Today’s post includes a recent sobering comment on overshoot reality by un-Denial regular Hideaway that I thought deserved more visibility, and a new essay on acceptance by B, who has recently emerged as one of the best writers about human overshoot.
The ideas of Hideaway and B complement some of the recent discussions here about acceptance and the nature of our species.
P.S. I did not receive permission from B to re-post his essay but I’m hoping that since un-Denial is not monetized he will not object, and I will of course remove the essay if B expresses concern.
By Hideaway: On Radical Reality
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, have 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, and 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, and we go into recession/depression. It becomes impossible to build ‘new’ stuff of any kind once energy use declines, unless we take the energy from 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 by increasing fossil fuel generated electricity for 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 without increasing total 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 for 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 grows, ore grades decline, 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 (the new source taking energy to build).
Visions for the future usually include extra energy efficiency for buildings, etc. but never, ever, include 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’.
The phrase ‘build new’ means more energy is required for construction and mining the minerals for the new or expanded factories. The Adaro coal power plant (new) and aluminium smelter (also new) in Indonesia are perfect examples of our predicament. The world needs more aluminium for ‘new’ solar PVs, EVs, wiring, etc. which means more energy use and environmental damage, regardless of whether we use fossil fuels, solar panels, or pumped hydro backup.
Civilization is a Ponzi scheme energy trap, we either grow energy and material use, or we stagnate, and then collapse. Following feedback loops, we see there is no way out of this predicament.
People often claim the future is difficult to predict, yet it is simple, obvious, and highly predictable for humanity as a whole. We will continue to use more energy, mine more minerals, and destroy more of the environment, until we can’t. The first real limit we will experience is oil production, and we may be there already.
Once oil production starts to fall with a vengeance as it must, say 2-3 million barrels/day initially, then accelerating to 4-5 million barrels/day, it will trigger a feedback loop of making natural gas and coal production more difficult as both are totally dependent upon diesel, thus reducing the production of both, or if we prioritize diesel for natural gas and coal production, then other consumers of diesel, like tractors, combines, trucks, trains, and ships, must use less.
Mining and agriculture will come under pressure, sending prices for all raw materials and food through the roof. World fertilizer use is currently above 500 million tonnes annually. A lot of energy is required to make and distribute fertilizer. World grain yields are strongly correlated to fertilizer use, so less energy means less fertilizer, which means less food, unless we prioritize energy for agriculture by taking energy from and harming some other part of our economy.
If we banned discretionary energy uses to keep essential energy uses going, while overall energy continues to decline, then large numbers of people will lose their jobs and experience poverty, further compounding the problems of scarcity and rising prices.
Money for investing into anything will dry up. If governments print money to help the economy, inflation will negate the effort. If governments increase taxes to fund more assistance, then more people and businesses will be made poorer.
The ability to build anything new quickly evaporates, people everywhere struggle between loss of employment, loss of affordable goods and services, increased taxation, and will be forced to increase the well-being 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 occur for individuals, groups and countries. Crime and war will further accelerate the decline in energy production, and the production and shipment of goods in our global economy. One after the other, at an accelerating rate, countries will become failed states when the many feedback loops accelerate the fossil fuel decline. Likewise for solar, wind and nuclear.
We rapidly get to a point where our population of 8.1+ billion starts 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 eaten. Farming of any type, once the decline accelerates, will not happen, because too many people will 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 made extinct all of megafauna. Whoever is left will be gatherers of whatever food plants have self-seeded and grown 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 scavenged cities, it will limited to producing a few useful tools, like harnesses to put on the slaves plowing the fields, or for 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.
Our complex economy requires a large scale of human enterprise. Reduce the scale, and businesses will have less sales, making everything more expensive. Rapid population decline will mean many businesses won’t just reduce production, but will often stop altogether when the business goes bust.
Because of interdependencies of our complex products, a scarcity of one seemingly uncritical component will have far reaching effects on other critical products. Maintenance parts will become difficult to obtain, causing machinery to fail, in turn causing other machines to fail that depended on the failed machines. Think of a truck delivering parts required to fix trucks. The same applies to production line machines, processing lines at mines, or simple factories making furniture, let alone anything complicated. If we only reach population decline as energy declines the problem is still the same.
By B: On Radical Acceptance
https://thehonestsorcerer.substack.com/p/on-radical-acceptance
So what is radical acceptance? For me, it means: accepting that no single technological civilization based on finite resources is sustainable. Neither in the bronze age, nor in the iron age; let alone in an era of industrial revolutions. None. Why? Because all spend their nest egg — be it fertile topsoil, forests or coal, lithium and copper — a million times faster than it can be replenished. Recycling and “sustainability” practices can only slow down the process somewhat… At least in theory, but rarely in practice. The “circular economy”, together with „renewables” are nothing but fairy tales we tell ourselves to scare off the wolfs at night. Sorry to be this blunt, but the decline of this techno-industrial civilization is inevitable, and is already well underway.
The only type of civilization (if you want to use that term), which proved to be more or less sustainable so far, was a basic hunter-gatherer society; complemented perhaps with some agroforestry, pottery and some low key metallurgy. Anything beyond that inevitably destroyed the soil and the very resource base supporting the entire edifice. With that said, I’m not suggesting that we should immediately go back to the caves and mud huts… That would be impossible for 4 billion of us, entirely supported by large scale agriculture based on artificial fertilizers and a range of pesticides. However, it is important to note, that this is the direction we are headed, with the only question being how fast we will get there and how many humans can be sustained via such a lifestyle.
And this is where acceptance comes into view. Once you understand (not just “know”) that burning through a finite amount of mineral reserves at an exponential pace leads to depletion and environmental degradation at the same time, you start to see how unsustainable any human civilization is. All that technology (in its narrowest technical sense) does is turning natural resources into products and services useful for us, at the cost of polluting the environment. Technology use is thus not only the root cause of our predicament, but it can only accelerate this process. More technology — more depletion — more pollution. Stocks drawn down, sinks filling up. Simple as that. Of course you can elaborate on this matter as long as you wish, conjuring up all sorts of “game changer” and “wonder” machines from fusion to vertical gardens, the verdict remains the same. It. Is. All. Unsustainable. Period.
There are no clean technologies, and without dense energy sources like fossil fuels there wont be any technology — at least not at the scale we see today.
Many people say: Oh this is so depressing! And I ask: why? Because your grand-grand children will have to work on a field and grow their own food? Or that you might not even have grand-grand children? I don’t mean that I have no human feelings. I have two children whom I love the most. I have a good (very good) life — supported entirely by this technological society. Sure, I would love to see this last forever, and that my kin would enjoy such a comfortable life, but I came to understand that this cannot last. Perhaps not even through my lifetime. I realize that I most probably will pass away from an otherwise totally treatable disease, just because the healthcare system will be in absolute shambles by the time I will need it the most. But then what? Such is life: some generations experience the ‘rising tide lift all boats’ period in a civilization’s lifecycle, while others have to live through its multi-decade (if not centuries) long decline.
I did feel envy, shame, and anxiety over that, but as the thoughts I’ve written about above have slowly sunk in, these bad feelings all went away. It all started look perfectly normal, and dare I say: natural. No one set out to design this modern iteration of a civilization with an idea to base it entirely on finite resources; so that it will crash and burn when those inputs start to run low, and the pollution released during their use start to wreck the climate and the ecosystem as a whole. No. It all seemed like just another good idea. Why not use coal, when all the woods were burnt? Why not turn to oil then, when the easily accessible part of our coal reserves started to run out? At the time — and at the scale of that time — it all made perfect sense. And as we got more efficient, and thus it all got cheaper, more people started to hop onboard… And why not? Who wouldn’t want to live a better life through our wondrous technologies? The great sociologist C. Wright Mills summed up this process the best, when writing about the role of fate in history:
Fate is shaping history when what happens to us was intended by no one and was the summary outcome of innumerable small decisions about other matters by innumerable people.
Scientifically speaking this civilization, just like the many others preceding it, is yet another self organizing complex adaptive system. It seeks out the most accessible energy source and sucks it dry, while increasing the overall entropy of the system. We as a species are obeying the laws of thermodynamics, and the rule set out in the maximum power principle. Just like galaxies, stars, a pack of wolves, fungi or yeast cells. There is nothing personal against humanity in this. We are just a bunch of apes, playing with fire.
Once I got this, I started to see this whole process, together with our written history of the past ten thousand years, as an offshoot of natural evolution. Something, which is rapidly reaching its culmination, only to be ended as a failed experiment. Or, as Ronald Wright put it brilliantly in his book A Short History of Progress:
Letting apes run the laboratory was fun for a while, but in the end a bad idea.
So, no. I’m not depressed at all. It was fun to see how far a species can go, but also reassuring that it was a one off experiment. Once this high tech idiocy is over, it will be impossible to start another industrial revolution anyway. There will be no more easy to mine, close to surface ores and minerals. Everything left behind by this rapacious society will remain buried beneath a thousand feet of rocks, and will be of such a low quality that it will not worth the effort. Lacking resources to maintain them, cities, roads, bridges will rust and crumble into the rising seas, while others will be replaced by deserts, or lush forests. The reset button has been pressed already, it just takes a couple of millennia for a reboot to happen.
Contradictory as it may sound: this is what actually gives me hope. Bereft of cheap oil, and an access to Earth’s abundant mineral reserves, future generations of humans will be unable to continue the ecocide. There will be no new lithium mines, nor toxic tailings or hazardous chemicals leaching into the groundwater. Our descendants will be forced to live a more sustainable, more eco-friendly life. There will be no other way: the ecocide will end. This also means, that there will be no “solution” to climate change, nor ecological collapse. They both will run their due course, and take care of reducing our numbers to acceptable levels. Again, don’t fret too much about it: barring a nuclear conflict, this process could last well into the next century, and beyond. The collapse of modernity will take much longer than any of us could imagine, and will certainly look nothing like what we see in the movies. And no, cutting your emissions will not help. At all. Live your life to its fullest. Indulge in this civilization, or retreat to a farm. It’s all up to you, and your values. This is what I mean under the term, radical acceptance.
We are a species of this Earth, and paraphrasing Tom Murphy, we either succeed with the rest of life on this planet or go down together. Nurturing hope based technutopian “solutions”, and trying to remain optimistic does not solve anything. This whole ordeal is unsustainable. What’s more, it was from the get go… And that which is unsustainable will not be sustained. And that is fine. We, as a species are part of a much bigger whole, the web of life, and returning to our proper place as foraging humanoids will serve and fit into that whole much better than any technutopian solution could.
Until next time,
B
un-Denial 
I stocked up on coffee, tea, grains, dried fruit, and sardines today.
Something’s gonna blow:
This analysis of Russia’s warning is very good.
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All this stocking up on food must be because of your denial gene Rob. What are you going to do with SHTF and your neighbors find out you have all this great stuff?
Fast Eddy has a new post up, The Utter Futility of Doomsday Prepping you should consider.
https://fasteddynz.substack.com/p/the-utter-futility-of-doomsday-prepping
Any comments?
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Doing something to prepare provides a sense of agency over things out of my control which improves my mental well-being. This is a good enough reason for prepping provided I do not waste money on things I will not use.
Prepping will of course not fix permanent scarcity or some other catastrophe like FE describes.
Prepping might sustain life during a temporary interruption to the availability of food, and it might make life more enjoyable when non-essential but highly valued goods like coffee become unavailable.
Prepping might also be a good use of limited savings if you anticipate inflation due to energy scarcity, even if food remains in the stores. I smile every time I see price increases on things I have in inventory.
Everyone should assess their local risks and do what makes sense for their circumstances.
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Yes, “prepping” gives one a certain sense of agency, but it gets me off my retired butt, and mostly, there are many scenarios where it will be of use. We still don’t know exactly how things will unwind, so why not do SOMETHING that may even contribute to a local “lifeboat community” should you be lucky enough to live where survival is possible.
We prep for food in a kind of three tiered way. Stored foods in the pantry and root cellar that would last quite a while, a large garden every year to lessen dependence on the market and replenish stores, and perennial food plants, that don’t need cultivation or replanting every year.
Think of it as a hobby with side benefits if nothing else.
A post about our root cellar from 9 years ago:
http://viridviews.blogspot.com/2015/10/a-tour-of-root-cellar.html
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Excellent rant today by Chris Martenson on the satanic behavior of our leaders around covid that still exists today.
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I think I may have planted a little too much all at once in my beds at the farm.
I’ve got 20m each of spinach, arugula, and radishes all ripe now that I’ve got to eat.
I can eat maybe 5cm of the 20m bed per day by myself. 🙂
Hopefully the farm will be able to sell some of the surplus.
My tomatoes are coming nicely with green fruit and I just planted basil next to the tomatoes.
Also planted a row of watermelons in the greenhouse.
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That’s great!
If you like, you may try lacto-fermenting the radishes.
Or give to your neighbours or just anybody or feed some animals or back to the soil…
There is never any waste.
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I fermented radishes once 10 years ago. I think they were ok but I don’t remember loving them.
I do love sauerkraut & kimchi and eat it almost every day.
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Hi Rob,
I’m green with envy! Well done on bringing forth your harvest! Yes, 20m rows are a bit ambitious for one person to consume, but all it takes is a pair of rabbits to help you with that problem!
Succession planting is the idea that you stagger your sowing of each type of crop every few weeks or so until the end of the growing season. So for instance, you can plant out 5 metres worth of seed at a time and they will hopefully mature in sequence. This is useful not only to provide a continuous harvest of the quantity you need, but it also is a way to avoid pests and diseases that might attack a whole monocultured mass planting, you have a back-up planting so it may not get infested because of the different timing of the insect or fungal cycle. Many greens (like the Asian greens you already discovered) bolt early due to the increasing day lengths or temperatures, so to stagger planting them throughout the whole growing season will find that sweet spot in their cycle that encourages more leafing before flowering. There’s all kinds of ways to tweak and manipulate, that’s all part of the art of agriculture.
I must admit my go to method of planting now is just letting things go to seed and self sow where they will and come up when they do, these plants always are the healthiest. It’s not an orderly rowed garden at all, with plants in all stages of growth and decay, but as long as I can find them and know they are edible, it is the easiest way I’ve found to grow food, more like foraging. You probably need more space to let different plants find their niche and thrive, and some will do better than others and eventually crowd them out so you may have to introduce more “motherplants” here and there. It’s all been a learning experience and I am happy to be a kindergartener (literally, child-garden) forever when it comes to communing with the earth and green things.
Happy Spring and Summer gardening all you in the Up Above!
Namaste.
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Sarah Connor explains why voluntary degrowth will never happen.
She does not discuss the most important question.
Which scenario results in the least total suffering?
https://www.collapse2050.com/trapped-by-economic-growth/
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She’s right that degrowth will never happen voluntarily but the reason is that we’re a species. That explains everything.
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“Humans are a species which explains everything”.
Here’s another statement that is probably also true and equally unhelpful:
“All complex life is constructed from eukaryotic cells.”
Now let’s rewrite both statements into something useful:
“Multicellular life requires more energy per gene to enable its complex morphology, and given that all life is chemiosmotic, the only way to achieve this is by increasing the ratio of membrane surface area per volume of cell, and on this planet the only solution discovered by evolution was to create a eukaryotic cell consisting of an archaea cell enclosing multiple bacteria cells which later evolved into mitochondria.
This statement leads to many fruitful lines of inquiry:
– why is more energy required for complexity?
– is there a different way to increase cell energy?
– was evolution of the eukaryote probable or improbable?
– why did it take 2 billion years for the eukarotic cell to emerge?
– how common will complex life be in the universe?
We are a species becomes:
“A dominant behavior of all life is the maximum power princple (MPP), because life at its core is chemical replicators competing for finite energy and material, and free will does not exist because consciousness is constructed from deterministic physical processes, therefore it is not possible for intelligence to override the drive for economic growth.
Now we can discuss interesting things like:
– what mechanism does evolution use to prevent intelligence from overriding MPP?
– what mechanism in the brain enables polymaths to understand everything except overshoot?
– why do we deny other unpleasant things that do not affect MPP?
– is it true in an everyday practical sense that free will does not exist?
– why are some people able to choose to eat less and consume less when this violates both MPP and no free will?
– if there is no free will, why do we punish people that break the law?
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No solution was discovered by evolution. Evolution isn’t a sentient being, it’s a name for what happens to life-forms. It doesn’t use any mechanisms, though the name is given for random mutations filtered by natural selection.
Intelligence is a name given by humans for some aspect of brain function. There are no units of measurement, though there are some tests which attempt to assign a number to it. It seems to be orthogonal to what we might call cleverness and to what we might call common sense. Consequently, it has nothing to do with how we might behave collectively or individually.
I don’t think anything can override MPP since it is part of what an organism is. Note that some organisms appear to have a weak adherence to MPP. Their genes would have a disadvantage compared to other organisms which adhere strongly to that principle. This is part of evolution. The fact that there are some weak adherents doesn’t mean the principle doesn’t apply.
Society punishes people who break the law because, a) it applies some kind of order to society, which would otherwise crumble, b) almost everyone believes that free-will does exist.
If you don’t think that “humans are a species” is useful, feel free to delete my comment.
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What mechanism prevents a brain capable of flying to the moon from understanding overshoot? Why does that brain also believe in god? Why does no other species have gods or fly to the moon?
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I’m not sure what the point of the questions is but being capable of understanding something doesn’t mean that the understanding can alter our species behaviour. Obviously, no other species has developed societies that can develop the technology to fly to the moon, primarily because they haven’t evolved abilities necessary for those things. I have no idea whether other species believe in gods but I don’t think it would alter their behaviour either.
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Hey Mike. I just read and liked your latest article from 5/28. I have to admit, your easier way of looking at things is very tempting. To just throw away this insane complexity (denial) and chalk it all up to this is how every species behaves (consume resources till they are gone with no ability to foresee and prevent the consequences from this consumption).
But why have some of us have been able to break through and see the bigger picture. Rob’s go-to line for this is “we have defective denial genes”. And that makes sense to me. What is your line to explain this phenomenon?
And I just saw this comment from Sarah Connor on her site. “It’s a shame because, unlike other animals, we have the foresight to understand the consequences of our unsustainable expansion and consumption. Yet, we still fail to act.”
MORT/denial tells me why “we still fail to act”.
But what tells me why we still fail to act in your line of thinking? And you cant say because humans are a species. I need more than that.
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Dammit!!! I hate when that happens. Mike, please disregard my reply. Rob’s is way better.
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Chris, although some of us have apparently broken through, I’m not sure it alters our behaviour much. If everyone lived as us, the planet’s ecosystems would still be deteriorating. For those of us who can still reproduce but plan not to, those genes would die out.
Sarah Connor’s comment illustrates it perfectly. We can understand what we’re doing but still fail to act. Through scientific endeavour, we’ve learned a lot about the universe but can’t override our innate species behaviour. So, yes, there is implicit denial but it’s a feature of being a species, no matter what mutations members of that species may have. Organisms live for today, not for tomorrow. I’ve explained this in other posts.
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Damn you! 😊 Now you got me feeling like Captain Mal from Firefly.
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It seems to me, different organisms consider different time-frames. Aren’t human groups able to optimize at the level of the year, and maybe even a bit more? (I mean taking winter into account, storing food, observing cyclical patterns, parenting, etc…)
Also, maybe, those with slightly sub-optimal strategies, are just a way for the group to hedge its bets. Because, sometimes, radically different circumstances occur and then different strategies will be more successful/help avoid total wipe-out.
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The future is unknowable, either by individual organisms or by nature. The only time that actually exists is now (pending some breakthrough in quantum tunneling) so that is what evolution works on.
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Art Berman’s been studying Hideaway.
https://www.artberman.com/blog/its-too-late-for-renewables/
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Hideaway…
https://peakoilbarrel.com/open-thread-non-petroleum-may28-2024/#comment-776250
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https://boriquagato.substack.com/p/us-lags-the-world-in-recognizing
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Dear Rob,
I hope thou are feeling well.
The website is outright monstrously unappealing, however it seems the Japanese rally has some merit of happening.
Bizarre claims from the site which did the “fact checking.”
https://thepeoplesvoice.tv/global-warming-is-a-hoax-bombshell-new-study-in-nature-reveals-antarctic-ice-is-expanding/#disqus_thread
Kind and warm regards,
ABC
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Hi ABC, extra ice accumulating on interior Antarctica does not mean climate warming is a hoax. In fact I’d be very surprised if there wasn’t more ice accumulating in the Antarctic interior.
As temperatures warm, the air can hold more water vapor. Going from an average temperate of -50 to -40 is a warming, and the air over interior Antarctica can hold and bring in more water vapor, which it drops as snow. Being so cold, even at -40 being warmer than -50, the snow compacts to ice and builds over time..
More ice build up in very cold areas of Antarctica is just more proof the climate is warming.
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Dear Hideaway,
I appreciate thine reply.
Well said and with exceptional clarity.
Kind and warm regards,
ABC
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https://oilprice.com/Metals/Commodities/Trafigura-AI-Boom-Could-Spark-a-Copper-Shortage.html
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Save those pre-1982 U.S. 1c coins. They’re 95% copper, and are worth almost 3c based on the copper value. There’s still plenty in circulation. (Some 1982 cents are 95% copper — the U.S. Mint switched in mid-1982 to 97.5% zinc pennies, because of the raw-materials cost of producing them)
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Five hours on the tractor today listening to podcasts. You can skip Nate Hagen’s latest with the master of mental masturbation, Schmachtenberger. I couldn’t take more than 10 minutes before ejecting.
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Alright. Enough is enough. Those are fighting words. 😊 Why is Schmachtenberger so disliked on this site? What am I missing here?
If you liked the Vanessa Andreotti interview from last week, you will like this one. (but I’ve only watched about 45min so far)
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For me, I don’t like that it takes him 1000 words to express a 10 word idea, and I do not like that he thinks he’s so brilliant and yet he discusses everything except what matters: population reduction.
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Fair enough Rob. I would not doubt that he is able to woo me in because I already think he is intimidatingly intelligent. I get the same genius vibes from him that I get in interviews with John Lennon and Frank Black. So I admit I may be starstruck with Daniel.
I will have to confer with my spiritual advisor Charles (like it or not charles… its true 😊). If he says he does not like the Schmach then I will contemplate it more seriously.
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We all have different tastes. Go with whatever works for you. I’m a depresssing person to be around. Much better to listen to someone like Charles.
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Gail Zawacki used to love poetry. It made her very happy.
I hate poetry. If someone’s got something important to say, I want it in the minimum number of words with maximum clarity. Poets are the opposite. They try to make you think they’re saying something important by using a lot of obtuse words. Like the master of obsfucation, Shakespeare.
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You are very truthful and consistent. When I was going through my comment history that is one of the main things that stood out the most. Your replies are always brief and to the point.
Thats why you and Hideaway make such a perfect team together. The two of you are one big goldmine. He’s gonna provide gold but its more drawn out and time consuming. You’re gonna provide gold, but in short quick bursts.
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Thanks kindly.
If I have any gold it was not discovered by me. My little niche is monitoring a lot of aware smart people doing original thinking and extracting and distilling their best ideas into a short clear story.
People like Varki, Hideaway, Tverberg, Murphy, Lane, Korowitzc, etc. do original thinking.
My job is to monitor them.
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Spiritual advisor. Ah ah ah. That was unexpected.
Personnally, I can’t listen to Schmachtenberger more than 60 seconds. I find him boring, full of himself and empty. That being said, my opinion doesn’t matter. If you enjoy listening to him, keep doing so. And even that doesn’t matter, if you feel better following somebody else’s tastes for whatever reason, please do so. There is no wrong way of being.
I will now fulfill my role of spiritual adviser: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=rjw7W_KYCyk
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As with any other guru, I can assure you that you will get no-thing from me. (As Truth can neither be possessed nor given, only received) And that the price will turn out to be quite high (in the form of money, but most importantly with some traumatic experience). But that’s exactly what you are looking for. So it’s all worth it.
Ah, and never forget: “it is more blessed to give than to receive.”
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Oh no!!! My spiritual advisor has lost his mind. I might have to perform an exorcism on Charles until he likes the Schmach. 😊
I loved the entire three-hour interview. But check out the clip below at the 23:44 – 25:25 mark. You haters might enjoy this. They are trying to explain what MPP is. I’m not saying they don’t understand it, just saying they don’t sound like they understand it… but I forgive them because if you put a camera on me and told me to explain MORT, it would be so ugly to the point where the audience would not buy anything else that I had to say.
And Charles, I just read your conversation with Rob on the older thread. That was a great breakdown of your philosophy. You are obviously a fan of Krishnamurti (I love the conversations with him and David Bohm).
Outside of Michael Dowd the only other hardcore “religious” people I have paid attention to is Joseph Campbell and Richard Rohr (in a weird way I should probably include Charles Eisenstein as well). Just curious if you know these names and what you think of them. Thanks.
Daniel Schmachtenberger: “A Vision for Betterment” | The Great Simplification 126 – YouTube
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🙂
Sorry to disappoint you 🙂
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I am also a fan of Swami Prajnanpad (https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=zTpVtVbWKbI) and Ramesh Balsekar (https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Q0OmAWKmkGk)
To me, they all point in the same direction.
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Dear Rob,
I hope you are feeling well.
I understand thine perspective, laconic responses suffice in most matters.
Kind and warm regards,
ABC
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I actually suspect Schmachtenberger is a scam artist. Once for fun I went all the way back through his public Facebook profile. It was over 10 years of him just sharing daily content of whatever ‘new age environmental’ stuff was going viral, absolutely nothing of substance. Plus some very odd sexual stuff all the way back. He makes a lot of money as an internet personality- he is an influencer, that’s it.
There is definitely something very off about him. He has all the attributes of a great cult leader: charismatic, pretty eyes, ability to talk gibberish for hours, and gives off mega creepy vibes to mentally stable females.
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Thanks for the inside scoop monk. Maybe you’re right.
Funny how easy it is to be a bullshit con artist these days. With everything getting worse by the day, there are eight billion of us waiting to be swooped off our feet and “saved”.
And you are so right about the cult leader vibe he gives off. 😊
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India hits New Record Power Demand Again
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Here is an intelligent argument that nuclear war is not as close and some of us here worry.
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All I can say is I hope he is right and that Putin is sane enough to counter the stupidity in the U.S. leadership and Europe. Many others, Mearsheimer, Sacks, Ritter, C. Watson and your favorite Canadian Prepper think a nuclear war is likely (perhaps inevitable?). Is Doctotow in denial? I hope not.
AJ
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Fantastic must watch interview with physicist Theodore Postol on geopolitics and the incompetence and ignorance of our western leaders.
This issue has been on my mind a lot lately with covid and now WWIII.
I remember in 1980 observing all the people in university that lacked intelligence in bullshit programs and wondering what they would do for a living?
The mystery has been solved. They lacked any useful skills for a job in the private sector so they are now running our governments.
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Why Biden’s New Bill Is So Terrifying
Note: The video is age-restricted and can only be seen on Youtube, not because it contains graphic content, but it contains content critical of Israel that ran afoul of the Youtube algorithm.
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I normally do not sign-in to see “restricted” content on Yahoo. I viscerally detest having to reveal myself to Google (YouTube) etc.
After reading some of the comments, I resolved to sign-in and watch the video. Not satisfied with entering the user ID and password, Google made me do a captcha and then also receive a 6 digit access code on my phone. Then I had to click a special acknowledgment button on the video to actually get the thing to play.
FUCK GOOGLE AND THE FUCKING NAZIS THAT WORK THERE.
The video was worth watching.
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I extract what revenge I can on Google by:
1) running the uBlock Origin ad blocker on YouTube
2) turning off the MANY tracking options in the Google account settings
3) periodically wiping my entire history with Google just to be sure
4) never using the Chrome browser
5) using DuckDuckGo instead of Google for searches
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Good to know I am doing something right. I’ve had uBlock Origin for years. Never get one single commercial on youtube. (or pretty much anywhere else).
A friend of mine (much more teki than me) did not believe me about no ads on yt. He had to come over and see it for himself. He thinks I got lucky with some old version of it (I never do updates). Because he has uBlock, but still gets plenty of ads.
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YouTube has been fighting back. Every month or so they slow down video loading if I have my ad blocker active but then they give up after a couple days.
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I love it. Keep outsmarting those a-holes.
Here is a head scratcher though. Like I said, zero ads on yt. But when I run an HDMI cable from cpu to TV, then I get loads of commercials from yt on the TV. I always end up going back to the cpu because I cant stand it. (nothing worse than getting into a nice long program about native americans and sustainable ways… and then some loud toyota ad pops up talking about how sustainable their trucks are. Talk about a mood killer)
p.s. That video is good. Thanks Stellar.
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Running YouTube via HDMI should not change ad blocking.
My guess is you are actually running the YouTube app on your smart TV and controlling it with YouTube on your PC. You want to simply use your TV as a monitor and not use the TV YouTube app.
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I’m using FireFox with uBlockOrigin on Ubuntu, Android and Windows 10 (home and Pro) – mostly no adverts across the board.
I almost never sign-in, so no history to clear. Firefox clears Cookies, Cache and History on closing. Also use DuckDuckGo, StartPage, etc.
A VPN would be next.
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I don’t use a VPN because it’s not allowed with private torrent trackers.
I use Edge and Firefox depending on the privacy I want.
I also have the Tor Browser installed and I keep it up to date for my occasional and always failed attempts to find Ivermectin, antibiotics, morphine, and other drugs on the dark web for my preps. Could use some help here from someone who really knows what they’re doing.
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I use a VPN, firefox and thunderbird on win11, adblocker ultimate, ublock, privacy badger and I get zero ads on anything. No issues with torrents but I don’t go to private trackers. YT does occasionally slow down but I just reload and prob solved.
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Mike’s “humans are a species” made me think about tweaking the story. If you are on the fence about MORT (I’m about 75% in support of, but I’m 100% down with denial) then I have a quick easy sell for you that worked for me: On a universal scale his theory is by far the gloomiest thing I have ever heard. And this coming from me who always accuses un-Denial of being nihilistic and killing off my last bits of hopium. At least MORT has a sense of “this can be cracked”. I still dream of some species out there in the universe getting it right. But Mike’s vision has no hope whatsoever.
But either way, its not worth dwelling on. Because they both tell the story pretty much the same way. I’ll try to demonstrate what I mean. Here is a comment from the Nate/Schmach interview. It might as well have been written by me prior to finding un-Denial. Its in regard to why the “good” will always be defeated by the “evil”:
This was pretty much the case for a couple hundred thousand years. The other tribes DID notice the aberrant tribe, and they banded together to drop the agent tribe from dominating. We know this is true, because it took the entirety of human history (up until 10k years ago) for a dominant culture to “win.” They were able to defeat the other tribes because this new culture grew its own food, and so it was able to field more combatants with access to constant food supplies. This culture acted in the same pattern as a cancer cell in the body, and the immune system didn’t shut it down in time. Now the whole world is cultural descendants of the dominator tribe.
Boy, I still love that Quinn way of selling our story. Impossible to not give you some hope that humans can live the “right” way. But I don’t see it like this anymore. Rob’s quote here sums up both MORT and “humans are a species” for me:
For the last 10,000 years we broke through normal resource constraints with agriculture (bigger share of solar energy) and fossil energy (ancient solar energy) and became a destructive unsustainable species, that is smart enough to know better, but denies what it is doing.
When abundance of energy enters the picture, it’s over. I think it’s that simple too. And maybe we were able to live “right” (with wisdom and all that) when our species was down in the 1.5 EROEI range (along with most other species). But as soon as it gets substantially more than that, it is game over. Every species will be guilty of consuming this abundance of energy until they collapse from overshoot. There is no way out of it. And it’s impossible to reverse it mid-flight (even with mass amounts of wisdom).
I pray there is something watching us all as if we are just one in a gazillion experiments. And there is some all-universe Olympic type event waiting for the top twenty species who put together the puzzle best. You gotta figure un-Denial would be there (yes, including you Mike). And we have to battle it out and finish the puzzle against some very different looking species who are similar to us with their knowledge & understanding of their predicament (and the rest of the universe). The top three medal winners get to save their species and planet and actually start some deep meaningful space exploration with magic unlimited no pollution energy. The losers (and the rest of life) get to die from horrendous overshoot.
Ooh. That sounds like a good movie. Or at least a half hour twilight zone episode. (and dont worry Rob, you’ll get top billing as our “Captain Kirk” type character) 😊
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“Humans are a species” is not gloomy, it is empty and does not convey enough information to spark a debate other than to reply “of course, humans by definition are a species”.
Which is why I attempted to reword it into what I think it is trying to say: “MPP is a dominant behavior and there is no free will”. This can be debated, and can be compared with MORT to determine which best explains the evidence.
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So hard to sift signal from noise these days but Europe and Canada central banks just cut the interest rate despite my eyes seeing no decline in food prices.
This might be an important signal and a reminder that central banks don’t really care about cost of living inflation, they care that their product, money (which is mostly credit), constantly inflates, because if it deflates we collapse.
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Hideaway:
https://peakoilbarrel.com/open-thread-non-petroleum-june-5-2024/#comment-776524
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Dear Hideaway,
I hope thou are feeling well.
I present to thee another humble wish of inquiry, with no expectations attached.
If plausible, I would immensely appreciate thine calculated perspective alongside with some numbers and information regarding the EROI, cost-effectiveness etc. on the Finnish nuclear power plant of Olkiluoto 3.
Perhaps this might even be to thine interest as a “newly constructed” power plant.
– An ordeal brimming with erratic events.
Kind and warm regards,
ABC
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To everyone,
I wish to bring forth the proposal previously suggested by our dear Gaia.
– A live meeting via the world wide web.
Kind and warm regards,
ABC
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