months in Haute Volta, now Burkina Faso.

      At the time, HV had the lowest per-capita income of any country in the world.
      Nobody was starving, because it was a sharing culture.
      (There was one area of kwashikori, where people weren’t getting adequate protein.)

      I’ve lived/travelled in nine countries.
      Overall, the people of HV were the happiest, most joyful I’ve ever met.
      Sure, they would like to have more and better food, some modern conveniences, etc., but
      were satisfied and thankful for what they had.

      There was a suicide in HV while I was there.

      When people heard about this, they said,
      Somebody killed this young man!
      ) No, he killed himself.
      You mean he was gutting a chicken and cut himself badly?
      ) No, he intentionally killed himself.
      . . . But . . . how is that possible?

      A single (reported)suicide in four months in a country of over 7 million people.
      (And yes, the number has likely gone up since 1982.)

      The world happiness report is from the UN and I’m curious if there’s a
      developed world bias to their criteria?

      Thanks and good health, Weogo

      Liked by 1 person

      Reply

      1. Thanks for sharing the nice story Weogo.

        When I was a child my country Canada consumed less than half what we consume today per person and life was very good.

        The problem I worry about is the debt we have built up which will explode everything when the economy starts to shrink in earnest.

        Like

        Reply

      2. I’ve heard lots of stories like this from various countries. Something definitely doesn’t add up. Maybe there’s a difference between societies that are poor but in industrial civilization, and societies that are completely outside of it. Maybe some cultures lie about their happiness. Maybe what counts as “happy” is different culture to culture. I will do some digging on this because I’m curious.

        Liked by 1 person

        Reply

  18. reedk020351@gmail.com

    Dear Sirs,

    There are Five Cornerstones of Independence. I am introducing you here to the first. This content is twelve pages. The objective is decentralized civilization. The types of people that this plan is intended for share that objective for sovereign, egalitarian communities and their confederations. I look forward to your evaluations.
    You and your family be well and be in Good Spirits!

    With respect, Reed C. Kinney

    The link to my book is included below.

    [p.26:] Author’s Introduction

    The Five Cornerstones of Independence

    Independent community is composed of five functioning components, the five cornerstones of independence:

    Community structured dialogical, consensus-based decision-making processes. It is understood that all organization needs an executive function. Decentralized organization is structured so that the executive function of civic organization is always under the control of the people.
    [You can go directly to Appendix C of this content.]

    [Pages 30-31:] WHAT IS DIALOGUE?

    Dialogue is realized among twelve or fewer adults. Its purpose is to empower the members with semi-self-sufficiency through their independent, pragmatic, concerted action. Dialogue facilitates unanimity, group decision making and its realizations without authoritarianism.

    A. Members dialogue in order to reach an agreed understanding regarding what particular problem they share, which they perceive to be pressing and solvable. The objects of dialogue are their own and whatever problem or problems they decide to solve is discretionary. However, they must be consistent in their aim to generate maximum independence, discussed below. Decentralized Economic Social Organization, DESO, content is designed to guide them towards that objective.
    B. They agree on what action they can deploy among themselves to solve that problem.
    C. They organize their efforts and solve that problem.
    Members agree to pool capital accessible to them to form their mutual community bank, MCB. An accountant records the donations made by each member. [External fiscal and material support is welcomed, and is solicited.]

    Members investigate productive enterprises they may purchase, or that they may develop.

    a. Proposals are written by members, with their costs itemized, reliable sources identified, overhead calculated, margin of profit calculated, market sustainability is determined, the needed skills of its personnel are ascertained, and so on.
    b. The various plans are dialogued by members until one is chosen as pragmatic to their needs.
    c. They use funds from their mutual community bank, MCB, for capitalizing their first Public Productive Enterprise, which employs some of their members.

    1a. The profit from the Public Productive Enterprise is used to keep the operation going, to compensate its operators, and to pay back those who donated to the project through their MCB.
    2b. Subsequent profits above overhead are deposited in the MCB public account.

    The first Public Productive Enterprise may be a simple operation, and ethically aligned with members’ values.

    Initially, its primary purpose may be for accessing conventional money for the mutualistic group in order to provide them with leverage. And, subsequent group investments may serve the same purposes.

    Examples of ingenious, appropriate industry – Public Productive Enterprises – are provided by Marcin Jakubowski (1). Pragmatic plans for low cost construction, and production are widely available – each mutualistic group decides how best to initiate its first Cooperative.

    Readily available, intensive, food production systems are open to investigation and actualization.

    The aim of each group of three to five mutualistic families (nuclear groups) is independence. It is convenient to begin with such groups, because they are pragmatic and doable among interested people.

    [pp. 32-34:] 2. CIVIC ORGANIZATION

    Individual Nuclear Groups are too small to generate the type of independence needed for actualizing genuine communities. Genuine community is a structured proposition.
    When two or more groups of mutualistic, three to five families begin to coordinate their productive efforts, for their respective benefits, they do so through their Community Coordinating Committee, CCC.

    The Community Coordinating Committee, CCC, is composed of members of each respective group of mutualistic, three to five families. Their functions include receiving the propositions for concerted action from the members of each respective Nuclear Group. (Each proposal is signed by a number of members to demonstrate that is was dialogued and approved prior to its submission to the CCC.) The civic format is flexible relevant to the needs of each community. However, I suggest that when a set of propositions are received by the CCC that they abbreviate each of them in order that they be drafted onto ballots. The first set of ballots is delivered to the respective groups of mutualistic, three to five families: one ballot for each group.

     Since each of those mutualistic groups of families is respectively sovereign, we can refer to them as Nuclear Groups, NG.
    The first ballot is discussed, dialogued, by each respective Nuclear Group. They decide the relative importance of each proposition on their ballot. A proposition may be granted a value of seventy percent consensus, or eighty, or ninety. How each Nuclear Group reasons the consensus value, or “weight,” of each proposition is up to them.

    The ballots return to the CCC. For example, the CCC observes that of all the “consensus weights” a proposal had received from the Nuclear Groups, most of them were eighty percent. Thus, that proposition will be allotted an eighty percent consensus weight on the subsequent ballot. The subsequent ballot will list the same propositions that were on the former ballot (the “weigh in ballot”), but each will bear its consensus weight on the “voting ballot”. In that manner, the community determines the relative value of each proposition.

    A proposition that the community wants passed, or approved in a hurry, may receive a seventy percent consensus weight. An important proposition may receive an eighty percent consensus weight. A proposition that will require an important concerted effort by all members may receive a ninety percent consensus weight.

    When the actual voting ballots are sent by the CCC to each Nuclear Group, each NG discusses and dialogues each proposition until they either approve it, or not.
    The CCC receives the ballots from the NG. If a proposition that had an eighty percent consensus weight was approved by eighty percent, or more, of the NG, it is approved. The same process is applied to all propositions.

    In this manner, a community is managed by its members without centralized power, further explained below. (See: APPENDIX C – COMMUNITY DIALOGICAL CONSENSUS BASED DECISION MAKING PROCESSES, INSPIRED BY MARK CURTIS KINNEY II)

    DEVELOPMENT OF THE MUTUAL COMMUNITY BANK, MCB

    The NGs consolidate part, or all, of their respective NG mutual savings into the Mutual Community Bank, MCB. Each contribution by each NG is accounted for, recorded, and monitored by MCB accountability. The MCB is a Core Public Productive Enterprise. It belongs to the community. It is operated by community members that have the skills needed for its accounting functions. (See: APPENDIX A – MUTUAL COMMUNITY BANKS, MCB, IN DECENTRALIZED ECONOMIC SOCIAL ORGANIZATION, DESO, INSPIRED BY THE CONCEPTS OF MARK CURTIS KINNEY II)
    CCC ACTIONS ARE COMMUNITY AUTHORIZED

    When the CCC is authorized to capitalize a proposition that was community approved it withdraws the required, capital amount from the MCB public accounts to actualize the project in conjunction with the project’s developers. (Procedures are developed among members.)

    The community project, most valued, most prioritized, by the community is allotted the first capitalization. The order of importance, as agreed on by members, determines which projects are funded by the community, relevant to what the community believes it can afford. These decisions are come about through the community-dialogical-consensus-based-decision-making-processes described above, or variants as determined by each community.

    THE CCC DOES NOT HAVE EXECUTIVE POWER

    Each community decides, among its members, how its MCB community accounts are used. The CCC functions to record, capitalize, and to monitor, the public concerted actions taken by the community members. Decentralized Economic Social Organization, DESO, Civic Organization precludes the centralization of power. Power is shared equally among the NG, their Civil Organization.

    CIVIC-ECONOMIC ORGANIZATION

    Core Public Productive Enterprises are the primary objective to be realized with capital generated from the Public Productive Enterprises mentioned above in the Civil Organization section. Public Productive Enterprises may be actualized whenever a community needs them, and are included in community Civic-Economic Organization, meaning that their management is regulated through the CCC. But their primary purpose is to generate the funds needed to actualize community Core Public Productive Enterprises.

    1. CORE PUBLIC PRODUCTIVE ENTERPRISES

    Core Public productive enterprises serve two functions.
    1. They are the primary providers of the Guaranteed Minimum Standard of Service, GMSS.
    2. They are the economic foundation of independence for all community members.

    THE GUARANTEED MINIMUM STANDARD OF SERVICE, GMSS
    The GMSS is composed of the essential, minimum components of a modern, healthful life …accessible to all community members.

     Community land and property acquisition is among the first challenges that may be addressed by community members and may be among the first objectives met with the capital generated by community public productive enterprises. Some members may own land that they make accessible to the community through contractual agreements with the CCC. Members locate accessible land and property. Through dialogical, consensus-based, community decision making processes conclusions are agreed on and action is taken by the community to access land and property. Land and property belonging to the community is community managed through the CCC.

    [pp. 88-91:] DIALOGICAL FORMATS

    The first dialogical session is for personal introductions and “speaking from the heart,” creating friendships, and sharing the intention to work together towards community. Subsequent sessions pertain to developing their priorities relevant to working-with-each-other-for-each-other to create their Nuclear Groups and their civic organization.
    The whole schema for the creation of Nuclear Groups and the establishment of community in decentralized civilization is charted out before its members; becoming their “over soul” that takes on a “life of its own” as they embark upon the creative challenge of bringing it into reality. In order to fulfill its function, the dialogical, consensus-based decision-making processes need that greater purpose.

    Provided here are examples of dialogical formats. The Listening Circle and the Wisdom Circle function in Nuclear Groups in real community.

    The Listening Circle format is a good beginning point, as well as a good format, among others, for Nuclear Group dialogical consensus-based decision-making process. These are flexible arrangements among leaders and all people who take part in planning and practicing their dialogical formats.
    Leaders have wisdom, knowledge, and skill, coupled with the sincere desire to work with all members to establish their unanimity relevant to concerted plans of action and desired results.
    The community councils of the community confederation use dialogical decision-making processes.
    “HOW TO DO A LISTENING CIRCLE
    This form of dialogue was used by Native American councils. It is practiced with many names and variations — talking stick circle, wisdom circle, council process, and others. I call it listening circle because of its trademark quality of listening — a deep listening to one’s deepest self, to the group mind and to Spirit, as well as to each other. We can even listen deeply when we are talking, we can be aware of the words we are saying as we say them, of the way our bodies feel, of the stream of semi-formed thoughts and emotions out of which our words are coming, and of the receptive group space into which we are sending them.

    Imagine now that we are doing a listening circle. You and I, and a number of friends, are seated in a circle. We tell a few newcomers what to expect. When we are all clear on what will be happening, our circle starts. We sit in silence. A stick (or some other object that can be held) sits in the middle of our circle. A woman, who feels moved to speak picks up the stick, holds it as she speaks, and we all listen to what she says. No one speaks unless they have the stick. We engage in no crosstalk or conversation in the usual sense. When the speaker is done, she passes the stick to the man on her left who ponders it for a moment before speaking. After a few minutes he passes the stick to the person on his left and so it goes. The stick continues around the circle, with each of us speaking in turn and the rest of us listening. When our scheduled circle time is up — or when we pass the stick around the whole circle with none of us speaking — the stick is returned to the center and our circle is done.

    That is the whole process. At its heart, it is that simple. …
    GOING AROUND THE CIRCLE
    To the extent we honor the stick (or other object) and its role, we do not need chairpersons and facilitators; the stick, itself, in its journey around the circle, shapes the structure and quality of our dialogue. Sometimes, though, someone sets the tone and gets things started, and someone signals the end of the meeting.

    As the focus of our attention moves around and around the circle, it spirals down into deeper shared understandings, richer shared meanings, and a growing sense of a shared, evolving story. Although sometimes we go around only once, our best circles result from going around at least 3 or 4 times, with people speaking briefly if necessary, to permit more rounds. Brevity can be immensely powerful. It is also important to sustain everyone’s attention. Sometimes we time our turns, often 1-3 minutes each, rarely as long as 6-10 minutes. A well-functioning circle should help those who usually speak a lot say less and those who usually do not speak up to say more.
    It helps to remember that the essence of these circles is listening and speaking from the heart. Head-tripping, pronouncements, chatter, posturing and run-on monologues of the sort that make up so much of ordinary conversation only serve to disrupt the atmosphere of the circle. On the other hand, silence (2) — so avoided in ordinary conversation — often helps deepen the atmosphere.

    We can learn …[much] about silence from Quakers, whose traditional meetings for worship have little or no ritual, leadership, or conversation, nor do they take turns around a circle. Rather, they sit in a silence which they perceive as being filled with Spirit. From time to time a member who feels “called” (moved from within by Spirit, by their “inner light”) rises and speaks. When finished, they simply sit down. No one responds. The pregnant silence settles once more among and within the congregation. Many circles try to nurture this spirit in their midst, at least occasionally, with or without a formal period of silence or the religious beliefs the Quakers bring to it. In a formal circle, anyone can create silence in their turn simply by holding the object and not speaking. A person can also skip their turn, passing on the object after only a moment.
    IN CONCLUSION ABOUT DIALOGUE
    Clearly, much skill, consciousness, and experience can be developed in the process of doing circles, and yet the basics are incredibly simple. All of us can promote the basic circle format and spirit wherever we are, in our families, spiritual communities, schools, workplaces.

    Even the simplest, most unsophisticated circles are experienced as revolutionary by people who’ve known little more than the hectic, banal, adversarial or repressed communication modes typical of our mainstream culture.

    You don’t have to do anything fancy to use the circle process — just get together with some friends or associates and take turns speaking from the heart as best as you can; use a stapler as a talking-stick if that’s what’s handy. The important thing is to just do it. You will be amazed at how powerful it is. Even before you learn how to do them “well,” in nine out of ten circles the rewards will pay back your efforts a thousand-fold.”

    I encourage Nuclear Groups as well as their nuclear families to use the Wisdom Circle Format for reaching unanimity efficiently, relative to their concerted decision making.
    “To encourage and facilitate the use of circles, Wisdom Circles has formulated a set of guidelines that we call the Ten Constants. These constants have been inspired by councils of indigenous peoples, informed by support and dialogue groups, and drawn from our own experience. The Ten Constants create a safe container that allows participants to tap their innate capacity to relate to each other in a context of wisdom and compassion.” (3)
    http://www.acocreativepath.com/wisdom-circles-constants/

    (See: APPENDIX C – COMMUNITY DIALOGICAL CONSENSUS BASED DECISION MAKING PROCESSES, INSPIRED BY MARK CURTIS KINNEY II)
    [pp. 96-99:] Appendix C

    Dialogical Consensus Based Community Decision Making Processes

    Inspired by Mark Curtis Kinney II
    Consensus based community decision making obliges each community to duplicate itself whenever its population becomes too large for consensus-based self-management. The type of decision making that maintains mutualism is unanimity. Structured unanimity means that all proposals from the community for community action must be community approved for community support.

    Each proposal is signed by twelve community members at large to assure that it was dialogued and ascertained viable, and in keeping with community values, before it is submitted to the Community Coordinating Committee, CCC. Community proposals received by the CCC are listed on rating ballots for weighing each proposal. Proposal consensus weights are decided in dialogue by each sovereign, Nuclear Group, and the consensus weights are rounded out to 90%, 80%, and 70%. An approval weight is assigned each proposal. (1)

To do this, each Nuclear Group, of no more than twelve (or thirteen) decision makers, dialogues each recommendation for community action and can vote, perhaps by a show of hands, to assign the approval weight, consensus weight, which they allot to each proposal. Or a community can create more stringent, consensus-based decision-making procedures for Nuclear Groups to assign consensus weights. 

The CCC tallies the consensus weights provided by the Nuclear Groups, and assigns each proposal its, respective, community approved consensus weight. For example, if the issue for investing in the purchase of a community mobile, water well drilling rig received more 70% weights than any other weights, that proposal would be allotted a 70% consensus weight.

    Then, the voting ballots are drawn up by the CCC and each proposal is printed with its community designated consensus weight printed beside it. Each Nuclear Group receives a single ballot. Each proposal issue is openly dialoged and voted on by each Nuclear Group.

    Each proposal that carries a 90% approval weight, consensus weight, must be approved by at least 90% of the members of a respective Nuclear Group to be approved by that Nuclear Group. Of twelve voters, eleven must approve. Among ten voters, nine must approve, and so on.

    Each proposal with an 80% consensus weight must be approved by at least 80% of the members of the Nuclear Group. Of twelve voters, ten must approve. Among ten voters, eight must approve.

    Each proposal with a 70% consensus weight must receive the approval of at least 70% of the members of the respective Nuclear Group. Of twelve voters, eight must approve. Among ten voters, seven must approve.

    When the ballots are returned to the CCC for counting and recording, the proposals are decided in the following manner:
    For example, three hundred member families of various sizes may comprise 50 Nuclear Groups.
    Each proposal voted on with a 90% approval weight would require the approval of at least 45 Nuclear Groups.
    Each proposal with an 80% approval weight would require the approval of at least 40 Nuclear Groups.
    Each proposal with 70% approval weight would require the approval of at least 35 Nuclear Groups.

      Approval weights reflect the degree of importance a proposal has for the community. For example, if the proposal to invest 150,000 FRN for the purchase of a mobile, water well drilling rig is important to the community that proposal may receive an approval weight of 70% to assure all members that the proposal will be approved. Or its level of importance may take the form of a 90% approval weight to assure members that nearly all members are committed to actualizing the proposal. The people base their decisions on what they prioritize and what they think that they can afford.

Important matters can be dialogued by community members on occasions when all Nuclear Groups come together with their respective speakers to explain the verity and pragmatics of their respective, prospective plans during “Community Hearings,” prior to each Nuclear Group going to one of their respective homes to dialogue among themselves before weighing their ballot or before casting their vote. Each community forms their organizational structures so that everyone can be involved in participatory, community policy making.

Consensus weights are decided among all Nuclear Groups, and stem from their independent judgments. Thus, the community itself determines the relative importance of each proposal that the community brings to the table. If a proposal is generally supported, it may receive an 80% consensus weight. 

If a proposal with an 80% consensus weight is not approved by 80% or more of the Nuclear Groups, it is not acted on by the CCC. The same holds for all proposals on the voting ballot.

Community self-management is directed through the decision-making structures described here, not to the exclusion of slight variants of that structure made by the people. Community survival is contingent on the permanent service of consensus-based decision-making processes. 

All of the suggestions I make are “objects of dialogue.” Every community decides how best to manage their internal, unanimous, community decision making processes. Nonetheless, the guiding principle is that structured unanimity must be maintained. However, unanimity only functions when a community population is small enough that general consensus can be arrived at through dialogical decision-making processes. Due to technology and knowledge providing sovereignty for smaller communities, communities may deploy other modes for actualizing organized consensus not suggested here. 

The consensus-based decision-making process as the sole means of community decision making is fundamental and necessary for the actualization of decentralized economic social organization. Without that component, genuine participatory community self-management cannot exist. Nor would there be any means to self-regulate each community’s population. With consensus-based decision making a community’s population stays within the boundaries of personal accountability among member families, which is a fundamental component or attribute of genuine, human scale community. 

Individualized conventional democracy as it is used by representational government, and its political parties, maintains a stratified society. It is corruptible, divisive, and it lends itself to the subjugation of mass populations. By contrast, the mutualistic economy described here demands the inter-personal accountability provided by structured, dialogical, consensus-based community decision making processes. 

Human scale, community organization provides the benefit of the direct, mutual support needed by everyone to grow in individuated self-development. Human scale community is prerequisite for sane, existential living. Humanness is exercised through dialogue in the context of community. The vital sectors of each community’s economy that provide security and wellbeing are shared equally among community members.

    Community self-management, with inter-personal accountability, as described here, is accomplished only in the context of a limited population. Consensus-based, community decision making processes enforce a limited population to maintain the permanence of community.

    Entry level community people enjoy the permanence of their first community, while their young folks create their own community.
    You can see and download the PDF of my book… DTN member, Barbara Williams was kind enough to make this link:

    Download a book by Reed Kinney

    Reconstruction of the Indigenous for Contemporary Times…

    Like

    Reply

      1. I remember my technical writing instructor in university was offended and made fun of me in front of the whole class when I addressed her as Madam in a cover letter for a class assignment. I was the only engineer in the class and got the top mark.

        Liked by 1 person

        Reply

    2. Hey Reed. I made it all the way thru your post. Most of it went way over my head. But I really dig the “Listening Circle” stuff.

      Question: Does your community live by these methods? If so, what does that lifestyle look like? (especially from a consumer/consumption level).

      Kind of feels like a bonus this month. 2 guest essays for the price of one. 😊

      Liked by 3 people

      Reply

    3. My question for Reed, How do we get to a ‘degrowth’ situation that is fast enough, that becomes equitable without the whole system of civilization collapsing?

      Secondly, why would whoever in charge of your local area, as in the biggest, strongest ‘leader’, want to share decision making equitably as they survived by being in charge?

      Liked by 2 people

      Reply

  19. Yet another (possible) new elephant in the covid room. It makes my head spin keeping track of how many things are wrong in the covid story.

    Dr. Philip McMillan discusses a new paper published last month. The opening sentence of the abstract explains the problem:

    The bacteriophage behavior of SARS-Cov-2 during the acute and post-COVID-19 phases appears to be an important factor in the development of the disease.

    “Bacteriophage behavior” is the equivalent of living in a burning building that everyone is ignoring.

    Viruses that infect humans do not normally infect bacteria. This means covid is a different beast and is equivalent to finding cyanide in your cup of tea at work. You would be naive to assume the cyanide was not deliberately put in your tea.

    Dr. McMillan reviews parallels with the 1980’s timeline for HIV. It took 7 years after HIV was identified as spreading in the community before funds were allocated to investigate prevention methods. HIV took 15 months after infection to present with symptoms. Imagine the damage from HIV if, like covid, it instead took 4 years after infection to present.

    The unusual bacteriophage behavior may explain why antibiotics were effective for treating covid. Not discussed here, but I recall they banned the use of antibiotics, as well as other effective treatments, and instead mandated deadly treatments like remdesivir, midazolam, and ventilators.

    McMillan concludes by saying anyone who underestimates the threat we face is not thinking clearly.

    Liked by 1 person

    Reply

    1. Hi Rob,

      It’s been a busy week but I would like to think about this a bit and get back to you. Not that I have any microbiology expertise but only my general systems way of thinking when trying to tie in medical evidence given what we already we know with high probability. At this point I think it is very safe to say that there are multiple mechanisms going on that are resulting in the extraordinary and continuing increase of morbidity across the board, many here can now add their own anecdotal stories of people we know getting sick and dying. After these next couple years, these increased incidences will become the new normal and be absorbed into the stats, and the trend may be to deliberately forget the baseline numbers prior to the “event”.

      My general medical advice most related to this bacteriophage inquiry, consider your gut microbiome (consisting of bacteria, viruses, and fungi) one of your best defences against infection and disease and do everything possible to maintain its good balance. Processed foods, lack of fibre, sugar, antibiotic use, these are the main culprits of gut flora imbalance. A diet that is predominantly plant or animal based produces distinctly different gut flora colonies but it is the balance and how your body reacts to it that determines if it is beneficial or not to each particular individual.

      Great to see everyone on this new page. Steve, your walking your talk is awesome and super inspirational! I am so heartened to know that you and your wife have been living out your ideals and taking such pleasure, learning and fulfilment through your real life experiments, season after season. Thank you so much for sharing and may the harvest for body, mind, and spirit continue to be abundant.

      Namaste, friends.

      Liked by 1 person

      Reply

  23. Mark your calendar for next Sunday March 31. That’s when China will invade Taiwan.

    Gaia, did you say April was best for an invasion due to currents, tides, and weather?

    Liked by 1 person

    Reply

    1. Hi Rob,

      Ooooh, this could be really bad. Really really bad. Like TEOTWAWKI level bad.

      I read this after the bacteriophage entry, now my gut has just done a little flip and this has become far and wide the most important news of our foreseeable future, in my honest opinion.

      It was here on your blog sometime last year that I read a military expert (and I can’t recall who or exactly when) say that the only possible months for a major sea incursion across the Taiwan Strait was March/April and August, and I assume that was because of the logistics of tides and other weather pattern factors. That made a huge impression upon me when I first read it and now the time is upon us, if it is to be this year.

      China has always made it clear that Taiwan was a redline and unification with the mainland is absolutely existential (just like Russia with its clear intent with Ukraine) but woe to those who do not heed and actively defy this warning. Given the geopolitical maelstrom that is our planet and the climate crisis playing out, it makes absolute sense tactically to take the island (and everything it stands for, mainly getting the US military out of the region as the primary goal, shutting down the US economy after the inevitable sanctions which will further castrate the beast, and gathering all the spoils which include the main prize of the microchip industry upon which everything now depends) now before things deteriorate further. It’s never going to get better and now is when leaders still think they have some control over the situation, in war it is almost always advantageous to strike first especially when the other side is not ready. They don’t need a reason, they already have told us Taiwan is theirs and theirs to take at any time, their time. Out loud the time frame was supposed to be before 2027-8, but given what is happening, it makes sense to spring it ahead even if not totally ready. The West is even less ready, totally embroiled in two major conflicts, the US facing near civil war with the election, and everyone still completely dependent upon China for goods if which shut off overnight would signal sure economic collapse, and then worse aftermath. I think China and Russia think the West is nearly ready to self-implode, and this could be the linchpin move to permanently recalibrate the world powers and their resource base, once and for all. I have always had it in my mind that Russia and Ukraine was to be the entree course to get this moveable feast started, and now the main course will be dished out just when the West already had a belly full and can’t take much more.

      I would like to think some more over this after going through the new intel, but if it is to happen, the writing is on the wall and the dates are our doom.

      Sorry to be in haste now, gotta pick up my husband from the bus. Crazy how we still fashion a “normal” life in the midst of everything that heralds doom. I am still thinking we will sell my mother’s house, FFS!

      Namaste, friends.

      Liked by 1 person

      Reply

      1. So, by April, the West could be facing a 3 front war. (One in Eastern Europe, one in the Middle East and one in East Asia).

        What happens to companies like Apple, Nvidia, and AMD if China invades Taiwan? The semiconductor industry should not have put all of its eggs in one basket, but only 3 companies can afford to manufacture the most advanced chips: TSMC (Taiwan), Samsung (South Korea) and Intel (US).

        Like

        Reply

        1. Everything will be fine as long as the US does not try to prevent China from reuniting a rogue province that split off in their civil war. The Chinese are mainly interested in business and will sell us the chips if the US doesn’t blow everything up.

          Like

          Reply

                1. Yes, I agree. I’d add intelligent with a deep understanding of systems, thermodynamics, and ecology.

                  I was also going to add defective denial genes but I think your description implies that.

                  Like

                  Reply

                1. Sadly, it sure looks that way. I don’t understand why but every single western country has an embarrasing moron leading it today. Perhaps it’s brain clots from mRNA? Or maybe as Dave Pollard proposes, unfixable overshoot problems are making everyone crazy?

                  Like

                  Reply

                  1. It is sometimes difficult to remain sane, being aware that this sword of Damocles is hanging over the Biosphere and our leaders are for the most part doing nothing about it other than cosmetic acts.

                    If you were an overshoot aware politician and you knew that you couldn’t speak about overshoot publicly and you couldn’t do much to address the situation, wouldn’t you go crazy?

                    Like

                    Reply

                    1. I’d do the right thing and speak the truth and probably woudn’t be relected.

                      Maybe if enough leaders did this we could move the needle and make it acceptable to discuss reality and what must be done.

                      Like

                  2. I wouldn’t want either an autocracy or an idiocracy. However, with an ideocracy, there is at least some chance of having some influence over who gets to make the rules. Sadly, it seems as though most of the world is becoming autocratic.

                    Like

                    Reply

        1. Hello Rob,

          Where did you find that date of the Putin/Xi meeting in Beijing? Just tried to scour the usual MSN sites and found reference to meeting in later May but also earlier could be the case, things are unfolding in real time and quickly. And today, even in our Australian news we have this piece

          https://www.abc.net.au/news/2024-03-21/david-cameron-730-china-blockade-taiwan-calamitous-gaza-war/103615650

          so it looks like we are supposed to wake up to this and it isn’t a drill anymore. It really feels like everyone is trying to work out their end game moves and the choices remaining are becoming more obvious and the need to make them in the right timing is critical.

          I don’t think things will be remotely rosy even if the West manages to withhold the nuclear option or even if they refrain from outright engagement–all it will take to upend our current world is for China to immediately halt sending goods or even the threat of that should send the markets and the masses spiralling out of control. That is why I think China is confident that this will be a relatively bloodless campaign, any sanctions to them will be shooting ourselves in the feet and as long as they have the autocracy to maintain their own law and order (which they already showed possible through their extensive Covid lockdowns) and be able to feed their own citizens through the early part of the crisis (and they have stockpiled grain and rice for years for this very eventuality) they can wait it out whilst the West implodes. Besides, they have Russia as their backstop for fuel and grain, and once again, in Xi’s congratulatory message to Putin’s re-election, he highlighted the “no limits friendship” of the two countries. Of all the world powers, China has the most munitions now as all other countries have been spending their stocks down with the two world conflicts. Now even MSN reports on how technologically advanced China really is in weaponry and how that should concern us. As if we should have the monopoly on the toys, the hubris of the West in this and all other things is something that really grates upon the Chinese psyche. It would be very unwise to forget that they do have old scores to settle and this is the Year of the Dragon, after all.

          I would be very interested to re-visit that post in which the window of March/April and/or August was first mentioned, sorry Rob that I can’t remember who or when but it was from a high profile military analyst. Anyway, perhaps it doesn’t really matter, it will all be revealed soon enough. 

          Namaste.

          Like

          Reply

          1. I saw it mentioned in the Twitter threads I previously linked. When I do my own search it says his next trip is planned for May. Maybe we can relax. 🙂

            I agree with your analysis however I’m not so confident the west will behave rationally.

            Taiwan is not the west’s business. Just as the Texas border dispute with the US federal government is not China’s business.

            Like

            Reply

  24. Just read Dave Pollard’s site ‘How to Save the World’, which I go to every now and then. He has some great stuff to say including this from his latest post…

    “The circumstances they (and we) are facing in this ever-more-complex and polycrisis-suffering world are such that competence is impossible. We are struggling with predicaments, not problems, and predicaments have no solutions, only outcomes. No one is ‘equipped’ with the competence to fix what cannot be fixed.”

    The “they” are leaders/elite/people in charge..

    I once had the opportunity to work with/around and against people at the top, Mayors/government ministers/head of public service departments etc. I found them all just like the rest of us, likes, dislikes, motives and agendas, ass covering to always make them look good in their positions. If they had to spend $25M to cover deliberate mistakes they made (as in trying to hoodwink public, forgetting to invite certain people to important meetings etc, and were found out, then no problems…

    They have just as many worries about the future but perceive they have more to lose, so will do extraordinary ‘things’, usually involving other peoples money, to keep the status quo going (ie them in power)…

    https://howtosavetheworld.ca/2024/03/20/incompetent/

    Liked by 1 person

    Reply

    1. Understood and agreed for overshoot issues like economic problems, unsustainable debt, inflation, and climate change.

      I do not forgive our leaders for tolerating Gaza genocide, or provoking an unnecessary war that killed 500K+ Ukrainians, or transfecting children with mRNA.

      I expect that as long as our voting system continues to work, most leaders will be thrown out after one term from now on because, as you say, none will be able to fix the problems.

      Like

      Reply

      1. It’s impossible to forgive our western leaders of “democracy”, “freedom”, “rules based order”, “progressive values”, and “technological innovation” for the Gaza genocide they are funding and permitting to happen.

        https://indi.ca/writing-when-wrong/

        The evil at this point is beyond evil. Bombing one hospital (actually the 20th, but who’s counting) and lying about it, then bombing hundreds more. Bombing bakeries and opening fire on people looking for flour, not once, but over and over, till massacres become mundane. Cementing over water supplies and bombing water tanks. Cutting off supplies of insulin and oxygen, killing the disabled, the sick, the young, the old. The Nazis would be proud. It’s a true holocaust, broadcast to the world.

        What I see now is that every condemnation Empire, heaped on Hitler, it was a confession. It was a promise. The entire premise of the White Empire’s existence is genocidal violence, Hitler’s only mistake was applying it to Europe. Colonialism is and was a slim percentage of people, their greed incarnated as corporations, cannibalizing the solar south, leaving their own people out in the cold, eventually upsetting the temperature of the whole world. The Empire is visibly dying, it visibly has no clothes, but still the killing goes on. It can still kill innocent men, women, and children and while it can, it will, so the killing goes on and on. White Empire has no other meaning, no other knowledge, this is its metabolic process and everything else is just marketing. The White Empire has already lost in any objective sense, they’re just taking as many people with them as possible. It’s a race to see if thermonuclear or thermodynamic forces get them first. And the epicenter of all this is Palestine, a gaping wound at the heart of the world.

        Liked by 1 person

        Reply

  25. Hideaway today schools the not so bright boys @ POB.

    https://peakoilbarrel.com/open-thread-non-petroleum-march-18-2024/#comment-772216

    We have to remember that the IPCC models are all political, as in ‘agreed’ by the politicians from the chief scientists input in the various countries.

    There are plenty of actual climate scientists that have publicly stated that the IPCC is totally underplaying the changes that are actually happening.

    Most models also only look at one changing variable, making the false assumption of ‘everything else being equal’. It’s the same type of nonsense economists use in models and for that matter most scientific work on any type of dynamic system. Likewise in the energy field..

    Has anyone modelled a huge increase in water vapor in the atmosphere combined with exponentially increasing methane while aerosols in the atmosphere are greatly reduced, along with huge reductions in sea ice? Nope, too many variables and too hard to work out the extent of any of the increases or decreases in a model. Does anyone add the nearing solar maximum for the current solar cycle into the models as well… Nope (we don’t want to consider that variable that usually gets lost in the yearly weather noise)..
    So what’s the final result?

    We didn’t see this coming, no-one could have predicted it etc, etc… Sorry, that’s garbage, no-one wanted to predict it as it would be “out there” in predictions and have the consequence of potential loss of tenure, job, funding for whoever does predict it. No-one is going to fund bad news, we want only ‘good’ news about the future and how we have lots of time to fix climate (or anything else) *** (A decade or 2 is considered a long time for a politician giving funding).

    We are in deep, deep, overshoot, there should be no surprises about any sudden massive great changes in a number of different symptoms of this overshoot, climate changes being one of them.

    There is plenty of evidence of ‘change’ not being a slow constant, but rather a series of smaller abrupt changes over a period of time, with gaps between each abrupt change, until a new equilibrium is eventually reached..

    Liked by 2 people

    Reply

  26. Denninger explains we are so desperate to deny bad news that up is perceived as down.

    https://market-ticker.org/akcs-www?post=250977

    “No Sir, There Are No Rate Cuts

    The market’s reaction to the Fed Rate decision is utterly insane.

    Obviously the market thinks rate cuts are imminent.  There’s no evidence for this in the Fed Statement or data.

    Specifically, the Fed strengthened its language on the job market in this statement, which would tend to remove said expectation, not add to it.

    The Committee is strongly committed to returning inflation to its 2 percent objective.

    Well, you’re not headed there with allowing the market to keep believing that which you don’t state, but which you also don’t strongly stomp on.  That’s a serious problem for the economy generally because inflation is most-certainly not headed back to 2% when, for example, both car and homeowner’s insurance is rising at about a 20% annualized rate.  May I note that automobile insurance is 2.8% of the basket all on its own so 0.5% inflation is represented by that even if everything else was literally zero!

    Never mind shelter costs are rising at close to triple the 2% target and that is 36% of the basket, so just taking that alone if everything else was zero they’d be at the target — and, obviously, everything else is not zero.

    Further, everyone knows that the CPI is a joke at this point — especially when it comes to mandatory spending on things like shelter, fuel and insurance of all sorts.

    I can’t fathom how this is a bullish statement, particularly given the credit issues at the consumer level and maturing corporate debt that will have to be rolled over the next year or two — and then at an increasing rate in the years beyond.  Most of this was refinanced in the last five to seven years and that was at rates that were much lower than those of today.

    I saw nothing in this statement that implied you should be buying anything — except the short end of the Treasury curve.”

    Like

    Reply

      1. Damn!! And I doubt its fake. Those poor people. RIP

        I only came across Richard a few days ago, but he seems like the real deal. He was definitely in the heat of the moment (which is usually a big mistake, but he pulled it off beautifully). Very raw, emotional and honest.  

        And now I have a new favorite saying – “History will know no more wicked bitch than (insert your most hated country)”.

        Liked by 2 people

        Reply

      2. Did the people firing that drone think it was a video game? Did they think they were killing NPC’s (Non playable characters) and not real people? Just WTF!

        Like

        Reply

  28. I have listened to The Duran pretty much every day since the Ukraine war started. I don’t link to them here too often because they are so frequent and often cover similar ground.

    This one stood out for me. It was the first time they spoke with guest Tarik Cyril Amar and also my first exposure to him. His understanding and ability to clearly articulate the lack of intelligence and sanity of European leaders is superb.

    Liked by 1 person

    Reply

  29. Add Jordan Peterson to the list of morons denying climate change. A lot of previously smart people are losing their minds.

    Liked by 1 person

    Reply

    2. This again is a perfect example of how intelligence in pursuit of some other goal is not rational (tribe, status, sex). As the “After Skool” podcast/video above had shown. Peterson has put forward a FIB (fashionably irrational belief) that is tribe takes as a marker of identity, ie that climate change is fake.

      It almost appears as if FIBs are what intelligent/educated minds makeup when they are in denial of reality.?????

      What do you think Rob, et al?

      AJ

      Liked by 4 people

      Reply

  30. Interesting explanation of how the housing boom transformed China, and how extreme risk and leverage fueled the growth, and how the bubble eventually made property unaffordable and an item purchased for speculation rather than accommodation, until the government deliberately popped the bubble in 2020.

    Then their story goes off the rails for a minute: “The Chinese government elected to inject it’s population with traditional and less effective vaccines than the novel mRNA vaccines used in the west, which meant they had to employ stricter lock down policies for a longer period”.

    Incomes fell and the flow of workers reversed with many returning to their rural homes.

    The biggest real estate developer Evergrande was too big to fail but the Chinese government let it fail anyway. Other real estate companies are now in similar trouble.

    The savings of the middle class was mostly held in real estate and is vaporizing. This is slowing down their economy and creating stress in the social contract.

    Liked by 1 person

    Reply

  31. After one year of investigations into the Nord Stream pipeline destruction the official conclusion is that the pipeline was sabotaged but they are unable to determine who did it.

    This despite Biden publicly stating he would destroy the pipeline.

    The guest here is Dmitry Polyanskiy, Russia’s representative at the UN. Notice how clearly and intelligently and professionally he speaks in English, his non-native language.

    Like

    Reply

  32. Go and watch any and every “End of the World ” movie, like Armageddon, Deep Impact, Don’t Look Up, Greenland, The Core, 2012, etc plus a zillion B grade movies..

    In every single one of them, they must keep ‘the end of the world’ a secret for as long as possible, for ‘them’ to maintain a working government while they work on a solution.. Of course it’s Hollywood and they always end up saving the world, except Don’t Look Up, but it’s meant to be a sarcastic comedy, so that’s OK..

    There is no way, that ‘leaders’ including the advice from top military ranks, don’t know clearly about overshoot and where we are headed, so to keep the secret they all talk up renewables and green growth, while handing out oil and gas permits like candy.

    Perhaps the real plan is to blow up most of the population in a nuclear war, while the elite hide in bunkers for 10 years or whatever, then ‘they’ will sort out what’s left afterwards?

    Or more likely they just want to keep everything going as close to ‘normal’ (IE them being in charge), for as long as possible hoping that ‘something’ turns up and it doesn’t all end on their watch. As I mentioned up thread, working with the ‘elites’ a couple of decades ago, I’m fairly sure it’s the latter, no plan (plan is more of the same), hope something turns up, but keep going with the perceived plan of green growth.

    What it really means, is ‘they’ will print more money until we get hyperinflation, no other choice. ‘They’ will keep the green lies going, throwing more and more money at it, including increasingly obvious non-solutions like synthetic fuels from renewables, any type of ‘new’ battery chemistry, fusion, any type of nuclear reactors different from the current obviously non-economic (and net energy user, not producer) fission power plants.*

    How do you, we, me, whoever, keep a large devastating secret? Hide it!! How do you hide something so large? Easy, stop people from looking, keep them so distracted with other things that they never bother looking. Let’s pretend we go to the moon, then keep smart people looking at how fake it all was, let’s destroy some building and kill some people and pretend it’s the fault of those ‘over there’, who are holding our oil, let’s throw huge sums of money and resources at some totally uneconomic oil and discredit all those peak oilers, let’s have a pandemic, kill a few million people with the disease and cure, but keep the inquisitive looking at everything going wrong there…

    What? Still too many people looking at overshoot, energy decline, resource limitations, pollution, species decline and not our preferred problem of climate change (that we have a nice boxed solution for, if we pay enough university professors to write up papers on the answers), so what’s next?

    OK time to start a war, not enough, OK another one, still not enough, OK WW3 or risk it, then we can drag all those people looking at the things we don’t want them looking at into armed service conscription, or just sensor them as enemies of the state, or terrorists. (In other words ‘they’ still have a few tricks up their sleeves).

    The overall plan of distraction seems to be working fairly well and of course every year or 2, a new major distractio… sorry, problem, of some type breaks out. Assuming the next major world event isn’t WW3, then what’s next in the bag of tricks?? EMP from the sun, another pandemic, perhaps an asteroid, that we can garner huge resources to fight, that we have a couple of years to work towards the problem, send Elon into deep space and be successful (of course it will all happen just too far away for normal telescopes here on Earth to detect, but trust how we saved you all, with this huge expense) ((Then begin to leak how it was all fake, but do this slowly to keep the people distracted)..

    Of course it might not be any of that, instead just one big conspiracy to control everything by God and/with the WEF, who have everything under control, remember you’ll be happy by 2030…. Sorry, got to go… “Yes Kate, what was that?”…….. “No Kate I’m busy”…..”OK I know you need the computer”, …. “what’s photoshop”? ……………….. Sorry bye….

    *Despite one of the principal aspects of economics, being how ‘economies of scale’ work, meaning larger is better cheaper to operate etc, we are now led to believe that something different to what we have, as in Small Modular Reactors will be more economic (and of course save the world).

    Liked by 1 person

    Reply

    1. You make two key points:

      1. Our leaders are overshoot aware but have no plan to address overshoot.
      2. Our leaders do have many plans to distract us from also becoming overshoot aware.

      Neither of those points ring true to me.

      On the first point, the majority of experts with relevant expertise are not overshoot aware. Why would our leaders with less expertise be any different? Think of the POB people you debate, or all the climate scientists who avoid population reduction, or all the environmental organizations pushing to shut down fossil energy companies.

      Observe that Doomberg (who denies peak oil) has 250k followers vs. Nate Hagens (who denies the need for population reduction policies) with 12K followers vs. me (who explains why we deny everything critical) with 300 followers vs. Jack Alpert (who has the only plan that might preserve some of our best accomplishments) with 4 followers.

      There’s an order of magnitude reduction in influence for every step closer you get to overshoot reality. Our leaders have a much bigger following than Doomberg, which means they understand even less.

      On your second point, I see no evidence that covid, Ukraine, Gaza, Taiwan, etc. are carefully constructed plans to distract us from overshoot awareness. Instead I see what looks like random emotional irrational outbursts from a social species facing scarcity pressures and threats to it’s power.

      P.S. I would guess the only reason I have 300 instead of 30 followers is that I post quite a bit about the covid crimes. My overshoot posts are far less popular.

      Liked by 2 people

      Reply

    2. Having worked in government I don’t think people are that smart. I worked in the BC Government for 30 years and in the last 10 years or more jobs have been based on “competencies” or telling s story in the job interview. We had people hired who had very little knowledge in the field they were awarded jobs in. We had a Ministry of Forests manager hired based on her experience managing a muffin shop. Competencies include things like “Developing Others”. On the day I retired I had an exit interview with an assistant deputy minister. My job included among several things, inspecting logging and road maintenence. He asked if I had any feedback on our legislation. I said it is impossible to charge companies for poor road maintenance leading to landslides. His comment was, that’s not our department. Logging roads are a huge source of erosion and sediment entered into fish habitat and have been impacting salmon, trout and steelhead reproduction for years. In general I found the organization to be top heavy with managers and very little field presence.

      Liked by 1 person

      Reply

      1. I agree with you. I have first hand experience leading a large HR group for a short period during a corporate takeover. Screw “developing others”. Did you get top marks in an advanced calculus course and can you solve a complex puzzle?

        Like

        Reply

  33. I still have my horse paste. Never needed to use it.

    Like

    Reply

  34. To the best of my knowledge Nate Hagens has never stated his position on the safety and effectiveness of mRNA transfections.

    Today his podcast discussed how difficult it is to speak truth in today’s culture. Instead of coming clean and stating his position on mRNA he made fun of the issue by beeping out all of his words related to covid.

    Protecting his subscriber base is apparently more important than preventing further unnecessary deaths.

    Hagens has zero integrity on covid.

    Like

    Reply

    1. Dear Rob,

      I hope you are well.

      I understand your frustration, alas I understand Dr.Hagens as well.
      – He could very well severely undermine his stature and credibility by going deep into this “socially controversial” matter.
      – Not addressing it does also potentially leads to some loss of traction, although more unlikely and smaller in comparison.

      By following the cautionary principle regarding reactionary consequences of the recent global medical intervention system, the message which he is trying to convey regarding overshoot might be utterly devastated and lose ground for not being “neutral” anymore.

      I am not defending this approach.
      Strategically it might be considered highly diplomatic and plausibly effective and even pragmatic.
      – As a publicly defamed person myself, I can attest to the unwanted and unintended consequences alongside the problematics of long standing repercussions of such.

      Could it be said that the educator at hand demonstrates the maximum power principle and loss aversion in terms of spreading the overshoot message, without the unwanted discourse of being labeled a “conspiracy theorist” due to socially unacceptable conditions…?

      Kind and warm regards,

      ABC

      Like

      Reply

      1. I understand what you are saying. That may explain his actions. Or maybe not. We don’t know what he believes.

        There is enough evidence about mRNA now to consider further transfections to be attempted murder and a violation of the Nuremberg code, and there is therefore no longer any valid excuse for silence.

        Like

        Reply

        1. Dear Rob,

          thank you for your quick reply.

          Considering the critical points that are presented in the video.
          The personal stance likely ia similar to “ours”, that the actions taken were and still are nothing less than absurd.
          – It would be exhilarating if Dr. Hagens would drop by, as he previously (at least once) has on this site.

          Warm and kind regards,

          ABC

          Liked by 1 person

          Reply

  39. Watched the whole 3+ hours. Some of it’s good, some of its so so. She repeated a lot of what Chuck Watson has already said in multiple talks with Nate. Her perspective seems tinged with American exceptionalism and demonization of the USSR and by extension Russia. As Andrei Martyanov has stated, the US is now 10 years behind Russia in all manner of weapons and can’t hope to catch up because we’ve sent all our manufacturing overseas and dumbed down our educational system with DEI.

    All of the discussion about aliens by both her and Lex is a waste. I think the evidence is quite clear that we probably are the only advanced civilization in the galaxy.They both appear not to understand how our evolution is contingent on multiple exceedingly rare events that have almost no probability of occurring again in the galaxy. IMHO

    And then they end with pure hopium while I end with the main take away being that we will more than likely not avoid nuclear annihilation.

    AJ

    Like

    Reply

      1. I doubt that they are aware of oil depletion or collapse of complex technologies/capitalism/civilization. Lex seems aware that civilization is at risk (and everything is lost) if we have nuclear war. Both hold out hopium that we move to Mars/the Stars via Elon’s daydreams (again not aware there is no energy that will get us there).

        AJ

        Liked by 1 person

        Reply

  41. I find Ukraine updates by Simplicius the Thinker to be the most interesting. Today’s is very good.

    https://simplicius76.substack.com/p/eventful-24-hours-moscow-terror-attack

    One way or another, things definitely feel like a corner has been turned recently, and the conflict is entering a new more dangerous phase. Recall that the last American military aid disbursement to Ukraine was in October, which is now coming up on almost six months soon. This explains the dire shape Ukraine is in and how desperate the West is becoming to save them. This is why rumors of French troops in the next “two months” abound, because as soon as Rasputitsa wears off in April/May, Russia could begin a powerful campaign of offensives which could totally break the AFU’s back, forcing NATO to strongly consider intervening. There have been reports that Russia is heavily stockpiling missiles for this, as it has launched relatively few large scale attacks, particularly ones utilizing Kalibr missiles, whose stocks should be swelling by now.

    Liked by 2 people

    Reply

  42. Tim Watkins on wind turbines and idiot leaders.

    https://consciousnessofsheep.co.uk/2024/03/24/the-enemy-was-always-within/

    Take, for example, concrete – one of the highest carbon emitting industries in the modern economy.  The foundation of a 5MW wind turbine includes some 900 cubic yards of concrete.  It also includes around 230 tons of that other high-carbon industrial product… steel.  Although given that most of the mass of a wind turbine is steel, that is only a fraction of the total 850 or so tons – making wind turbines, especially the offshore ones, the most steel intensive forms of electricity generation… something which is increasing along with capacity.  As Kris De Decker at Low Tech Magazine explains:

    “The most popular offshore wind turbine nowadays has a capacity of 7 MW, while the largest ones have a capacity of 14 MW… a 14 MW offshore wind turbine would require 1,300 tons of steel per MW or 18,200 tonnes in total.  Such a wind turbine thus consumes 24 times more steel than a coal or gas power plant of the same power capacity.”

    And yet somehow our politicians seem to have completely missed this, just as they remain oblivious to the massive volume of diesel fuel consumed in the transportation of those turbines from China, along with the petrochemicals required for the blades.  How otherwise, did we end up with an industrial policy which is diametrically opposed to our energy policy?

    Liked by 1 person

    Reply

  43. And now, Deep Thoughts, by Jack Handey:

    “Pornography is what the end of the world looks like” – Robert Jensen
    Yes, this is gonna be about porn (don’t worry, I will not be graphic). Seems out of place for this website, but I believe it ties into MORT.

    Chris Hedges is the only person in my network who regularly talks about the evils of internet porn. I’ve heard Michael Dowd and some others mention it a few times. I’ve watched a couple of documentaries. And I know there are books written on the subject, but it is still a very under-explored topic. 

    This issue recently came up with a few friends of mine over dinner. My stance was that “I hate internet porn because it is so destructive to our social cohesion and personal wholeness. But I am addicted and no matter how many times I try to quit, I always come back to it”. Figured I would not be alone with this viewpoint, but I was. They were all on the side of “there is nothing wrong with it and even younger generations are better off now because they can experiment and find out what they are into”. All I could think was “my god, it should be so obvious that the 24/7 free, easy access is not a good thing. How can you idiots not see this”. But we dropped the subject thankfully before I blew a gasket.

    Growing up in the 80’s, porn for me was watching movies like Porky’s and Revenge of the Nerds on cable. Dirty magazines were a big thing too. My friends and I had a fort in the desert and if someone brought in a playboy or penthouse (stolen from their dad’s stash) then they were the popular kid for that month.

    Video stores eventually started popping up everywhere so now you could rent the movies with nudity. Some of these video stores had an “adults only” room, where the real treasure was waiting for anyone who dared to enter (sometimes not even a room, just a small curtained off section). You had to really work up some nerve to walk in there, select a movie, walk out, go pay at the front and then run to your car and breathe a sigh of relief. Same with buying an adult magazine at a 7-eleven. It took courage. It was enough of a mission to keep you in check. Maybe working up the nerve once or twice a month to get new porn material. And it stayed this way until the early 2000’s.

    Looking back now, it was innocent. But today’s pornography is on a whole nother level. I have not been able let go of that dinner conversation. Its the same feeling I get when I try to talk collapse with them. And that made me realize that our denial of porn is very similar to our overshoot denial. Ask people about their personal porn habits and you will see the highest level of denial possible. I was looking up anti-porn articles, but there are not a lot of good ones. This quote from Gail Dines helps to explain why – “When you fight porn you fight global capitalism. The venture capitalists, the banks, the credit card companies are all in this feeding chain. This is why you never see anti-porn stories”. But I would argue that MORT is the bigger reason why.

    Internet porn has been a part of my life now for twenty years. It has a wetiko type feel about it. The amount of stimuli that we receive nowadays would be like walking into the “adults only” section of the video store and walking out with 100 movies… and then coming back the very next day for a new batch of 100 movies. In other words, totally unrealistic and completely insane. We humans need something to keep us in check or we will overdo it every time. 

    This is an excellent article from Hedges in 2015, breaking down the damage. (warning – very graphic)

    https://www.truthdig.com/articles/pornography-is-what-the-end-of-the-world-looks-like/

    Liked by 1 person

    Reply

    1. Dear Paqnation,

      I hope you are well.

      Decadence reigns supreme as the march of folly continues.
      “Progress” equals to mental regress in many if not most aspects, nothing short of “wickedness”.

      Kind and warm regards,

      ABC

      Like

      Reply

      1. Hello ABC, 

        Aint that the truth! And I have never told you this before, but I always enjoy reading your comments (even if I dont understand them all). You have a style that sounds like Yoda from star wars. And I like it.

        Like

        Reply

        1. Dear Paqnation,

          thank you for your quick reply.

          I am amused and humbled, if not slightly perplexed.

          I suppose, that an approach of a bygone era besieges me, especially when the quill is involved.

          Please, ask for clarification if my musings are unclear.

          I wish to articulate matters precisely and consistently.

          Kind and warm regards,

          ABC

          Liked by 1 person

          Reply

  45. Since our fearless leader is MIA today (hope everything is ok), I’ll try to keep the vibe alive.
    Indi has a good one today titled ‘The Genocide of a Generation’.

    “Entire generations won’t remember the Nazis, but they will remember the ‘Israelis’ the ‘Americans’ and all their colonial vassals quite viscerally. These are the Nazis of our time. These are the Nazis that our children will remember, as a widely understood epithet for pure evil.”

    https://indi.ca/the-genocide-of-a-generation/

    Liked by 1 person

    Reply

  46. And today from the great and powerful Oz, also known as B:

    “can AI save us then? It depends. I mean, from what, and for how long? If your answer is saving us from an economic, societal and ultimately civilizational decline resulting from a peak and fall in net energy from oil, made all the worse by a wrecked climate and ecosystem, then the answer is a clear no. If the question relates to kicking the can down the road a few more years, then the answer is: definitely yes. (Presuming that AI doesn’t kill us all in the process)”

    https://thehonestsorcerer.medium.com/meet-the-gator-growing-energy-demand-316de796d191

    Liked by 1 person

    Reply

    1. I left the following comment:

      I like Art Berman’s take on how an AI with super high energy intelligence will help us: “The AI will tell us to use less oil”.

      I’d add, it will also tell us to get our population down to reduce the coming suffering.

      Liked by 2 people

      Reply

  47. Confidently stating Ukraine had nothing to do with the terrorist attack in Russia 50 minutes after the shooting ended is similar to confidently stating a new mRNA transfection technology is safe and effective for pregnant women after a few months of testing in non-pregnant people.

    Liked by 2 people

    Reply

    1. One of the must read books on ecology. I vaguely remember it as poetry masquerading as prose for a world that was no more. Very much like all the poetry of Loren Eiseley of which I have hard cover first editions – elegiac works of an anthropologist/paleontologist for a natural world that is no more.

      AJ

      Liked by 1 person

      Reply

    3. Hideaway today @ POB with some good insights.

      https://peakoilbarrel.com/open-thread-non-petroleum-march-25-2024/#comment-772517

      As solar panels get ‘cheaper’, using thinner glass etc, then of course such incidents are going to become more frequent. Then add the effects of climate change, which makes hail storms more likely and frequency goes up yet again.

      All the projections of the nice green renewable future are based upon narratives of cheaper solar panels, yet somehow expect them to last 25-30 years despite the changing climate of more frequent larger storms. To make solar panels be able to withstand increasing hail size, they should be made with thicker glass covers, not thinner..

      In a world of declining fossil fuel use either because of climate or depletion or a combination of both, we have this myth that we can build a lot more renewables, using ever declining resource grades, yet somehow building more will use less, all while maintaining current lifestyles and spread western lifestyles to the rest of the world.

      It’s all make believe fairytale stuff, which every larger hail storm will prove. Having trackers that add ‘hail protection mode’ to panels, increases capital costs and resource use to build it, plus adds maintenance costs because of moving parts.

      We are building $35/Mwh energy with cheap $2-$5/Mwh energy and embedded energy from the past. Entropy never stops and replacing the $35/Mwh energy in the future wont be built with $2-$5/Mwh energy, it has to be built with $35/Mwh energy, from declining resources, which means the next ’round’ of building energy gathering machines can only be built done at a cost of ten times current cost, or $350/Mwh, all in today’s dollars.

      It doesn’t work, it’s a ponzi scheme and to continue current civilization we need to build $2-$5/Mwh energy from current sources, not $35/Mwh energy. The LCOE bandied about is nonsense, it doesn’t matter what the energy source, if it’s more expensive that what we uses to get ‘here’, then it’s not possible to maintain where we are at.

      We have efficiency gains made over decades that mask the real problem of using up all our cheapest fossil energy sources. We are running into massive debt problems by trying to get the harder to obtain fossil energy sources, because the EROEI is lower than the easy to obtain fossil resources, plus we have used all the easy to obtain material resources as well. Improving efficiency in, say, car engines by 50%, doesn’t stop the resource running out, it just takes twice as long providing Jevon’s paradox doesn’t step in. Efficiency gains do not help one iota in the long run.

      It’s simple, civilization as we know it is not possible in the long run unless energy can be supplied as cheaply as it was to build it in the first place. We only get the complexity of modern civilization because of the massive participation of 1 -2 billion people involved, allowing economies of scale of everything. When we lose the cheap energy, the infrastructure we built (including such things as homes, water supply, sewerage, roads etc) wont be able to rebuilt it with expensive energy, or perhaps just a lot less of it, meaning fewer people involved in modern civilization, but we also lose the complexity with less people involved making individual costs much higher. It becomes a self reinforcing feedback loop of less modernity that spirals down to nothing.

      Like

      Reply

  51. google translated from here:

    https://www.achgut.com/artikel/das_vergiftete_spenderblut_der_geimpften

    The poisoned donor blood of those vaccinated

    By Jochen Ziegler.

    The medical catastrophe caused by Covid vaccinations is becoming more and more unprecedented. Now it comes out: blood from vaccinated people contains the dangerous spike proteins .

    It has been clear to a critical minority of doctors, which also includes the group of colleagues writing at Achgut , since the summer of 2020 that the so-called “vaccines” against SARS-CoV-2 are actually gene therapeutics that have no effect against the pathogen but are toxic . The suspicion soon arose that the blood of “vaccinated” blood donors could poison the recipients. This question is now addressed in a scientific  review from Japan  by Ueda et al.  after.

    First, the authors describe the numerous toxic effects of gene therapy drugs on the vaccinees, as we have already explained many times here. They conclude that “there is no longer any doubt that the SPIKE protein used as an antigen in the genetic vaccines is itself toxic.” This is documented in great detail and professionally. The main toxic effects of the “vaccination” are:

    1. Blood clotting disorders such as platelet deficiency (thrombocytopenia), deep cerebral venous thrombosis or pulmonary embolism, all of which are fatal or often cause severe chronic damage.

    2. Deformation of erythrocytes (red blood cells), contamination of the blood with residues from vaccine production as well as inflammation and autoimmune diseases caused by the lipid nanoparticles (BioNTech and Moderna).

    3. Damage to all organs due to the production of the spike protein in the blood vessel endothelia and the parenchymatous (function-bearing) cells of the organs. The best-known examples are myocarditis and glomuerulonephritis (destruction of the kidney). This also includes the damage to the fetus caused by vaccinating pregnant women, which may have led to the largest decline in the birth rate ever recorded in 2022.

    4. Vaccine-induced autoimmune diseases. These will continue to make people sick in the next few years who were last “vaccinated” in 2021, because it can take years before the resulting organ damage becomes clinically visible. Many organs tolerate partial cell failure and only functionally fail when half or more of the parenchyma is destroyed.

    5. VAEH and VAIDS, which are immune deficiency caused by vaccination and increased likelihood of contracting COVID. This can also lead to an increased likelihood of other infectious diseases, as well as a greatly increased risk of developing cancer and having a worse course of the disease than unvaccinated people (so-called turbo cancer). An important mechanism of these syndromes is overproduction of IgG4.

    6. Central neurotoxicity due to direct organ damage to the brain through spike-induced formation of amyloid, which can lead to cognitive deficits and even dementia.

    7. Damage to the peripheral nervous system with severe syndromes such as Guillain-Barré (a polyneuropathy with muscle weakness) or causalgia (diffuse burning pain throughout the body).

    There is little research into the proportion of vaccine recipients who have suffered at least one of the damages listed above, but it is likely to be at least 1 percent.

    Which of these damages can be transmitted to the recipients of blood products? How long after vaccination do the toxins circulate in the donor’s blood? It can be assumed that two weeks after vaccination, most of the toxic molecules (especially nanoparticles and exosomes, but also other molecules, see below) have disappeared. However, the spike protein is still produced in the body for months after vaccination, albeit in small doses. This is bad for the vaccinated because the protein is toxic even in small doses and, above all, can trigger and maintain autoimmune diseases.

    Unfortunately, vaccinated people were allowed to donate blood again just 24 or 48 hours after vaccination, so there are certainly blood products with a relevant proportion of toxic molecules in the blood banks. In addition, the authors have other concerns that apply even if blood donations are carried out long after vaccination. They list six categories of toxins in the blood of vaccinees.The toxins in the vaccine blood

    First,  the highly toxic spike protein is found in the blood of those vaccinated, especially if they donated shortly after vaccination. They can harm the recipient. 

    Second,  the blood products may contain lipid nanoparticles that can transfect the recipients, giving them an undesirable vaccination effect like a vaccinee. The particles themselves promote inflammation and can also trigger a so-called adjuvant-induced autoimmune disease in the transfusion recipient, regardless of the effect of the spike protein. 

    Third,  the donor blood may contain thrombi (blood clots) that harm the recipient, for example through microinfarcts in the brain. 

    Fourth,  due to their immunodeficiency, donors may be acutely or chronically infected with pathogens that are in the blood. These can be transmitted to the recipients and also make them permanently ill, because infection through the bloodstream is much more dangerous than through natural routes (such as breathing or eating). 

    Fifth,  amyloids and amyloid microtubule aggregates form in the bodies of the vaccinees. These are tiny protein clumps that consist of aberrant spike-induced proteins, such as those found in Alzheimer’s, and the remains of the cytoskeleton of cells destroyed by vaccination. These amyloids and aggregates are toxic and can cause organ and brain damage. 

    Sixth,  the donor blood contains IgG4-positive plasma cells (a special type of immune cell), which can trigger chronic inflammation in the recipient.

    While the first three categories of poison in the vaccinee’s blood only occur if the vaccinee donates blood in the first few days after vaccination, the last three effects are also possible if the vaccination precedes the donation by months or years.

    We cannot quantify how many blood products are affected and how severely, as studies and surveys are missing and have not been carried out, as this medical crime has not yet been investigated. But since at least half of the population in the Northern Hemisphere (significantly more in the West, up to 85 percent) was poisoned (“vaccinated”) with the genotoxic agents, it can be assumed that a relevant part of the blood products are poisoned. A rough estimate suggests that at least two thirds of blood donors in Germany were vaccinated with genotoxic drugs. If one of the above-mentioned toxin categories is found in the blood of 5 percent of the vaccinated, then 2 to 3 percent of the blood products are poisoned. Since only the last three categories can be present years after vaccination and the chronically ill vaccine recipients, in whom these toxins are increasingly present, slowly disappear from the group of donors because they become too sick to donate or die, this proportion is likely to be higher in view of the Half-life of blood products (between 30 days and 2 years) also decrease.The proportion of poisoned blood products has never been as high as it is today

    However, recipients of blood products face a serious and quite likely risk of harm from the transfusion. There has also been contamination of blood products in the past, for example with HIV, hepatitis viruses or perhaps with prions. But never in the history of blood donation, which began around 1900 when Karl Landsteiner discovered blood groups, has the proportion of poisoned blood products been as high as it is today.

    The authors of the paper suggest a number of measures to control blood products and reduce the risk to recipients. But it is questionable whether these will be followed. Until the toxins disappear from the blood products through the elimination of poisoned donors as described above, we will probably simply have to expect consequential damage to the recipients. Once again it affects the chronically ill, weak people who are chronically dependent on blood products, or accident victims who need to be given blood acutely.

    But the Paul Ehrlich Institute is not concerned about the danger posed by the poisoned blood products of the vaccinated people, but rather about the  supposed danger  of SARS-CoV-2 being transmitted via blood transfusion. This does exist if you receive the blood of a vaccinated person who has been reinfected with SARS-CoV-2 and has viruses in their blood, but the risk is rather low because such a patient would have a fever and would therefore have to be excluded from donation. 

    In Germany, however, no public service medical institution requires systematic testing of blood products. And drugmakers’ research pipelines are full of additional modRNA products. A rationally thinking doctor who is committed to serving people is at a loss when faced with the state of academic medicine.

    Dr. Jochen Ziegler is the pseudonym of a doctor and biochemist. He works as a consultant for private healthcare providers and lives with his family in Hamburg.

    Saludos

    el mar

    Like

    Reply

    1. Thanks. Is there any broad discussion in Germany of these problems with mRNA? Here in Canada it is silent.

      Citizens don’t want to know what was done to them and the “experts” who did it don’t want to lose their jobs.

      Liked by 1 person

      Reply

      1. Even the collapse aware people that I know don’t want to talk about COVID, therapies or vaccines (gene therapy) AND the whole corruption of pharma, regulators, and the medical establishment. Just do/think what your tribe tells you. Denial all around.

        AJ

        Liked by 1 person

        Reply

      2. It is still a small, but growing minority. More and more people become. doebtful, asking questions because of many death and illnesses. Als friends and relatives.

        This was published on mainstream TV recently:
        https://www.zdf.de/nachrichten/politik/deutschland/rki-protokolle-corona-klagen-100.html

        From “das gelbe forum”

        “After the independent internet magazine “Mulitpolar” and the journalist Paul Freyer went to great lengths to sue for and publish the RKI’s internal minutes, the ÖRR in Germany has now also taken on this issue. ZDF reports in an unusually drastic manner about the explosive contents of the largely blacked out but still highly informative protocols of the government agency subordinate to the Federal Ministry of Health.

        What was particularly exciting was the realization that there was apparently a high-ranking actor who exerted political influence on the RKI’s scientific decisions. Unfortunately his name is blacked out.”

        Saludos

        el mar

        Liked by 1 person

        Reply

      3. A fourth person in my life has now developed turbo cancer. Scans six months ago there were no tumours and now he is riddled with them. He went from being overweight to skin and bone within six months. Boostered at least two times on top of the initial AZ injections. He swore blind to me that the vaccines were normal vaccines and I was lying to him at the time. NO idea how he feels now as we aren’t talking. I expect to be at a funeral soon.

        Additional to this I have people close to me that have got atrial fibrillation, excessive high blood pressure, spinal stroke, an aorta embolism and memory issues. All happened soon after being vaxxed.

        Liked by 2 people

        Reply

        1. I’m not well read on this topic but I believe Dr. Peter McCullough and colleagues at the FLCCC have developed protocols. They were the only people I trusted for medical advice during the pandemic.

          The FLCCC is not always right, but they have integrity and will adjust their advice as they learn from experience, unlike our leaders that still recommend mRNA gene therapy transfections for everyone including children, without full disclosure of the risks as required by the Nuremberg code.

          https://covid19criticalcare.com/protocol/i-prevent-vaccine-injury/

          https://covid19criticalcare.com/protocol/i-recover-post-vaccine-treatment/

          My advice would be the usual stuff like eating unprocessed real food, little sugar, intermittent fasting, exercise, 8 hours sleep, vitamin D, and vitamin C.

          Liked by 2 people

          Reply

  52. “by 2050, half of the gross energy output will be engulfed in its own production.”
    That is just a quarter century from now.

    If you want a silver lining, peak oil will likely rule out RCP 8.5 (The worst case climate scenario).

    Liked by 1 person

    Reply

      1. Like mRNA harms, not a whisper from our leaders.

        Silence might prevent panic, for a short while, but it will also waste oil on useless activities, like long distance vacations and the military, that could have been used for building a softer landing zone, like relocalizing food production, community food processing facilities, water systems, public transit, tree planting, reskilling citizens, etc. etc.

        When I first published this post in February of 2022, I said that peak world oil production might have arrived, but it takes 5 years in the rear-view mirror to call it. Now peak “crude oil including lease condensate oil” is officially here! Production was less in November 2023 than the peak of global oil production in November 2018. See for yourself at the U.S. Energy Information Administration site here.

        You can ignore all the other liquids, they do not make diesel fuel for heavy-duty trucks, locomotives, and ships that do the actual work of civilization. Mainly the other categories are good for plastics, which we have more than enough of. Or ethanol for gasoline, but you’d destroy a diesel engine if you added this to extend diesel fuel. I suspect these categories were added to keep people from panicking like they did in the oil crises of 1973 and 1979. Why would they panic? There is a very tight correlation between fossil production, GDP, and population.

        Unconventional shale oil was responsible for over 90% of the increased production above the 2008 plateau with a little help from Canadian tar sands.

        Seven of the eight U.S. shale basins are past peak, with only the Permian producing the majority of fracked oil. And it may peak in 2024 (Geiger 2022). Or not, some scientists think the USA shale oil production could be on a plateau until 2040. But at any rate, when shale oil and gas decline, will be a hell of a rollercoaster ride down, since shale oil declines 80% over 3 years. And already 81% of all the other oil production is declining at 8.5% a year, offset by 4.5% enhanced oil recovery.

        I think a great deal of oil will be left in the ground. Geology isn’t the whole issue. Oil makes all other resources possible, including food, so its decline is likely to lead to social unrest, depressions, war and civil wars, supply chain failures, natural disasters like hurricanes taking out offshore oil platforms, floods and earthquakes damaging refineries, and other catastrophes that disrupt oil production. And don’t forget that the FLOW RATES will be lower. Maybe the last oil will take 1,000 years to get out — if we can maintain the level of technology we have now when things are falling apart. Nor are unconventional tar sands (Canada) or heavy oil (Venezuela) likely to produce much oil since their energy return on invested is very low. So that leaves their estimate of remaining conventional oil of 1100 Gb (Table 1) to carbon of ~470 GtCO2, well under the 580 GtCO2 limit to CO2 emissions and if the above parameters occur, less coal and natural gas as well.

        Like

        Reply

    1. Just like the article mentions, I get bored reading this stuff. But I think the main reason I avoid it is because it always ends up bumming me out. My paranoid covid theory (which I am in favor of) requires competent, overshoot aware elites that are willing to sacrifice a little bit of their fancy lifestyles and in return they get to rule the New World with a population under one billion.

      Financial stuff like this makes it seem much more likely that they know the party is almost over, but they are just gonna go full throttle till the end. Taking us all down with them. I don’t know why I would expect anything else though. It just mirrors exactly what our species is doing to all life on earth. 

      Liked by 2 people

      Reply

      1. I don’t know.

        I used to believe default vs. hyperinflation was a political choice to print money or not, which gave hyperinflation a higher probability.

        But then I began to think the deflationary force of declining energy on an enormous debt bubble might overpower any political choice.

        Now it feels like there will be global war before the economy gets bad enough to threaten the western way of life, and then for those lucky enough to live away from the hot zones there will be nothing to buy so deflation vs. inflation may be a moot question.

        Liked by 1 person

        Reply

        1. Could it be that the global war is a last-ditch effort to gain resources to stop the debt bubble from bursting? (Ultimately, the attempts to stop the bubble from bursting will be futile.)

          Liked by 1 person

          Reply

          1. I often ask myself that question.

            Is the hatred of Russia caused by:

            1. Russia not having a “rules based” western democracy? or
            2. Europe needs Russia’s resources and are pissed that the deals they inked with Yelstin to exploit the resources were torn up by Putin who did not want to be colonized?

            My guess is western leaders think the reason is 1) but the real reason is 2) which is masked by their genetic denial of limits to growth.

            Liked by 1 person

            Reply

  54. Just watched or should I say tried to watch Nate Hagens latest podcast. I’d put it in the category of why don’t we all just get along and sing kumbaya, as in nothing to do with the reality of the world and especially what’s coming.

    Liked by 3 people

    Reply

    2. The following appears to be Hagens’ latest video.
      Riane Eisler: “Domination and Partnership in Society” | The Great Simplification #116

      I have to concede, there is almost nothing worth listening to and Eisler is particularly difficult to listen to, nevertheless, denial gets mentioned (even if it is wrong).

      Nate thinks social media allows an increase in empathy – completely ignoring ;
      – the swing to right-wing ideologies and anti immigrant isolation
      – the ease with which social media allows unrelenting bullying
      – the fact that social media is an unmitigated cesspit of shite.

      At about 29 minutes.

      Nate Hagens : Because I think that, and this may be a relatively new mass development, but I see more and more people who have empathy for people that they are not part of their in-group. And we have social media and technology to thank for that maybe.

      Riane Eisler : Yes. Well, it’s not the technology, it’s how it’s programmed. And what we’re seeing in our nation is two subgroups, aren’t we? Those who want to move forward, if you will, to a more caring, less violent, more equitable, and certainly more respect for our life sustaining systems, and then you have the other ones. But there’s one characteristic that they have in common, and it’s called denial, whether it’s climate change denial, whether it’s election results denial, whether it’s COVID denial. And that, as I write and elucidate in Nurturing Our Humanity, is a trait acquired very early. Because if you are in a rigid domination family, you are dependent on the very people who are causing you pain for life, for food, for shelter, for whatever care you can get. So you have to be in denial.

      She implies that if instead of a “domination family” you are brought up in a “partnership family” [gag] then you do not “have to be in denial”. Alas, she will likely be dead before realizing nature is cruel.

      Liked by 3 people

      Reply

      1. I’m glad it wasn’t just me. I agree that since Nate has had his India experience he is off his game of the great simplification, he needs to return to reality, though I suspect like all of us we really want to deny the inevitable failure of civilization, simply because reality is going to be very unpleasant going forward.

        Liked by 1 person

        Reply

          1. I too did not like that interview. Just watched Nate’s newest Frankly 58. It’s a fairy tale directed at children. I agree, there is something different about him since India. (he is probably in a better mental place, but we the audience want the cold hard reality of collapse)

            He seems further away from ever addressing over population with the serious attention it deserves, than he has ever been before.

            Liked by 2 people

            Reply

  55. https://indi.ca/a-future-without-planes-or-container-ships/

    Planes falling out the sky and ships crashing are not anomalies. These are signs of the times. This is the new normalcy. It’s not just Boeing or Baltimore, the Panama Canal is running dry and the Red Sea is off-limits cause western genocide. Almost every choke-point is choking, and these are just the signs. The planet itself is calling time.

    There is no ‘renewable’ transition out of this. ‘We’ simply have no like-for-like replacement for heavy fuel (mainly diesel). The entire economy runs on heavy fuel and we are A) running out of economical supply and B) the emissions are killing us. We are both running out of drugs and dying of an overdose at the same time. Oil has gone from a net energy return (EROEI) of 100:1 to to 10:1 to 3:1 for last veins like tar sands. You used to be able to poke a hole in the ground and get a gusher, and now you have to frack your water supply to get less and lesser. And it’s not like we’re producing more of this stuff, nobody’s laying down forests and compressing them over millions of years. This was a one-time inheritance and we blew it on dumb shit like Dubai.

    Let me walk you through how, precisely, we’re fucked, using the math of Dr. Tom Murphy. An electric Boeing 737 with equivalent range would require a 300 ton battery, nearly 10x the weight of the rest of the plane, which is literally a non-starter. Such a plane could reduce its range to 200 km to get off the ground, at which point you’re better off staying there and taking the train. Meanwhile, an electric shipping container would need a 65,000 ton battery, displacing two-thirds of the cargo capacity. It would take three electric ships to move the same cargo as one fuel ship, using nearly 200,000 tons of batteries to move about 100,000 tons of goods. Needless to say, this is all more expensive than the magic bean juice we found in the ground. The fuel-to-weight ratio is 20x worse! Meanwhile, making those batteries would require tearing (mining) the Earth a new asshole, which it cannot take.

    Liked by 1 person

    Reply

    1. I particularly liked the last sentence of his essay: “The fossil-fuel era is going the way of the dinosaurs and this, my friends, is the time of asteroids.”.
      AJ

      Liked by 2 people

      Reply

    2. An electric Boeing 737 with equivalent range would require a 300 ton battery, nearly 10x the weight of the rest of the plane, which is literally a non-starter. Such a plane could reduce its range to 200 km to get off the ground, at which point you’re better off staying there and taking the train.

      Commercial aviation is almost certainly going to end within my lifetime (I am in my 20s). If you have plans to visit other parts of the world, do it while you still can.

      https://indi.ca/how-financially-were-fucked/

      Hence the next item in planetary Bingo (after pandemic and land-war in Europe) is financial collapse. A motherfucking big one. All of the fraud of the 2008 collapse inflated into even greater proportions, with no tools left to pump the bubble up anymore. And so, inevitable, it will pop. Taking down not just banks (already happening) and people (already fucked) but entire currencies, including ‘safe’ imperial ones. The people at the core of White Empire (America, UK, EU) are in fact the most levered up and the biggest frauds. The trouble with seeing these bastards justifiably fall is that we are almost all in the White Empire and their greed will collapse on everyone, hitting the poor and undeserving the worst of all.

      Like

      Reply

  56. I like the opening two paragraphs of Rintrah’s essay today. The rest is irritating and I recommend you skip it.

    https://www.rintrah.nl/not-what-we-deserve/

    The problems our world faces are not going to be solved. Nobody who is capable of understanding how immense our global problems really are, is going to radiate the kind of energy that leads people to reward them with power. If you genuinely understand what we’re dealing with, you will appear exhausted, depressed and dark, so people will avoid you. This is not just your elected representatives, it applies to government officials, people at NGOs and everywhere else too.

    Here’s an example: The Biden administration is angry at Ukraine for targeting oil refineries in Russia, which drives up gas prices and could risk Biden’s reelection. If that’s the state of the world in 2024, when priorities of the most powerful country in the world revolve around whether 95IQ fat American ketolards have to pay more at the pump for their child-slaughtering SUVs, then it’s over, nothing is going to get solved.

    Liked by 1 person

    Reply

  58. “Our culture was captured and commodified and that destroys humanness” – Sid Smith 

    Have you guys ever seen the documentary ‘The Century of the Self’? It was made in 2002 by Adam Curtis. I saw it years ago. Was recently listening to a Sid Smith interview and the quote above was said while he was recommending this film. So I decided to invest a few hours and check it out again. All it did was reignite my ideas about white skin being humanity’s downfall. 

    It got me thinking about who could be labeled as “most damage caused by one person”. Edward Bernays is my nominee. If we made a list of top 10 or 20 or even 100, are there any non-white people on that list?

    The Century of the Self (Full Adam Curtis Documentary) (youtube.com)

    Liked by 1 person

    Reply

    1. All life is about growth. You can hate Edward Bernays but if it wasn’t him it would have been someone else. If Europe would have not conquered and enslaved the world someone else would have. If you are happy with what you have or even downsize then you are, from an evolutionary perspective, a defective individual and the chance is very very high that you will be thrown on the genetic trash heap. There is this saying To understand all is to forgive all and while it can be hard to not show emotion in this absolut cluster-fuck there is absolutely no point to attach yourself to an outcome. As the second law of thermodynamics clearly tells us, everything will end and so will your most favorite thing you hold so dearΩ

      Liked by 1 person

      Reply

      1. I agree 100% with your words of wisdom, but easier said than done. And I know I get too hung up on my hatred for how our story ends with these last 500 years. Zinn and Chomsky started me down that road years ago. My collapse & human history journey seems to reinforce it at times.  

        You’re correct, ‘The White Empire’ (Indi’s word) would have been some other empire, but I want to see that world. I bet they come out of their fossil fuel run with more to show for it than plastic surgeries, mansions, and yachts.  

        Like

        Reply

      2. I think we all wish you were not accurate, but you are, this is a well stated fact of reality of life, which means for certain we go into collapse when resources have been used, without any possible means of stopping it from an evolutionary point of view. Thanks Florian

        Liked by 1 person

        Reply

  59. There are tens of thousands of doctors in the US. Why aren’t they all standing up and saying, oh my gosh, I’m so sorry.

    Liked by 1 person

    Reply

  61. I though this monologue by a Canadian permaculture guy was pretty good.

    He discusses how hard it is for him to talk about climate change because he doesn’t want to sound like a doomer but all the news is really bad.

    He laments that a lot of his audience comes from the homesteader community and they tend to deny climate change.

    He discusses how the best political choices for climate change in both Canada and the US are still bad choices.

    I left the following comment:

    I appreciate your honesty and integrity. On the political question, I wouldn’t worry about who to vote for. The policies proposed by Trudeau and Biden won’t make a difference to how the climate changes. The only thing that would make the future less bad is to shrink the economy and no one proposes to do that. It’s very simple. One person at a keyboard can do it. Just keep increasing the interest rate until the economy contracts. CO2 emissions are proportional to the GDP. If you want to cut emissions by 50% then shrink the economy by 50%.

    Liked by 3 people

    Reply

  62. Superb 2.5 hour conversation on covid by two intelligent people with integrity.

    Too much to summarize. One quote stood out for me:

    99% of practicing physicians don’t understand basic immunology.

    Like

    Reply

    1. Facinating. Most of the dozens of serious problems with the covid story were discussed EXCEPT Dr. Joe Lee’s String Theory.

      Everyone continues to ignore String Theory, despite the fact that if true it is the easiest way to permanently kill mRNA, and many other vaccines.

      Like

      Reply

  63. https://theconversation.com/climate-change-puts-global-semiconductor-manufacturing-at-risk-can-the-industry-cope-225879

    The 21st century chip manufacturing industry has been described as “at least as significant geopolitically as oil was in the 20th.” But semiconductor manufacturing requires vast quantities of water to keep machinery cool and wafer sheets free of debris, and the unfolding climate emergency puts the industry at risk.

    I disagree with that because the semiconductor industry could not exist without oil.

    No matter the climate change scenario considered — whether optimistic, business-as-usual or pessimistic — a minimum of 40 per cent of all existing semiconductor manufacturing plants are located in watersheds that are anticipated to experience high or extremely high water stress risk by 2030.

    The semiconductor industry is deciding, in their infinite wisdom, to open up a bunch of new fabrication plants in Arizona of all places. One of the driest states of the U.S.. They don’t mention at all the Semiconductor industry’s dependence on fossil fuels or how peak oil will affect the industry.

    Liked by 1 person

    Reply

  65. Maybe this was already reported here before…
    For those into system dynamics, I stumbled upon the recent work (https://www.eurekalert.org/news-releases/983253) of researchers from an initiative (Earth4all https://earth4all.life/) of a swedish foundation (Global Challenges Foundation https://globalchallenges.org/)
    Using a system dynamics model, they make two scenarios with estimates of peak global population which are earlier and lower than the UN estimates.
    Here is the full paper(https://earth4all.life/wp-content/uploads/2023/04/E4A_People-and-Planet_Report.pdf) with nice graphs.

    Like

    Reply

    1. Is their conclusion true? Wealth tied up in paper assets would be spent on automobiles.

      Better to confiscate the wealth of the rich and use it to build a softer landing zone for everyone, or pay down public debt to reduce the size of our bomb.

      The researchers also concluded that at current population levels it is possible for everyone to escape extreme poverty and pass a minimum threshold for a dignified life with access to food, shelter, energy and other resources. However, this requires a (much more) equal distribution of resources.

      “A good life for all is only possible if the extreme resource use of the wealthy elite is reduced,” concludes Randers.

      They also think 100% “renewable” energy by 2050 is possible.

      Like

      Reply

      1. Better to confiscate the wealth of the rich and use it to …

        Rob, how does this work? I’ll assume you mean :

        • on a global scale
        • the top 100,000 wealthiest entities (people, family trusts, etc.)

        If governments ‘take’ the wealth (mostly stocks, maybe land), do they then sell it? Who is buying it and where do the buyers get that (massive?) amount of money?

        Lets say we keep it simple – the government takes the wealth and directly transfers it to the ‘poor’. For example, Bill Gates, Jeff Bezos, Warren Buffet, et al. have all their stock and land taken from them and transferred to the poor – do the poor then sell the stock to some other parties that have been sitting on a lot of cash?

        But anyone sitting on a lot of cash is wealthy, and that would be taken and so on.

        You cannot simply claim something is ‘better’ without even a hint of how it works.

        For completeness – I think the amount of wealth the ‘people’ at the top have is reprehensible. It should never have been allowed to happen. We have unfettered capitalism, a conveyor belt that takes natural resources and moves them to landfill. Profits are private, costs are externalized to the commons and losses are socialized. The fundamentals need to be revisited :

        • what is profit?
        • who gets to make “profit”?
        • is there a cap?
        • etc.

        Like

        Reply

        1. Thanks Hamish, well said, however as the adverts say, “But wait there’s more”….

          All the wealth of the world is in deposits, stocks, bonds, even certificates of titles to land, in other words bits of paper. It’s all an illusion that ‘humanity’ agrees with/allows to happen.

          Let’s say it was possible for banks to create new money (it happens all the time), to give the poor to buy these assets seized by the governments, so the ‘wealth’ is now evenly distributed. There is no more energy or resources available, just the same quantity as before, so the ‘price’ of everything must rise, until the new wealth of the poor disappears.

          Take the billionaire that own 50,000ha of great grain growing country and has half a dozen, million dollar combine harvesters as part of his wealth (plus farm managers/workers etc). How do we distribute the combine harvesters equally? Every poor person gets a bit of metal?

          What’s the ‘value’ of grain land, that’s usually relatively marginal, think 350mm-400mm rain a year (13-15 inches), and has ~2 metres of evaporation/yr , that could only be used for a bit of grazing without modern large machinery?

          If we give every poor person in Africa and Asia say $US10,000, they would all try to spend it buying something like a fridge or new cooking stove to make their lives easier, yet the sudden increase in demand is not accompanied by new resources or factories to make these billions of appliances, nor the energy to do so or even run these new appliances.

          None of this type of redistribution can go close to working, which is why we are in massive overshoot right now. Despite all energy available and used from fossil fuels over the last couple of hundred years, it has only been enough to raise 15% of current humanity to a level of prosperity enjoyed by most of us (not all even here), in the western world.

          Let’s pretend we can wave Nate Hagen’s magic wand and reduce the world’s population to 1.5 billion ‘rich’ people and have all the same energy and resources we use today. We are still in massive overshoot, because we are still running out of all the high grade easy to obtain fossil fuels and minerals. We would still have to downsize and reduce complexity going forward as there will be less obtainable from the environment in future decades and centuries. Degrowth must happen rapidly from this much lower level of population.

          Liked by 1 person

          Reply

          1. Exactly!

            Norway has taken the proceeds from selling North Sea oil and gas, to create the world’s largest sovereign wealth fund (<a href=”http://fingfx.thomsonreuters.com/gfx/rngs/GULF-QATAR-QIA/010041PS3P9/index.html“>Thomson Reuters</a>) with more than 1 Trillion USD of assets under management.

            Even if every investment was wise, they are all still predicated on business-as-usual. It is highly likely that the value of those assets is completely dependent upon :

            • Functioning Logistics : Shipping, rail and trucking that depends on diesel.
            • A population somewhere (with jobs / money) to purchase the ‘productivity’.
            • A climate that supports life as we know it.
            • And so much more.

            Literally anything upsetting that apple cart and the notional ‘wealth’ is gone, like a fart in a hurricane.

            Transferring the ‘wealth’ of Amazon Inc to pay off Mexico, just moves money between pockets.

            Like

            Reply

      2. I don’t know. I see these kind of studies as elaborate technical hopium. I mean, to me we are already on the down-slope of society net-energy availability in a greatly impoverished environment (compared to pre-industrial), with still no real will for degrowth. So, I rationally can’t imagine a world with more than 2 billion people by 2050. I accept I may be totally wrong on this, this is just back-of-the-enveloppe estimates, but I will gladly welcome anything better than that as extremely good news 🙂 Maybe pre-industrial world population estimates are just wrong? Or maybe they were low on purpose, because most energy was expanded to maintain the power structure? And the coming catastrophe is the only escape towards a new distribution of power? (just trying to think totally outside the box here)

        Anyway, to me, these kinds of models constitute the ultimate best-case scenarios. I am just finding interesting that they are slowly trending downwards (UN world prospect went from continuous growth untill at least 2100, to a maximum of 10.4 billion in 2080, https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Projections_of_population_growth, then the Lancet study has its peak at 10 billion around 2060, and now this study estimates a peak of 8.6 billion by 2050)
        Also, every time I see a publication with a prospect for 2050, I can’t help but think that they are really talking about this year or next (you know the “worst than expected effect”?)

        I wanted to end with a side-thought: in the Annie Jacobsen interview by Lex Fridman, I found the graph with the evolution of numbers of warheads in the world particularly interesting (https://thebulletin.org/nuclear-notebook/). The legend read “Having reached a peak in the late 1980s, the number of nuclear warheads has dropped significantly. But more countries now possess them.”
        To me this, again, sounds like the dissipation of a concentrated energy source.
        So I have this model in my head: the system should by itself be trending towards a somewhat equal distribution resources, achieve some kind of a balance of powers. Hence, society inequality is a voluntary design which requires focused forces to be maintained (that, or just a product of an initial very unequal situation which will slowly fade away).

        Also, now that the species has reached the limits to growth (for at least between 5 and 15 years already?), I think the collective behavior and model is going to change from raw, relatively “easy” expansion (which essentially required speed and brute force) to more refined, subtle strategies (which will require more skill, intelligence, time, compromises, cooperation…). Take the death of Moore’s law as an example and think of the way gains in computer efficiency are not possible by simply doubling the amount of transistors before competition anymore. See, point 2 of the MPP post by Preston Howard (https://un-denial.com/2023/09/28/by-preston-howard-the-maximum-power-principle-and-why-it-underscores-the-certainty-of-human-extinction-in-the-near-future/). Of course, since I believe collapse is already built in, it will soon be obvious that there is no point in refining/optimizing activities that will soon be rendered obsolete (the future has some amount of unknown so we don’t know precisely what yet).
        So I am particularly thinking about activities like food production where manual intensive and ecologically sound practices will fare better than industrial large scale agriculture.

        Sorry for this bunch of deconstructed random intuitions… At some point, there is not much to add. After all, our predicament is inescapably what it is (from a material human-centered standpoint that is :)…

        Like

        Reply

        1. By the way, does anyone have trustworthy sources on agricultural yields (per hectare, not per person)? (Leaving aside the problem of food distribution to the cities and property rights for a moment : let’s assume we can somehow optimally distribute over land)

          The peakoil crowd claims current agriculture production would not be possible without hydrocarbons (think fertilizer, pesticides, herbicides, irrigation, machinery)

          The regenerative/permaculture crowd (I do not include organic which goes in the same category as conventional to me) claims we can both have similar yields and improve the health of the land. The only concession made seems to be that these approachs are much more labor and skill intensive, that no size fits all exists (the optimum agricultural systems will be location-dependent) and that some time is needed for land to reach its full potential.

          I’d really like to know which is true.

          Masanobu Fukuoka claims (see page 93 of the one straw revolution https://library.uniteddiversity.coop/Food/The-One-Straw-Revolution.pdf) this:

          If 22 bushels (1,300 pounds) of rice and 22 bushels of winter grain are harvested from a quarter acre field such as one of these, then the field will support five to ten people each investing an average of less than one hour of labor per day. But if the field were turned over to pasturage, or if the grain were fed to cattle, only one person could be supported per quarter acre. Meat becomes a luxury food when its production requires land which could provide food directly for human consumption.* This has been shown clearly and definitely. Each person should ponder seriously how much hardship he is causing by indulging in food so expensively produced

          If I am doing the maths correctly. 1300 pounds from a quarter acre field is 5200 pounds per acre (to be compared with the best US yields, California 8590 pounds per acre according to this source https://www.statista.com/statistics/190832/top-us-states-for-rice-yield-per-harvested-acre/). 5200 pounds is 2358 kg, so that is 2358 kg/acre. There are 2,47 acres in an hectare, so Fukuoaka’s rice yield would be 2356*2,47 ~ 5819 kg/ha (to be compared with Japan’s highest yield of 5970 kg/ha according to this source https://www.statista.com/statistics/1285148/japan-rice-yield-per-ten-ares-by-region/)
          Basically, (if my conversions are not wrong and the units used in his books are the same as today) he is claiming similar yields as the best in Japan. And that’s without taking the winter grain production into account. Would that be his best year or average?
          If that is true, then my dire projections have no reason to be 🙂 I may have to apologize for being a doubting Thomas…
          That’s only one claim, on data-point, from a master in agriculture, in a given region of the world after at least 10 years of failed experiments. From this article (https://finalstraw.org/en/masanobu-fukuoka-and-natural-farming/):

          So when he first tried this, he took the barley and put it on the rice, but he kind of piled it on thickly, in clumps, just as it came off the thresher He piled it like that and it was very effective at weed control, but was also effective at controlling the rice, the rice couldn’t get through. So that year his rice yield was about 20 percent of normal, or 20 percent what his neighbors were getting. And they didn’t know what to make of him, and they said gee, growing rice is like the simplest thing in the world, and he’s doing this strange stuff…

          If it is true, we can both feed the current population and improve the land base without fossil fuels. Then why was world population lower before the industrial revolution? (Was it because food is not the limiting factor on human population? Was it because the species was not trying to increase population to its maximum at the time?)

          Anyway, maybe the future of agriculture looks like forests of Jackfruits, Breadfruits and the like (adapted throughout the world)… There is room for experiments…

          Like

          Reply

          1. I’m skeptical about claims that yields without fossils can match those with fossils for the following reasons:

            1) I work on a small organic farm and our yields would plummet without imported fertilizer. Even though organic fertilizer does not use natural gas as a feedstock everything else in its manufacture is totally dependent on oil.
            2) Fukuoka’s example of rice is an outlier that does not represent the norm. Asian rice gets nutrients for “free” from the melted glacier water used to flood the patties.
            3) After 10,000 years of organic farming practice the world with 1-2 billion was on the brink of starvation as the guano deposits were depleted and we were saved by Haber-Bosch natural gas which then pushed our population to 8 billion.
            4) China had deep expertise in organic farming yet when the US opened up trade with China the first thing the Chinese purchased was Haber-Bosch factories.

            A person I would trust on this issue is Jason Bradford. His book The Future is Rural discusses the challenges (see page 61 Transforming the Food System) and presents data on what might be possible without fossils (see page 80 In Focus: Diet and Land Modeling).

            https://www.postcarbon.org/publications/the-future-is-rural/

            A transformative shift on farms is likely to come from high-priced, persistently unaffordable, or even unavailable natural gas, and consequently expensive synthetic fertilizer. It is a wonder farms rarely use cover crops in the U.S. since legumes bring nitrogen into soil from the air. But planting a cover crop has costs. Farmers must buy seeds, use equipment and labor to plant them, and then use more resources to terminate the cover crop and incorporate it into the soil to release the nitrogen it accumulated. Farmers compare the cost of doing these activities for a cover crop to the cost of buying and applying synthetic nitrogen, which has been very cheap for the past several decades. Many farmers no longer have the equipment or knowledge to readily switch to cover crops. The natural gas and fertilizer price spike in 2007-2008 created a pulse of interest in cover crops, but cheap natural gas returned before widespread adoption. Someday, perhaps soon, as shale gas fizzles, the pressure to switch will be consistent.

            Farms and food processors use natural gas directly for drying crops, manipulating raw crops in myriad ways (e.g., grinding, separating, blending, etc.), and cooking food to be sold in cans and other ready-to-heat packages. With more expensive natural gas, farms may favor crops that need less post-harvest drying. Fall-planted wheat, for example, may become more abundant and supplant spring-planted corn. Food processors may struggle to stay in business and those that have invested in renewable energy systems, such as biogas from processing waste, will likely have an advantage.

            Diesel is critical for most modern U.S. farms as it is the power supply for tractors and combines. A sudden shortage or dramatic price rise in diesel could risk the supply of fuel to farms and lead to a decline in food production on a vast scale. Although farm equipment has become more fuel efficient since the oil scare of the 1970s, no substitutes for diesel fuel have been developed at any significant scale. The risk we face is a rapid drop in the availability of liquid fossil fuels without the time to wean farms from this key input.

            Trucks and railroads don’t function without diesel either. We rely on trucks and railroads to get critical inputs to farms, such as replacement parts and fertilizers, and to move crops from farms to processing and distribution centers, and finally to cities.

            As transportation costs rise, it will become more difficult to get vegetables, fruits, and fresh dairy foods to market. These so-called water crops are heavy, spoil quickly, and are therefore energetically costly to move. Even though the climate in California and Mexico is conducive to growing vegetables with high yields year-round, at some point it will become cheaper and more reliable to grow vegetables and fruits locally again. The nation’s salad bowl is also at risk from climate extremes, rising sea level, and declining quality and availability of water, which is often pumped from deep and depleting aquifers using electricity mostly generated by fossil fuels.

            As fossil fuels become more expensive, electricity will cost more too. Irrigation pumps are typically electric, so higher costs will incentivize farmers to grow less water-demanding crops. Corn acres are set to decline in the western U.S. where irrigation is required. Similarly, one of the largest crops by area in the U.S. is alfalfa, and it is heavily irrigated in dry regions to serve large dairies. Dairy farms are already stressed by overproduction and low prices for milk and other products, and they are vulnerable to higher feed costs that will come with less alfalfa production and increased shipping costs. Small, pasture-based dairies, where animals can walk between forage and milking barns, will be more resilient to these changes.

            Published diet and land models may be incomplete in the context of the Great Simplification if they assume a steady supply of exogenous energy and fertilizer. When factory-produced nitrogen can’t be applied reliably or is cost-prohibitive, cover crops and more complex rotations that build soil quality become crucial. For example, fields in the Midwestern U.S. will no longer be able to grow corn and soy year after year while maintaining high yields. The rotation would need to include the area and time for nitrogen-fixing cover crops, such as red and white clover, and/or livestock grazing. The same principle applies in gardening systems like Grow Biointensive that aim to maintain and replenish soil organic matter and mineralizable nitrogen through crop rotation, cover cropping, and composting.

            When all land is worked using fossil fuels, no land is set aside to feed working animals or grow biofuels for tractors and other farm equipment. The key energy input for farming with tractors and transporting goods to and from farms is liquid hydrocarbons, such as diesel and gasoline. Possible replacements for fossil stocks of these, including biodiesel, green diesel, straight vegetable oil, and ethanol, require specialized equipment to harvest, process, store, and combust. The diet and land assessment should estimate the proportion of land on a farm needed for self-reliance in energy and nitrogen while maintaining or building soil organic matter. Doing this while trying to maintain current energy consumption, i.e., substituting biofuels for fossil fuels at present day levels, is impossible.

            Liked by 2 people

            Reply

          2. Fukuoka lives in Japan on the side of a volcano and has volcanic soil rich in every mineral, relative to old soils in most areas of the world. Assuming crop rotation including legumes to increase nitrogen levels in the soil, plus a consistent rain pattern, then he should be able to grow around the best yields in the world.

            We are heading out of the stable Holocene climate, because of climate change, which will reduce the ability to produce consistent crop yields everywhere.

            If you don’t have a young, volcanic soil, then you can’t get Fukuoka’s yields unless you import every mineral you need, being fertilizers and trace elements.

            Farms everywhere are mining the soil nutrients if they are sending the produce to a city or town. Replacing the mined minerals, requires a huge amount of energy replacing those minerals, which we do with fossil fuels, even if it was organically or regeneratively or any other method.

            It’s the energy we wont have, so wont be able to take the nutrients back to farms. Even composting all human wastes then returning to farms will involve losing ‘some’ minerals, it’s not possible to return 100% of anything, so in the long term it’s just not sustainable at all. Once we have no fossil fuel use, it wont be possible to return all human wastes more than 1-2km, meaning towns no bigger than a few thousand in ‘good’ soil areas, just like we had a few thousand years ago.

            This all assumes no damage to most soils, which we have clearly been doing with modern agriculture. Once we add poor soils relying on fertilizers to grow anything, climate change, no animals available especially bred for the tasks we use to put them to, lack of natural non hybrid seeds, overuse of water resources and massive overpopulation, that will try to eat everything nearby and burn the rest for warmth, in a serious decline, then the idea of any type of ‘farming’ becomes highly unlikely..

            Liked by 1 person

            Reply

              1. Thanks for the compliment. Realistically it is a combination of both. If we unlimited cheap/free energy there would be no mineral shortage, as it takes energy to concentrate minerals.

                We could mine copper in the ppm range with unlimited cheap/free energy (in the correct forms). The less energy we have to mine with, the higher the grade of ore that will be needed for viable mines, as there will be competition for the energy.

                When we get much more expensive energy, because of declining production, of oil in particular, the ore grades needed will quickly go above the ores available, of everything, including the fossil fuels.

                When oil goes into large year over year declines in production, all other resources production will also have accelerating contraction, because of all the feedback loops affecting production.

                Like

                Reply

            2. Comments

              a) Fukuoka died in 2008 aged 95 and he did his main work 40-50 years ago

              b) he found that rice did not need flooding and he stopped doing this to his rice fields, so I doubt there’d be such a benefit from glacial water.

              Liked by 1 person

              Reply

            3. Yes, I understand. I agree.

              However, I want to understand things in details. Let me try and explain my thought process.

              I know we have a transportation and mineral return problem. However, I want to set this aside for a moment, because I believe the spread and decrease of the population is unavoidable (and could be done, to some extent, in an orderly manner). I’d like to simplify the system, to understand the constraints, the remaining window of feasibility.

              So I want to get a grip on the scales: because, in a way, it is all a matter of how fast, to how low (a population), and how “orderly”.

              So here are some of the questions I am asking myself:

              • what would be the maximum productivity of the planet in terms of plant material?
              • what would be the maximum productivity of the planet in terms of human food? (in a sustainable way)
              • can the productivity be increased without fossil fuels (in a sustainable way)? Was it already maximum before the industrial revolution or not?

              I understand that we took a stock of energy from the depths and fed it into life to boost production. But it seems we did that in very inefficient and destructive ways (because it was easy/we were so rich for a time). And, it may be that there are wiser ways to do this (like desert to forest conversion). But is it really true? (move one thing, change all things)

              These, to me are difficult questions to answer, because I don’t have the data, technical knowledge…

              I know there are such notions as net ecosystem production (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Net_ecosystem_production), net primary production (https://wad.jrc.ec.europa.eu/primaryproduction) and human appropriation (https://wad.jrc.ec.europa.eu/humanappropriation). I don’t know what percentage of the production would the human species be “allowed” to harvest for its exclusive use without wrecking the system. I find these are interesting questions 🙂

              Of course, humanity will navigate the down slope anyway and maybe no map is needed for that: the species will discover the territory by trial and error.

              Liked by 1 person

              Reply

              1. Hi Charles, there are some tough questions in this!! Firstly, I don’t think anyone anywhere knows the answers to your questions, it’s a guestimmate at best…

                What I do know is that as a member of an organic certification committee a couple of decades ago, I never saw an economically successful organic farm that didn’t import huge quantities of off farm inputs, mostly compost bought from others, trucked in. Those that didn’t import compost for their farms and relied on rotations were effectively mining the soil and had declining yields after the first few years.

                Having a look at what we have done to climate and ecosystems, it should be no surprise that the carrying capacity of planet Earth has fallen, plus we have or are in the middle of taking the climate out of the Holocene stable climate period. Before the Holocene agriculture wasn’t possible because the climate (and weather) varied too much for stable, repeatable agriculture.

                The other aspect I go back to was how humans lived 20,000 to 50,000 years ago. There was some very limited agriculture happening in various cultures, but while there were around 4M humans, we had extinctions of many mega fauna around the world. To me that means it’s possible there were too many humans with only 4 million of us.

                We are not going to go from 8 billion to less than 4 million in an orderly fashion IMHO.

                I will not be surprised if humanity continues to alter the world long after the collapse of civilization, to the point we do so much damage to natural systems that we eventually can’t live in the environment and make ourselves extinct. then the remainder of life can get on with self organising the rest of time until life is no longer possible on this planet.

                Liked by 1 person

                Reply

                1. Thank you for your answer.

                  You may well be correct. And so be it.

                  4 million is an awfully small number (compared to current population 🙂 But not inconsistent as it would put us on par with large mammals such as lions.

                  This is going to be such a shock for so many who expect so much more…

                  I will still go along the Fukuoka experiment. The only things I know so far by direct experience (after 4 years at this current scale) is that it is possible to:

                  • practice no-till and avoid watering,
                  • while restoring degraded soil without external input (by frequent cutting/pruning of locally grown plants), thus improving productivity year after year,
                  • and still harvesting some amount of edible produces.

                  I think keeping seeds year after year and mix of annual, perennials and trees is one of the necessary key. However, the yields are nowhere near that of conventional farming methods (I am not measuring this accurately, but I’d say 1/10, maybe a bit more but less than 1/5) and the plants harvested are not the same. The harvest are however extremely tasty (and probably less hazard dependent). This approach, for the time being, would clearly not be economically viable 🙂

                  Liked by 1 person

                  Reply

                  1. In this country if you own land you have to pay rates, and sometimes land tax to keep ownership. This means off farm income is a must, by either selling your labour off farm or ‘produce’. If we sell produce at markets we need by law ‘insurance’, product liability at a minimum. So more money..

                    The way the system is set up, you are not allowed to be entirely off the grid, you must be contributing or they take the land off you.

                    Somehow we have to get past all of this. My suspicion is that governments will tax land owners more as times get tougher, to keep the services of government going whether you want them or not.

                    I suspect there is no escape from the modern world humanity has created and we all go down together.

                    Liked by 1 person

                    Reply

                    1. Same in France. But owning a small piece of land is still way less expensive than owning a car 🙂

                      So it’s still possible with a standard income.

                      I know we have to swim against the whole system. The system wouldn’t stand a chance against entropy if it wasn’t designed this way. It will lose eventually or morph into something else.

                      To me, that’s how life is: never static, always flowing, with no definite answer 🙂

                      (The only problem I had with all of this, is that I was spoon fed so much bullshit that it took me so much time to somewhat clear up my mind. The journey was worth it nevertheless 🙂

                      Anyway, thank you for the chat. This is all interesting.

                      Like

                    2. Hi Hideaway,

                      I am replying to your comment down below here, because we have reached the limit of nested comments.

                      I am not sure I understand the issues you raise and more importantly what’s the underlying point.

                      First, Ernst Gotch is commercially viable. There are solutions. Not saying it is necessarily easy and possible for every body in every contexts.

                      Then, I am not saying we should keep everything else the same and simply replace industrial agriculture with syntropic agriculture. I agree with the nutrients loss/displacement effect (even though I have doubts about the time it takes to hit when exporting produces from trees, which are mining from the rock). But then, this changes once products are consumed more locally and streams of life (salmon, bisons…) are allowed to move things back up again. Isn’t it?

                      To me syntropic agriculture is an interesting tool (together with Fukuoka and Joseph Lofthouse), I consider in my experiments on plots of various sizes (the idea that pruning boosts growth was, to me at least, revolutionary and counter-intuitive). Indeed, I am not a farmer: who can be competitive these days forbiding oneself the use of any tool with a motor 🙂

                      Yes, life and entropy. I understand. But are we concerned about what’s going to happen in a billion years or in the next 50?

                      Lastly, it seems to me that survival, living fully and commercial viability are three different things 🙂

                      Like

                2. Charles, I agree with Hideaway’s answer and would add the following.

                  I’m also interested in the questions you raise. Until there’s a definitive answer I will rely on the anecdotal evidence.

                  There are millions of small organic farmers motivated to achieve the goal of abundance without fossils. If a small organic farm with zero fossil dependencies out-produced a same sized fossil farm somewhere on the planet it would be front page news and we’d all know about it. I conclude that we haven’t heard about it because it doen’t exist which means it’s probably not possible.

                  I use the same argument for concluding an all electric solar powered world is not possible. Millions of communities in many countries are motivated to achieve this. If it was possible and someone achieved it or even came close we’d know about it.

                  Like

                  Reply

                  1. Yes, Hideaway and yourself are probably right about world population without fossil fuels. Let’s settle for the range between 4M and 2B. Getting there in approx. 30 years will be disastrous anyway. That’s well enough to know 🙂

                    About the “If a small organic farm with zero fossil dependencies out-produced a same sized fossil farm somewhere on the planet it would be front page news”, you are probably right, but I am not sure.

                    First because this is not a topic which interests many people: most simply don’t want to work on the field (too hard even compared to cubicle life). Second, the system is not interested in small labour intensive solutions. It prefers a leveled field of consumers.

                    And for the first time, I will end my comment with links to some music I like in hope to sooth the atmosphere 🙂

                    Liked by 1 person

                    Reply

                  2. By the way, if we are still around with some connection in 6 to 10 years time, I will let you know to which extent my own little experiments work out or fail 🙂

                    Liked by 1 person

                    Reply

                  3. Hello Rob,

                    What do you think of syntropic farming? That’s another data point in a different location (than Fukuoka Japan).

                    In this document (https://bosquedeniebla.com.mx/wp-content/uploads/2019/09/Syntropic-Farming-guide-1.pdf), they state:

                    Syntropic farming achieves similar or greater yields without relying on resources from outside of the farm. This redefines what most people think of when they talk of sustainability. What is most phenomenal about syntropic farming is that it goes beyond being self-sufficient. The farm doesn’t just sustain itself, it eventually produces an abundance without external inputs. There are reports of harvests of 40 tons/hectare/year1, compared to the best mono-culture yields which are about 11-15 tons/hectare/year.

                    And, later:

                    Yes! Numerous syntropic farms are thriving all over the planet. Some have demonstrated amazing yields and resistance to disease. For example, a study comparing Ernst’s cacao farm to neighboring conventional farms found that his produced similar cacao yields, while it needed no fertilizers or pesticides5.
                    There are positive studies from Bolivia as well. A syntropic orange tree system produced significantly higher yields than a similar mono-culture farm. That mono-culture farm had twice as much aborted fruit due to fruit flies6. In another study, a comparison of a syntropic cacao system to a mono-culture farm found that the return on labor was nearly twice as much from the syntropic farm7! Another cacao
                    comparison showed there was significantly less diseased trees (Witches’ Broom) on a syntropic farm compared to conventional farms and the yields were similar or higher8. More studies are pending.

                    I have a hunch, getting stronger by the years, that we are greatly underestimating the realm of possibilities when dealing with life. We, humans have been depleting life for so long that we forgot what abundance really was like on this planet.
                    Now that the destructions enabled by fossil fuels and ores are almost out of the way, I feel we are going to witness the greatest natural turnover not seen in a long time.

                    I know what you are going to say about me going into denial 🙂
                    Sure, many people are probably going to die early. But that’s already past, and in more than one way self-inflicted, history, baked in (vaccines, junk food, air pollution, maybe impact of electro-magnetic waves which undeniably have on impact on cells…). Finance is going to crash. Places with large density of domestic animals and humans are going to fail one way or another. Those in these places, blindly participating in a horrible desensitized way of life still have a choice. It is a choice.

                    However, I feel very distinctly renewal has started for the next generation. We/they will be part in regenerating plant life, not to “save” the planet, but because it will be the only way to produce food in quantity. The planet is an interdependent system, noone can be above for long, noone can avoid cooperating for long.

                    Maybe, I can feel this earlier, because France is further advanced than Canada and the US on the path of degrowth. It is already in the air.

                    Like

                    Reply

                    1. I don’t know anything about syntropic farming and just skimmed your document. If you live in a climate that supports the types of food plants that can thrive amongst other tall plants then it looks promising. I don’t think it would work where I live.

                      I can imagine the ecosystem would be healthy and resilient due to the biodiversity, and would be a pleasant place to live. I don’t however see how it solves the nutrient extraction problem associated with food crops. What you remove must be replaced. Perhaps nitrogen and carbon can be pulled from the air by the non-food crops, however the other nutrients will still be a problem and they suspiciously did not discuss that issue in the document.

                      I’m very glad there are young people like you ready to embrace new low energy livestyles with optimistic ideas. I wish you good luck.

                      Like

                    2. Charles, from your raising the Syntropic Farm type development, I can see you are not a farmer. Have a look at the succession of plants. After the first year or 2, where do you get your corn, beans and rice from?

                      Also the way our society is set up, a farm gets a reputation for growing certain products, not from changing what’s grown from one year to the next. Small farms also rely upon marketing of their product. Once you have a reputation for producing excellent AAAA, but in year 4, 5 and 6 try to market different produce, you are starting from scratch again…

                      Also there are many varied minerals used by plants, in a natural ecosystem, everything returns to the system, but even here over time some will be washed away by natural rainfall, flood events etc, and over time the available minerals/nutrients will change and so will the plant communities.

                      Every form of agriculture is an acceleration of the process of nutrient loss, unless fully replaced, which is what farming tries to do. Without replacing nutrient losses to towns and cities, it in not possible for the same plant communities to survive over the longer term.

                      All farming, that doesn’t fully return all the minerals sent off farm, is just mining the soil, much faster than natural processes that change soil mineral components over time anyway.

                      Stepping right back, to look at really big picture stuff. All life is just increasing the rate of entropy, in the breakdown of the Earth’s crust.

                      Liked by 1 person

                  4. Thank you Rob (I am replying here, because we have reached the comment depth limit).

                    I see myself as belonging to a generation which is still too old to see only but the beginning of life’s regeneration. (And I don’t see any good reason why my generation could or should enjoy a life expectancy as long as our immediate predecessors. I wouldn’t be surprised if it dropped by at least ten years by the time I get there 🙂

                    As for nutrients, I believe city sizes will decrease while large animal migrations will slowly recover (once we are not able to maintain the fences and roads anymore. We could theoretically choose to do this earlier, but this culture probably won’t: property rights, humanity undeniable rights to rule over the animals…)

                    Don’t get me wrong: the times ahead will be very tough. To me, the goal of syntropic agriculture or other methods is not to yet again increase human population. It is rather to work towards reconcialition with natural processes while somewhat softening the population crash.
                    So, I am slowly becoming convinced of several things:

                    • whatever we do, life will rebound,
                    • it is able to do so, as soon as our ability for destruction is forced to decrease, and so has already started,
                    • we humans can be actors of both destruction and regeneration,
                    • the way we behave has a lot to do with what we believe (and thus denial matters),
                    • even if we do not choose to change our beliefs, they will be forced to change when they prove time and again to lead to disasters. (It is not that people will necessarily change their beliefs, it is just that people with beliefs which are not adapted to reality simply will fade away)
                    • change starts small and is initially not perceptible by many

                    Like

                    Reply

              2. If you want to understand it in details, just use math xD AND simplify it to the extreme:
                – We need ~2k calories per day
                – Legumes and grains are the most effective crops (in terms or EROI)
                – 3kg of broad bean to meet your daily intake of calories
                – Maximum 10t out of a hectare (10 000m2 ) when it comes to broad bean yields

                In other words: 3kg*365days = 1t of broad bean
                Or 1000m2 of land just to grow broad bean for a single person to meet a daily intake of calories.
                What about other aspects, like:
                – your wife
                – your children
                – clothes
                – soil degradation
                – proteins (try to eat just legumes)
                – fats (try to eat just legumes)
                – rats/worms (they love legumes)
                – energy for cooking
                – tools manufacturing
                – weather anomalies
                – being sick
                – bla bla bla

                Don’t get me wrong, but the “overshoot community” is full of dreamers, who don’t understand math, philosophy, psychology, etc.

                Liked by 1 person

                Reply

                1. Thanks.

                  OK. That’s a way to do a computation. I guess this means you are calling Fukuoka a quack or a dreamer? Maybe you are right. I don’t know myself 🙂 I just follow my intuition and then validate by observation of reality. Some experiments need quite some time and some experiments are not reproducible as they rely on widely differing contexts (one of the limits of the scientific approach when looking for generalizing “laws”).

                  Out of this computation, then what would be your guesstimate for the maximum population on the planet without fossil fuels?

                  Because, if I am not mistaken, with more than 4 billion hectares used for agriculture in the world (https://ourworldindata.org/grapher/total-agricultural-area-over-the-long-term), wouldn’t your computation lead to an absolute maximum of 40 billion people?

                  If that’s the case, then 4 billion, or even 8 billion people (for a time) doesn’t sound implausible. You are giving me more hope than Hideaway’s and Rob’s anecdoctical evidences, which I find quite convincing 🙂

                  (By the way, quite a long time ago, I read this book https://www.amazon.com/How-Many-People-Earth-Support/dp/0393314952 and it didn’t contain a definite answer)

                  About philosophy, psychology, could you elaborate? I am not seeing the connection right away. What aspects of these fields should the collapse community be aware of? This sounds interesting.

                  And by the way, I find, there are two ways to procrastinate: claim everything is best or claim everything is worst. What lies in between is shadily full of meaning.

                  Like

                  Reply

                  1. IN THEORY yes, 40 billion people, with a lot of assumptions:
                    – all people are equal (hey comrade!)
                    – all people are farmers
                    – yields are always the same
                    – we have enough fertilizer
                    – and many, many more

                    In other words: it’s a completely made up number. You can’t use just pure math to judge what’s going on, as there are many other things, that are not measurable, like human psychology. Learn about all cognitive biases (there are hundreds of them) and you will quickly realize our limitations.

                    To be honest I don’t care what’s the exact number. I know one barrel of oil has the same amount of energy as ~25,000 hours (~12.5 years ) of human labor. As a result our modern agriculture has a negative EROI, in some cases massively negative. Let’s take growing tomatoes in a commercial greenhouse. You need a lot of gas to keep it warm, a lot of artificial light, etc, etc. And how many calories tomatoes provide?

                    Like

                    Reply

                    1. Thank you for the clarifications. I understand your point better and I agree that pure math is not enough.

                      I am convinced modern agriculture, industrial civilization, financial ponzi schemes will collapse quite badly. I am convinced the changes on the biosphere are there to stay and are greatly changing the face of the Earth massively (for instance, witness the change in marine population).

                      And then, I don’t know.

                      I just know I like the word: coexistence. And I see the planet as a massively complex unpredictable interacting crowd of beings, each specialized in its own task, each seeking the continuation of its own life and offsprings. I see no reason why this system could not exhibit extraordinary behaviours (in one way or another: convergence, divergence).

                      Let’s live and see how this all turns out 🙂

                      Like

                2. Not saying you’re wrong but I thought potatoes were the calorie per hectare champion. Plus I think the Irish proved you can survive on nothing other than potatoes plus a little milk, albeit with some risk from blight.

                  Like

                  Reply

    1. WordPress has been making changes to the commenting system. I thought I’d wait a few days for it to stabilize before trying to figure out a fix or complaining to them. In the meantime I’ll fix YouTube links that do not display correctly.

      Like

      Reply

  69. Crucial Update on Global Warming Acceleration by James Hansen and his pals.

    James Hanson seems to advocating for nuclear energy.

    Like

    Reply

  70. After a couple years of my pestering and badgering, it finally happened. A person in my inner circle confided in me that he wants to learn what is going on in the world but does not know where to start looking. This person is not collapse aware even in the slightest. And just like the rest of idiocracy america he does not read books and only likes to watch videos on his phone. He caught me off guard and I found myself rattling off too many sources. I was starting to overwhelm him.

    So I cut it back to just a few. Here is where I sent him in order:

    Michael Dowd video – Overshoot in a nutshell (31min)
    Michael Dowd video – Collapse in a nutshell (33min)
    Sid Smith lecture – How to Enjoy the End of the World (63min)
    Nate Hagens animation video – The Great Simplification (33min)
    Sid Smith video series – HTETEOTW (5 chapters each about 20min)

    I want to be more prepared if this ever happens again. Does anyone have any other suggestions for a “starter kit” of collapse awareness? (and if you think my list has anything too advanced for a beginner, let me know)

    Liked by 1 person

    Reply

  71. Today’s essay by Steve St. Angelo is behind a paywall but the intro probably says all we need to know.

    https://srsroccoreport.com/using-it-up-record-u-s-oil-production-exports-the-highest-annual-amount-of-proven-reserves-in-the-world/

    While the U.S. is bragging about being the world’s largest oil producer, it is also draining its oil reserves at the fastest rate compared to the other leading countries.  Worse yet, it is exporting nearly one-third of its domestic fast-reserve-depleting oil supply overseas… BRAVO…

    Liked by 1 person

    Reply

    1. I like Robs Un-denial Manifesto, You Know You’re in Trouble When, and What Would a Wise Society Do pages. Have shared them frequently to friends and colleagues……. who are still mostly in denial.

      Like

      Reply

      2. Thanks!

        Pretty much everything I’ve written since those early pieces just says the same thing in different ways.

        I’m still fascinated by denial. I see it every day in every single person I interact with. No one speaks reality (except the few that hang out here).

        Liked by 2 people

        Reply

      3. Thanks CampbellS. Ya, those are good. I had already read all three, but you made me look em over again. Rob and the other “lifers” that have evidence to prove their knowledge/awareness have so much credibility with me. A lifer to me is someone who knew this stuff prior to covid.

        An easily predictable airtight guarantee is that as our collapse gets harder to deny, more and more people will be coming out of the woodworks saying they too have been collapse aware for years. I already see it now in comment sections of various sites compared to when I became fully overshoot aware three years ago. I always pay more attention to the lifers, so I doubt I’m exaggeration this. I used to come across maybe 10-20 per month, but now it’s more like 100-200. I expect that number to continue its rapid exponential growth.

        So not only collapse, but we’ll be drowning in bullshit at the same time. I can picture Jordan Peterson holding up Cattons book Overshoot and saying he read it 30 years ago and how it changed his life. (oh, what a nightmare)

        If I was a “lifer”, not sure how I would react. Hopefully with “Better late than never, welcome aboard”, but I’d probably go with the more unproductive approach of “Too late you dumb motherf#ck#rs”.

        Liked by 2 people

        Reply

  72. Screw overshoot. We’re moving on to abundant places.

    Liked by 1 person

    Reply

    1. Ah ah ah 🙂 A great expensive fireworks for a decadent society.

      If I remember well, he claimed more than 10 years ago, he would already have sent a man on Mars by now. (Not saying that Starship is not an impressive technological feat from an engineering perspective)

      Liked by 1 person

      Reply

      1. Honestly if this is the best we can do after 55 years of having been to the moon then it is pathetic. A clear indication of our collapse if ever there was one.

        Liked by 2 people

        Reply

  73. https://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/pii/S0016328719303507

    Highlights

    The stable climate of the Holocene made agriculture and civilization possible. The unstable Pleistocene climate made it impossible before then.

    Human societies after agriculture were characterized by overshoot and collapse. Climate change frequently drove these collapses.

    Business-as-usual estimates indicate that the climate will warm by 3°C-4 °C by 2100 and by as much as 8°–10 °C after that.

    Future climate change will return planet Earth to the unstable climatic conditions of the Pleistocene and agriculture will be impossible.

    Human society will once again be characterized by hunting and gathering.

    Liked by 2 people

    Reply

  74. Dr. Geert Vanden Bossche is growing more confident that we created a major health problem by discarding 100 years of pandemic wisdom by mass vaccinating in the middle of a pandemic. He now predicts problems will begin to surface within a few weeks.

    The take-away message is stay healthy, stock up on horse paste, and don’t count on the hospitals to help.

    https://kunstler.com/clusterfuck-nation/this-is-not-an-april-fools-gag/

    I had the honor of interviewing the Belgian virologist Geert Vanden Bossche on Friday for my podcast, and he had quite a sobering message. “What I am predicting,” he said, “is a massive, massive tsunami” of illness and death among highly-vaccinated populations with dysregulated immune systems.

    “You commit errors or even crimes at the very small scale, you can hide them,” he said (at around 47:00 minutes into the hour-long discussion). “I have seen this happen with the Ebola vaccination with Africa a number of years ago. . . . However, if you do this at the very large scale, like what has happened with this mass [Covid] vaccination campaign, the truth will surface. And those who have committed these crimes who have been lying to the people, who have not been taking care of the health and safety of the people, will be severely, severely punished. . . . If these people would now go out and say, ‘Yeah, wait a minute, we have been making some mistakes, it wasn’t all right, we have to correct them, we have to revise our opinion,’ these people will be stoned in the streets. . . . They can only hope that something will happen that will distract from this issue, but it won’t. . . . The truth will surface: this has been a large-scale experiment of gain-of-function on the very human population. This will be something that will be reported in history for many many generations to come.”

    A bit further on (around 55:20 minutes) he says, “You will see what will happen, for example, in the next coming weeks. . . is more and more cases of more serious long Covid. . . . They will start to replace the surge of the cancers. . . now we have a more chronic phase. It will end with a hyper-acute phase, a huge, huge wave. . . I’ve been studying this now for four years. I know what I’m talking about. I’m probably the only person, in all modesty, who understands the immunology behind this. . . . (At 1:00:12) The thing I want your audience to understand, what we will be facing in the hyper-acute Covid crisis that is imminent, is that we will have to build a completely new world. . . . It is very very clear that when this starts, our hospitals will collapse. And that means the chaos in all kinds of layers of society — financial, economic, social, you name it — will be complete. And that is what I’m very clearly predicting. . . . It’s very strange for me to make such statements, but I’m not hiding it because I’m two hundred percent convinced that it will happen.”

    What, if anything, can you do to prepare for this? Dr. Vanden Bossche is also very clear: “What I can advise. . . to all these vaccinated people: they need to avoid reinfection. It is the reinfection of vaccinated people that is responsible for this situation. . . . Well, the only thing they can do — it’s very simple — is take anti-virals, of course. The only difference is, you will not be able to wait to take anti-virals until you have symptoms. . . . As soon as people see that in one of the other countries, or one of the other states in the United States, when this starts with hospitalizations going up very rapidly, they need to take anti-virals prophylactically, not wait until they have any symptoms. I’m in Belgium. If it starts in the US, or starts in Israel, or starts in the UK, I bet you that within a few days, you will see the same scenario in many of the highly-vaccinated countries.”

    By “anti-virals,” Dr. Vanden Bossche means specifically Ivermectin, the Nobel Prize-winning drug that the FDA and the CDC demonized brutally in order to distract the public from knowing that there was a safe and effective treatment for Covid. To acknowledge that would have vacated Pfizer’s and Moderna’s Emergency Use Authorization, which allowed them to make tens of billions of dollars on a very poorly tested pharma product while enjoying blanket protection against lawsuits.

    “I have been predicting already a half a year ago, that the public health authorities are finally going to have mandates for ivermectin.” Dr. Vanden Bossche said. “The results with ivermectin are fabulous. It is very safe. It is the only anti-viral that is cost-effective, that is widely available, that can be supplemented in sufficient quantities. . . . There is simply no alternative.”

    Like

    Reply

    1. Have not read the link yet, but the text you provided is very exciting. Chaos might be right around the corner.

      But he had a horrible line here “This will be something that will be reported in history for many many generations to come.”

      “many many generations” is 100 plus years in my book. 75% of the people that seem to have it all figured out end up saying something idiotic like this.

      Like

      Reply

          1. Yes, another threat vector I have been following.

            We have:

            • tissue damage from self attacking foreign protein causing myocarditis
            • degraded immune systems causing turbo cancer and susceptibility to viruses jumping from other species al al Rintrah
            • promotion of more virulent variants a la Bossche
            • clots causing heart attacks and autism via string theory al la Lee
            • DNA contamination transfection doing god knows what

            Meanwhile our leaders are still recommending mRNA transfections for children and boosters for all.

            Did I miss anything?

            Like

            Reply

    2. The hubris of Bossche saying,”I’m the only person that understands the immunology of this” is amazing and offends me. Bossche reminds me of Guy McPherson who we all know has been predicting NTHE occurring in the next 6 months for at least the last 10 years or more. Although McPherson maybe right about NTHE someday, I tuned him out long ago. The same with Bossche. The lack of humility and stating that one could make a mistake, always makes me suspicious of a person’s conclusions.

      AJ

      Like

      Reply

      2. I hope you’re right that Bossche is analogous to McPherson. I’ve come to the conclusion that the people in charge really are brain dead stupid so I’m not so confident Bossche is crying wolf. Time will tell.

        Like

        Reply

  75. B today with advice on personal preparation.

    https://thehonestsorcerer.substack.com/p/dodging-the-gator-what-can-be-done

    Contrary to the myths of overproduction and a stock market crash in 1929, the Great Depression was caused by the very same predicament we face today — the depletion of rich reserves of the master energy resource of the day (coal). Oil, of course was already in use then, but it wasn’t the fuel powering the economy. Only when adequate methods and machinery were developed to switch from a coal based economy to an oil based one did the depression end. (It shouldn’t come as a surprise then, that during the ensuing second world war one of the major goals of the Axis powers in both theaters was to get hold of rich petroleum reserves, ultimately to decide who will lead this new world order based on oil, after the previous one based on coal fell.)

    In this sense one could say that we should prepare for another World War. But I also have to ask: fought over what? Unlike the previous one fought over oil, there is no alternative fuel — entirely independent from the previous one — waiting in the wings. Nuclear, wind and solar remain hopelessly dependent on diesel in every step of their lifecycle, so along with uranium and rare earth mines, one would also have to secure reliable petroleum resources as well; besides coal and natural gas to secure a stable electricity supply and the high heat needed to run the industry. 

    So no, combat skills and guns will not save you. If my thinking is right, and I fully agree with Tim Morgan here, instead of another world war we are heading into a re-run of the Wall Street crash and the ensuing Great Depression… On steroids. 

    Financial independence, and owing tangible items of value on the other hand seems to me one of the more viable strategies for the upcoming years. One of these assets could be owning a small patch of land and the knowledge on how to grow food. Not with a goal of self-sufficiency — that takes much more land and work than any one of us could imagine — but for growing vegetables and fruits: food items, getting crazy expensive these days. I don’t think we are facing mass famines, even if the mother of all financial crashes pays a visit: the production of basic necessities will always be a key priority for even the most distressed economies. While there might be serious disruptions, or even chronic shortages of all sorts of items, you will most probably find something to eat. With rising fuel and fertilizer costs, droughts and heatwaves, however, the costs of producing food will increase further still; leading to ever higher grocery bills, and leaving barely anything left to spend on non-essential goods and services. So while it will be impossible to bug out this period of economic hardship on canned food, having a small stockpile of non-perishable items might actually be a good approach — with an added bonus feature.

    Having a few extra packs of coffee, tea, sugar, tobacco, or a few extra bottles of wine to trade for services in case of a hyperinflation or an economic / political collapse is always a good idea.

    Make sure you take care of your health, and of those around you, both physically and mentally.

    The sooner you accept such periods as perfectly normal, the sooner you can move on towards practical steps in everyday life, and will be able to accept the economic realities of a civilization in decline. Collapse is a feature of human civilization, a common trait with all complex systems. Something, which is entirely due to a natural cause, overshoot, and all its symptom predicaments: resource depletion, a net energy crisis, political upheaval, climate change, ecosystem degradation and so on. 

    I know it is hard. But it is also perfectly normal. Think about that.

    Liked by 2 people

    Reply

  77. I found this article very useful, thanks, but where I live – in the UK – I consider 17 hectares a huge amount of land. It amounts to 170,000 m2, or a rectangle 425 by 400 metres.

    I think a couple in the UK climate could probably be self-sufficient on about 1,000 m2 (one quarter-acre, or 0.1 ha) of land. That’s a large suburban garden here or perhaps a normal US suburban garden.

    To reply to the point about commercial aviation ending in our lifetimes, it’s also possible to travel the world by passenger ship. This was the normal method until about 1970. Of course, it’s much slower and it may not consume much less fuel, because boats are huge compared to planes. Water offers a lot of resistance even to a boat travelling at 30 km/hour (about 20 miles/hour).

    Liked by 1 person

    Reply

  78. Dr. Tom Murphy today explains how his life changed and how his beliefs evolved after he became overshoot aware.

    First understanding that infinite growth is not possible on a finite planet.

    Then hoping that a steady state economy would solve the problem.

    Then hoping that solar PV solar could keep modernity going.

    Then understanding material scarcity will constrain PV.

    Then understanding recycling can not solve the materials problem.

    Then understanding that industrial civilization is a flashbulb compared to evolutionary time.

    Then awareness we are destroying the web of life that sustains us.

    Then understanding that modernity will fail.

    Then wondering why so few see what is so obvious.

    I hope Murphy’s next step in personal growth will be to discover Varki’s MORT.

    https://dothemath.ucsd.edu/2024/04/distilled-disintegration/

    Liked by 2 people

    Reply

    1. That’s a brilliant summary Rob, and is pretty much my journey, though I’d add just a couple of aspects in my case.

      Working out that the EROEI of solar was so poor compared to fossil fuels, so any steady state was not possible ..

      Adding up all the products we get from fossil fuels, from fertilizers, to asphalt ,to plastics and explosives that we have no way of obtaining without fossil fuels, especially insulation for electrical wires

      Working out that making liquid fuels from solar and wind electricity was so inefficient and very material intensive despite us needing liquid fuels for any type of continuation of modernity, was for me the last nail in the coffin.

      Like

      Reply

      1. I never thought about wire insulation. That’s pretty core to a green electric world.

        For my journey I’d add:

        • Hoping awareness of MORT would enable a change in course.

        • Realizing MORT blocks awareness of MORT.

        Like

        Reply

        1. Ya, looking at that summary, Murphy only has one stop left to complete his journey. Like I said in my introduction comment on this site a couple months ago, MORT feels like the final piece of the puzzle.

          And that feeling is only getting stronger with time. But your last bullet point is the nail in the coffin. Once you realize that MORT blocks MORT, its actually easier to give up on the impossible (and waste of time) task of getting people to understand our predicament. Ya, I still send stuff to my inner circle, but I’m just going thru the motions. I don’t have nearly as much passion anymore.

          No need to apologize Rob, I don’t mean to come off like that. I think there is a point in everyone’s collapse journey where they actually need to stumble onto this website. Anyone who fits the following criteria (or at least 3 outta 4), is a prime candidate of needing to find MORT:

          Understand overshoot & collapse on an expert level.
          Still getting frustrated at not being able to convert friends/family (or anyone).
          Think its possible to get overshoot-blind people to stop consuming, quit their jobs, etc.
          Belief that the human experiment is not a failure and that our culture is to blame.

          I fit this like a glove. There are many more like me (Alan Urban types & Sarah Connor types). This site is where hopium goes to die. LOL. It’s true though. Sometimes after I hang out in a Nate Hagens forum, I come away with Steven Pinker ideas. And that is not healthy.

          Like

          Reply

          1. I think the point I was trying to make in my ramblings above was that if the entire collapse community (defined as overshoot aware and I’m gonna guess 500,000 people… too low? too high?)  could get on board with MORT, then we would …….? I’ve been thinking about what that is. And it just seems to be the same problem as getting people to see overshoot. So nothing changes.

            I guess tweaking the story and denial now being the front and center issue (for overshoot aware people) has potential to pick up some steam. There are lots of end of the world knowing people (religious zealots, hardcore preppers, misguided conspiracy theorists, etc), but they just don’t know why/how its happening. Maybe our collapse community grows to 50 million people with this new message. Thats a pipedream and likely the absolute best-case scenario and would still not make much of a dent.

            Get MORT into mainstream religion worldwide somehow and now we are getting somewhere. LOL, it all seems so easy when the hopium’s talking.  

            Like

            Reply

            1. I think, but am not certain, that it is impossible to override MORT in most people and so nothing will change until we are forced to change, and then it will be a gong show because most will deny the underlying forces and will blame the wrong actors.

              For those people still fighting for positive proactive change, like Alpert, Hagens, Murphy, Martenson, Michaux, Korwicz, environmental organizations, green party members, etc., I believe they must focus on finding a way to override MORT to have any chance of success.

              In other words, MORT needs to be their top priority, but it is not, not even in a single person, and so they are all wasting their time, and all will fail, and all will wonder why.

              Liked by 3 people

              Reply

              1. Yes.
                But fail what?
                We all die at some point.
                And life is a tough one. (not hard/difficult, enduring/resilient 🙂
                So.

                Maybe, you care most about this set of living arrangements/civilization/species?
                Or, is it about the human “achievements” that will be lost? Isn’t this a form exceptionalism? In other words, the astonishment lies in the eye of the beholder.
                Oh, and there is human suffering (humanism). But that’s already part of everyday’s life for most.
                Or maybe, accepting how little agency one has? The myth of total control, the myth of absolute free-will, the fantasy of the engineer, the builder. It’s hard to accept that ultimately, all rests in the hand of forces that surpass this body and any of its Machiavellian machinations (be it God/Buddha/the System/Laws of physics)
                Doesn’t our identification contain the seeds of our fears, hopes and values?
                Once we pinpoint our exact identification, aren’t there small steps that we can do to embody it? Doesn’t it matter more than success?

                I am pretty convinced that if MORT were to be acknowledged and acted upon, then another even greater failure would lie around the corner. This existence is not meant to be confined within the realm of reason only. This is the lesson of this tragedy (we are at the end of means)
                This is, by the way, also the root teaching of Fukuoaka. And the antidote of humanism. We are in a quest for solutions. But our solutions are the problems.
                Or U.G. Krishnamurti, there is no answer without a question. The question gives rise to the tension, the febrility of searching. We make up questions, because we like (are accustomed to) this state of febrility.
                We are already in the garden of heaven. It is simply not of our pleasing. Being content does not rely on external conditions.

                Granted, people fighting for positive proactive change are not succeeding much. But, any total success is a totalitarian failure in the making. (And I am pretty convinced they are not all fighting for the same outcome) And I wouldn’t say they are failing completely. This is a cultural process with lots of inertia.

                I see the end of this destructive way of life (not by choice, but by attrition) and I rejoice: it will give the living (which we are part of) some room to breathe.
                The living does not require a global civilization.

                🙂

                Liked by 1 person

                Reply

                2. It sounds like you think nothing matters and so wasting time on activities guaranteed to fail is not a problem as long as you enjoy the journey.

                  My brain doesn’t work that way.

                  Like

                  Reply

                  1. Yes. That’s a way to put it 🙂

                    However, rather than say “guaranteed to fail”, I would prefer to say, that the outcome is not up to me.
                    Yes, my actions have consequences (most unanticipated). Yet, to declare that they are failures (or claim I am the reason for success) seem both without meaning. It sounds like we are unnecessarily berating ourselves (or claiming credit) for things that do not belong to us.

                    And, to me, genuine joy is a good indication of being in the right track. To recognize ultimately “nothing matters” does not preclude that some things are dearest to me. I still honour this.

                    Yes, there are wide differences in the inner workings of people 🙂

                    Liked by 1 person

                    Reply

                  2. When I am at my best (all this means is watching Dowd, Charles Eisenstein or reading about the Tao and Native American history, or doing chores around the house), I am at my most spiritual. Genuinely trying to live with more humility, moderation and connectedness. And I’m closer to what Charles is talking about.

                    When I am out of that zone (which is most of the time) its back to less cooking, more fast food, binge watching hollywood movies and playing video games. For having no spirituality for most of my life, I now have a novice understanding of mysterious concepts like having faith, practicing your faith & losing your faith… ooh spooky!!! 

                    Because I view everything from my narrow lens, I would have bet that one of the side effects from most peoples collapse journey would be some sense of this spirituality. At the very least to see Mother Earth as our absolute creator/sustainer/end (and not just in some factual way). Am I in the majority or minority? 

                    Liked by 1 person

                    Reply

              2. I wonder if they have worked out the only way they will be taken seriously, by mainstream is to have a ‘plan’ for modernity to survive. People will just not accept (hence deny), any future that does not offer hope.

                Perhaps the only way to get people seeing through their MORT, is by laying out the problems, with a ‘solution’, for them to understand the reality of the situation, then later they understand the ‘saviour plan’ cannot work.

                Look at me as the classic example. I was all for the ‘renewable’ future a few years ago, even though I studied Limits to Growth 49 years ago, and knew for most of that time we would eventually hit the wall of resources. I’m guilty of jumping onto the ‘renewables will save us’ bandwagon, until I did the calculations for myself about how little energy they provide. I also woke up to the environmental damage every new ‘development’ of any kind has.

                It was trying to calculate how to power a mine via solar, wind and pumped hydro/batteries, in a very remote location that really woke me up. If this doesn’t work, then ‘that’, over there can’t work, which means … In other words, suddenly a chain reaction of links of ‘things that can’t work’ fell into place.

                Before then, even though I’d been reading posts and comments here, I had been one dismissing MORT. My own denial made me dismiss it. It took my brain to calculate for itself what wouldn’t work, to come back to understanding denial.

                Then a couple of years ago, I did calculations on the Haru oni plant; wind to synthetic fuel, that totally cemented in me how much denial was going on in the world.  (The Engineers working on that project would fully understand it’s not a solution to anything, but stay silent because they are being paid for their work). All the workers at that plant, just driving a car to work and home, over the life of the plant and the energy embedded in their vehicles, will use more energy than produced by that plant.

                Yet somehow, people have the belief that if we build hundreds of thousands of these wind turbines, all destroying a bit more of the ecosphere, we can have a green future, while paying no attention to where all the materials to build it all comes from..

                In the world, it’s always the same excuse, just a little more damage ‘here’ to make the world better for everyone (human, short term). Every new mine, every new chemical to spray on crops, every new road, every tree cleared to grow XYZ. Every new powerline to take ‘renewable energy’ from A to B.. As I just stated on POB, we have been doing just a little bit more damage for thousands of years, fossil fuels allowed us to speed up the process.

                Even if we had a world wide one child policy, implemented tomorrow, the population of the planet would still be over 6 Billion in 50 years time. Imagine the damage we could do the the ecosphere by dragging everyone up to the type of lifestyle enjoyed by only 15% of humanity now. (BTW, that’s all of us with the ability and means to be posting on here, living in a western country, with reasonable education, healthcare and a government sponsored ‘safety net’, not the super rich).

                I’ve rapidly come to the conclusion that people’s own self interest in being ‘better off’ guarantees we continue growing the human enterprise until we can’t, then we will blame others (Americans already complain about their oil being under the ground occupied by Arabs), and fight over the scraps, accelerating collapse.

                Liked by 1 person

                Reply

                1. I like your bait and switch idea. I have no clue what that looks like, just off the top of my head some type of govt incentive program to get people to switch from their bullshit jobs over to something with actual value like farming, composting, or taking care of soil (whatever you make now, the govt will double your salary). And when the rug is pulled from underneath our feet, those new jobs will no longer pay big money.

                  At that point you’ve got hundreds of millions of new people who now know something about the important stuff in life (farming, soil, etc). Maybe that helps them comprehend overshoot. At the very least, you have a boat load of people who are a little bit more self-sufficient than they were prior to their govt job.

                  Of course this is all hogwash because it requires a non-corrupt government. But I do like the bait and switch approach for the possibility of overriding MORT.

                  Liked by 1 person

                  Reply

                2. Well said.

                  How do you make an obese person understand they need to cut carbs? And that life can be pleasant with fewer carbs?

                  The unfortunate reality is that denying reality makes the eventual reality worse.

                  Maybe one strategy is to leverage our need for hope into understanding that genuine hope increases with increased awareness of reality.

                  Like

                  Reply

                3. Yes.

                  Some amount of shock is necessary to shake everyone out of entitlement.

                  I read a long time ago that: “Truth is never painful, rather the unveiling of illusions is”

                  Like

                  Reply

  80. Hello everyone,

    Hope you’re all travelling well. It’s not hard to be a Chicken Little with the sky falling down all around us anyway but today’s news of the 7.7 mag earthquake in Taiwan has shook me up in more than one way. It’s early April now and we have been forewarned that this is a window for China to invade, logistically. What better timing than to claim they are sending reinforcement troops to help with disaster management (whether Taiwan wants it or not), and after all, China considers it their territory to do with as they like. I can believe that the US would also respond in kind, this is another opportunity to increase their presence in Taiwan, and that would certainly up the ante for China. My feelers are all tingling that this latest geological disturbance is the beginning of the next stage of geopolitical tremors, and it had to happen at some point. I can’t see China waiting another year to take control of Taiwan to once and for all get the US military out of their rear view mirror and even encourage the sanctions that will only serve to upend the West, all the while using this conflict to get their own economy back on the straight and narrow along with more autocratic rule of their population. With Russia as their backstop and the rest of BRICS lined up like ducks in a row, there’s no better time than the present. Why wait for another climate catastrophe summer that will surely cause even more global instability and resource uncertainty? It is in China’s best interests to have its internal machine rejigged and running as best as it can prior to everything and everyone else falling apart, as long as they can hold out for some time the power transfer will go as smooth as possible from West to East. At least this is what is hoped, with as least turbulence as possible. How many times has China said to the West, don’t mess with what isn’t your business and things can still work out for everybody, but if you do, then the whole world will be in turmoil. I just don’t know if the West has the brains or heart to step down gracefully or if it will have to learn the lesson the hard way. All the best to everyone, these are strange times indeed but we are amongst the fewest of our species who know it to be so, and somehow that should give us strength and courage to bear them.

    Namaste.

    Liked by 1 person

    Reply

    1. This reminded me that the invasion was supposed to start 2 days ago according to somebody with a twitter account. 🙂

      I wonder how the chip factories survived the earthquake? They are pretty fragile complexes. I remember reading that the foundations are massive so that vibrations from trucks driving on nearby roads do not cause the delicate silcon patterning process to fail.

      Like

      Reply

  81. More from Rintrah today.

    https://www.rintrah.nl/cross-reactive-natural-immunity-between-bird-flu-and-sars2/

    I’m not a genius with a crystal ball, I can’t tell you whether we’ll have bird flu pandemic a month from now, a year from now or a decade from now. But I can read studies. Those studies very clearly demonstrate: Natural infections with unrelated respiratory pathogens protect people against severe influenza viruses.

    In contrast, an adaptive immune response, induced by multiple breakthrough infections after vaccination with inactive vaccines against a particular respiratory infection, has no such effect. Rather, it increases vulnerability to unrelated pathogens. People’s lungs are now filled with T cells and B cells, that are trying desperately to keep out SARS2.

    That’s not my theory. It’s not Geert van den Bossche’s theory either. It’s simply what humanity knows, from the numerous studies that have been done on this subject.

    We live in the pandemic era. That’s the logical consequence, of a number of things:

    • Climate change forcing animals in contact that would normally never meet each other.
    • Human overpopulation.
    • Many millions of immunocompromised people kept alive with various therapies.
    • Humans traveling around the world in airplanes, that can put you from London in Brazzaville within hours, a journey that would take our ancestors weeks.
    • Human factory farms, full of inbred animals.
    • The stupid decision to vaccinate the chickens in the factory farms against influenza.
    • Vaccinating people of all age categories with these inactivated vaccines, against a respiratory virus (SARS2) that killed less than 1% of people it infected, almost all elderly in poor health, is a luxury humanity could not afford. Yet they decided to do it anyway. It did not work, it caused constant reinfections with waves of more infectious variants of the virus. The fortunate side-effect of that, is that unvaccinated people in good health have built up competent immunity that will help protect them against the bird flu pandemic. We spent our ammunition on the wrong bug. We went into the woods at night and emptied our gun on a wolf, not realizing the bear approaching us from the back.

    Liked by 1 person

    Reply

  82. UK oil and gas EROI will be less than 1 in 7 years and the rest of the world will shortly follow.

    Rachel with nervous laugh: “Don’t they know?
    Alister: “I don’t know.”

    Rachel Donald is intellectually and physically hot. I wish I was young and handsome and rich and Scottish.

    When do you think we’ll run out of oil?

    2050? 2100? Never? That’s understandable given the IPCC models access to oil until 2100; politicians like Rishi are betting big on North Sea deposits. Petroleum is the life blood of our global economy, and it’s difficult to imagine it drying up. More often, when we talk about transitioning away from fossil fuels, it’s because of the necessity to limit global warming—not because we run out.

    But a team in Scotland are warning exactly that—we’re running out. Fast. Alister Hamilton is a researcher at the University of Edinburgh and the founder of Zero Emissions Scotland. He and his colleagues self-funded research into oil depletion around the world and the results are shocking: We will lose access to oil around the world in the 2030s.

    They calculated this by establishing the Energy Return On Investment (EROI) and found that whilst there will still be oil deposits around the world, we would use more energy accessing the oil supply than we would ever get from burning it. This is because we’re having to mine further into the earth’s crust to access lower-grade oil. According to their calculations, the oil in the North Sea will be inaccessible—in a dead state—by 2031, and the oil in Norway by 2032. Around the world, oil reserves see the same trend through the 2030s.

    Petroleum is the life blood, and we haven’t yet built out a different circulatory system to support renewable energy—in less than a decade, the world as know it could crash.

    Like

    Reply

    1. I might try and do this one. Have not watched this channel since the William Rees interview. Rachel was so bitchy to him, it made me hate her.

      Like

      Reply

          1. Have listened to a bit-will finish later tonight.

            Sounding quite a lot like ShortonOil’s thermodynamic theories from a few years ago on Peak Oil as still followed by a German called Berndt Warm(sp).

            Short died some time ago but took a lot of flack for his theories. It’s all a bit vague in my memory but he had a thing about a “half way point” and that things would get rough about 2022. Wish my memory was better.

            Mick N

            Like

            Reply

              1. Thanks El Mar and Niko B for the information. Yes timing is always tricky. BW seems to have moved to car production.

                Mick N

                Like

                Reply

              2. Maybe only a little bit early.

                What if COVID had not hit in the fall of 2019 and dampened oil demand?

                The Hills Group engineering study, as I understood it, was about averages for the entire global oil deposits, infrastructure, and industry, and the ~1.4 billion or so vehicles burning fuels refined from oil.   From memory, The “Dead State” for that thermodynamic system was somewhere not too far after 2020.  My interpretation was that reaching this dead state did not mean that there was no more energy available to power an economy, rather it meant the current thermodynamic system – economic and geopolitical – must break and re-organize to a lower level of energy consumption.   

                It feels like that is happening now.   I suppose we will know for sure in a few years.

                P.S. I always felt like there was something directionally correct to the Hill Group / Shortonoil oil system as a thermodynamic system engineering study. But I lack the math skills to give a credible opinion.  Since fuels refined from oil especially diesel fuel are the largest drivers of the current global industrial economy, building a model of that oil energy system based on global averages seemed appropriate to me. (I would note that Dr. Tim Garret modeled the global economy as thermodynamic system.) 

                Well, The Hills Group study is an old story for the history books now, whatever is coming our way with oil and the economy is well in motion and soon to arrive.

                Like

                Reply

                1. It might have been Einstein who said that thermodynamics is the bedrock of physics and its theories are the least likely to change as our understanding improves.

                  I struggle with thermodynamics math but I know it’s important and very predictive. I am a big fan of Tim Garrett and I think it reflects very badly on the disciplines of climate science and economics that they ignore him.

                  Climate scientists would immediately understand that all of their “solutions” are bullshit if they studied Garrett’s work. Economists are too stupid to understand Garrett’s work.

                  I’ve posted a lot of work by Garrett over the years:

                  https://un-denial.com/?s=%22Tim+Garrett%22

                  Richard Nolthenius is the only climate scientist that tried to help promote Garrett’s ideas. Shame on the rest of them.

                  https://un-denial.com/?s=Richard+Nolthenius

                  Liked by 2 people

                  Reply

      2. I watched that interview and my interpretation was that she pulled Bill Rees up for being a bit too condescending to her audience, they already knew the easy stuff he was going on about. I thought she brought some of Bill’s best arguments out of him, but yes she definitely still had some hopium no matter what he said..

        If I was that young again, I imagine I’d also push back against the nothing we can do arguments of Bill Rees (and me!!)

        Liked by 1 person

        Reply

  83. New quote for the sidebar:

    Denial, it seems, is the only economic resource which is still growing exponentially. — Tim Watkins

    But “the sixties” had been built on the weak foundation of a finite energy source… one which became ever more expensive to produce as the years went by.  Had we not been bamboozled by the energy-blind economics that emerged out of the oil-age to tell us that infinite growth on a finite planet would be easy, we might have noticed that without energy, there can be no prosperity.  Instead, even now as the slurping sound of the planet’s last oil deposits being sucked out of the Earth is growing ever louder, a majority remains convinced that the prosperity of the 1960s is still just around the corner.

    https://consciousnessofsheep.co.uk/2024/04/03/what-was-the-1960s/

    Liked by 2 people

    Reply

  85. Alice Friedemann today on nuclear winter.

    https://energyskeptic.com/2024/nuclear-weapons-must-be-reduced-or-we-risk-nuclear-winter/

    This contains excerpts from a post by two of the leading nuclear winter scientists and is a good summary of the situation. There is also a section on what can be done, how you can help.  Nuclear winter is a double whammy, it is also extreme climate change and is a smaller version of the  asteroid that wiped out the dinosaurs 65 million years ago with smoke high in the atmosphere that cooled the Earth for a decade or more. Several papers have found that up to 5 billion people might die.

    But nuclear winter is not a consideration in arms control or a spur to get arms reduction talks going. What could be a higher priority?  No, instead the U.S. started an arms race when it decided to upgrade our nuclear missiles, submarine fleet and more. China had 200 bombs in 2020, but now plans to have 1500 by 2035 to counter the U.S. buildup of our nuclear arsenal.

    I very much recommend this 8 minute (4 on 2x speed) video to give you an idea of how absolutely insane and dangerous our nuclear policies are.

    Like

    Reply

  86. In the study’s worst-case scenario of a 4° C warmer world, around 2.7 billion people will experience at least one week of daytime (8h) ambient conditions associated with uncompensable heat stress, 1.5 billion will experience a month under such conditions, and 360 million will be faced with an entire season of life altering extreme heat.

    Overall, he seems to be a bit energy blind, but it is still an interesting video.

    Like

    Reply

    1. Climate change will fall upon deaf (dead) ears. Energy and resource depletion will wipe out billions before climate change will sink its teeth in. The future is change. Most species won’t like it but there is nothing they or we can do to avoid what has already been set in motion. If people think we can then denial runs strong in them. But don’t despair as life will endure even if we don’t. Carpe diem, for night is falling.

      Liked by 1 person

      Reply

  87. Art Berman is also thinking about denial and the need for awareness to have any genuine hope.

    https://www.artberman.com/blog/radical-acceptance-of-the-human-predicament/

    Figure 1 alarms the hell out of me and should alarm any sane and reasonable person. The planet is 20% hotter than the average temperature since before agriculture began, and I see no relief in sight unless something very different happens going forward.

    We are well beyond a soft landing for the planet. There are no moderate pathways ahead. The only move we have left is radical acceptance of our situation, of the human predicament.

    Solutions are impossible until we understand and accept what we’re up against. Let’s start there. Right now.

    Liked by 1 person

    Reply

    1. It’s amazing how many people fall for this bit, and of course is used by every denier of climate change under the sun… “ The planet is 20% hotter than the average temperature …..”

      A bit of extra CO2 is not going to increase the temperature by 20% and indeed it hasn’t. The world’s average temperature has gone from 282*K to 284*K an increase of less than 1%. Kelvin is the absolute temperature measure we should be using for everything about climate.

      A temperature change of 2-3% Kelvin will make a lot of the planet’s surface uninhabitable for humans and most other megafauna, and it doesn’t take a lot to do that. Of course with fences and borders, humans have stopped most other forms of land fauna from being able to move when the climate changes, so extinction is pretty much guaranteed for many.

      Liked by 1 person

      Reply

  88. Got this link from a recent Paul Beckwith video. Bunch of authors on this one. I only recognized two names. Michael Mann (who I dislike) and Eileen Crist (who I like). So I decided to read it. Prior to finding un-Denial I would have enjoyed this and come away with the usual feeling of “at least someone understands whats going on”. But now I come away with “nobody knows WTF is going on”. 

    Not one word about denial. And not enough about overpopulation. And still tippy toeing around the topic like this: “Whether the world is considered overpopulated depends on various factors.” 

    Dont waste your time reading the paper, I am only commenting because I needed to vent my frustrations.

    https://academic.oup.com/pnasnexus/article/3/4/pgae106/7638480?login=false

    Like

    Reply

    1. Thanks! It’s very nice to know a few others see the significance of denial.

      I’m amazed every day by denial’s ability to overpower the most obvious evidence in even our most intelligent and best educated.

      Like

      Reply

      1. Not for this prepper. 🙂

        Twinkies are full of unhealthy sugar and (probably) palm oil. The orange substance in Kraft Dinner has a terrible shelf life, so it’s much better to stock plain bulk pasta which is cheaper and lasts forever. Tang is mostly unhealthy sugar.

        Spam is mostly pork, processed in a manner that tastes good, can be eaten without cooking, and will last for 20+ years. Proteins will be one of the first things to disappear from the shelves when SHTF. Extra cans of Spam will be valuable for trading.

        Liked by 1 person

        Reply

  91. I have no knowledge or opinions on Brazilian politics but I continue to think Elon Musk is one of the good guys, albeit a little crazy and in denial.

    Like

    Reply

  92. https://www.pnas.org/doi/10.1073/pnas.1809600115

    Pliocene and Eocene provide best analogs for near-future climates.

    These analyses illustrate how the policy and societal choices represented by RCP emission scenarios are akin to choosing a geological analog, with higher-end scenarios causing near-future climates to resemble increasingly distant geological analogs. For RCP8.5, the emergence of Eocene-like climates indicates that the unmitigated warming of RCP8.5 is approximately equivalent to reversing a 50-My cooling trend in two centuries. (Emphasis mine) Conversely, stabilization pathways, such as RCP4.5, are akin to choosing a world like the Mid-Pliocene (ca. 3 Ma).

    These analyses also indicate that the Earth system is well along on a trajectory to a climate state different from any experienced in our history of agricultural civilizations (last 7 ka) (34) and modern species history (360–240 ka) (35). Climate states for which we have good historical and lived experience (e.g., 20th century, preindustrial) are quickly diminishing as best analogs for the coming decades, while being superseded by climate analogs drawn from deeper times in Earth’s geological history (Figs. 2 and 3). Future climates also tend to exhibit greater geographic separation from their closest analogs over the coming centuries (SI Appendix, Fig. S14). Efforts to keep the Earth within a safe operating space, defined as climates similar to those of the Holocene (11, 36), seem to be increasingly unlikely.

    Like

    Reply

  93. Another warning from Dr. Geert Vanden Bossche, this time with a lot more detail, and with an interviewer that understands the complex topic, and that tries to clarify Bossche’s ideas.

    Bossche says to expect a pandemic crisis, primarily in vaccinated vulnerable people, like the elderly and those with other health problems, before the end of June 2024.

    I don’t share AJ’s view that Bossche is crying wolf. I think Bossche knows what he is talking about however there is a big element of chance in evolution so I do think he is too confident on the timeline and certainty. It would have been wiser for him to say there is a 75% probability that his predictions will occur.

    Like

    Reply

    1. I try never to say god bless anyone, being a good atheist 😉 . But, Joe Rogan is so right here. I couldn’t speak about ivermectin to anyone, even close friends thought I was crazy. My only regret is that I took the first shot. Now my trust in almost all doctors is gone.

      AJ

      Liked by 1 person

      Reply

      2. Me too. 😦 I have an elderly fully boosted close friend suffering from a serious covid “breakthrough” illness. I thought about offering him some of my horse paste but I’m sure he would reject it. He’s made it quite clear on several occasions that he does not want to hear any of my covid opinions.

        Like

        Reply

    1. Abstract

      “The most disturbing scenario calculated by LtG is “overshoot & collapse” case where humans exceed the carrying capacity of Planet Earth and die out like bacteria in a petri dish 🥴

      I confirm that when I modeled LtG and played around with a computer in 1984, I could not get anything but overshoot & collapse, sooner or later. “Equilibrium” never lasted very long.”

      Saludos

      el mar

      Liked by 1 person

      Reply

    2. Thanks! An interesting sweeping history of economics and geopolitics. My brain tended to substitute energy, MPP, and denial for malevolent elites in places, but it was still a good overview.

      I agree with his conclusion although instead of decades I expect the depression to be more or less permanent due to the lack of affordable fossil energy needed to resume growth.

      My forecast, based on my reasoning posted in this thread, is Great Global Depression starting later in 2024 and lasting for decade(s).

      Liked by 1 person

      Reply

  97. I was just writing a comment to answer one of the Cornucopians on POB, when I realised the entire hopelessness of the renewables or nuclear arguments, plus the entire uselessness of the ‘circular economy’ people. Or maybe it was just reinforced. The human enterprise of modernity and 8.1+ billion humans is going down. Reduction in available energy is the trigger and there is nothing we can do to stop it or make it less unpleasant, or save the macrofauna from extinction.

    As we build more energy machines of any type, their output increases overall energy available, and used, providing this happens faster than the retirement of old energy producing machines. Over the last few decades we, as in humanity in it’s entirety, has increased fossil fuel use developing more, tearing up the environment more, while increasing the build of renewables.

    On a world wide scale, we have not replaced any fossil fuel use, we have just increased all energy use with more fossil fuels being part of that increase, renewables being part of the increase.. At some point growing energy use must stop, unless we make the planet uninhabitable for all life, which means we stop anyway.

    Because of our economic system, as soon as we stop growing energy production and use, the price of energy goes up, we go into recession/depression. It becomes impossible to build ‘new’ stuff of any kind once energy use declines, unless we take the energy off other users, for our ‘new’ builds.

    Building more renewables, batteries, EVs, etc, currently means using more fossil fuels to build it all. There is no realistic attempt to build it all with electricity from renewables, nor is that possible. If we diverted existing renewable energy production to, for example, a new mine, then that renewable energy, removed from a city, would have to be made up from increasing fossil fuel made energy (electricity) in the city.

    If we ‘ran’ the new mine from new renewables, then these have to be built first, meaning we need the mine for the minerals to build the renewables, or we take minerals from existing users, elsewhere. It’s all just more, more, more and none of the proponents of renewables, including major green organizations want to acknowledge it.

    The circular economy can’t work as we cannot physically recycle everything, plus we would need to build all the recycling facilities. If we were to try and do this from a stable amount of energy use, where does the energy come from to build these new recycling facilities? Other energy users? For the last couple of centuries it’s always come from ‘growth’, especially in energy use. None of us, nor our parents or grandparents have known a world where the amount of energy available to humanity does anything other than grow.

    Because of losses of all materials due to entropy and dissipation into the environment, we will always need mining, of ever lower ore grades, meaning an increasing energy use in mining. It is simply not possible to maintain output from mines once we go to zero energy growth, unless the energy comes from other uses, and users..

    Once energy production growth, stops, the price of all energy rises, because we need energy production to go up just to maintain the system, as population is still growing and lower ore grades etc. If energy production was to fall, the price becomes higher, making everything else cost more. We can see this on a micro scale every time an old coal power plant is closed. On average, the wholesale price of electricity, goes up, until compensated for by some newer form of electricity production (a new build taking energy to make).

    Every argument I see about the future usually contains parts about extra efficiency in buildings etc, but never, ever, anything relating to the energy cost of these energy efficiency gains. For example, a simple hand wave about using double glazed or triple glazed windows. To do this, on a worldwide scale, we would need to build a lot of new glass factories, and probably window manufacturers as well. It will take more energy to do this, just like everything else ‘new’.

    There is that term ‘build new’, meaning more energy spent on the building and mining of minerals for the inputs to the new or expanded factories. I’ve been using the example of the Adaro Coal power plant (new) and Aluminium smelters (also new) in Indonesia, as a perfect example of our predicament on POB. The world needs more Aluminium for all the ‘new’ solar, EVs and/or whatever, which means more energy use and environmental damage whether we use fossil fuels or solar panels and pumped hydro backup.

    Civilization is an energy trap or a Ponzi scheme, we have more energy and material growth, or stagnate, then collapse. Following feedback loops, we see there is no way out of this predicament.

    People often state how hard the ‘future’ is to see, yet it’s really simple, obvious and highly predictable for humanity as a whole. We continue using more energy, mining more minerals, destroying more of the environment, until we can’t. The first real limit to be reached will be oil production, and we may be there already.

    Once oil production starts to fall with a vengeance of say 2-3 million barrels/d one year, then 4-5 million barrels/d the next, as in an accelerating decline, it has the feedback loop of making gas and coal production more difficult as they totally rely upon diesel, likely reducing the production of both, or a greater proportion of the declining oil production goes to coal and gas, meaning other heavy users of oil have greater declines in available diesel.

    Mining and agriculture both come under pressure, sending prices for all raw materials and food through the roof. World fertilizer use is currently above 500 million tonnes annually. (Forget about using Hannah Richie data from Our World in data as they only seem to have nitrogen use as total fertilizer use, despite naming it ‘all’). Lots of energy used in making this fertilizer and distributing it. World grain yields are also strongly correlated to fertilizer use, so less energy available means less fertilizer, meaning less food, unless again we keep this up, by taking energy from other uses.

    If we banned all discretionary energy uses, to keep essential energy uses going, while overall energy continues to decline, this puts huge numbers of people into poverty from losing jobs, let alone the problems from reduced food and huge price increases in everything. Money for investment into everything totally dries up. If governments try to print money, to pay for anything, all it will do is push prices of goods up further. If governments try to increase taxation, it just makes people poorer on average, squeezing businesses further.

    The ability to build anything new quickly evaporates, people everywhere struggle between loss of employment, loss of affordable goods and services, increased taxation, and start to increase the wellbeing of their immediate ‘group’ to the detriment of ‘others’. Crime rates go through the roof, the blame game increases with some trying to dispossess others of their resources. This will happen by individuals, groups and countries. Crime rates and wars will of course further accelerate the decline in energy production, plus the movement of goods in our globalised economy. One after the other, countries will become failed states at an increasing rate, very rapidly when the feedback loops accelerate the fossil fuel decline. Likewise for solar, wind and nuclear.

    We rapidly get to a point where the population of 8.1+ billion people start to decline, with starving people everywhere searching for their next meal, spreading from city to country areas, eating everything they can find, while burning everything to stay warm in colder areas during the search for food. Every animal found will be become someone’s or some groups meal. Farming of any type, once the decline accelerates, will not happen, too many people would be eating the seed, or the farmer. Cows, sheep, horses, chooks, pigs, deer, basically all large animals will succumb because of the millions or billions of guns in existence and starving nomadic people.

    Eventually after decades of decline, humans will not be able to be hunter gatherers as we will have sent every large megafauna we can find extinct. Whoever is left will be gatherers of whatever food plants that have self seeded and grow wild. Even if we were able to get some type of agriculture going again, there would be no animals to pull plows, all old ‘machinery’ from decades prior would be metal junk, so food would remain a difficult task for humans, unless we found ways to farm rabbits and rats, without metal fencing. While we will use charcoal to melt metals found in scavenging cities, it will be for a few useful tools, like harnesses to put on the slaves plowing the fields, or keeping the slaves entrapped.

    Once we go down the energy decline at an accelerating rate, nothing can stop complete collapse unless we can shrink population much faster than the energy decline, which itself may very well be pointless as we have created such a globalised economy of immense complexity, where fast population decline, has it’s own huge set of problems and feedback loops.

    Complexity can only happen because of the huge scale of the human enterprise. Reduce that scale, businesses have falling sales, making everything more expensive. Rapid population decline means that many businesses don’t just reduce production, but often stop altogether when the business goes bust. Again feedback loops, of less in one area might make certain ‘widgets’ that are necessary in another crucial aspect of modernity suddenly unobtainable, having repercussions in these other areas. All type of parts will become harder to obtain, making machinery become rapidly useless, as different machines are often reliant on other machines working in order to keep a production line running, from processing lines at mines, to simple factories making furniture, let alone anything complicated. If we only reach population decline as energy declines the problem is still the same..

    Liked by 3 people

    Reply

    1. Diseases like diphtheria, dysentery and typhoid will be become rampant among roaming people leaving their homes. Having access to clean water will be the biggest concern. So many ways this could all go and at various speeds. In fact I guess each area will experience something unique and we will not know as the internet will have disappeared.

      Like

      Reply

    2. Ah ah ah. Maybe. This is a mind model. I quite agree with the first quarter. I am not sure it is accurate all the way.

      Don’t we have a lot of energy wasted in the system for activities which do not benefit the overall welfare?

      Won’t the conditions become slightly easier once the population starts to fall?

      Won’t wild life rebound at the first opportunity?

      Aren’t we enablers of life as much as we are destroyers?

      Will aging population really chose to wage wars?

      Won’t cooperation become necessary again?

      Etc…

      Liked by 1 person

      Reply

    3. Have you read the book Bright Green Lies? I have been listening to an audio-book of it recently. I knew that “renewables” were not 100% “clean and green”, but I didn’t know all of the gory details. If the wording of this post seems weird, it is because my brain is fried right now.

      Like

      Reply

    4. Thanks, I enjoyed reading this. I shared it with my brother and he quit halfway through. Too scary. MORT strikes again.

      Like

      Reply

  98. 2024 Apr 8

    https://thehonestsorcerer.medium.com/on-radical-acceptance-d5f85bee5442

    … barring a nuclear conflict, this process [collapse] could last well into the next century, and beyond. The collapse of modernity will take much longer than any of us could imagine, and will certainly look nothing like what we see in the movies.

    2024 Jan 29

    https://thehonestsorcerer.medium.com/collapse-will-look-nothing-like-in-the-movies-e753f510492d

    … collapse is a nearly instantaneous event, and that it happens everywhere, precisely at the same time. The day before everything looks and works fine, the day after the entire world is in ruins. Buildings take a torn down look in a matter of days, streets get clogged with crashed and abandoned vehicles, and there are barely any survivors left to be seen. Everything looks, well, visibly collapsed.

    I subscribe to the notion that collapse started a long time ago (decades) and is becoming more pronounced from one day to the next – ending with a few months of hell, likely over a winter and either hemisphere could lead.

    Like

    Reply

      1. Haha. I’m glad you noticed it too. I even re-read it a few times to make sure I was not crazy. But ya I agree with you that we’ve been in collapse for a while now, and it will only get more noticeable with each passing day.

        Like

        Reply

      2. Same here 🙂

        It’s good to see B is consistent, at least, between these two essays.

        And I too agree with you: we are somewhere in the middle of collapse. Somehow, sleepwalking through it.

        Like

        Reply

  99. I read and very much liked both Hideaway’s comment and B’s essay today. I was thinking of publishing both in a single guest post as a way highlighting two valid ways to view the same overshoot predicament.

    Liked by 2 people

    Reply

  100. Dr. Tom Murphy today explains why we won’t colonize other planets.

    https://dothemath.ucsd.edu/2024/04/post-modernity/

    Contextual hardships of living in space include:

    1. Nothing to breathe: we’re adapted to Earth’s atmosphere and need oxygen.
    2. Nothing to drink: water is thin on the ground out there.
    3. Nothing to eat: we eat biology—not rocks—and that’s all on Earth, as far as we know.
    4. Distances defy intuition: the moon is about 1,000 times farther than the space station and Mars is 600 times farther than the moon, on average.  The next star is 200,000 times the distance to Mars.
    5. Cosmic radiation is about 100 times higher outside Earth’s magnetosphere, so Moon or Mars means cancer is likely within a year or so.
    6. Space travel eats our planet’s resources like crazy, effecting a large environmental cost to Earth: a person in space is doing the equivalent of driving sixty diesel buses at once.
    7. Relating to the prior point, the fastest way to destroy Earth is to try to leave it—only to land somewhere more “destroyed” than Earth in its suitability to support life.
    8. The International Space Station has not solved closed-cycle living and depends on monthly resupply from Earth’s surface (for oxygen, etc.) at $100M a pop (high rent).
    9. Mars’ atmosphere is 95% CO2, while a 0.01% increase in atmospheric CO2 on Earth (from 0.03% to 0.04%) has us stymied.
    10. Our solar system is a desolate, barren wasteland in the context of providing human needs: living on Mt. Everest or the ocean floor is far easier, but still prohibitively hard.
    11. We have not succeeded in creating an artificial environment capable of supporting human life even on Earth where it would be far simpler and cheaper than trying in space. What took evolution billions of years to sort out is not easily replicated or even fully understood.
    12. Interstellar travel brings in a new list of even crazier insanity. Really. It’s insane. Proponents need serious help relocating grounded reality.

    Murphy also explains why humans 2.0 won’t have agriculture (below) and what other lifestyles might replace it (see the essay).

    Proper attention to ecological health probably eliminates agriculture. Otherwise ecology eliminates us: not really a choice, you see. Despite the fact that we’ve been doing it for a while, a variety of ills accumulate (e.g., nutrient depletion, salt buildup, erosion, desertification) so that fields do not remain viable for very long on relevant timescales. It is possible that agriculture can persist in some regions (like in flood plains that are continually refreshed) and at small scale. More likely, horticulture can survive the longer haul. The difference is that ecologically-viable horticulture tends to plants that already exist in a region, so that the complex web of life in place is already adapted to “service” the plant—just as the plant services its environment in return.

    Whether or not we maintain domesticated animals is difficult to predict. Dogs voluntarily built mutual associations with humans in a non-captive capacity prior to agriculture’s appearance. Cats half-heartedly joined once we had grain storage (and thus rodents), so maybe they don’t persist as companions if we abandon the surplus/storage model for food. Draft animals are certainly an agricultural concept. Captive livestock for eating (lazy hunting) may continue to be practiced, but just as human slavery is morally reprehensible to us today (noting that we did not go so far as to raise slaves to eat, as far as I know), animal enslavement might well be rejected as disrespectful of animal “sacredness” in a world where we value all life and do not see ourselves as masters. I don’t know for sure, and would not want to place bets either way.

    Liked by 2 people

    Reply

Leave a comment