It Bears Repeating: Best of Overshoot Essays

A year ago Steve Bull assembled a best of compilation of essays titled It Bears Repeating from writers that discuss human overshoot.

Steve contacted me and I contributed my un-Denial Manifesto that launched this site.

Other writers and their essays in the compilation are:

  • Michael Dowd – Forward & Afterword
  • Steve Bull – That Uncertain Road, Part 1
  • David Casey – Preparing
  • Alice Friedemann – Net Energy Cliff Will Lead to Collapse of Civilization
  • Kevin Hester – Militarism’s Role in The Sixth and Possibly Last ‘Great’ Extinction
  • Tristan Sykes and Dr. Kate Booth (Just Collapse) – Talk Collapse for a Just Collapse
  • Erik Michaels – Bargaining to Maintain Civilization
  • Dr. Simon Michaux – Challenges and Bottlenecks for the Green Transition
  • Dr. Tim Morgan – Written in the Skies
  • Dr. Bill Rees – The Human Eco-Predicament: Overshoot and the Population Conundrum
  • Mike Stasse – Turning Marginal Land Into Fertile Soil
  • Tim Watkins – The Narrative Problem After Peak Oil
  • Max Wilbert – Climate Profiteers Are the New War Profiteers
  • Connie Barlow – The Legacy of Catton’s 1980 book, Overshoot

Steve recently contacted me again asking for suggestions of writers that might contribute to a second volume of It Bears Repeating. This triggered me to search for volume 1 on this site, and for reasons I cannot explain, it seems I never provided a link to the original compilation.

This post is intended to correct my error.

You can download the compilation here.

It Bears Repeating V1Download

235 thoughts on “It Bears Repeating: Best of Overshoot Essays”

  1. I thought this was a nice little case study on how and why modernity is unwinding.

    Low cost airlines are failing because their operating costs are going up because:

    • rising fuel cost
    • climate change disruptions to schedules
    • failures of advanced tech complexity intended to increase efficiency

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    1. I suspect that another early casualty of peak oil will be ultra-long haul flights.
      https://theconversation.com/bucking-the-trend-is-there-a-future-for-ultra-long-haul-flights-in-a-net-zero-carbon-world-183212

      While it might seem like a single flight would produce less emissions, the opposite is true.

      The most efficient flights (based on fuel burned per kilometre) are those between 3,000 and 5,000km, depending on aircraft type. By contrast, non-stop ultra long haul flights produce more carbon emissions than two shorter journeys with a stop-over.

      The reason is simple physics. Planes flying ultra long distances must carry lots of fuel, especially at take-off, to cover the later stages of the journey. For the new planes Qantas has ordered, it takes about 0.2kg of fuel to transport a kilo a thousand kilometres.

      Given the long distance, this means it’s not a very efficient use of fuel. Not only that, but the high fuel load means there is less space for passengers.

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    1. Found this comment on that site. And even though it has the tone of “everything is fine, quit listening to the doomers”, I can still relate to it. What a waste of my time if I’m here 20 years from now still banging the drum about overshoot. No goddamm way!!, but I’m sure that’s the same thing you lifers were saying 20 years ago. The perfect time to start learning about overshoot would be about a year prior to full collapse.

      Jerry McManus on July 17, 2024 at 5:02 pm

      “In my darker moments I shudder to think we will be having the same conversations and reading the same headlines in 20 years. Except everything will be just a little shittier than it is now.

      That’s basically what happened 20 years ago. I first learned about Peak-Oil in 2004. I was immediately hooked. All those graphs showing everything falling off of a cliff…, any day now!

      In the years that followed everyone who had anything to say about it, other than sneers of “doomers” and “neo-malthusians”, anyone who thought they were being serious about it, they just played into the echo-chamber and parroted what everyone wanted to hear: Collapse any day now! No way we make it past 2015!

      Eventually, after being turned on to the much larger and MUCH more long-term predicament of global ecological overshoot, I got around to reading what geologist M.K. Hubbert actually said about oil production and Lo! Behold! It turns out all the peak-oilers had been blowing smoke out of their hat the entire time. A gigantic, ridiculous, and utterly futile exercise in curve fitting. Total waste of everyone’s time. Big surprise.

      Now, 20 years later, not only has everything NOT collapsed, here we are reading all the same headlines and having all the same conversations we did 20 years ago. Except everything is just a little shittier…”

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      1. Printing more money than any of us imagined possible made all of us wrong on the timing.

        But did that money printing improve or worsen the future?

        Did we do anything useful with that printed money?

        I think extending and pretending will end up harming more people than had we allowed the market to force us to live within our means.

        We’ll see. Maybe I’ll be wrong again.

        What do others think?

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        1. As an atheist why do you care about suffering? It’s just a chemical reaction, right? What are your feelings when it comes to decomposition or photosynthesis then?

          The first half of “The Limits to Growth” describes what’s wrong with the current situation. The second half though is about creating one world government that will ration everything – of course – for the common good. Why is that?

          I think atheists don’t give a f*ck about other people, they are just afraid about losing their own status/lifestyle, and thus they position themself as the saviour of mankind, non-stop talking about reducing suffering, building heaven on earth, etc

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        2. Hi Rob,

          I totally agree with you Rob. I believe, the future will show “we” should have acted more cautiously. I believe many people will regret and despair. And it will be too late. They probably won’t even understand “the” cause (the same way we doomers do). And then they will just go on being people 🙂

          But, that’s all the “idealist” part in me talking. I think this part is not wise. It is asking “too much of reality”. Or rather it is expecting reality to be more like it wished to be. And that is not so.

          For the best: if reality were always as we expected it to be, there would be no means to grow, learn, discover, live.

          I try to turn the question upside-down. Because, the way we are framing things makes us somewhat lunatics. Rather than asking how reality should be to correspond to my ideals, I try to ask myself how I should respond to every situation as it presents itself, while not betraying who I feel I am. And, that’s quite hard, not the path of least resistance, but fulfilling.

          I hope what I just said made some sense 🙂

          Also, on a different level. I believe there is an individual reason each doomer is a doomer. This situation strikes us, resonates with us, because of something we have to uncover inside of us. That needs to be worked on. Because, if we are frank with oneself: why should we burden ourselves with the future fate of humanity? What’s the connection? Why do we care?
          While, we could just eat, poop and die blissfully 🙂

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    2. Yeah I saw all the headlines he posted, but the fools just keep that stock market chugging along. I’ll probably be dead before I can tell my wife I told you so, as she is one of the believers in a perpetual future of getting richer and richer.

      AJ

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      1. Haha. That comment about your wife reminds me of Ralph Kramden from The Honeymooners.

        “Alice, If you don’t believe me about overshoot… One of these days. Pow! Right in the kisser.” (don’t do it AJ 😊)

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  3. One of Indi’s best essays in a while. He’s leaning heavy into Joseph Tainter. My favorite part was this story from Socrates:

    The story goes that Thamus said much to Theuth, both for and against each art, which it would take too long to repeat. But when they came to writing, Theuth said: “O King, here is something that, once learned, will make the Egyptians wiser and will improve their memory; I have discovered a potion for memory and for wisdom.” Thamus, however, replied: “O most expert Theuth, one man can give birth to the elements of an art, but only another can judge how they can benefit or harm those who will use them. And now, since you are the father of writing, your affection for it has made you describe its effects as the opposite of what they really are. In fact, it will introduce forgetfulness into the soul of those who learn it: they will not practice using their memory because they will put their trust in writing, which is external and depends on signs that belong to others, instead of trying to remember from the inside, completely on their own. You have not discovered a potion for remembering, but for reminding; you provide your students with the appearance of wisdom, not with its reality. Your invention will enable them to hear many things without being properly taught, and they will imagine that they have come to know much while for the most part they will know nothing. And they will be difficult to get along with, since they will merely appear to be wise instead of really being so.”

    How AI Is A Sign Of Collapse — indi.ca

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  4. Another mind numbing discussion with Daniel Schmachtenberger about why every dimension of human overshoot is accelerating, and why everything we are doing to try to make the future less bad is not helping, or is actually making the future worse, and not one word on the one thing we could do that would improve every dimension of overshoot, namely population reduction policies.

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    1. LOL. Had a feeling this was gonna be posted soon. I always enjoy listening to Daniel. He gets me thinking. 

      But… with my new fire focus, I couldn’t even make it 20 minutes. I can absolutely understand all the criticism about him. He just wants to talk in circles about complex things that will never change. (But I still like him)

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        1. All the stuff he comes up with about how AI is going to take over, is just ridiculous, very unwise. So far I have not been able to get AI to ‘think’ at all, just regurgitate lots of information quickly and often repetitively over something I’ve just dispelled!!

          As already stated, AI relies totally on normal supply and energy chains of fossil fuels.

          One aspect DS did raise is something I’ve often spoken of, how no new energy resource has replaced any fossil fuel resource. Even the early hydro electricity plants were just additive to the total energy used.

          I often ‘discuss’ the future with AI (Googles Gemini), and it has built in recycling, renewables, circular economy, sustainable etc no matter what evidence you bring up. It’s like talking to believers in the POB forum. It has all those terms programmed into it, so evidence doesn’t change it’s mind, which is what would happen if there was any intelligence in there.

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              1. Yes, that’s an excellent comment by Gaia.

                I am very proud of the quality of comments on this site by our little international band of misfits.

                We have representatives from Germany, France, Australia, New Zealand, USA, Canada, and ???.

                I think we’re a cut above in civility and awareness and diversity and intelligence.

                What we lack in traffic we make up for in quality.

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    2. Many people will call you slurs like “Malthusian”, “Eco-fascist” or “Anti-human” if you openly call for population reduction.

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      1. I wear the term Malthusian as a badge of honor, when anyone calls me that. I usually respond with something like “so infinite growth on a finite planet is more believable is it?”, which usually pulls up the person suggesting it..

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  5. There is one number that impresses me more than any other: 100,000,000.

    That’s the number of barrels of oil we consume per day.

    The biomass required to produce that volume is unimaginable for my brain.

    100,000,000 * 159 * 365 = 5,803,500,000,000 liters per year!!!

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    2. Good trip down memory lane. I was so hung up on this number for the first few months of my overshoot journey. I always focused on it in my emails to my inner circle. Here is one overly dramatic example (after explaining where oil comes from, how old, etc):

      “And when you look at what humans do with this sacred ancient sunlight, its very easy to teeter between the extremes of sobbing uncontrollably and laughing hysterically. Worldwide, we use over 100 million barrels of oil every single fucking day to keep this evil, phony, materialistic, human supremacy machine called civilization, running. Destroying mother earth and her children every step of the way.”

      LOL. Most of my old writings to them is seething with that type of anger and disgust. 

      Another crazy stat is USA consumes 20% of those 100 million barrels (with 4% of total population). Only one country comes close to that much consumption. China at 13% (with 18% of the population). USA is still living large off the prize of winning the race for the Old World to create the first major empire in the New World.

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  7. Sarah Connor explains that she also doesn’t have anyone in real-life that she can discuss overshoot with.

    https://www.collapse2050.com/the-first-rule-of-collapse/

    The poly-crisis is the most important issue facing humanity. Not the election, not the Middle East, not inflation. These issues are all intertwined, but the driving forces behind almost all of our current and future problems – war, polarization, wealth disparity, etc. – are biosphere collapse and resource scarcity.

    So why don’t I talk about it, despite my writing on this website and Twitter? I don’t discuss the state of civilization much with friends, family or colleagues – this is precisely why I began writing about it.

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    1. The comments over there are really good too. When is 2050’s audience gonna trickle over here and start getting engaged. Both sites are pretty much identical with knowledge level. Just missing the priority level of denial, which we would gladly and kindly show them the way😊. (and then they can catch up to us). Funny if un-Denial has a reputation. Without a doubt it would be the “bad boy” or “gothic” rep.

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      1. Denial is by far the most interesting aspect of overshoot because the problems are huge and obvious, yet almost everyone aggressively denies them.

        It’s very strange that more people are not exploring genetic denial.

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  9. Good one today by Hideaway…

    https://peakoilbarrel.com/open-thread-non-petroleum-july-10-2024/#comment-778475

    OFM … “Arguing for no growth economic policies in the real world is pretty much equivalent to a political death wish.”

    I fully agree, that no-one will ever have degrowth as a policy, no-one would ever get elected on that type of platform, while others are promising growth forever, which is precisely why the suffering and collapse will be way worse than it needs to be.

    Solar, wind and batteries are not renewables, they are replaceables or rebuildables and are no answer to anything. They have a limited life, so in 10 years for batteries, 20 years for wind and if lucky 30 years for solar, they need replacing, with more digging up of minerals from lower grades on average..

    Did you see up thread how the largest battery recycling company in Australia is charging $5.63/kg to take old lithium batteries? For average Joe it will be far cheaper to dump batteries than to recycle them, so the recycling rates will be much lower than most expect. It’s the only way the company can make money as selling the recycle scrap is not profitable!!

    Only by destroying the last of the rainforests and natural areas to gain access to all the remaining higher ore grade bodies of every metal, and by using up all the remainder of the fossil fuels would we be able to build all the HVDC transmission super grid and solar and wind out the ying yang for the whole world, then what?, as it all crumbles over the next couple of decades??

    It’s not the fortune it costs, it’s the immense quantity of materials and energy needed to build it, that’s the problem. Plus of course it’s all built with fossil fuels, and so will the next generation, if there are any fossil fuels to build it..

    BTW, the first generation of wind farms are up for replacement or rebuilding only a couple of hundred kilometers from here. They are all going to be torn down with diesel equipment, including the foundations, which will be an enormous operation, powered by fossil fuels. There are currently zero plans to replace them, mainly because the wholesale price of electricity goes negative when the wind is blowing and sun shining here.

    We have lived in a world of growing energy availability, as did our parents and grandparents. The downslope will be vastly different as there will NOT be the energy available to rebuild anything!! People everywhere will be scrambling just to survive.

    The complexity of all our energy systems is so massive, relying totally upon 6 continent supply chains, that when it all collapses, that’s it, modern civilization is over. There will not be the fuel available to take an old truck around to old cities and grab scrap metal to take to smelters, as the smelters will not have the fuel to operate!!

    None of it can get going as people everywhere are starving as farms wont have fuel and over 80% of the populations in developed countries are in cities. There is no fuel to take them to the country and build them anywhere to live. Without a grid in operation and no fuel available because all the easy to access oil as used up, rebuilding anything will become a non starter..

    It doesn’t matter how much willpower or organisation there is, as the only oil available will require really complex technology to gain access to, the type of complexity we have today with high level computers helping to operate horizontal drill bits 10,000 ft below ground in a very narrow precise area, but wont have after collapse.

    There will be no, simple to gain access to, energy available, with the remaining forests being shredded by people to just keep warm.

    OFM …” What we have to do, in the here and now, is come up with and implement ways to save as much of the living environment as we can, while stretching out our limited and depleting one time gifts of nature such as oil, natural gas, and metal ores, etc.”

    Except none of that is happening.. We keep using excuses to build another Thacker pass, or rip up more rainforest in an effort to make more renewables available. That’s what’s actually happening, so by the time the renewable world is ‘built’, there will not be much of a natural environment left.. There will never be enough renewables either, as building MORE always requires a higher energy use to do, which raises the base level needed in civilization, so MORE needs to be built, meaning destroying more of the natural world to do it. It’s a never ending feedback loop.

    The simple reality is that it all ends when the available energy declines at an accelerating rate, as the lower energy will feedback upon itself making less energy available the following year, no matter what the energy is.

    Another simple reality is that drilling a hole in the ground to gain access to another million cuft of gas every day for a decade or 2, to be sent into a nearby pipeline requires a fraction of the energy needed to build a solar farm of equivalent energy output (hundreds of MWh plus GWh of batteries !!).

    Of course the gas provides energy 24/7, every day including middle of winter when the sun doesn’t shine, plus, provides the building blocks for many products that are essential for the modern world.. The solar doesn’t do either of these while taking so much more energy and materials to build!!

    We get to the stage where fossil fuels are too difficult to gain access to as depletion sets in, plus destroy the climate in the process, so they are NOT an answer. But neither is using lots more fossil fuels, to build out a system of lots of eventual statues after a short life span.

    We should have had population control and a simplification of everything decades ago, but instead chose as a species to use up every available resource possible to reach the current level of plague phase, where the only option is to reduce numbers by one or 2 orders of magnitude fairly quickly. We can chose to do it or let nature do it to us.

    We have been choosing to let nature do it to us, by denying that unlimited growth on a finite planet is not possible, nor was ever possible. Because of entropy and dissipation, we always need MORE materials from lower grades in even a steady state economy. Materials from lower grades means more growth in energy use, just to remain stable, which is impossible in the long term…

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    1. https://peakoilbarrel.com/open-thread-non-petroleum-july-10-2024/#comment-778566

      OFM, It’s like you have fallen for all the propaganda…
      “We’re not going to run out of sun, or wind.”

      It has nothing to do with the sun or wind..

      It has everything to do with the building of the machines and entropy of the already built. Solar panels do NOT last forever, they are machines that suffer from entropy like everything else in the universe, they need to be replaced over time as they stop working!! We do all the mining, processing and manufacture of all the components with fossil fuels.

      What do you suggest happens at the end of life when we can’t build any new ones due to the depleted nature of fossil fuels??

      OFM ……”It will be necessary to subsidize a lot of conventional generating capacity, so as to keep it ready to go, but only as needed….. at night, when the skies are cloudy, anytime there’s not enough wind and solar juice to meet demand.”

      So your solution is for a much more inefficient system, that will be much more expensive in terms of money, and energy to build and maintain, that still totally relies on fossil fuels anyway, a depleting resource that is eventually leaving us.

      OFM ….”But given that we can shift loads, and find ways to live as well using less electricity per capita”
      How does this work if you have to constantly replace machines made from metals that come from lower grade ore bodies on average? If you do the hand wave of, “we’ll recycle everything”, please show the energy calculations on how that is possible including ALL steps, using just electricity as the input source of energy, not fossil fuels.

      It becomes increasingly obvious to me that the ‘renewable’ future only works if everything else throughout modern civilization happens in a business as usual manner, which includes increasing use of fossil fuels. A world of less fossil fuels, means less energy for mines, less energy for processing and less energy for transport of everything.

      Competing interests for this lower energy means higher prices for EVERY sector.
      Renewables, batteries, EVs become more expensive as they are extremely energy intense machines to build. So does every other type of machine, Nuclear power plants become much more expensive to build, so do coal fired power stations, or gas turbines, plus ships, tractors and trucks.

      It all gets extracted and built with cheap fossil fuels, none of it gets built with just electricity, the underlying assumption seems to be “so long as we have fossil fuels to do all the hard bits”..
      In the long term it can’t work and in the short term it means increasing fossil fuel use to accelerate the building of ‘renewables’. In other words, it’s all an excuse to appease the public that ‘something’ is being done to ameliorate CC’, when in reality it’s just more BAU until it all collapses..

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  11. Dinner last night with a family member that I was very close with until covid revealed how we process evidence differently. 😠

    She was recently sick with a strange virus that caused a persistent cough. Her doc said lots of people have it, but it’s not covid. 🙄

    Rintrah has a fresh idea today on why they pushed the “mRNA miracle” so hard. It’s consistent with my recollection of how worried friends and family responded when they were told that a method to fast track the testing of a new vaccine had been found that did not compromise safety.

    https://www.rintrah.nl/youre-not-crazy/

    Another week, another 437 people who left this world prematurely. There is no heatwave going on, so that’s not it. It has been steadily building up the past few weeks, spiking now.

    We can see very clearly what it correlates with: SARS2 RNA in wastewater.

    Any moron can figure out that if you vaccinate people against a virus like this, you will select steadily more virulent variants. Normally mild infections induce no antibody response at all, so the population would find itself discriminating against virulent variants.

    Right now, your population is discriminating against variants that have not yet shortened the immunogenic loops in their N-terminal Domain and added glycans to it. Good luck with that.

    That’s why you can also see that the excess mortality steadily grows worse every year. In fact, if you would correct the numbers to account for the deficit mortality you’re supposed to be seeing, you would realise how ugly the picture really is.

    Everyone else is now busy chasing the LSWM substack bux, including van den Bossche apparently. But everything I post on this topic is free and will remain so.

    The one place where they can’t cover up the excess mortality with statistical trickery is in young children.

    Here they run into two problems:

    -The kids don’t result in deficit mortality later on.

    -The kids don’t have immunity from previous infections so the rising virulence becomes apparent.

    What bails them out here, is that when you zoom in on any demographic with few baseline deaths, the signal tends to be drowned out by the noise.

    Tern on Twitter has posted about this, others have too.

    I don’t have much new to say on this. I could sperg about every single detail, but that can come later.

    But it’s therapeutic to mention and i think it’s useful for everyone else, who feels like they’re being gaslighted. If you feel like something is wrong, yes, that is because something is wrong.

    They didn’t solve it, they made it worse.

    I don’t know why they peddled these vaccines. Lately, looking back at some conversations with some insufferable friends of friends, I think the answer may be simple: The vaccine was the magical ceremony necessary to get the most insufferably bourgeois middle-class morons to consent to ending the unsustainable idiotic lockdowns that were killing droves of poor people in the 3rd world and causing crops to rot away unharvested in the fields in countries like Australia.

    But yes, if you were wondering this is why everyone is coughing in the middle of summer (including the people in the seat in front of me), that’s why you get weird headaches in the area above the nose, that’s why you feel more tired than usual. Your immune system is forced on high alert again, in the middle of summer.

    You’re not crazy, you’re not a hypochondriac, they just screwed up and now decide to cover it up.

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    1. In the comments, Rintrah reminds us why Trump is just as guilty as Biden.

      All this unironic fellating of Trump annoys me.

      He pushed for a catastrophic experiment that killed millions.

      And he has never shown any remorse for it.

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  12. Chris Martenson thinks he’s found evidence there were two people shooting at Trump.

    I have not listened to it and do not have an opinion.

    A very big deal if he’s right. Embarrassing if he’s wrong.

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    1. I made it 15 minutes. I didnt bail because I hated it. He was actually convincing me. I bailed because I realized I was falling into the JFK trap. This is gonna distract the masses for a long time (with lots of wasted energy).

      Watched Home Alone 2 (1992) the other night. Forgot he was in it (just a quick cameo). It got me thinking about his trajectory. So crazy and funny how when our civilization ends, this dude is the most famous person in all of human history. I’m sure he was already high on the list prior to last week. Our assassination fascination will cement him at #1. 

      If I still despised everything about the way our story ends, this would be a tough pill to swallow (who am I kidding, I still do a little). But if this con man (and just overall bad person) ends up #1 at our peak population and the beginning nosedive off the cliff, it will actually make sense considering how inefficient, upside down, and wrong we were about everything that matters. (because of broken energy constraints)

      He’s got it locked up at this point. It can only play out three ways. He wins (already has it won) and serves his 4 years. He’ll be the leader of his party for life. Everyone clamoring for his endorsement and all the media looking to get his “expert opinion”. Or “they” get really desperate and try to make the federal convictions disqualify him. Or maybe Martenson is right and “they” will be successful next time. 

      Win, win, win for Donalds popularity legacy, which is all he cares about. (I do still let it get to me. But pick any US president from Reagan on and its the same type of horrible personality traits. Trump just doesn’t give a shit about hiding it, which is the only cool thing about him)

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      1. I think Chris Martenson is out to lunch with this one. On the surplusenergyeconomics site of Tim Morgan, I think they have it mostly correct, with the game plan of TPTB, which seems to be, extend, pretend, and distract away from the big issues of Energy, climate, pollution, extinctions and overall ecosphere health.

        The whole Trump saga is a distraction to stop people looking at the big picture of what’s going on, and CM has fallen for it.

        Instead of concentrating on what he’s good at; being peak everything, which wont pay the bills, by going well off course he will attract attention as just another crazy conspiracy theorist, which might get him a few more subscribers, but less attention in the mainstream..

        Nate Hagens has the opposite problem by deliberately trying to stay mainstream, he doesn’t cover the full story of how bad the situation really is, just sneaks around the edges. If Nate found the same evidence or whatever Chris has, he would just ignore it as he is extra careful to be not labelled a CT.

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        1. #283: The seductive risk of financialization

          Hideaway:

          Thanks Joe, you beat me to it. If money is stalled due to lack of trust, with the financial system seizing up. then there is no way for the corporate megafarms to pay workers, or buy fuel to transport food to mega factories, that have also closed due to inability to purchase anything, or pay for workers or energy.

          The entire system very quickly melts down and we are 9 meals away from anarchy.

          For this reason alone, I expect governments will just instruct central banks to keep printing every time there is a hint of trouble in the financial system in the attempt to keep everything afloat, which will sort of work with inflation in everything while the median person continues to get poorer.

          In other words continuation of what we’ve had for the last few decades, until oil that is the lubricant that drives the monetary system starts falling in production volumes at an accelerating decline. The inflation will become too high, the defaults will accelerate as interest rates also increase, despite extra money printing.

          The financial chaos unwinding will be a civilization simplification as the highly complex nature of every subsystem unravels at the same time. In other words collapse. The 6 continent supply chain cannot work without the financial system operating normally. Every factory, mine and modern farm relies upon this complexity, so parts and fuel all become unavailable very quickly in our JIT (Just In Time) world.

          Sorry Dr Tim, but financial collapse means total collapse of modernity, and with over 8 billion ravenous humans on the planet, it will get very ugly very quickly, hence why the financial games will continue for as long as possible, despite not making any sense and the unpayable nature of all the debt being obvious to everyone.

          Of course I assume that it’s the rapid decline in oil that creates the chaos/collapse and ‘they’ don’t decide to nuke each other first….

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        2. Yesterday’s episode of the Grant Williams podcast is worth a listen to understand how big money (and central bankers) believe they can keep the system growing by printing money without blowing it up. FYI, I think both Williams and his guest Gromen are overshoot blind.

          My guess is they’ll be successful until oil supply starts falling in an amount too big to hide.

          In episode eight of Shifts Happen, Luke Gromen returns to discuss the current fiscal situation and its implications for rates trading, explaining how his views on the fiscal situation have made him unpopular among rates traders, as his predictions suggest that their industry may become obsolete. We also discuss the possibility that policymakers either don’t understand the situation, refuse to acknowledge it, or are too deep in to change course, and Luke also highlights the need for a new benchmark for pristine collateral, which he believes will be gold. Also under the microscope is the latest CBO report, which shows the need for a “super bubble” in the US, and Luke offers an explanation as to why he believes a recession in the US is unlikely. Finally, we conclude by looking at the potential outcomes of the current fiscal situation, including the possibility of retrenchment and reshoring or a dangerous escalation leading to nuclear war. Plenty to think about here with Luke once again on top form.

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        3. LOL, no sooner do I write the above and Nate’s newest ‘Frankly’ is out, and sure enough it’s more of the usual, and steering well clear of the week’s ‘events’ in the US.

          He talks “Reality”, then makes sure he skirts around the elephant in the room of massive overpopulation in total overshoot of carrying capacity.

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  13. Lots of hard work in high temps at the farm this week.

    The blueberries are ripe so I needed to get the electric fence tuned up to keep the bears out. I flail mowed both sides of the fence on the entire perimeter using the BCS walk behind tractor. Then went down both sides of the fence again with a blade installed on the gas strimmer to cut the grass and weeds underneath the fence. Then fixed all the shorts from falling branches, etc. Voltage is back up to 9.5kV on the entire perimeter which means we should be in good shape.

    My crops are producing well. I’ve got more beets, carrots, swiss chard, basil, and cherry tomatoes than I can eat.

    The farm has extra cooler space so I plan to bulk store carrots and beets.

    Tomorrow I’m going to try making a big batch of refrigerator pickled beets. My plan is to steam them, cut them into slices, transfer to a mason jar, cover with vinegar, salt, and sugar, and store in the fridge. If anyone has any tips on vinegar concentration and salt/sugar or other spice amounts it would be appreciated.

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  14. Huge Microsoft Outage Linked to CrowdStrike Takes Down Computers Around the World
    https://www.wired.com/story/microsoft-windows-outage-crowdstrike-global-it-probems/

    Banks, airports, TV stations, health care organizations, hotels, and countless other businesses are all facing widespread IT outages, leaving flights grounded and causing widespread disruption, after Windows machines have displayed errors worldwide.

    In the early hours of Friday, companies in Australia running Microsoft’s Windows operating system started reporting devices showing Blue Screens of Death (BSODs). Shortly after, reports of disruptions started flooding in from around the world, including from the UK, India, Germany, the Netherlands, and the US: TV station Sky News went offline, and US airlines United, Delta, and American Airlines issued a “global ground stop” on all flights.

    The widespread Windows outages have been linked to a software update from cybersecurity giant ​​CrowdStrike. It is not believed the issues are linked to a malicious cyberattack, cybersecurity officials say, but stem from a misconfigured/corrupted update that CrowdStrike pushed out to its customers.

    …

    “It reminds us about our dependence on IT and software,” Olejnik says. “When a system has several software systems maintained by various vendors, this is equivalent to placing trust on them. They may be a single point of failure—like here, when various firms feel the impact.”

    …

    Cybersecurity researcher Kevin Beaumont posted on X that he has seen a copy of the CrowdStrike update that was issued and says the file isn’t properly formatted and “causes Windows to crash every time.” Beaumont says, in further posts, that it appears there isn’t an automated way to fix the issues, at least currently. This may mean that impacted machines need to be manually rebooted before they can come back online, a process that could take hours or days depending on the impacted entity.

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    1. I’ll be interested to hear Steve Gibson’s analysis of what happened. If I learn anything interesting I’ll let you know.

      My guess is that adding complexity to a system increases the probability of defects and failure. That’s why I do not use RAID for my backup system, and why I only use the standard security software shipped with Windows.

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  15. https://energyskeptic.com/2024/colonization-of-mars-the-moon-a-book-review-of-a-city-on-mars/

    Colonization of Mars & The Moon: a book review of “A City On Mars”

    About half the book is on governance in space, but given finite fossil fuels on Earth and none at all on other planets we will never colonize space and need to think about governance.  There are so many other issues this book covers. It can’t happen. But like Peak Everything, the 9 existential environmental boundaries, and the 6th extinction, most people don’t want to know about it. We’ve been raised on Sci-fi movies and Star Trek.

    But if you can handle reality, it is very interesting to see the challenges of space colonization. Without fossil fuels that requires resorting to renewables, but those work in space either. Hydropower requires flowing water. Wind power requires wind. Although there are, in fact, occasional proposals for Martian wind power, to make use of the ultra thin atmosphere the turbines would have to be huge. Geothermal energy, where heat is drawn from deep underground, won’t work on the geologically quiet Moon. It might work on Mars, but would be another enormous on-site construction project, and the best locations for geothermal power may not be the best locations for an early Mars habitat. Solar won’t work because space dust will clog the panels. Nuclear power may explode in a giant Ka-Boom!

    The solar and galactic radiation that washes over Mars, which at its closest is 34 million miles away from Earth, is potentially 700 times as great as what passes through our magnetic defenses.

    Asteroids and other planets are not made out of platinum, lithium, and other valuable minerals. There is zero economic incentive to go into space, except by a few billionaires with bloated egos engaged raising investments in a hopium scam.

    Basically the book makes the case that even if climate change ravaged the planet with heat, drought, and more, if a nuclear war caused a nuclear winter for a decade, and so on — the Earth would still be a better place to be than Mars or the Moon.  I am sure you’ll agree if you see what some of the difficulties are. I discuss other obstacles at energyskeptic.com in post: “Escape to Mars after we’ve trashed the Earth?”. If this topic interests you, I highly recommend Mary Roach’s “Packing for Mars”, which was very funny. So is this book.

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  17. Unusual clots that began appearing coincident with mRNA transfections are still a thing and are still being ignored and not investigated by the “professionals” our tax dollars pay to protect us.

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  18. “However because most of the population does not want to give up their creature comforts, they look to any piece of fiction to hold onto the modernity they enjoy and deny the possibility of a bad outcome in the future, which is precisely why we will head into a fast collapse when we are past peak oil production in an accelerating decline.” Hideaway

    Here is a guess about timing! What is your guess?

    Larsen Lars William: Diesel will leave us 2027
    https://archive.org/details/oil-exports.-34odt-1
    July 2023

    Epilogue: “Global collapse may begin 2026, at the latest The calculations in this chapter, now with different parameters, “being on the safe side”, are pretty much a confirmation of my previous calculations. I came almost to the same conclusions here as in part 5. Only maybe one year, almost two, differed, that’s not much in the grand scheme of things. The calculations were again conservative, I used a conservative, very modest estimate of the average decline of conventional oil production between now and 2030, only 2,5 % per year (think about this: from 2019 to 2020 global oil production declined with at least 14 % because of the pandemic), with an acceleration in the end. And then I didn’t take into account my “ten critical factors” referred to in part 1. These factors are really, really important. So this is again almost a best-case scenario.

    I see no possibility that there will be any diesel exports beyond 2027- 2028. That’s the upper limit. Remember now that in the peak days of diesel exports, in 2005, we had about 6,4 mbd of global net diesel exports (30 % of 46 is 13,8. 13,8 subtracted from 46 = 32,2. 20 % of 32,2 mbd is 6,4, 6,4 x 5 is 32,2, we had 46 mbd of overall export oil back then), today (2023) we have about 2,67 mbd left, having a global diesel shortage and then, 2026, we will have only about 0,86 mbd, or 860 000 barrels of diesel exports left. This is a decline of over 86 % from 2005 (0,86 is 13,4 % of 6,4), it’s only about 1/9 of what we had in 2005. This is really, really serious. 52 Remember that at least 155 countries in the world are dependent on oil imports in the world (almost three of four countries), and thus also on diesel imports. At least 155 countries, probably more, have to share 860 000 barrels of diesel exports in 2026! Just think if three-quarters of the world’s shipping industry vanished in 2026! It’s mindboggling. And that’s just one industry that needs diesel. I would say that at the latest, global industrial civilization will begin to collapse by then or by 2027.

    And by collapse I mean when many trucks stop running and many grocery store shelves are empty. And that is precisely what will happen when we run out of diesel, because trucks run on diesel. The global diesel shortages have begun already (I wrote this in the end of 2022), but they will continue to get worse and worse for four long years until global civilization collapses with a “long bang”, probably because diesel shortages will pop “the Everything Bubble”. Then the whole domino card house will fall, and fall steeply, because we kicked the can down the road so far with monetary stimulation, debt and “enhanced oil recovery”, among other things. The shale oil bubble or the “Shale Ponzi Scheme” will collapse, and contribute a lot to the popping of the Everything Bubble. And this is still almost a best-case scenario, in my opinion.

    So many things could go wrong before that. I have trouble believing my own calculations, so strange are the results. But I have to follow the data, wherever they lead. Prepare yourself for austere times.”

    Saludos
    el mar

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    1. Nice find!

      I will read carefully. I’m interested in Hideaway’s take.

      I remember the export land model was widely discussed in the early days of peak oil. Now you rarely hear anyone like Berman, Hagens, Tverberg, Friedemann, Martenson, etc. discuss it. I wonder why? It seems like a valid model for predicting depletion.

      For those unfamiliar with the export land model, it says that effective global supply will fall faster than geologic supply because oil exporters grow and therefore consume over time a greater share of the surplus oil they have available to export.

      Now add to this the effect of degrowth on a mountain of debt, and the effect of our increased dependence on fast depleting fracked oil, and the networked effect of diesel scarcity on pretty much everything in our economy that depends on diesel, and increased use of diesel to fight scarcity wars, and one can imagine a very rapid collapse.

      If this timeline is true, then the insanity of the NATO war against Russia’s perfectly legitimate security concerns begins to make sense.

      el mar, I am unable to access Larsen’s blog due to an invalid security certificate. Do you have a link to his writings?

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      1. Why does the model assume that oil exports to China and India will keep growing, while oil exports to the rest of the world shrink exponentially?

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        1. I have not read it yet so do not know.

          A guess would be China and India are low cost manufacturers of necessities which means they will have something of value to trade for scarce oil unlike countries such as the UK/France/Germany/Japan etc. which after SHTF will have nothing affordable of value to offer for oil so will not be able to import any oil.

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      2. I’m able to access those files, I use google chrome as a browser..

        I very much agree with Lars on the unravelling of complexity but I’m not certain on the timing as we have all have incomplete knowledge of what oil remains.

        When we get to an accelerating oil production decline, exports will decline at a faster rate, so we’ll see the number of peripheral countries dropping off the modernity lifestyle rapidly increase.

        When pushed I’ve said around the 27-30 timeline, but I take that guide as a WAG, (Wild Arsed Guess), given that everyone that has predicted peak oil in the past was incorrect.

        Even at peak oil, and just past it, I think the world will stagger on for a ‘bit’ (perhaps we are in this phase now), it’s going to be the accelerating decline phase that cannot be overcome by any means whatsoever, with chaotic feedback loops accelerating the decline.

        Modern oil extraction is a highly complex operation, which is what most people don’t understand. It’s no longer a case of getting a cheap rig and just drilling a hole a few hundred feet deep, then collecting the black gold as it rushes out of the ground..

        If we had to use the oil rigs of the 1920’s to drill for oil now, we would get very little to none, of the oil resources left. Going back to simple methods doesn’t work on what’s left, for oil, for minerals and metals.

        Lars has 6 documents on that link and I’m on pg22 out of 102 on the first pdf…

        He’s posted on POB in the past and is one of those who ‘gets it’…

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        2. The financial system is the bottleneck, because it is already overstretched with “bobbing”.

          BAU is unlikely to last another 30 years.

          Saludos

          el mar

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      3. Lars Larsen’s new blog has a nice primer on overshoot and prepping with many links to more info, including most unusually, a link to un-Denial.

        Larsen’s 40 years old and and copes with overshoot awareness by believing Jesus will return.

        https://skogslars.blogg.se/

        This blogpost is the end point of almost 18 years of blogging, the crown that crowns it. I have put a lot of effort into it. And I want it to be the most important practical, spiritual and prophetic information I can ever offer.

        A big love adventure lies before us, and it is about returning to a simpler lifestyle, forced by the deepening collapse of industrial civilization, a collapse which is deepening at an accelerated rate, i.e. exponentially.

        This process, the Fall of the Great City, the Fall of Babylon, will pave way for the “Second Coming of Jesus” and “The Millennial Kingdom“, which is more than we can imagine. 

        Don’t take it as an accident, a disaster or catastrophe, but as a great liberation from the horrible slavery that we have lived in inside industrial civilization (just think of office work 8 hours a day), a return to our real origins, to a wild and free, grounded and earthed life, in small communities, where love and relationships are our main focuses again, not serving a horrible zombie economy that destroys virtually everything, not least community, our bodies and souls, yes Nature itself. This view of the collapse is shared by anarcho-primitivist ecophilosopher Derrick Jensen (b. 1960), in this youtubeinterview from November 2019: “Derrick Jensen: “The Collapse of Civilization Will be Cause for Rejoicing” “

        In this blogpost, my last one, I have tried to help you make the coming transition easier. 

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  19. Denis Rancourt just released a new paper updating his estimate of covid all-cause mortality from 17 million to 30 million.

    In summary most of the deaths were caused by our incompetent/evil leaders and experts and we would have been far better off if a pandemic had not been declared.

    https://correlation-canada.org/covid-excess-mortality-125-countries/

    The spatiotemporal variations in national excess all-cause mortality rates allow us to conclude that the Covid-period (2020-2023) excess all-cause mortality in the world is incompatible with a pandemic viral respiratory disease as a primary cause of death. This hypothesis, although believed to be supported by testing campaigns, should be abandoned.

    We describe plausible mechanisms and argue that the three primary causes of death associated with the excess all-cause mortality during (and after) the Covid period are:

    – Biological (including psychological) stress from mandates such as lockdowns and associated socio-economic structural changes
    – Non-COVID-19-vaccine medical interventions such as mechanical ventilators and drugs (including denial of treatment with antibiotics)
    – COVID-19 vaccine injection rollouts, including repeated rollouts on the same populations

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  20. Hi Rob,

    I’d be honoured if you chose to add my essay (won first prize in Beyond Peak’s Scenario Contest!) to your collection of documents.

    Unlike many such essays, this is a work of fiction, a possibility, more than a prediction.

    I just stumbled upon your site. Now it goes in my RSS menubar reader, for instant updates and access!

    Thanks for what you do, and if you know of preparation groups in Western BC, please let me know. I was doing this for fifteen years, but was forced to take a pause and rejoin the modern world of medicine for a while.

    Jan

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    1. Hello Jan. Nice to see you here. I’ve seen your name in the comment sections for all the collapse sites that I visit. You sound like you have been overshoot aware for a long time. I think you will be impressed with Rob’s site (and the audience).

      I just read your fictional essay and liked it. The ending was great.

      And just a tip (unless you did it purposely), most of the audience will not see your comment because it’s on last months guest essay page. (current essay is titled Humans are a not a species)

      Welcome to this crazy tribe called un-Denial 😊.

      Chris

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      1. Thanks for the reply, Chris!

        And for the hint about exposure. I think I found that page via a search of some sort. Hard to tell, as my browser generally has as many windows and tabs open as my poor machine will support without bogging down!

        Now that this site is in my RSS reader, I’ll keep up with current work.

        Jan

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