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 
Got sucked into the Mount Toba theory last night. Hopefully this is not common knowledge for everyone here. I’ve heard of it prior but now I have Vit B12 on the brain. Our story is an easier one to dissect and digest if this theory is true. Toba erupted 74,000 years ago in Indonesia. This is from wikipedia:
“The Toba catastrophe theory is that this event caused a severe global volcanic winter of six to ten years and contributed to a 1,000-year-long cooling episode, resulting in a genetic bottleneck in humans.
The Toba eruption has been associated with a genetic bottleneck in human evolution about 70,000 years ago; it is hypothesized that the eruption resulted in a severe reduction in the size of the total human population due to the effects of the eruption on the global climate. According to the genetic bottleneck theory, between 50,000 and 100,000 years ago, human populations decreased to 3,000–10,000 surviving individuals. It is supported by some genetic evidence suggesting that modern humans are descended from a very small population of between 1,000 and 10,000 breeding pairs that existed about 70,000 years ago.
At least two other Homo lineages, H. neanderthals, and Denisovans, survived the Toba eruption and subsequent MIS 4 ice age, as their latest presence are dated to ca. 40 kyr, and ca. 55 kyr. Other lineages including H. floresiensis, H. luzonensis, and Penghu 1 may have also survived through the eruption.
The exact geographic distribution of anatomically modern human populations at the time of the eruption is not known, and surviving populations may have lived in Africa and subsequently migrated to other parts of the world. Analyses of mitochondrial DNA have estimated that the major migration from Africa occurred 60,000–70,000 years ago, consistent with dating of the Toba eruption to about 75,000 years ago.”
Pretty much starting over from scratch 70kya is a much better starting point for me than the next alleged big event human bottleneck 900kya. And when I throw in Hideaways recent B12 theory… the story seems to be getting simpler.
Now there is a problem. There is plenty of material debunking the Toba theory. But all is not lost. The debunking is not about the bottlenecking of humans, but with the super volcano being the main cause of everything. Evidence showing that societies and cultures away from Southeast Asia continued to develop after the eruption help to discredit the Toba theory but does not explain the genetic bottleneck found in humans around this time.
This reddit thread was interesting.
If Mount Toba Didn’t Cause Humanity’s Genetic Bottleneck, What Did? : r/askscience (reddit.com)
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It was probably during this bottleneck that a mutation for denial of death (implemented as a tendency to deny unpleasant realities) and a mutation for an extended theory of mind emerged, converting two maladaptive traits into a planet dominating trait.
These new behaviorally modern humans invented god, and outcompeted, or more probably killed, all of it’s close relatives, after having sex with them, and probably were genetically fragile, which may explain why there are no full hybrids of the cousins we had sex with.
https://un-denial.com/2018/03/26/by-ajit-varki-why-are-there-no-persisting-hybrids-of-humans-with-denisovans-neanderthals-or-anyone-else/
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LOL. Your reply had me trying to connect everything together with some deep pulitzer prize writing. Even thought it was a future guest essay. I had to delete it all. So embarrassingly ugly and amateurish.
Thanks for decoding Varki’s letter. Lot of words I never heard of (just like a Gaia & David conversation 😊). And good comment from Apneaman: “If human groups/tribes can genocide each other just imagine what humans would do to ‘other’ hominids.”
Cant imagine how brutal it was back then. I dont see a world of harmony, wisdom and Leavers. I see destruction, genocide, and Takers. With or without the conquering of god (EROEI).
It took just under five months for this site to (correctly) kill the Quinn in me. Finally seeing and realizing how defensive quinn fans get was a big part of it too (something with MORT there for sure).
But at least they make perfect sense to me with being sad and desperate that humans may not survive (because quinn fans “know” that humans are capable of doing it right. peace & love). The anti quinners that want humans to survive is confusing to me. (other than our usual selfish supremacist mindsets)
All this stuff is obviously new for me. And I think it might even come with a commonsense belief of not just “yes, humans need to go”, but also “there is no good scenario (peace & love) involving intelligent life (human level or higher) in the universe”. Take that away from the whole picture and wow!… not much to be striving for or even dreaming about. (for an Empire Baby, that is)
It does simplify things though. Yes, with extreme discipline, it can all be a beautiful wonderful grateful miracle of life thing. But for the other 99.99% of us, time to party like its 1999. Lets start with a toast to our 28/29 collapse. Cheers. 😊
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I don’t fully understand Dr. Varki’s thesis on the absense of full hybrids but I suspect it’s the same argument Dr. Nick Lane makes for why it took 2 billion years for the eukaryotic cell to emerge, and why it happened only once.
It was an extraordinarily rare evolutionary event that transformed the planet, and the new cell was very fragile and incomptatible with other life for a long time. It had to evolve many complex things like a nucleus, two sexes, and DNA junk tolerance for it to stabilize and not go extinct.
Behaviorally modern humans must acknowledge and override their genetic tendency to deny unpleasant realities to stabilize their new superpowers and they’re running out of time.
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One trillion additional debt in 100 days is being used to extract more carbon to force a little more growth so another trillion debt can be created the next 90 days, then 80, then 70…
We’re going out with a bang.
https://www.theguardian.com/environment/article/2024/may/09/carbon-dioxide-atmosphere-record
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The customers and regulators of Madoff are a classic case study for MORT. Few were able to accept what was obviously true (and very unpleasant).
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I’ve rapidly come to the conclusion that all businesses and govt, that are selling the story of a bright future by doing X, Y, Z are no better or worse than Bernie, promising a future that’s not possible. This includes my own family as we plant more of our main business, take cuttings to propagate more etc.
Time is short until it all comes crashing down and I’m fairly certain it will crash once oil production declines accelerate year over year, because the world as a whole will have contracting energy availability then, with no end in sight.
We are not there yet, but it’s always possible for some other black swan, (none of them are really black as I think we have most of the bases covered between all of us), to kick the system down first and cause a great plunge in energy availability…
In this world, for all businesses it’s…. grow or die, then grow and die later. When the ‘grow’ bit is no longer possible, it’s just death to most, taking most of existing humanity with it.
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Assuming we avoid WWIII, and the stock market doesn’t crash, and the banks don’t fail, and covid doesn’t come back, and it doesn’t get too hot for the grain crops, and AMOC keeps going, and the sun doesn’t burp, and…
what’s your best guess on when oil supply begins to fall for real?
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It’s a really hard question as the Arab states keep their ‘real’ reserves a state secret. Saudi Arabia has released the same reserve for 20-30 years 267B bbls, or thereabouts.
I’m getting suspicious that it’s earlier, than later, as the Saudi’s keep coming up with reasons to extend ‘cuts’ to production. The real reason might be they are at peak now with Ghawar oil field in decline. If they are all flat out now, with decline setting in, then when the US shale runs out of tier1 spots to drill, and the best tier 2 spots, it could be downhill quickly by 2028-9.
If the Saudi’s do have spare capacity and Iraq can overcome difficulties to increase production the US falls in production then another few years after that in the early ’30’s. By then we will be producing over 105-110Mbbl/d of all liquids compared to around 100mbbls/d today.
Basically falling from a greater height, with a higher world population, and everyone telling us all how wrong we were because EVs will be up to 20% of all vehicles by then, lots more solar and wind everywhere, plus higher world population and greater energy use..
Very reluctant to be specific, because it’s really the circumstance of when oil production decline is accelerating, not a particular year…
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Thanks. That’s later than I would have guessed which probably means you are right.
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Way to sack up Hideaway! Can’t stand all of the ego fear and pussyfooting regarding collapse predictions.
28/29 sounds reasonable to me. (crazy that five years from now sounds optimistic at this point). For me it’s a coinflip on what gets our full steam collapse started first. Oil rapidly depleting or Paul Beckwith’s cascading tipping point stuff.
And talk about the perfect storm. Soon we will be running out of the bonanza that propped this species up to unheard of numbers & lifestyles while at the exact same time the consequences from using this bonanza will start wreaking havoc on the climate. Karma is such a bitch.
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Governments have to peddle hopium to get elected. How many people do you think will vote for a politician who tells the truth about energy and overshoot? Even countries like China, though they don’t have elected governments, are still pursuing endless growth.
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True, but even those political parties that have the environment as a priority, and no hope of being elected, do not speak the truth.
Nor do wise aware retired politicians.
Nor does any cultural leader, spiritual leader, or business leader.
Something else is going on.
I think it’s genetic denial.
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To illustrate the accuracy of your point Rob just have a look at our recently retired Green Party leader.
He was Minister for Climate Change for 6 years and leader of the Greens for 10. He helped push through our pretty much useless Zero Carbon Act and kept telling the climate change naysayers that climate change is the biggest economic opportunity of our time. Never mentioned overshoot or limits to growth despite the previous leader giving numerous speeches on peak oil and limits.
He resigned from Parliament a few weeks ago. Here’s his website http://www.jamesshaw.com. Here are his current work commitments…
1. Operating Partner at Morrison, a leading global infrastructure investment management company. He is focused on next-generation decarbonisation investment initiatives, nature-based solutions and building Morrison’s market presence in South-East Asia.
2. On the Sustainability Advisory Panel of Air New Zealand who are peddling so-called sustainable aviation fuels, hydrogen and electric airplanes.
3. Director of Climate Opportunity and Global Development for Greenbridge Capital Management, a new investment management company focused on providing institutions with access to climate-positive investment options.
He’s a smart likeable guy but in complete denial of reality.
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Thanks Campbell. A very good example. I’m sure he genuinely believes he’s saving the planet.
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Serious question.
Do they know what we at un-Denial know, and what they were really trying to do was create tools they could use to prevent us from killing each other when the oil supply starts to fall in earnest?
Or are they a bunch small minds seeking power so they could force the globe to embrace green growth to fix climate change?
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Rob have you watched the British TV show Utopia from 2013. It has 2 seasons. I think it sums up nicely what is probably going on in the background. Don’t watch the US version it is garbage.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=uJnN3WMwDsk
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I vouch for this. Forgot about it, thanks. Saw it 10 yrs ago, this will be brand new for me.
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Make sure you get a good copy because the cinematography is incredibly good.
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Yes I have. It’s very good. I created these clips for the un-Denial gallery years ago.
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Hi Folks,
Interesting May 27th post from CHS, saying, “a deflationary crushing of risk assets and soaring interest rates” is more likely than hyper-inflation:
https://www.oftwominds.com/blog.html
Thanks and good health, Weogo
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Thanks. Probably explains why Buffett is holding record high cash.
CHS paints a reasonably happy story for people who stay out of debt and sell speculative assets before the crash, but his story does not discuss energy.
I don’t have any debt or speculative assets but I’m less confident about a happy ending.
For sure real estate and stocks will be available at bargain prices. But what about energy and the food it makes cheap and abundant?
I’ve become a little obsessed with food. I remember friend Gail Zawacki was also obsessed with food.
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Israel’s Rafah Massacre: They Think They Can Get Away With Anything
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Excellent essay today by Richard Heinberg recapping our polycrisis and launching a new paid service from Post Carbon Institute.
It’s refreshingly frank about what’s going, but not quite to the Hideaway level.
I like the acknowledgement that our problems are wicked.
This would be a good essay to recommend to someone you know who is beginning to wake up. I won’t be subscribing to their new service but for someone who needs help and doesn’t have time to sift the free noise this might be a good use of funds.
https://richardheinberg.com/museletter-374-invitation-to-a-journey
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Indrajit Samarajiva today rips both the left and right, and the western rules based “democracy” that is dependent on importing cheap resources from poorer countries.
He’s refreshingly aware and direct however I wonder if poor non-white countries would do the same if the tables were turned?
https://indi.ca/americas-trolley-problem/
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“I wonder if poor non-white countries would do the same if the tables were turned?”
The MPP stuff will make me say yes. But history and reality make me say hell no.
Indi and I have the same bumper sticker on our car: History will know no more wicked bitch than White Empire.
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Hmmm…
Dr. Tom Murphy now seems to think our peaking and soon to decline population may save us from the worst implications of overshoot.
For him to be right, modernity must continue without collapsing well beyond 2050. This seems highly improbable given oil depletion and other dimensions of the polycrisis.
Is Murphy’s optimism MORT at work, or am I too much of a pessimist?
https://dothemath.ucsd.edu/2024/05/watching-population-bomb/
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Low birth rates should be seen as a blessing in disguise. In fact, it is only in disguise, if you believe in fantasies of endless economic growth.
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You are not too much of a pessimist, Rob.
https://dothemath.ucsd.edu/2022/09/death-by-hockey-sticks/
Saludos
el mar
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What about all the non-US health ministers that stay silent on this crime and the mRNA transfection harms?
There’s many more than these four that need to go to prison.
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Mike Benz rocks. If you still care about getting to the bottom of covid, this is a must watch.
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The fact that this guy is considered some sort of genius instead of an idiotic conman and a moronic troll on the internet should prove beyond any reasonable doubt that this civilization never stood a chance.
I will concede one thing though he is the most successful conman in human history. He makes Bernie madoff look like a small time pickpocket.
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I like what he’s done with X. Maybe saved social media from total censorship. Time will tell.
The rest of his stuff is a colossal waste of precious resources.
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I agree with you that his stand on censorship and cancel culture does seem sensible and has provided a platform to those who would otherwise be left without one.
What I find interesting is that all his businesses other than twitter are just outright scams. The psychology of people who keep these ventures alive is what I find quite fascinating. You have mentioned that the only way for civilization to even have a somewhat soft landing is population and consumption reduction. Look at his companies EVs, spaceships, Brain-Computer interface, RoboTaxis among others. And its not like he is delivering on any of the promises. He is just a vaporware salesman and Tesla is just a meme-stock. Yet despite all the evidence people flock to him because he is the high priest of the religion of progress telling people exactly what they want to hear.
He is portrayed as real life Iron man but he is just Irony Man.
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Musk is an interesting case study for MORT.
I think Musk is smart, a good person, overshoot aware, believes our only hope is to expand to another planet, and may be leveraging his techno-utopean dream companies (which he knows are dreams) to fund his Mars plan.
Somehow MORT enables him to believe Mars colonization is possible.
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https://peakoilbarrel.com/open-thread-non-petroleum-may28-2024/#comment-775818
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Hi Rob,
Looking for similar cars:
Our Honda Fit, 98.4″ whelbase, weighs about 2500#
Our electric Mitsubishi I-MiEV, 100.4″ wheelbase, weighs about 2600#. About 4% more.
2023 Chevy Bolt, 102.4″ wheelbase, weighs about 3600#. About 44% more.
Lexus ES, wheelbase 113″, weighs about 3700#
Tesla Model 3 standard range, one motor, 113″ wheelbase, weighs about 3900#, about 5% more.
Yes, electric cars are generally heavier, about 4% to 44% heavier, not twice the weight.
Not saying EVs are great.
I think electric-assist bicycles could make sense.
Thanks and good health, Weogo
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Bossche on bird flu.
https://voiceforscienceandsolidarity.substack.com/p/lets-get-a-break-from-corona-and
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Good interview. Art Berman is getting better and better.
I’m of course biased, but the entire conversation danced around denial without acknowledging MORT.
“The most destructive and disruptive technology of all time was the horse.”
“The solution is consume less energy.”
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Yes, this was excellent. By far my favorite conversation with him. Listen to an interview with Art from two years ago and it’s much more optimistic. Something in the air because most of the trusted experts are similar to Art, and getting way more desperate (wrong word choice, maybe a better word is “accepting”) with our predicament.
I still have a problem with Rachel though. Might just be my lingering disgust at how she treated the godfather, Bill Rees.
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I wasn’t that upset with her treatment of Bill Rees, as she was asking for more in depth as her audience were already exposed to a lot of overshoot concepts. He kept starting at basic level like most of his videos, and I was also after more in depth from him at the time.
After she pulled him up several times he did get it, and went a bit deeper. Rachel is young and therefore has more denial in her, so kept pushing back on different aspects, that we have often covered, but I suspect it is younger people that have a larger internal need for denial as they would want a long, healthy, modern lifestyle..
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Art Berman did state at one point…. “There may not be any solutions”, then quickly added “Let’s not go there”, while easily admitting we are in massive overshoot.
Then Rachel asked about solutions after also dismissing ‘Just stop oil’, because of the dramatic collapse it would bring on. “what can we do”?
Lots of talk around the issue until Art eventually came up with we need to define the problem properly.
Lots of pussy footing around the real issue of far, far too many humans on the planet, and never mentioning population…
The simple test is that ‘just stop oil’ right now would be catastrophic collapse with 8.1 billion people on the planet.
If the human population was shrunk tomorrow to only 10 million (with Nate Hagens magic wand), spread evenly over the planet, then ‘just stopping oil’ tomorrow, would not be an issue. The remaining people could easily survive (ignoring spent fuel ponds for a minute, another magic wand wave), and thrive with a mass of materials, food etc, less stress on environment.
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Ya, I noticed that too. I tried to find it again, but cant. (if anyone knows the timestamp, let me know)
It was almost like a “Lets not talk about the fact that there are no solutions because it will be too scary for your audience Rachel.” Then one minute later she said “ok, so lets talk about solutions?”
The overpopulation thing is becoming more and more taboo. It’s like you’ll have an angry mob show up with pitchforks the minute you bring it up.
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Go to the 30.00 minute mark and listen for the next 10-20 seconds….
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Thanks Hideaway. Yesterday I was not watching, but only listening. Seeing Art’s facial expressions is much better.
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Not talking about the need to get the population down quickly to reduce suffering is evil because there’s a lot of suffering coming and nothing else will help.
Doubly so since the simple act of discussing the need for population reduction will help because many people listening will choose to not have children.
Whether or not someone discusses population is a great way to assess their level of reality denial, understanding of overshoot, and integrity.
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https://fasteddynz.substack.com/
Fast Eddy is not letting up with its UEP solution!
Saludos
el mar
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Thanks for the link el mar. Does anyone here vouch for Fast Eddy? I only know him from random comment sections, and I always avoid him because he seems full of that scary combination of crazy + methamphetamines.
Just got done reading a few of his articles and was horrified to see that I liked his writing and content. He is way more into the whole “x-files cigarette smoking man” than I am but he seems like he knows what he’s talking about.
Is this guy for real, or just a real good bullshitter.
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I wondered where he went after leaving OFW.
UEP might have a low probability of being real if knowledge of the plan was restricted to a small number of people like Fauci, Gates, and WHO head.
Fast Eddy claims the leader of every mRNA injecting country is in on the UEP plan and they’ve all decided to sacrifice themselves for the greater good.
The probability that UEP exists as Fast Eddy describes is zero.
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I recently watched OJ: Made in America. Its an eight hour documentary that explores race and celebrity through the life of O. J. Simpson. Its very good and I highly recommend it. But I’m not here to talk about that. There was another takeaway I had while watching. Most of the major players involved back then were in this. Every single one of them (male and female) look better today than they did 30 years ago. No way a 70-year-old Marcia Clark should look better now than when she was 40.
We all know White Empire has perfected the art of oppression, propaganda, and inequality. But another aspect they are perfecting, is in making the entire world superficial. I suppose some of this is associated with having money & access to plastic surgery. Face lifts, tummy tucks, botox, implants, etc. But it’s much more than that.
Felt like going down memory lane so I busted out my High school yearbooks (1991-94) as well as my mom’s (1968-70). It was depressing as far as the “beauty” aspect I am talking about. People used to be unique and stood out from one another. This big diversity of characteristics shows up clearly in my yearbooks, and is even more profound in my mom’s. So then I had my nephew bring over his yearbooks (graduated 2021). LOL. What a joke. Every page was filled with clones of Justin Bieber and Britney Spears. It was gross.
My nephew told me how there were still clique’s at his school, but it was nothing like my day. More about ethnicity and sexual preference. This great quote from Ferris Buellers Day Off is totally outdated: “Oh, he’s very popular Ed. The sportos, the motorheads, geeks, sluts, bloods, wastoids, dweebies, dickheads – they all adore him. They think he’s a righteous dude.”
Everyone clamoring to look and act the same is obviously a byproduct of the internet. I so miss the pre-internet world that I was born into. And if there are other species in the universe that have gone through a “peak of whats possible” then I hope their only claim to fame afterwards is something more than “At least we made our species more eye appealing”.
Ferris Bueller’s Day Off – He’s a Righteous Dude (1986) (youtube.com)
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Yes, lots of unhealthy effects of social media. TikTok is scary. I check it once in a while and am usually shocked.
I’m bucking the trend. I cut my own hair (future prep tip) and wear only Costco clothes.
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Ya, I’m right there with you. I’ve gotten a fade haircut my entire life for $8-15. Nowadays its around $50. So I just shave my head every six months. Its not as pretty, but its free.
Have not bought new clothes in over ten years. Hand me downs is all I wear. One of my friends throws out his entire wardrobe every few years and I end up making out like a bandit.
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Nice update from Paul Beckwith on climate tipping points.
Bill Rees discusses overshoot in the Q&A.
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https://abcnews.go.com/International/india-records-hottest-temperature-amid-severe-heat-wave/story?id=110639547
India may have recorded its hottest temperature ever amid severe heat wave
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A Ministry for the Future wet bulb 35C event coming soon.
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Hideaway nails the energy transition coffin shut.
https://peakoilbarrel.com/open-thread-non-petroleum-may28-2024/#comment-775848
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Canned corned beef on deep sale today limit 1 per purchase.
How many trips should I make into the store?
I’ll decide after watching today’s Ukraine update.
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https://x.com/RandPaul/status/1796206448545816816
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https://x.com/elonmusk/status/1796211882606366943
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What would be Fauci’s motivations be for carrying out such a conspiracy?
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Fauci was funding gain of function research for bioweapons in China because it was illegal to do so in his own country, a mistake was made (or deliberate release if you believe UEP), and he covered up what happened to save his own skin.
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The rate of strokes was falling until 2020, then increased, and is expected to continue to increase for a decade or more.
The only thing our leaders know for sure is what did not cause this.
Meanwhile, Dr. Philip McMillan is not yet brave enough to discuss Dr. Joe Lee’s String Theory in public.
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Peter Joseph has a new essay out. (also has a new podcast on yt “Revolution Now”). I love Peter and will continue pushing him on this site.
He is far from perfect though. In the 2020 election, he was way too “you have to vote Biden because Trump is a monster”. Also, I think he got the jab. Once in a while he says something like “and now people can’t even agree about getting a shot that may save their life”. And he has too much techno-optimism. I sometimes get the sense that he thinks the planet can sustain 8 billion people with the correct use of technology.
This essay was good, but long. Here is his general list to follow regarding how to vote. (hint – you’ll never be able to vote red or blue)
Do not vote for anyone promoting the following, ever:
Vote for anyone promoting the following, all the time:
Nexus: From Capitalism to Fascism – Peter Joseph: Substack
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So if you live in the U.S., you should vote democrat? I agree with all of his main points. On those points, the democrats seem to be less bad than the republicans.
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You have a rare option this year that is not a “less bad” choice.
RFK Jr. might be your last chance to vote for a wise and good man before SHTF and only despots are on offer.
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Disclaimer: I know politics is a hot button. This is just my opinion which could totally be wrong
Stellar, that makes sense on the surface. Yes, it looks like Dems are better with abortion, capital punishment, regulation, etc. But that is all part of the illusion. When I dive deeper into it, red & blue are identical with the same exact goals. Both parties are servants to the ruling elites. (one way to see this better is to look into how impossible it is to get a meaningful 3rd party into the political arena)
If I vote Biden because I perceive him as the LOTE, I am actually making things worse. Trump is so obviously unqualified that he gets half the country engaged in activism. Biden is such a career professional politician that he gets the activism to die down because we think we have the right guy in charge (the Obama factor).
And Rob is correct that RFK is definitely the best choice of this group.
I hate to be sticking up for the empire babies, but they have no chance of selecting the best candidate. He who has the $$$, will be the victor. 24/7 ads of Trump/Biden will soon be here. And RFK will be lucky if he gets 5% of the exposure they get.
Citizens United was such an obvious corruption method added to the mix. A child could even see it. Back around 2011, when I was way too political, my nephew (8yrs old at the time) compared C.U. to baseball and why the NY Yankees are always better than his favorite team the AZ Diamondbacks. NY had a team payroll of $250million, but the Dbacks was only $30mill. (I was so proud of him for connecting these dots on his own😊)
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Please disregard that disclaimer I made above about politics being a hot button. What a silly thing for me to say on a collapse site that talks about nuclear war, exit strategies, wet bulb event, overpopulation and the billions who will die because of it.
If I offend anyone with my political babbling, then tough shit.
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Speaking of politics, Donald Trump has been convicted on 34 counts.
https://www.nbcnews.com/politics/donald-trump/donald-trump-verdict-hush-money-trial-rcna152492
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Ya, I have not been paying attention to this. I expect it will only make Trump fans even more aggressive. Imagine if he ends up winning the election and gets sentenced to 40 years in prison. It will be pure chaos over here. But definitely entertaining.
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Sorry to keep this thread alive, but I want to go on record with this simple-minded prediction. The high up elites want Trump out of the picture. We all know he blurts out stuff he shouldn’t be saying, and they have a hard time keeping him on the proverbial leash.
They are going to eliminate him from the election with this conviction. But they have to walk on eggshells because the threat of a civil war is not out of the question. They’ll do it in a way where nobody can be blamed. “Sorry but our hands are tied on this one. See, it says it right there in the constitution. Nothing we can do about it.”
They better be more creative than that though.
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The US authorized Ukraine to destroy one of Russia’s radar systems for detecting a nuclear attack.
From this we (and Russia) can reasonably conclude:
Let’s hope Russia behaves like an adult interacting with a mentally defective child.
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Good afternoon,
I hope everyone here is feeling well.
Are there insights and thoughts regarding the latest Peak Oil discussion?
Hideaway & Rob,
If thou could ask any questions in this discussion and/or future ones, what would they be?
Kind and warm regards,
ABC
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Right near the end Simon Michaux is talking about getting his thorium reactors off the ground and jokingly says he needs $200M from Zuckerberg to build his reactor and another $1 billion to get his Venus project off the ground. This sums it all up for me, pie in the sky ideas that need massive inputs of cash, to pay for the materials and energy to build it. Once the first $1.2B is spent, he would need more, and more and more, because that is the nature of humanity…
It’s the materials and energy that’s the problem! We seem to have enough at present to maintain the system, but are having a hard time growing anything of substance, because the maintenance of the system is taking all the resources. Simon has never bothered to mention how his ‘new’ system of thorium reactors keeps itself going without fossil fuels, none of it magics itself into existence.
I think Steve St Angelo with his short presentation on the growth of oil, really being growth of natural gas liquids, of lower energy value, hiding the real problem of constrained energy sums it up. We are rapidly running into the wall of less energy and therefore material wealth, in a world of growing population, where taking resources off others is increasing.
There were no answers, because there aren’t any, but everyone remains polite to Simon’s thorium fairytale. I think everyone participating in that discussion realises that you only get listened to providing you offer a solution, no matter how far fetched it really is.
We’ve been aware of problems for many decades, yet chose to ignore them and continue to grow our population to the detriment of the environment and future humans.
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Dear Hideaway,
I hope thou are feeling well.
If plausible, I ask that thou further elaborates on how Dr. Michaux’s remarks are not compatible with the requirements which he articulates.
What are the likely constraints which Molten Salt Thorium reactors face during the present time and declining EROI Hydrocarbon future?
What if such plants are operational.
Dr. Michaux stated remarkably that there exists fuel for thorium which translated into supply of several thousand years.
To note.
Kind and warm regards,
ABC
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Hi ABC, there is a lot to try and answer in your questions..
We have the complexity we have, because of massive growth from a massive population using a growing quantity of fossil fuels over 2 centuries. To build something like a thorium reactor takes an immense amount of complexity. The combination of ‘parts’ and expertise that makes up something like a reactor and the specialist equipment involved, would have come from hundreds of separate processing plants of metals, and likewise for factories around the world.
We need the entirety of the modern world to maintain and rebuild any highly complex system.
The goal of the Venus project is to build a self sustaining community based upon the energy provided by a thorium reactor. How does this small self sufficient community replace the reactor at the end of it’s life? The materials alone for every aspect of the reactor come from mines all over the world.
Every single one of those mines around the world uses fossil fuels at some point in the planning, exploration, mining, removal of waste, processing and transport of concentrates to smelters, metal refineries, then to warehouses and eventually to factories that need metals form all over the world to make their ‘bit’ of modernity, before sending it on to other factories that put groups of manufactured ‘bits’ together into products.
Let’s pretend a pipe bursts somewhere in their thorium reactor due to an unknown weakness fracture, all the safety protocols kick in and the plant at the Venus project shuts down. They need to replace this pipe, but it’s not just a pipe, it’s made from a special combination of metals that we call ‘stainless steel’.
However there are many different grades and types of stainless steel. What they need is most likely a combination of Iron, Chromium, Nickel, Molybdenum, with perhaps some manganese, titanium and small amounts of carbon, phosphorus, silicon, and sulfur (all depending upon which pipes for which application), all made in very specific processes..
Are they going to start with a godzillion spare parts for everything? Or are they assuming the rest of the world continues to work ‘normally’ so they can get extra parts and expertise whenever needed?
This applies to not just the reactor, but every single piece of machinery they intend to run off the power provided by the reactor. Assuming they plan to recycle everything. What size recycling plant, capable of recycling everything used by a modern society do they need to build. What about the ‘bits’ we don’t have recycling processes for, like composite plastics?
Where will they get their plastics from? A synthetic fuel plant, powered by the reactor and hydrogen electrolyzers, plus refinery to separate components from synthetic fuel production, then a chemical plastics plant…
Now all these plants have thousands of their own components all made separately in factories all over the world. What happens when XYZ breaks in one of these factories??
On and on it goes, anything highly complex totally requires the entirety of the complex system to exist, so a world wide effort right now to go ‘thorium reactor’ to power everything electrical, which then means we need to make everything run on electricity including all transport, means massive mining of lower grade ores (lots more energy than currently), vast multiples of quantities already mined, all done with fossil fuels, all destroying more of the natural world and increasing the rate of CO2 going into the atmosphere.
Fast forward 10-15 years, we hit peak oil while building all this, the world average temperature is up another 1-2 degrees causing havoc with agriculture everywhere, the world use of energy has gone up by another 100,000Twh’s/yr, so we are chasing our tail still. Oil production starts falling rapidly due to sheer depletion of most fields, transport of everything heavy suffers and we can’t complete the build out of the reactors, because it’s all still relying upon fossil fuels to build, operate and maintain.
We just collapse from a higher level, with an extra billion people on the planet and a lot less of the natural world…
This is the short answer!! LOL
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Dear Hideaway,
I hope thou are feeling well.
I appreciate thine response.
I suppose Dr. Michaux expects the thorium plant operators to be able to continue the manufacturing, even in a rapidly declining EROI circumstances, or to be able to replace the needed components of complexity powered by Thorium operating components.
It would indeed be a remarkable achievement to witness a mine or a whole manufacturing network powered by thorium, which then would be capable of replacing their own components in entirety.
– Mines, smelters, logistics, precision equipment, digital networks etc.
Dr. Michaux has stated before along the lines of having an industrial cluster, as to minimise the required complexity.
A lovely idea of some partial modernity existing, this however seems to be a process which would currently take decades to replace.
Perhaps China could replace one isolated industrial cluster rapidly, however even that would require a great deal of preparation and likely take years, if at all even plausible to begin with.
I appreciate Dr. Michaux and his unconventional approach to matters, however unconventional and plausibility are different matters entirely.
Kind and warm regards,
ABC
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LOL! I watched this before you posted it.
I’d probably ask them:
1) Why don’t you discuss MORT since it’s the keystone that must be overcome for any improvement to our overshoot predicament?
2) Why don’t you discuss policies that could be used to rapidly reduce the population? Unless you fix this, a hungry mob is going to take whatever Zvorygin and Michaux build.
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Simon Michaux is just another example of the intelligentsia class: “Society needs to know about…” xD. There’s no such thing as society, it’s an abstract! That’s why your population reduction plan is just wrong.
I’m from Poland – a former communist country. Nobody knows here anything about commies, except some BS like it’s gone. Why? Is it MORT? Or maybe people just don’t want to smell shit? Or maybe most people are not capable of abstract thinking?
BTW: Mielcarski sounds polish as fuck xD. Powodzenia!
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Hi, nice to meet you.
My father was polish but I became estranged from him at a young age so know very little about polish culture. He was expert at making smoked kolbasa sauasage and I still love it.
If reducing our population is a bad idea, what do you think we should do to prepare for overshoot collapse?
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It’s a bad idea because it’s impossible. It’s against human nature. A so called “society” will never accept it or understand it. Not to mention other aspects like servicing debts, pension systems, economic degrowth, lower standards of living, etc.
What we should do to prepare? Well, such question assumes there’s some kind of a solution…
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There is no solution but there are paths that could reduce suffering and maybe retain some of our better accomplishents longer.
It looks like we’re not even going to try.
We’ll probably end with a nuclear war and the survivors will never know overshoot was a cause.
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Modern Civilization was always a one off burning of ancient sunlight. Once it’s gone so is modern civilization. We can only have complexity with a huge population, we only have a huge population because of fossil fuels (fertilizer, herbicides, pesticides, bulldozers clearing land etc).
I agree with Rob the only thing we could ever do to lessen suffering when the collapse comes is to rapidly reduce population humanely. The most humane thing to do is stop/rapidly reduce new people being born and offer humane ways for the really old and infirm ways to leave the world comfortably. No-one wants to engage in either of those.
The reason everyone wants more people in their tribe is to protect their tribe from others. If there was guaranteed no threat from others, then there is no reason to grow beyond carrying capacity of the land.
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Hello anonymous. You are dark. Maybe even more than me. Do you long for humans to go extinct? Or does it make you sick that civilization is collapsing and there’s no solutions to save it? I hang out in the former most of the time. Probably a 70/30 ratio.
The 30% time is never spent thinking of solutions. Its just a “Fuck it, its over. Let it all burn to the ground” mentality. Very unhealthy.
The 70% is easier to clearly see that there are good solutions to how we prepare. I dont wig out and focus too much on it, because I don’t have confidence in humans getting it right.
I know its the most overused analogy for collapse, but its true: the terminal patient being given six months to live… that’s exactly how we should be preparing. Now what that consists of seems to vary greatly. The selfish, scared and desperate side of me wants the solutions to be all about lessening the pain and suffering for us. The reasonable, rational and compassionate side wants it to be all about helping everything except humans (in other words, atoning for our sins). Perhaps there’s a middle ground there.
But c’mon, you gotta admit there are solutions for how to prepare. Now about the masses going against their human nature, as you call it… yes, that is the problem. How do we get them to see and understand the world the way you, me, and the rest of the overshoot aware people see it? (other than when SHTF and they cant deny anymore… actually, they’ll probably just go deeper in denial)
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I’m just a realist. I know my numbers. Plus I spent a lot of time studying modern philosophy/ideologies. You should see my smile while reading sentences like “How do we get them to see and understand…” xD. It’s the same as “Society needs to know about…” from Michaux. It’s the same as communist slogans, because we “know better” what’s good for others.
Don’t get me wrong, I’m a prepper too. But nowadays more because it’s just fun for me. Again, just because I know my numbers. Just one example: how much arable land do you need to feed a single family without fossil fuels and its derivatives? Do you know some wild edibles? Have you tried to cook something out of your canned buckwheat groats? Do you know that without our modern supply chains, most spices won’t be available? I know answers to all those questions. And now look around you! Ask your neighbors xD
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Nate Hagens does not want his channel to sell fear or catastrophe however the threat of nuclear war is so high right now that he feels compelled to discuss it again.
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The West is challenging Russia to a game of chicken.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Chicken_(game)
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I’m surprised they calculate only 1.7x overshoot. When oil depletes, our population will fall much more than 1.7x times.
https://energyskeptic.com/2024/world-scientists-warning-ecological-overshoot-human-nature/
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They are only considering renewable resources in their 170% overshoot. If they also looked at non renewable resources then we have overshot on day one of every year, January 1. Again William Rees is one of the authors as I would expect, but not lead in this paper.
I’m not sure why they don’t look at metals and minerals as well, except for the fact that earth has ‘plenty’ of all of them, it’s just the energy we would use to extract them. Perhaps it’s all too hard to put a finite number on this.
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Thanks. Casts doubt on their competence and work. What’s the point of trying to quantify overshoot if you ignore the most important factors? Do they even have a clue what overshoot means? More denial I assume.
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The problem of ‘quantifying’ the non renewable resources is way too difficult. For instance I worked out that there is approximately 4.8 trillion tonnes of gold in the earth if we include the crust and mantle. Humans in thousands of years of history have mined around 200,000 tonnes in total.
There is no shortage of gold, and we know how to extract it in very minute grades, much lower than we actually mine it. It all come to economic decisions. The price ‘others’ are prepared to pay for gold determines how much can be mined at ever lower grades of ore. At present it is economically viable to mine gold at below 1g/t as in one part per million. This is especially so in countries where wages are lower, as everyone gets paid $US dollars for their gold.
At today’s price there might be 50,000 tonnes of gold counted as reserves, but if prices were to double there might be 200,000 tonnes of gold reserves, assuming the price of everything else remained the same as it is now. (of course nothing else ever remains the same). Reserves being the economical quantity that can be mined with today’s prices and technology. The 4.8 trillion tonnes are the known resources, while the 50,000 tonnes are the reserves. (Most don’t count the 4.8t tonnes as resources as htey know most will never be accessible, but might have 1M tonnes as resources using some other cut off).
The same is applicable to every mineral and metal. We often hear of how much uranium is in seawater that we could ‘mine’. We never hear any proponent say how much energy it would take, nor anything about the equipment needed. Yet it is ‘possible’ with current technology.
The problem is Reserves, the economical part of mining resources has been growing all the time with more discoveries of concentrated resources, better technologies and cheap growing energy availability.
However like oil, the rate of discovery is falling, especially for the metals and minerals we’ve been looking for over many decades. Newer minerals with economic value like lithium, we never bothered to look for them before 10 years ago, so of course new discoveries are going up.
If they tried to use reserves, it would give ammunition to every critic of overshoot, they would quickly point to growing reserves of this and that (the critics already constantly do this!!) What they all miss though is 2 aspects..
1 A lot of what the USGS states as reserves are not ‘real’ in the first place.
2 When energy prices skyrocket past real peak in availability, then a lot of the reserves simply disappear because of no longer being ‘economic’.
All those that believe in the bright green future, assume energy will get cheaper, which makes more of the resources become reserves.
Because of all the above it’s too difficult to include non renewables, so what they come up with gives a false sense of what’s happening in totality, while still showing how even the renewable resources are in deep overshoot.
I do wish all the reports added that non renewables are a larger problem, as they all know it, but I suspect they want the message to remain simple, just to get people discussing the issues..
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I understand your points but I think the complex issue of reserve size and quality can be ignored by simply making the easy to defend assumption that non-renewable resource supply will scale with diesel availability, regardless of the reserves.
This simple but true enough assumption makes all of their work on quantifying the severity of overshoot misleading and basically worthless.
All they need to do is focus on accuratley forecasting diesel depletion.
This simplification works because the onset of rapid and permanent decline in diesel supply is not 500 years in the future, but rather will begin in 1 to 10 years depending on how lucky we are.
This means that it pretty much does not matter what the reserves of other resources are.
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Remember you’re preaching to the choir with me. I fully agree, but I’ve already had the conversation about diesel with cornucopians on POB, probably last year. They always come up with ….
“we’ll just make enough synthetic fuel for the purpose or all mining will be done with electricity” type arguments… Then I go off on the tangent of explaining why that’s not possible etc, etc, then the next week they start all over again,,, “Look there is xy% more solar ‘somewhere’ we are all saved blah blah blah”. I start at the beginning again, go through the basics again..
Just the simple fact that it doesn’t matter how much evidence is produced, the believers in a bright green future, will continue to deny any problem if we just……..(fill in the blanks)…
I do it for those not yet believers in the green future who still have an open mind. These people are few and far between…
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You just explained why I’m a fan of Varki’s MORT.
I’d go crazy trying to make sense of the world without it.
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Very good round-up of economic news from friend Panopticon today. Notice how much of the news revolves around war. We are sleep walking into WWIII.
https://climateandeconomy.com/2024/05/31/31st-may-2024-todays-round-up-of-economic-news/
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Good history of energy use and economic growth today by Tim Watkins.
https://consciousnessofsheep.co.uk/2024/05/31/nowhere-to-run/
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Instead of a great default, we may see hyperinflation so bad, that we start writing our denominations in scientific notation.
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Art Berman is also very worried about escalating tensions and brain dead US policies.
https://www.artberman.com/blog/the-u-s-will-lose-the-economic-industrial-war-with-china-on-the-renewable-energy-front/
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I really enjoyed this conversation with Nate & Vanessa. With all of the doom and gloom lately, if you are in need of a pick-me-up, this is it. She will have you smiling for most of the interview. At the very least watch for a couple minutes at the 32 minute mark. She has a cool way of explaining why we have not been able to make any overshoot progress with our inner circle.
And without even trying, she is very good at making me see how the ancient wisdom was so radically different than how we are capable of thinking today. Her book Hospicing Modernity has been on my shelf for over two years untouched. I need to read it finally. Same with Robin Wall Kimmerer’s Braiding Sweetgrass.
Way back prior to my brain being hijacked by the internet, I used to love reading books and would average 1 or 2 per month (mostly fiction). I can still get in that zone once in a while, but it’s hard. Its like I have narcolepsy or something. Nowadays I’m lucky to make it thirty pages before I fall asleep or get back on the computer. David Graeber’s ‘Dawn of Everything’ is the epitome of this. I love the subject matter, but after only three or four pages I’m out cold.
p.s. I see the name TennesseeJed in the comments of all the good sites I visit. He definitely knows his shit. Surely you are on un-Denial too. Why don’t you ever post comments here?
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Suggest you try listening to audiobooks while walking for exercise, or while doing physical labor that does not require a lot of brain power. That’s how I read almost all books now.
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Physical labor? What is this weird phrase you speak of? We empire babies do not comprehend. 😊
Physical books are a thing for me. Just like how grandpa won’t read the news online because he needs the newspaper in his hands. I can’t even do a kindle. I definitely need to break this habit and pivot towards audiobooks. Might even get me back to taking my long walks in the desert.
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The audiobook I gave you is an excellent one to practice with. Each chapter stands alone and the book can be stopped between chapters for as long as you like with no loss in enjoyment. One chapter should be about the right length for a nice walk.
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Re: “The Dawn of Everything”
Unfortunately, that book lacks credibility and depth.
In fact “The Dawn of Everything” is a biased disingenuous account of human history (https://www.persuasion.community/p/a-flawed-history-of-humanity & https://offshootjournal.org/untenable-history/) that spreads fake hope (the authors of “The Dawn” claim human history has not “progressed” in stages, or linearly, and must not end in inequality and hierarchy as with our current system… so there’s hope for us now that it could get different/better again). As a result of this fake hope porn it has been widely praised. It conveniently serves the profoundly sick industrialized world of fakes and criminals. The book’s dishonest fake grandiose title shows already that this work is a FOR-PROFIT, instead a FOR-TRUTH, endeavour geared at the (ignorant gullible) masses.
Fact is human history since the dawn of agriculture has “progressed” in a linear stage (the “stuck” problem, see below), although not before that (https://www.focaalblog.com/2021/12/22/chris-knight-wrong-about-almost-everything ). This “progress” has been fundamentally destructive and is driven and dominated by “The 2 Married Pink Elephants In The Historical Room” (https://www.rolf-hefti.com/covid-19-coronavirus.html) which the fake hope-giving authors of “The Dawn” entirely ignore naturally (no one can write a legitimate human history without understanding and acknowledging the nature of humans). And these two married pink elephants are the reason why we’ve been “stuck” in a destructive hierarchy and unequal 2-class system , and will be far into the foreseeable future (the “stuck” question — “the real question should be ‘how did we get stuck?’ How did we end up in one single mode?” or “how we came to be trapped in such tight conceptual shackles” — [cited from their book] is the major question in “The Dawn” its authors never really answer, predictably).
Worse than that, the Dawn authors actually promote, push, propagandize, and rationalize in that book the unjust immoral exploitive criminal 2-class system that’s been predominant for millennia [https://nevermoremedia.substack.com/p/was-david-graeber-offered-a-deal]!
“All experts serve the state and the media and only in that way do they achieve their status. Every expert follows his master, for all former possibilities for independence have been gradually reduced to nil by present society’s mode of organization. The most useful expert, of course, is the one who can lie. With their different motives, those who need experts are falsifiers and fools. Whenever individuals lose the capacity to see things for themselves, the expert is there to offer an absolute reassurance.” —Guy Debord
A good example that one of the “expert” authors, Graeber, has no real idea on what world we’ve been living in and about the nature of humans is his last brief article on Covid where his ignorance shines bright already at the title of his article, “After the Pandemic, We Can’t Go Back to Sleep.” Apparently he doesn’t know that most people WANT to be asleep, and that they’ve been wanting that for thousands of years (and that’s not the only ignorant notion in the title) — see https://www.rolf-hefti.com/covid-19-coronavirus.html. Yet he (and his partner) is the sort of person who thinks he can teach you something authentically truthful about human history and whom you should be trusting along those terms. Ridiculous!
“The Dawn” is just another fantasy, or ideology, cloaked in a hue of cherry-picked “science,” served lucratively to the gullible ignorant public who craves myths and fairy tales.
“The evil, fake book of anthropology, “The Dawn of Everything,” … just so happened to be the most marketed anthropology book ever. Hmmmmm.” — Unknown
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Hello Lewis. Jeez, you really pissed me off with your comments. Not just because I am a big Graeber fan, but because you sent me down a four-hour rabbit hole. 😊. I read Knight, Bell, Nevermore, and a bunch of other links.
I got into David around 2019 (much prior to when I became overshoot aware and hip to what is really going on in the world – Jan 2022). I love his writings, interviews, and lectures.
It took me over two years to read Dawn. It was a struggle, and I was no doubt lost in certain sections (never struggled or got lost in any of his other writings). But Dawn definitely gave me hope and even a Daniel Quinn type vibe of “some humans got it right in the past, therefore we can get it right again in the future”.
I have learned (mostly because of un-Denial) to always red flag and be careful with anything that gives me this vibe.
But after reading the Chris Knight essay, it sounds like I interpreted the entire book wrong. I am interested in knowing more about Knight and maybe even James Woodburn’s ideas. (but they are already giving me that red flag Quinn vibe… which is probably why I want more of them)
Graeber’s death in 2020 had me convinced of foul play. And the fact that Dawn does not seem written in his usual style & words…. does lend credibility to what sounds crazy at first glance (that David had been “gotten to” sometime after he wrote “Debt: the first 5k years”). But I have no interest in going down that rabbit hole.
Anyways, thanks for the info. I appreciate it.
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xraymike79 today provides an update on our polycrisis and a forecast for what we should expect.
Note the reference to MORT in the first excerpted paragraph below.
https://collapseofindustrialcivilization.com/2024/05/31/last-rites-for-a-dying-civilization/
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Well, there goes that warm fuzzy feeling I had from Vanessa and Nate’s conversation above.
Xraymike is outstanding. Thanks for getting me back into him. Hope he starts writing more often. That book he mentions, “Decameron” by Boccaccio, sounds very interesting. Anyone here ever read it?
I think Mike is just quoting a source here, but dont you hate this kind of wording: “The excessive consumption of resources by industry and industrial agriculture to feed a growing world population is depleting reserves to the point where the system is no longer sustainable.”
No longer sustainable?? LOL!! Oh, the denial is everywhere.
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Another first class interview with Col. Larry Wilkerson.
Lots of truth bombs here on the unacceptable behavior and ethics of his own country, the US.
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Hideaway:
https://peakoilbarrel.com/open-thread-non-petroleum-may28-2024/#comment-775994
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LOL. Safe to say no one is topping that anytime soon.
Hideaway is this a long thought-out comment (based on timestamps the most you could have taken is 2.5 hours). Or do you just sit down and pump out guest essay worthy replies in five minutes?
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Thanks to a reader who prefers not to comment here for introducing me to this overshoot aware writer, Wendy Williamson.
https://www.wendywilliamson.com/is-the-usa-becoming-the-former-ussr
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I’m sorry to say it, but that author knows history from YT or TikTok videos xD
I switched to another tab after this funny statement:
“The Soviet Union was a vision that came from the Bolshevik, who represented the Russian people…”
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I have not followed Williamson long enough to vouch for her intelligence or integrity. She does lack an engineering degree which sets off warning bells. 🙂
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Another denial inducing climate change roundup today from Panopticon.
https://climateandeconomy.com/2024/06/01/1st-june-2024-todays-round-up-of-climate-news/
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During the initial rapid increase in fossil fuel use in the ’50’s and 60’s the extra CO2 didn’t seem to do much., the world temperature record shows a cooling during that period..
I’ve often wondered how much the cooling effect was from all the atomic weapons testing in the ’50’s, ’60’s and ’70’s and how long it lasted. It seems no coincidence to me that we had a ‘cooling’ period from the end of the second world war through to the mid ’70’s, when we did the above ground testing.
There were over 500 above ground nuclear blasts during those 3 decades.
Then of course there is a lag time for the masking effect to dissipate. Assuming there is always a lag before we get the full effects from any cooling change or warming change, I’m more a believer in James Hanson’s calculations of warming, though don’t bother following it as closely as others.
It’s bad, getting much worse, and there is nothing we can do about it, except nuke each other to bring on cooling, which will probably have it’s own downside complications…(sarc)….
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https://www.sciencenews.org/article/50-years-ago-scientists-puzzled-over-slight-global-cooling
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Never heard of cooling from nuclear weapons tests, might be a contributor.
I suspect the recent warming acceleration is primarily due to the huge ocean heat sink starting to fill up, plus a reduction in pollution that was blocking the sun.
My memory as a non-expert tracking this for 15 years is that James Hansen’s prediction accuracy far excceeds the IPCC and the majority of experts. I like that Hansen favors studying what actually happened in geologic history rather than relying mostly on computer models.
Hansen predicted a 0.5C+ near instantaneous jump if pollution stopped for any reason in his 2009 book.
More recently, Hansen warned that the warming rate forecast by the IPCC would be 50-100% low. Actual warming rate is running 100% higher than the IPCC expected. This demonstrates Hansen is conservative and not prone to exageration, nor influenced by politics to paint a happy story.
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What I find interesting is how some climate experts think a limited nuclear war between India and Pakistan would be enough to cool the climate a few degrees for a few years. It makes me ask if a hundred or so nukes could do that then surely the 500 above ground tests did ‘something’.
I put it all in the category of ‘we don’t really know until we find out by doing’, but the lower temps in the decades after WW2 must be more than just sulphate emissions, that were increasing before WW2 while the temperature went up.
I can easily buy a combination, most things are a combination of factors. Science and models though nearly always want to look at just one factor as multiple factors are too hard to model with feedback loops affecting each output.
We always search for simple solutions for complex issues, which is precisely why we are in the mess we are in..
—————
*Rob, are you having a problem with the picture/diagram, I can could change it, or second thoughts about the article??
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Over 500!!! Damn, I would have guessed only a dozen or so. That reminds me of another line I heard recently (can’t remember where I saw it, but I think it was an interview linked on this site) about how at the peak of the cold war there were over 80,000 nuclear weapons in the world. And now there are only 12,500 (as if we are supposed to be impressed).
No idea how much resources & energy goes into making one nuclear bomb, but I imagine its a ton. And it sounds like we have made about a 100,000 of these energy-wasting contraptions. Feels like 15% of all fossil fuels have just gone to this arena alone. And the fact that we have used only two on people and 500 on testing… tells me once again, that we dont know what the fu#k we are doing, and it would be best for everyone if humans just go away.
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Yes I’m a computer geek. This history of Napster brings back many memories. I was a Napster fan, and an early adopter of DivX used to compress a dvd onto single cd-r when hard drives were expensive, and I witnessed the “unbreakable” blu-ray encryption being cracked, and I was an early adopter of BitTorrent.
https://torrentfreak.com/napster-sparked-a-file-sharing-revolution-25-years-ago-250601/
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Yes, good trip down memory lane. I never messed with Napster but was into KaZaa and LimeWire. That first weekend after I figured out how to steal music, I must have burned about 100 blank cd’s. Kid in a candy store. Dopamine on steroids. BitTorrent eventually became my drug of choice. And by 2008 I was fully corrupted and now binge-watching these downloads for 6 hours every night.
Main takeaway of this article is how bad I messed up in life. I was in the perfect age bracket (23 yrs old in 1999). I should have been in the w00w00 chatroom tinkering around with this stuff. I could have been a millionaire. I was enrolled in a computer university in 1998. Dropped out after two semesters because it was too hard and I thought the cpu fad would never last. I’m such a visionary. 😊
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Nice detailed technical presentation by a nuclear war expert on the implications of the recent attack on Russia’s early warning radar system.
Russia has lost a few precious minutes to assess whether they are under nuclear attack and to decide if they should respond in kind.
There is a high probability that US political leaders do not understand these technical implications.
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The Chance of a nuclear war seems to be getting closer and closer. IMHO it probably will be an Extinction or very, very, near Extinction event for humans and many animal species. But, most people in the US are too clueless to see it coming and think if it does occur it’ll just end up with a Mad Max type of world. I personally find those movies complete preposterous and can’t enjoy them at all even if I attempt to suspend disbelief because where does all the energy come from, huh? A lot of Sci-fi is just no longer fun for me because I always ask the energy question and dilithium crystals just don’t cut it.;)
AJ
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I suffer from the same issue with sci fi now. There is basically no science in them.
The matrix ruined it for me when they ran the energy out of humans.
They should have stuck to the original idea which was that the AI lived in the matrix of human meshed minds. But dumbed down audiences wouldn’t get it.
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I was going through my comment history of this site and saw this line from a Feb 10th post: “I cant even watch my favorite sci-fi movies anymore. I get too hung up on the magical “energy” that is never discussed”
Watching sci-fi has been an issue with me for a while now. But its trickling into other genres. I was a big fan of shows like The Office and Arrested Development. Cant watch anymore. Anything with that “it’s cool to be dumb” type comedy. So maybe not energy related, but something to do with how we are just wasting everything. (I agree with AJ and the rest of you regarding nuclear war seeming more and more inevitable. Maybe it has something to do with that.)
p.s. Was going through my comment history in chronological order because it tells a good story. No doubt when I got here, I knew my shit. My introduction post proves it. But then you slowly see a confident pro-sustainable-cultures guy turn into an angry/desperate child. And then eventually back into a semi-confident MORT, MPP, EROEI kind of guy. Had me laughing. (I recommend everyone do the same with your own comments. Might tell a story or at the very least be funny)
p.s.s. Rob, if you ever have a pain in the ass newcomer like me again, save your energy and just point them to my paper trail. 😊
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https://www.counterpunch.org/2024/05/31/you-cant-turn-back-the-clock-on-genocide-200000-deaths-in-gaza/
/
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https://indi.ca/the-earths-lungs-and-our-smoking-problem/
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Dr. Jennifer Smith, a virologist with no conflicts of interest because she is paid by no one, and who was fired for following the science, discusses bird flu and covid.
One of the better interviews on this topic I have listened to. No hyperbole and a lot of wise well informed words.
“How can public health officials make good decisions and explain to the public what is going on when they do not understand virology.”
https://smithvirologist.substack.com/p/welcome-to-my-substack-blog
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This is the first interview /discussion I have watched on covid/ flu in ages, it was excellent. Based on what Dr. Smith said, I doubt if I would ever get another vaccine in my life (other than tetanus), and definitely no flu or mRNA vaccine. I’ll keep my supply of horse paste handy just in case. It was nice seeing an interview of someone with intelligence and integrity rather than self-serving lies.
AJ
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https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=aU0zQpxdUTE
I replied to the pinned comment.
Our Changing Climate is in denial about overpopulation, but that is probably just MORT in action.
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Insane but hilarious answers from Google AI
https://www.nbcnews.com/tech/tech-news/google-ai-im-feeling-depressed-cheese-not-sticking-to-pizza-error-rcna153301
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Paqnation above described his phases of awareness growth.
Joining in on this theme, for me, the phase I’m in now, is struggling to accept how incompetent, and in some cases evil, all of our leaders are.
Can you name one good and wise man or woman leading a western country?
Or one leader that is competent in anything that matters?
Or one of hundreds of health ministers that has atoned for what they did?
Endurance today with an excellent historical recap of what our leaders did to us BEFORE the mRNA transfections were rushed into production and coerced into billions.
He includes a quote I’ve added to the sidebar: “You can avoid reality, but you cannot avoid the consequences of avoiding reality.” – Ayn Rand
https://endurancea71.substack.com/p/a-reminder-of-where-were-at
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Of course there was a sane leader in the Western World!
BoJo ordered everyone to stay at home to save all grandmas, and made a quiz-party during the same time xD. Because he knew that knowledge is power!
Brits are now upset that their leader wasn’t following his own protocols. They are not able to connect the dots: BoJo knew from the very beginning that it’s BS…
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Can somebody explain the current oil market to me? I really don’t get it at the moment. What is causing the lack of demand? Or why do we have falling prices?
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I would guess one of the following two possibilities:
1) There’s an oscillation inherent to oil prices: The economy grows, which increases demand for oil, which increases the price of oil, which harms the economy, which lowers demand for oil, which lowers the price of oil, which stimulates the economy to grow again…
Layered under these oscillations is a steady upward trend in the cost of extracting oil due to depletion of low cost reserves, which imparts an upward trend in oil price, and an upward trend in the ratio of debt growth to real economic growth, to pay for the higher priced oil (see point 2).
2) We are due for a depression to correct an unprecedented bubble of debt and asset prices. It’s possible this correction has begun.
In summary, the economy may be temporarily slowing down, or may be slowing down for the long term.
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You need to read Gail on Our Finite World. She explains how:
Basically most of the oil pundits agree there is currently no price for oil that both consumers can afford and oil companies can make a profit from. It’s now too high for consumers and too low for oil producers.
Gail describes this much better than I can. https://ourfiniteworld.com/oil-supply-limits-and-the-continuing-financial-crisis/
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https://www.scientificamerican.com/article/could-an-industrial-prehuman-civilization-have-existed-on-earth-before-ours/
Could an Industrial Prehuman Civilization Have Existed on Earth before Ours?
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Thanks for the link. I am a sucker for this type of speculation. Fun to think about.
Prior to un-Denial I was much more open to the idea. And some other stuff I have read makes it seem like fossil fuels are a one-time-only attempt per planet.
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Hey there Chris,
Hope you’re going well. I appreciate what you said a couple days back about just riding this out and being “entertained” by our collective last civilisational gasps. We did have our moment in the sun and it is time for something new–H sapiens as a species does seem to be a one-trick pony in our core exploitative behaviour, however much we would like to think that we could have transcended it after thousands of years of playing out the same rise and fall and despite thousands of enlightened beings telling us that there is a way out of this cycle.
The on-going genocide of the Palestinians really nailed it for me. Now we know that given the opportunity, we would act just the same way the majority of Germans did, in turning a blind eye to what we know is morally unjust and thinking we can continue with our own lives. We will watch the slaughter and deplore it, but why don’t we have the courage to upend our lives by doing something radical in effort to stop it? It’s the same for the response to Covid. It seems the most radical thing a Westerner can do (and more power to the pro-Palestine youngsters at universities who still have heart and guts) is publicly protest but why are we not all walking out of our jobs or going on hunger strikes and the like? What does it take to really take a stand, to deliberately override every instinct of survival by choosing suffering and even death (like Aaron Bushnell, who conflagrated himself) for an ideal? The drive to protect ourselves and just keep living the lives we are accustomed, especially us in the West is overwhelming–we have too much to lose and we know we cannot survive outside our system. We are workers in the hive, and we are programmed for only the hive. Knowing this, we finally come to understand that we are not free beings and never have been, but that does not mean we do not still have choice and our internal world can be closer to what we want to make it. That’s why the Stoic philosophy is particularly attractive to me; I have succumbed to relinquishing any hope of changing the outer world but I can still find meaning, purpose and joy in life by improving my inner self.
This was totally not the direction I meant to take when setting out this reply, but apparently it was something I wanted to share and thank you all here for bearing with me. What I wanted to say was that I could relate to Chris’ attitude of seizing the day and enjoying whatever diversion appeals (as long as it doesn’t harm another at least intentionally and directly, because as we know just about all our actions affect another in energy and power balance) and his interest in the mysterious and speculative which I also share. I would like to introduce a Youtube channel that I believe you (and possibly others here) would really enjoy, if you don’t already know of it. It’s the Why Files?
https://www.youtube.com/channel/UCIFk2uvCNcEmZ77g0ESKLcQ
In it’s own words, “The Why Files is a channel for people who are fascinated (obsessed) with mysteries, myths, legends and conspiracies. We tell stories, seek the truth, and have a few laughs along the way.” The host and his co-host are just what we need for diversionary entertainment for these crazy times, I will say no more and let you discover for yourself (like I said, if you haven’t already). I am only new to finding it and have been binge watching assorted episodes, I think there are over 150 now, mostly short around 15-25 minutes. In fact, I guarantee you would dig it, just as you correctly predicted that I would like Cloud Atlas (I did, both book and movie).
Hope all are going well and forward. Thank you all again for being here and contributing to this space. Every day I can check in here is like an extra pat on the back for me to just keep going knowing that others who understand what we do are keeping going, too.
Namaste friends.
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Hey Gaia. Wonderful comment! And thanks for the Why Files. Forgot about that channel. A very entertaining method to waste time. Gonna head over there after I type this. 😊
You beat me to the punch with the whole “good german” thing. It’s been on my mind too. So disappointing that we can’t break the cycle. And of course, it all ties back to energy (god). This homerun streak that Hideaway has been on lately is helping me to see the bleakness and certainty of energy.
A quote (that is oozing with MORT) from Leave the World Behind sums up perfectly the dark cold truth that is only get gonna get stronger over time:
We fuck each other over all the time, without even realizing it. We fuck every living thing on this planet over and think it’ll be fine because we use paper straws and order the free-range chicken. And the sick thing is, I think deep down we know we’re not fooling anyone. I think we know we’re living a lie. An agreed-upon mass delusion to help us ignore and keep ignoring how awful we really are.
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Hi Gaia,
Those are profound and powerful words about our response to evil that deserve more light.
Please consider converting your paragraphs into a mini guest essay. You wouldn’t need to add or change much.
I would love to publish it. You have my email.
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https://thehonestsorcerer.medium.com/the-energy-transition-story-has-become-self-defeating-875076135425
The Energy Transition Story Has Become Self-Defeating. We need another kind of transformation more than ever.
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Good essay. B sees the problem but it will take a few years for him to catch up to us on the consequences.
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Who wrote this article, B or Hideaway? LOL
B, would you come out of the closet already and admit you hang out here. We would love to chop it up with you.
And I like this quote from the comment section: “Cheap fuel makes cheap food makes cheap people who waste cheap fuel.”
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Haha. you are so right! That last post by B sounded just like Hideaway, whom we know is the original and best for all things calculated out to the kJ! And as seen here first, accept no imitations! (not that the Sorcerer being honest is an imitation, but just consider that we’re all sincerely flattered for Hideaway) Not that being flattered for spelling doom for our civilisation is something to be exactly thrilled about…but our Hideaway is also Honest! Two can play that game!
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Hi Gaia, I think B writes more better than I do, with better grammar. English is his/her second language, where I only speak and write in Aussie English…
There are a few commenters on energy and future outcomes that now consider fast collapse is more likely and I think we are all feeding off each others ideas.
Of course all the same concepts appear to each of us when thinking in the logical order of how civilization arrived here and where it’s going.
I’ve been reading B’s comments since about number 15 or so, and read all his/her earlier ones as well. Credit where credit is due, this latest essay of B’s is really good… However all the cornucopians will ignore the mining aspect and claim we’ll just recycle everything, also ignoring the losses to trying to do this.
How’s sunny Queensland, we’ve had way too much sun down here and virtually no rain for months. It’s probably the driest Autumn we’ve have ever had here in the Otways in Southern Victoria and no end in sight…
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Hi there Hideaway,
I like your sense of humour! Can’t get “more better” than taking the mickey out of oneself! But seriously, I don’t think I’ve officially added my appreciation for everything you’ve elucidated here, thank you for your tireless (and perhaps to those who just can’t or won’t get it, tiresome) efforts. Since I’ve found this site, my learning of our collapse predicament has been exponential, (kinda like those hockey stick graphs we’re all too used to seeing now), but because of the coherency and camaraderie of this group, my depression curve hasn’t bottomed out but plateaued to a resigned acceptance (yes, checking in daily is a therapy session!).
Hope you and your family are all well. You must have some very interesting dinner table conversations with all of your knowledge, experience and forecastings now coming to pass. I hope you had a good harvest this autumn despite the drought. It was brutally dry all summer in Tassie as well, but thankfully we were spared bushfires and you, too. Here in Far North QLD it has been the complete opposite of Sunny QLD until just very recently, the rainy and mizzle-drizzle overcast days (6 weeks straight in my area) have finally broken with glorious sun and blue skies for the past 4 days, a record! I would take too much rain over drought any day; there’s nothing worse than seeing plants shrivel in the heat and trying to rely on pumps to irrigate with whatever water one has. I am assuming that on your homestead you have multiple sources of water and means to distribute it. Whatever the forecasts, we know all bets are off now as records tumble day after day.
All the best to you and look forward to your next guest posting.
Namaste.
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Hi Gaia, Family don’t want to hear about it, they all prefer to just ignore it, MORT clearly operating.
Weather wise I’m worried about next summer if we don’t get winter/spring rains, it will be a bad fire season. Mind you we live in one of the most reliable areas for annual rain possible. I’ll probably be complaining of too much rain in 3 months time if the usual happens. LOL
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Dear Hideaway,
I hope thou are feeling well.
In previous times thou replied on the EROI of nuclear, stating that the conventionally presented high EROI results are lacking in many parameters.
If plausible, I’d be delighted to observe thine reasoning with as many numbers as thou can and are willing to elaborate.
Alas, it is not a small task and as such I place no emphasis, concern nor demand on the matter.
However if thou would be feeling generous and thus willing, I would be grateful to understand more of the flaws of the presented claims of major conventional entities such as these:
https://world-nuclear.org/Information-Library/Energy-and-the-Environment/Energy-Return-on-Investment
Kind and warm regards,
ABC
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Hi ABC, this one is an easy one. From that report the Gen 11 PWR takes 75,000M3 of concrete and 36,000t steel to build, and the energy used in manufacturing that much concrete and steel is what they consider the energy input..
If you gave me $10B, much cheaper than something like the Vogtle reactor in the US, I could dump 75,000m3 of concrete and 36,000 tonnes of steel on your front lawn (it will be a tall stack!) and there you have a nuclear reactor and I’ve made a huge profit. According to WNA it will take zero energy to make this conglomeration turn out electricity..
In this country a cubic metre of concrete costs around $400 delivered, steel around $2,500/tonne delivered.
Somehow I think people (experts!), machining, trucks, factories, smelters etc are involved, yet the calculations the WNA uses, are just the energy content of the items themselves. Apparently, by their calculations there is zero energy involved in shaping the concrete and steel into exactly the shape you want that ends up being a nuclear reactor.
Zero energy cost of the humans involved yet I’m pretty sure those people had to be educated to do the jobs they do, they have to eat and move from education to home when young and learning, then have to eat and travel when working on the nuclear reactor. This is all energy that’s never counted in any of the EROEI studies.
It’s why the Vogtle reactor in the US cost $16.5B to build 1.15Gw, and not just the $120M the concrete and steel would cost. (plus a bit of copper, plastic and a few other bits and pieces).
The only real way to account for all the energy throughout the system spent on any energy producer is the dollar cost, as this takes into account the cost of the ‘experts’ involved.
As they say in the advertisements,, but wait there’s more!!
Say it takes 10 nuclear physicists to be involved in the planning, building and safe operating of a NPP (I have no idea the real number). We don’t just take 10 villagers out of north Sentinel Island and give them the job, with no training. Nor do we take 10 kids off the streets of Atlanta, Georgia and teach them to be nuclear physicists either.
We send all the kids to school, where any one year around 5-6% of then will do high school physics. Of these 1-2% might go on and get a degree with specialty in physics, or perhaps 5% of this smaller group specialize in nuclear physics. Of this smaller group 5% might go on to do a Phd. in nuclear physics.
Now we choose from this limited group of trained, capable nuclear physicists with doctorates, who will earn top dollars to be involved with our nuclear plant. We needed the entire system of complex civilization to function properly, just to produce the experts we’ll use in our ‘simple’ NPP. This is a massive energy cost of past accumulated cheap energy that is never accounted for, and even the wages of these people really underplays the energy used. Likewise for every other expert on the project, even the concrete pourers. The concrete needs to be poured exactly, not haphazardly like an amateur..
I use the dollar cost of the planning, construction, operating and maintenance costs over the life of any energy producer to represent the energy input, with overall possible production over the life as the output, then compare to the rough average of wholesale energy costs over the last decade (around $US40/Mwh). I use this latter cost per Mwh to work out the EROEI..
We still are getting (some not all) oil and gas costing us $US2.50/Mwh (this is refined to the consumer), Coal at $US5-$9/Mwh (as electricity to consumer through existing power lines), solar and wind around $US 34-35/Mwh (through existing power lines, but no back up power), Nuclear $66/Mwh (Hinkley PC in the UK, on expected final cost, using US actual costs of operating NPPs).
In a world of energy being around $US40/Mwh, the Saudi oil (some not all) cost of $US2.50/Mwh gives an EROEI of 16:1, which makes it wildly profitable in today’s world, which it is, while the NPP at 0.60:1, is actually using energy over it’s life and will require government subsidies over it’s life to keep operating. It’s costing them $66 for every Mwh produced, in a world of $40/Mwh cost.
Please excuse the sarcasm early on….
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It gets tiring when no one really gets it.
I admire you sticking with the fight, you certainly don’t pull any of your punches Hideaway.
Everyone I spoke to about the level of energy investment to get to where we are and keep it going just don’t see why it is an issue. ……………sigh.
I enjoy your very clear summations, don’t stop unless you have to.
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Dear Hideaway,
I appreciate thine swift and thorough reply.
Kind and warm regards,
ABC
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Kind of a strange essay from Dr. Tom Murphy today.
He does a fresh deep dive analysis of population trends and concludes there is uncertainty in what will happen but hopes population falls fast enough to avoid the worst.
Then he advises UN population demographers to revisit their assumptions in light of overshoot and imminent collapse.
Me thinks Murphy may be losing his mind like the rest of us aware people. 🙂
https://dothemath.ucsd.edu/2024/06/peak-population-projections/
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I think you’re right. I can picture Tom with his white lab coat on conducting experiment after experiment and always concluding with the same phrase: “Oh god, say it aint so!!! This can’t be right”
I believe Hideaway is correct with “I think we are all feeding off each others ideas”. And all of this is leading to a more guaranteed feeling that complete collapse is sooner rather than later.
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Wikipedia has some an article about projections of future populations of cities in 2100:
Lagos, Nigeria: 88.3 million
Kinshasa, DRC: 83.5 million
Dar es Salaam, Tanzania: 73.7 million
Mumbai: 67.2 million
Delhi: 57.3 million
Niamey, Niger: 56.1 million (currently, it has a population just above 1,000,000)
Kabul, Afghanistan: 50.3 million
Karachi, Pakistan: 49.6 million
New York City: 30.2 million
None of these projections seem plausible to me.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Projections_of_population_growth
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Hideaway:
https://peakoilbarrel.com/open-thread-non-petroleum-may28-2024/#comment-776246
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Well, don’t ask the U.S. State Department, they’re techno-optimists who are all in for artificial intelligence and, oh yes, we need to solve the climate crisis…
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Interesting interview with Pepe Escobar. He thinks it’s probable western leaders have already decided to start a hot war with Russia to reset their monetary system debt problems.
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I used to dismiss a lot of ideas that struck me as crazy as conspiracy theory sort of stuff. The problem for me now is, lately, a lot of crazy conspiracy theory sort of stuff/things keep turning out to be true.
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Dear Rob,
I hope thou are feeling well.
Perspectives relating to USA/NATO & Nordics.
– USA possessing sovereign soil & building bases etc.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=WU8SvWvE6AI
A speculative thought:
USA supposedly neutralised the Nordstream pipeline.
– Perhaps the aim was to create an excuse and thus secure infrastructure to the arctic for the supposed hydrocarbon reserves, if such findings are accessible and feasible?
If any of our dear visitors could enlighten us by dismantling such notions of the potentiality of arctic hydrocarbons, I would appreciate such a gesture.
Kind and warm regards,
ABC
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My knowledge of artic hydrocarbon reserves is poor. I believe cost of extraction will be very high and so exploitation will be limited.
I think US blew up Nordstream to:
1) harm Russia economically
2) block closer ties between Germany and Russia
3) export more LNG from US to Europe
4) confirm to the world they don’t give a shit about climate change by releasing a lot of methane into the atmosphere
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Hello everyone.
I left the comment below on Collapse2050’s newest essay. It is so obvious to me that un-Denial is where you need to be at in your journey. But upon further review, I don’t love my wording. Just wondering if any of you have a better elevator pitch for this site. I want to start leaving this type of message on the site’s I visit. Any help would be appreciated. Thanks.
“Hi Sarah. Another great essay. I want to recommend a little-known site that I found in January that has helped me immensely in seeing how we got here and why “we won’t do what is necessary”. It’s called un-Denial and was created years ago by Rob Mielcarski.
It focuses on the denial aspect of our species (which is never focused on enough anywhere else). He puts up a new guest essay about once a month. Everyday Rob and the audience post useful links and chat about all the various topics regarding collapse. He is an expert at detecting bullshit and will not hesitate to call you out if you are posting something with shady sources. But it is the audience that makes this site so good. So informed, aware, and polite.
As an added bonus, when you read some of the older essays, it’s not uncommon to see comments from the big names like Nate Hagens, Michael Dowd, Jack Alpert, etc. Also, after you start going on this site every day, it will become obvious to you that most of the good collapse writers come here. Tom Murphy, B aka the Honest Sorcerer, Erik Michaels, etc.
I highly recommend you and any of your readers come check it out. You will love being in the company of like-minded realists. It’s therapeutic. Here is the website manifesto:
un-Denial Manifesto: Energy and Denial – un-Denial
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Thanks for trying to promote the site.
This would be my elevator speech:
un-Denial exists to promote the Mind Over Reality Transition (MORT) theory by Dr. Ajit Varki that explains:
1) Why only one species on the planet believes in god.
2) Why that species dominates the planet with a brain much more powerful than any other species.
3) Why that species is capable of understanding fantastically complex topics, yet is unable to understand the simple fact of its own overshoot, nor the obvious implications of resource depletion and environmental destruction, nor the obvious action it should take in response.
There are two reasons that the MORT theory is important:
1) If you have not given up and still want to make the future less bad, then finding a way overcome our genetic tendency to deny unpleasant realities is the keystone to any progress.
2) If you have given up, then MORT will keep you sane by explaining the insanity that surrounds you.
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Excellent. Thanks. I’m gonna use that. Will probably still try to crowbar in a few names like Hagens and Dowd for the idiots like me who are impressed by big names. 😊
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I’ve spent 10 years promoting the work of all the “big names”.
Not one “big name” has promoted MORT, ever.
Not one person with a platform understands the significance of MORT.
This despite MORT being THE most important idea in the overshoot space.
It’s quite remarkable when you think about it.
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MORT is not solvable so fits neatly into all the other unsolvables that will just be ignored because there is no money in it. Unless you are making a shit tonne from this site………..😉
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Somehow the little group here overpowered MORT, so it is possible. We just need to figure out the recipe for our secret sauce.
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IMHO the 3rd question is completely wrong. A species doesn’t think, it’s an abstract! Some people understand overshot very well, some don’t. Some people understand abstract thinking, some don’t. Some people are musically gifted, some aren’t, etc.
That’s why I’m always opposed to statements like “We need our society to understand this and that…”.
I’ve an alternative explanation to our denial. Our brain doesn’t want to spend much energy on unpleasant things in general. That’s why we don’t like to smell shit, watch ugly things, touch unpleasant surfaces or think about collapse. We usually run away in such scenario. Very similar to how we use stereotypes, it’s always about minimizing the energy. Yes, in some cases stereotypes won’t apply to certain people/situations, but in most cases they will, which means less energy spent on analyzing/comparing/thinking.
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That’s exactly what I’m talking about. Those guys believe in progress, science, creativity and will never acknowledge the overshoot concept. It would require a massive energy expenditure just to stay sane. I know from my own experience. Even learning about the dollar hyperinflation is super scary. It will be temporary, right? Max 2 years like in Weimar, right? Hmm, but what was the exact reason the US detached their dollar from gold? Oh shit, no way… Most people will run away, because that requires less energy and won’t interrupt their homeostatis.
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Before I explain why I think your hypothesis is wrong would you please explain in one sentence the essence of Varki’s MORT theory? Every time I engage in these debates I later uncover that the person arguing against MORT does not understand it. I’d like us to avoid wasting time.
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Hello Rob,
I am wondering.
Which field in science would Varki theory belong too? Who are the top scientists in this field(s)? Are you in contact with them? Are they dissecting Varki’s theory? If not, why? Isn’t Varki’s theory, just one amongst a myriad theories, like the ones in physics, that most serious physicists don’t even want to spend time reading (and most of the times for good reasons)?
And, more importantly. Would you be able to let go of MORT? Without MORT, would the world seem unbearable to you? If yes, why?
And then, (regarless of the veracity of MORT) isn’t it kind of a personal fetish idea, a mental and emotional crutch? A nightlight.
I now find cephalophores most wise: heads full of far-fetched concepts are superfluous, even counter-productive, to joyful living.
🙂
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It would take several hours to answer your questions and nothing I can say will change your beliefs so that is not a good use of either of our time.
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Disappointing. But OK. Fine with me 🙂
Anyway, this was just an attempt to show the multitude of doors.
I’d like to stress that the word “belief” misrepresents what I was expressing. In fact, it’s the complete opposite direction: the destruction of all beliefs in favour of direct intuitive experience.
If I’d have a belief on this matter, it would be: if Varki’s theory is to be taken seriously, then it should be studied and discussed by more trained scientists (in the field of evolutionary anthropology? evolutionary psychology?). For the time being, I’d classify the theory in the same category as the aquatic ape hypothesis (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Aquatic_ape_hypothesis). The burden of proof does not lie with me here (I would be incapable of proving anything in this field anyway).
To clear any potential misunderstanding: I am not the Anonymous who started this conversation. He may want to resume the discussion in a totally different direction.
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You see the world in a way that my brain is incapable of.
You also seem happy and at peace with what’s happening in the world.
You are fortunate.
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I am replying here to your last comment down the thread, because we have reached the upper limit of this discussion.
Thank you Rob.
Yes, I am happy with what’s happening in the world. Whatever the outcome. Whatever the way it unravels. (Which doesn’t mean I don’t have problems which come and go and need to be solved, up and downs, fears and obsessions probably like many)
I so wanted to share with you the ticket out of thinker’s hell, out of humanist’s hell. It turns out to be hard. It all seems so simple now, that I don’t even remember what exactly triggered a change of state.
Maybe it’s the realisation that there is a limit to our ability to predict the future, or that the worst already happened (more that once) in the past (the Shoah, Native American genocide, …), or witnessing so many experts defending tooth and nail their own version of truth, or noticing that imagination of a dreaded outcome has nothing to do with the actual experience, or going through some hardships and realising that things just go on, or that the world is 1 without 2 (it is as it is and not some imaginary else), or seeing how tough life is on most people yet they somehow manage, or that it’s always all an experience, good or bad, it’s entertaining (like I am the station in front of which trains come and go and I have no agency on which type of trains or the schedule. So I might just as well enjoy the show), or realising the shallowness of the myths that have been stacked one upon each other (by religion, by science, by the self, by the mind, …) and for which we deploy so much fervour and energy.
Maybe it’s simply the recurring small encounters with beauty, with life. Gardening does that for me, fearlessly exchanging with people to reach the depths and truth of an aspect of their mental shape too (as we are doing now), or just greedily inhaling every small details reaching my small field of consciousness.
Or, it may just be getting bored of negativity.
As much as I had wished to share this state, it seems not to be really communicable. It will dawn on you, I am sure. And some day, you will be suddenly laughing out loud in the middle of the fields. If anybody sees you then, they will think all that worrying ended up getting the best of you. 🙂
Anyway, thank you for finding and periodically bringing to our attention smart people doing original thinking on this topic of collapse. I am grateful for your clear eyesight, your ability to separate the chaff from the wheat. Especially, it has been a great support during covid.
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Hi Charles, that was very helpful and clear.
I think I finally understand your philosophy and I can see its wisdom for living a life with as much happiness as is possible.
Believe it or not, I actually do what you recommend a significant amount of the time. The voice in my head occasionally gets loud and my anger boils up but most of the time I just live the way I want to live, try to ignore what others do and think, and take pleasure in small things. I also feel like I’m a train station watching.
Your advice for aware people here could be copy and pasted with a little introduction to make a great guest essay if you are interested.
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Again backtracking, because we have reached the mirror’s edge.
Thank you for proposing to publish my previous comment as a new guest essay. I am unsure it will rouse much interest in your readership. But, yes, feel free to do so.
If you like, you can add this last paragraph as a form of conclusion: Redemption, betterment, moksha, liberation, self-realization, illumination, enlightedment, progress, self-improvement, planet rescue… As if the world could be any different than it is. As if it could be improved upon. As if we had control. As if the dynamic of life were a math problem with an optimum solution. If you meet the Buddha, kill him. I say burn them all, Fahrenheit 451 style: Buddha, Jesus, Darwin, Einstein, Malthus, the Meadows. They clutter our souls. Time for renewal. Snap out of any form of idealism, absolutely any kind of indoctrination. Now the earth was formless and empty. Go back there and start anew.
I could also probably expand the previous comment more. I could try to recount my encounter with non-duality. I could list some of the leads I followed: Ramana Maharshi, UG Krishnamurti, Swami Prajnanpad, Ramesh Balsekar, Paul Hedderman. And, how one day, the whole mental edifice crumbled. The whole indoctrination of science, layers upon layers painstakingly acquired during years of learning, repetition and practice, nothing but rumbles. Not to be replaced.
Would it be understood (comparing science to a belief system is anathema to many: sometimes the only way to notice we are wearing a pair of glasses is to try wearing another one)? Would it be of any use? Isn’t one of the points that no generalization is possible, that every one’s experience is fiercely unique.
For the entry picture of the essay, if you are OK, you can put this video: https://www.youtube.com/shorts/lDgBUxt728k. I know, not a very intellectual video, but a pretty good depiction of our quite comical situation: getting a free ride thinking we are in charge. To close the post, this video is as nice as anything else: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=rkTZ7lAvU6Q.
As for the title, maybe “Waiting for the Barbarians”, as a reference to https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Waiting_for_the_Barbarians_(poem) and https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Tartar_Steppe.
Or alternatively, “Collapse: doomer’s jubilee”, in reference to https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Jubilee.
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Let me add: all the apparent insanity in the world does not prevent me from playing my part the way I wish. (And maybe it’s quite the opposite: one needs black to see white and white to see black. Contrast)
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OK, here we go…
At some point in human evolution two gene modifications happened at the same time: mortality salience and denial or reality.
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I’m glad we did this. That’s completely wrong.
Here’s my summary:
Here’s the best paper by Dr. Ajit Varki, co-originator of the MORT theory:
https://link.springer.com/chapter/10.1007/978-3-030-25466-7_6
Here’s the best video on MORT:
If you want to continue this, please come back with a revised single sentence summary of MORT.
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