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.
un-Denial 
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
LikeLike
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.
LikeLiked by 1 person
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
LikeLiked by 1 person
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
LikeLiked by 1 person
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.
LikeLiked by 2 people
it’s so sad
LikeLike
Do you have advice for people who have already taken the mRNA?
LikeLike
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.
LikeLiked by 2 people
“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).
LikeLiked by 1 person
https://energyskeptic.com/2024/failing-oil-and-gas-companies-a-sign-of-peak-oil/
LikeLiked by 1 person
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.
LikeLike
US debt now $34,600,000,000,000 and increasing by $1,000,000,000,000 every 100 days.
US annual interest payments now $1,100,000,000,000 and increasing by $100,000,000,000 every 100 days.
Watching these numbers makes one feel like Fermi under the bleachers at the University of Chicago in 1942.
https://www.zerohedge.com/markets/cbo-director-warns-debt-market-meltdown-us-debt-unprecedented-trajectory
LikeLike
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.
LikeLiked by 2 people
Do you think this will be resolved by default or hyperinflation?
LikeLike
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.
LikeLiked by 1 person
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.)
LikeLiked by 1 person
I often ask myself that question.
Is the hatred of Russia caused by:
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.
LikeLiked by 1 person
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.
LikeLiked by 3 people
I quit after 5 minutes. There are a lot of academics in the world that wasted their lives on nonsense and understand nothing that matters.
LikeLiked by 3 people
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.
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.
LikeLiked by 3 people
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.
LikeLiked by 1 person
Nate needs to wake up and realize that population reduction is the only good path.
LikeLiked by 1 person
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.
LikeLiked by 2 people
https://indi.ca/a-future-without-planes-or-container-ships/
LikeLiked by 1 person
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
LikeLiked by 2 people
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/
LikeLike
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/
LikeLiked by 1 person
This is from 18 months ago.
https://www.nbcnews.com/politics/joe-biden/biden-warns-risk-nuclear-armageddon-highest-cuban-missile-crisis-rcna51146
LikeLike
“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)
LikeLiked by 1 person
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
LikeLiked by 1 person
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.
LikeLike
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
LikeLiked by 1 person
LikeLiked by 1 person
https://energyskeptic.com/2024/fusion-may-never-happen-due-to-lack-of-tritium/
I guess the governments funding fusion research need to peddle some form of hopium to remain in power.
LikeLiked by 1 person
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:
LikeLiked by 3 people
Superb 2.5 hour conversation on covid by two intelligent people with integrity.
Too much to summarize. One quote stood out for me:
LikeLike
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.
LikeLike
https://theconversation.com/climate-change-puts-global-semiconductor-manufacturing-at-risk-can-the-industry-cope-225879
I disagree with that because the semiconductor industry could not exist without oil.
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.
LikeLiked by 1 person
The Fellowship of the Ring: ‘Bend Not Break’ Version | Frankly #58
LikeLike
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.
LikeLike
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.
They also think 100% “renewable” energy by 2050 is possible.
LikeLike
Rob, how does this work? I’ll assume you mean :
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 :
LikeLike
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.
LikeLiked by 1 person
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 :
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.
LikeLike
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 :)…
LikeLike
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 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/):
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…
LikeLike
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/
LikeLiked by 2 people
Thank you, interesting.
LikeLike
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..
LikeLiked by 1 person
Thanks to you and Simon Michaux I’m slowly rearranging my synapses to understand that peak minerals is at least as big a problem as peak oil.
LikeLike
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.
LikeLike
Yes, in addition, extracted crude substances are following the same path as mineral ores with lower BTUs per volume. See Art Berman’s tweet below.
LikeLike
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.
LikeLiked by 1 person
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:
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.
LikeLiked by 1 person
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.
LikeLiked by 1 person
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:
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 🙂
LikeLiked by 1 person
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.
LikeLiked by 1 person
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.
LikeLike
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 🙂
LikeLike
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.
LikeLike
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 🙂
LikeLiked by 1 person
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 🙂
LikeLiked by 1 person
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:
And, later:
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.
LikeLike
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.
LikeLike
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.
LikeLiked by 1 person
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:
LikeLike
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.
LikeLiked by 1 person
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.
LikeLike
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?
LikeLike
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 🙂
LikeLike
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.
LikeLike
https://doctorow.medium.com/https-pluralistic-net-2024-03-25-black-boxes-when-you-know-you-know-4e5360f60032
Cory Doctorow makes a lot of good observations at his site. This particular entry touches on issues that are discussed here a lot.
Epistemology- important, but hard.
LikeLiked by 1 person
The new Youtube embeds are not working.
LikeLike
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.
LikeLike
Israel LOSING Gaza War: Israeli Major
LikeLike
Crucial Update on Global Warming Acceleration by James Hansen and his pals.
James Hanson seems to advocating for nuclear energy.
LikeLike
Very good thanks. Beckwith says many climate scientists are denying Hansen’s findings. MORT is everywhere.
LikeLiked by 1 person
Ya, this was one of Paul’s better videos.
On a side note: A lot of people dont know this, but Beckwith changed his name only recently. He used to be the news director for a struggling AM radio station in Ohio. I’ve got video proof here:
The Genius of Les Nessman – YouTube
LikeLiked by 1 person
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)
LikeLiked by 1 person
Martenson’s crash course is also good for introducing overshoot.
LikeLiked by 1 person
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/
LikeLiked by 1 person
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.
LikeLike
Oops that was meant as a reply to paqnation.
LikeLike
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).
LikeLiked by 2 people
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”.
LikeLiked by 2 people
Screw overshoot. We’re moving on to abundant places.
LikeLiked by 1 person
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)
LikeLiked by 1 person
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.
LikeLiked by 2 people
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.
LikeLiked by 2 people
Nice post. That paper is one of my favorites. Of all the famous collapse articles I can only think of one that I visit more frequently than this. The Sam Hall one.
https://medium.com/@samyoureyes/the-busy-workers-handbook-to-the-apocalypse-7790666afde7
LikeLike
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/
LikeLike
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.
LikeLike
Bossche like most other covid dissidents is overshoot blind.
LikeLiked by 2 people
add to that
https://www.rintrah.nl/you-still-have-a-choice/
LikeLike
Yes, another threat vector I have been following.
We have:
Meanwhile our leaders are still recommending mRNA transfections for children and boosters for all.
Did I miss anything?
LikeLike
yes, they are all safe and effective.
LikeLike
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
LikeLike
Tend to agree with your conclusion AJ.
LikeLike
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.
LikeLike
B today with advice on personal preparation.
https://thehonestsorcerer.substack.com/p/dodging-the-gator-what-can-be-done
LikeLiked by 2 people
LikeLike
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).
LikeLiked by 1 person
You are a dreamer:
https://un-denial.com/2024/03/19/by-steve-carrow-what-would-a-wise-community-do/comment-page-1/#comment-94979
LikeLike
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/
LikeLiked by 2 people
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.
LikeLike
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.
LikeLike
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.
LikeLike
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.
LikeLike
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.
LikeLiked by 3 people
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.
🙂
LikeLiked by 1 person
What I meant: you don’t need to have any feelings of regret.
🙂
LikeLike
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.
LikeLike
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 🙂
LikeLiked by 1 person
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?
LikeLiked by 1 person
Maybe, we are in a minority of two.
Ah ah ah 🙂
LikeLiked by 1 person
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.
LikeLiked by 1 person
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.
LikeLiked by 1 person
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.
LikeLike
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”
LikeLike
Israel Murders Aid Workers, Destroys Hospital. This Is What Genocide Looks Like.
LikeLike
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.
LikeLiked by 1 person
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.
LikeLike
More from Rintrah today.
https://www.rintrah.nl/cross-reactive-natural-immunity-between-bird-flu-and-sars2/
LikeLiked by 1 person
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.
LikeLike
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.
LikeLike
You might be bitchy too if you started a podcast to save the world and then learned from your guests that we’re f**cked. 🙂
LikeLiked by 1 person
haha. Good point
LikeLike
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
LikeLike
Berndt Warm (user: keepitcool) is posting here (german language):
https://www.wallstreet-online.de/diskussion/1157619-neustebeitraege/peak-oil-und-die-folgen
Saludos
el mar
LikeLike
I did not understand how well temperatures are used to predict reserves.
LikeLike
Yes Alister gave numerous talks on Shortonoil’s dead state theory.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=vHRHQZ1dpik
Back in 2016 they thought by 2022 that no excess energy would be available for the energy industry. Way too early.
LikeLike
Thanks El Mar and Niko B for the information. Yes timing is always tricky. BW seems to have moved to car production.
Mick N
LikeLike
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.
LikeLike
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
LikeLiked by 2 people
LikeLike
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!!)
LikeLiked by 1 person
Alister Hamilton is like Simon Michaux. He has hope that some secret sauce thermal stirling engine thingy will save us. MORT in action.
LikeLike
Time for a global one child policy.
LikeLiked by 1 person
Enjoy it while it lasts, but prepare for a post oil future.
LikeLike
New quote for the sidebar:
https://consciousnessofsheep.co.uk/2024/04/03/what-was-the-1960s/
LikeLiked by 2 people
Short but good article from Sarah about how capitalism is not going to save us.
“Given that capitalism is responsible for wanton environmental destruction, why would it also be the solution?“
https://www.collapse2050.com/what-collapse/
LikeLike
Alice Friedemann today on nuclear winter.
https://energyskeptic.com/2024/nuclear-weapons-must-be-reduced-or-we-risk-nuclear-winter/
LikeLike
Overall, he seems to be a bit energy blind, but it is still an interesting video.
LikeLike
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.
LikeLiked by 1 person
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/
LikeLiked by 1 person
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.
LikeLiked by 1 person
Thanks! I always learn a different valuable perspective from you.
LikeLike
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
LikeLike
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.
LikeLike
Unrelated - but are any un-denialists going to be in Bloomington for the eclipse?
LikeLike
Woohoo! Spam was on sale today. Loaded up.
LikeLiked by 1 person
Twinkies, Kraft Dinner and Spam. Washed down with Tang. Sounds delicious. A prepper’s wetdream.
LikeLike
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.
LikeLiked by 1 person
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.
LikeLike
Michael Shellenberger seems to be in denial about biodiversity loss and and believes that nuclear energy will allow us to have our cake and eat it too. Just another denialist in my view.
https://public.substack.com/p/no-humans-are-not-causing-a-sixth
LikeLike
Thanks, don’t follow him, don’t know anything about him, just found Musk’s response to Brazil’s demand for censorship encouraging.
LikeLiked by 1 person
https://www.pnas.org/doi/10.1073/pnas.1809600115
Pliocene and Eocene provide best analogs for near-future climates.
LikeLike
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.
LikeLike
Good Ivermectin rant. God bless Joe Rogan.
LikeLiked by 1 person
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
LikeLiked by 1 person
Good thing you only got the one AJ.
Fingers crossed for you that it didn’t disregulate your immune system.
LikeLiked by 2 people
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.
LikeLike
Why are cancer rates up? Gee the experts can’t seem to come up with any ideas
A stage 4 diagnosis at 29: Are more young people getting cancer? | Stuff
LikeLike
Yet they are certain what is not causing the cancer increase. The health care profession is a disgrace.
LikeLiked by 1 person
LikeLike
https://threadreaderapp.com/thread/1775697935600115788.html
Good summary about money and gold from Tamay Ozgokmen!
LikeLiked by 1 person
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
LikeLiked by 1 person
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.
LikeLiked by 1 person
LikeLiked by 1 person
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..
LikeLiked by 3 people
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.
LikeLike
to counter the arguement
https://thehonestsorcerer.medium.com/on-radical-acceptance-d5f85bee5442
LikeLike
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…
LikeLiked by 1 person
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.
LikeLike
Thanks, I enjoyed reading this. I shared it with my brother and he quit halfway through. Too scary. MORT strikes again.
LikeLike
2024 Apr 8
https://thehonestsorcerer.medium.com/on-radical-acceptance-d5f85bee5442
2024 Jan 29
https://thehonestsorcerer.medium.com/collapse-will-look-nothing-like-in-the-movies-e753f510492d
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.
LikeLike
LOL. Seconds after posting I just realized that the January text is the way collapse is portrayed in typical movies.
LikeLike
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.
LikeLike
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.
LikeLike
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.
LikeLiked by 2 people
Dr. Tom Murphy today explains why we won’t colonize other planets.
https://dothemath.ucsd.edu/2024/04/post-modernity/
Murphy also explains why humans 2.0 won’t have agriculture (below) and what other lifestyles might replace it (see the essay).
LikeLiked by 2 people