Today’s essay by un-Denial friend paqnation (aka Chris) takes a fresh big picture look at the uniqueness of humans and concludes our use of fire is at the core, and is the real creator and destroyer.
Modernity’s colossal level of separation & superiority beliefs is perfectly valid. It’s the only rational/sane choice. Although it’s not a choice, it automatically comes with breaking through the three sacred energy constraints of fire, agriculture, and fossil fuels. And the belief is exponential. Grows stronger with every so-called step of progress. Only one group out of billions slipped through the cracks and pulled off all three. Nobody else has ever come close to breaking just one. Pretty damn separate & superior if you ask me. Thinking that I can get people’s worldviews to turn upside down is the only irrational/insane choice. That’s why I’m done trying and more interested in preaching to the choir.
Planets can have one species completely dominating it for long periods of time (dinosaurs 150 million years). But the golden rule is still the same: no broken energy constraints allowed. Fire by itself is not evil, at all. Harnessing it is. Everyone misses this point when trying to break down our story and how we got here and what we need to do to change things. It’s too dark at first, that’s why. Whether its Daniel Quinn and his takers & leavers, Nate Hagens and the great simplification, or Michael Dowd with his sustainable vs unsustainable cultures. It’s all predicated on the notion that you can break certain energy constraints and still fit in with Mother Earth and the rest of life. Spoiler alert: you can’t.
My entire overshoot/collapse journey has been full of ideas about agriculture and fossil fuels being evil. But almost zero talk about fire. For example, Quinn’s “takers” concept is built around the fact that humans turned the second energy constraint of captured solar energy into totalitarian agriculture (and if we had done agriculture differently, our world would be much better). In his view, two broken energy constraints are perfectly acceptable. Quinn was magnificently underestimating those built in exponential separation & superiority worldviews.
Humans are no longer a species. I say you cease being one as soon as you get to that unique position of breaking the first energy constraint. It’s actually shocking that we have allowed ourselves to still be labeled as such. It invokes some kind of connectedness. I’m in favor of going all the way with separation and removing humans from those labels of species, primates, mammals and putting us in a whole new separate category. It might even help with this insanely incorrect line of reasoning that certain broken energy constraints are acceptable (this would have saved me a lot of time on my journey).
As soon as the first constraint is broken, the countdown to the second one begins. It took 1.5 million years for the homo genus to conquer fire. Then took another 1.5 million years to get to agriculture. Pretty easy to accept why the first one took so long, but why so long for the 2nd? Most of my sources have said because of the Holocene period. 12,000 years ago, the climate got warmer and stabilized for the first time in a long time. In the 1.5 million years since we conquered fire, climate was never ripe for agriculture until 12kya? Hmmm. But its the wrong question because human brains were not equipped to pull off agriculture until only recently. We had our last major evolutionary process about 100,000 years ago (in other words this exact version of us today is 100kyo). I’m talking about the MORT theory.
If you believe this theory, as I do, then you know this was an astronomically rare situation with evolution unlocking our extended theory of mind (eToM) and mind over reality transition (MORT) at the same time. Without these evolutionary processes, we would still only be at one broken energy constraint. And if we had never figured out fire, we would not have been in a position to receive those evolutionary gifts/curses that gave us the capability to bust through agriculture.
So my question about the climate being ripe for agriculture changes to the last 100k years (ever since we’ve been capable). And yes, the Holocene is the only time in that stretch where the conditions were ripe. (another hidden bonus with MORT theory is that it gives me very logical answers to some of these questions).
In our group essay I had this line, “I am now slowly shifting to a new state of mind where it’s all about energy constraints and you can pretty much throw everything else out the window”. This has been growing stronger by the day. Putting the first constraint into the same importance (evilness) category as #2 and #3 seemed like a big reach. But I now have it as the most important because it’s the only possible way to get to the much more ecologically destructive agriculture and then final solution of fossil fuels.
I asked Rob for some help on this topic. As always, he came through with some excellent advice:
Humans are the only species to use fire and this behavior has profound implications. This is a very interesting topic with many dimensions you could explore. For example:
- Predigesting food by cooking allowed resources to be shifted from the gut to the brain (see Richard Wrangham).
- Increasing productivity beyond what muscles alone can accomplish.
- Disrupting the natural carbon cycle to influence the climate.
- Why is our species the only species that leveraged fire in a big way, despite its obvious advantage to reproductive fitness. Usually when something is really helpful, like say eyesight, evolution “discovers” and deploys it multiple times.
I started to get overwhelmed when I began to research Rob’s suggestions, almost turned me off from writing this essay. So I did what any true Empire Baby would do, I aborted on the research. (A good future essay would be to take his 1st and 2nd points and tie it in with how fire is all about slowly preparing you for MORT). But here is a quick thought on each of his topics:
- This is the main ingredient that allowed evolution to make that freakishly rare final version of us 100kya. I suspect Hideaway’s vitamin B12 theory to play heavy into this: Perhaps the need for B12 supplementation is attached to the gene that gave us ability to deny bad outcomes and believe in magical solutions to problems (god), and the ability to talk, while meaning only those that ate meat thrived in early Homo sapiens development, separating us from other Homo species.
- More help in getting us to that final version. These first two are telling me that fire is the one and only key to unlocking MORT (all the way).
- Gloriously and stunningly separate & superior.
- Because evolution is as confused as us. We are “off the grid”.
Fire is a constant taking from the planet, and a constant exuding of pollution. It should be the beginning stage of Quinn’s “takers”. If you are cutting down live trees to burn, then you can add a thousand other negative effects. Let’s stick with deadwood only. That piece of wood is going to be feasted on by fungi, moss, and a million other life forms until it is completely gone or decomposes back into the soil. But you just took it away from them and made it disappear. In other words, you stole it. (if you had eaten it or made tools/shelter with it, that would be ok because its more in line with the rest of life “on the grid”). And you didn’t quite make it all disappear either. You created some pollution that is now in the atmosphere and will eventually have to be dealt with. It’s so radically new from the planet’s perspective. First time ever that a species is stealing (constantly) and polluting (constantly), all for their advantage and at the expense of everyone else. But no serious worldwide damage because population can never explode (need agriculture). But very serious internal damage with staying on the correct path of life.
I love Dowd, Quinn, and Hagens. They were big parts of my journey. MORT is what prevents them from seeing this. Focusing on the energy constraints led me to fire and now it’s as obvious as some of these overshoot concepts. Understanding MORT has helped me get to a place that is probably the hardest to get to. The very top of collapse mountain where the unthinkable awaits: If we can’t even have fire, then what’s the fucking point? LOL. And that’s what breaking energy constraints does right there. It creates something (not a species) that is actually complaining about the meaning of it all. So damn separate & superior, my god!
If it’s all about life, then the planet has a purpose. To provide resources round the clock. Life’s purpose is to thrive (aka: Do whatever it takes). The two mix very well together. Until an ultra-rare unnatural event tilts the scales. Like 66mya when a big asteroid hit earth. Or 1.5mya when a curious species started playing around with fire. Same result. Most if not all life on earth eventually wiped out. From Life’s point of view, it’s very easy to see that harnessing fire is not acceptable and is off limits. Ditto for Mother Earth.
It seems to me the only purpose of conquering fire is to get to MORT. Purpose of MORT is to get to agriculture. Purpose of agriculture is to get to fossil fuels. Purpose of fossil fuels is to eliminate life in a speedy fashion. Purpose of eliminating life is so that the Great Reset can get the planet (resource provider) back to no broken energy constraints. LOL. Sounds biblical. And fire is the apple. At the very least it’s a hell of a good fail-safe plan. And all of the terms we use to describe human problems like parable of the tribes, tragedy of the commons, multipolar trap, etc.… they don’t apply to us. They apply to conquering fire. “It just takes one” to create the Great Reset.
Five hundred years ago our population was only 500 million and 90% of them were “on the farm”. Would have been impossible to deduce that we are not a species. Today it’s much more obvious with 8.1 billion and 2% on the farm. Getting this far into the journey is not for everyone. One of my favorite collapse writers, Tom Murphy, can barely even consider it. Few months ago, I mentioned to him that Leavers had not figured out how to bust though the energy constraints and that’s all it is. If they could have figured it out, they too would have become Takers in a heartbeat. Tom had more to say but his core message was, “I prefer to operate on the premise that we’re not just rotten to the core and thus are wasting our time trying to find better ways to live”. Very anthropocentric, Thomas😊. And too much denial for my lack of denial to accept.
Starting your overshoot journey first leads you to understanding how unsustainable and destructive fossil energy is. That’s the easy constraint to “get”. Stick with it long enough and you’ll think the same about agriculture. But that’s usually the end of the journey and most can’t even make it that far. Lonesome territory at the top of collapse mountain. But once you get here, your journey is a wrap. You will see how silly all this frantic and desperate clinging on is (like Nate’s The Great Simplification). You’ll especially get a kick out of anything involving an awakening of consciousness or a paradigm shift. Dowd had a great line, “if you don’t understand overshoot, you will misinterpret everything that’s important”. Time to change “overshoot” to “fire”.
The good and the bad of this outlook, good first. It will put an end to those “rotten to the core” thoughts that humans are hardwired for destruction. Conquering fire is what’s hardwired for destruction, period. The simplification makes it much easier to stop focusing on all those things that are hardwired into breaking energy constraints (extreme overshoot & ecological degradation, Wetiko, MPP, climate change, collapse, etc). Which in turn gives me a much better chance of letting go of it all and just sit back and genuinely be entertained by watching it unfold. Helps me to understand why humanity is drenched in evil. Which actually helps me to forgive myself and the rest of humanity for going down this road. (kind of like the famous “it’s not your fault” scene from Good Will Hunting.
And the blame game starts to evaporate. No longer valid for me to point the finger at elites, USA, white skin, politicians, technology, etc. But the best benefit is the same relief as when I found un-Denial/MORT. Being able to understand the batshit crazy times we are in is the greatest joy/relief one can receive post red pill. It makes swallowing the pill (which I regretted many times) much more bearable.
Morpheus: This is your last chance. After this, there is no turning back. You take the blue pill – the story ends, you wake up in your bed and believe whatever you want to believe. You take the red pill – you stay in Overshootland, and I show you how deep the rabbit hole goes.
Now the bad. Obviously, the big one is the darkness of it all. Understanding that there is not supposed to be any intelligence higher than pre fire (in the universe), will mess with your modern (human centered) brain. If you’re not careful you could end up in a very nihilistic state of mind. Also, this might make you doubt or cloud up any religious beliefs you have (My spiritual advisor on this site, Charles, and his views about “the world is 1 without 2. It is as it is and not some imaginary else. There is nothing to be either fearful, angry, saddened or cheerful about. It is just as it is.” LOL, three years ago I would have dismissed him as a lunatic and now I’m all about trying to find that exact frequency).
And the entertainment value for movies/tv is dropping significantly for me (I’m losing interest in watching off grid life pretending to be comedic and dramatic). But I’ll take the tradeoff because certain music is now hitting me on a much deeper level.
In closing, I would like to give you my quick pitch. If you can’t get yourself to agree that fire and agriculture are evil, then move over to fossil fuels. Any events in history that can be traced to using fossil energy (and that no other species had ever done prior to or since) is absolutely not acceptable and completely off limits per life and the planet. Fire is the one that starts it all. I’m sure there are important evolutionary events (or freak accidents) that lead to fire, but I’m sticking with the flame as the beginning of evil (going off grid).
Over 100 billion stars in our galaxy (and ours is an average one). Two trillion Milky Ways in the universe. Certainly, there is much life out there. If MORT is as rare as we think, then most species that break the 1st energy constraint never get to the 2nd one. That paints an incorrect picture that fire is acceptable. MORT is inevitable for everyone who cracks the 1st barrier. It’s all part of the fail-safe plan. (if you don’t believe MORT theory then it should be even easier to see that fire automatically leads to agriculture). If MORT is astronomically rare, then so is harnessing fire.
The maximum power principle (MPP) always frustrated me because I was looking at it wrong. I thought it meant that if you run the human experiment 100 times, every time it’s going to play out similar to our story. I was taking it too literal. Every planet that has had a Great Reset to get back to no broken energy constraints will look identical as far as the processes in chronological order; new species, fire, MORT, agriculture, fossil fuels, extinction. This fail-safe plan is another word for MPP. But the way each planet gets there can be drastically different. I’m sure some had no concept of monetary value. Or some went all in with space travel. Others may have avoided war altogether. And maybe some even perfected the equality aspect and truly lived in a utopian civilization (for their species only of course). And as hard as it is to believe, I bet some even did it much worse than us.
But regardless of how they got to their “Peak of what’s possible in the universe”, they all have the same thing in common. They’re off the grid from the rest of life (no longer a species) and they are solely responsible for their planet’s Great Reset because they started playing around with fire (something that had never been done on that planet prior). This simplifies things quite a bit for me about our insane civilization (and human behavior). Everything after breaking the first energy constraint is irrelevant. Good, evil, indifference… irrelevant. (See, I sound like Charles already 😊)
I like this quote from Leave the World Behind because it sums up everything and is so easily understood from the top of collapse mountain:
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.
un-Denial 
About denial:
The Last Messiah By Peter Wessel Zapffe
This essay from 1933, arguably one of the best Zapffe has written, formed the basis for the dissertation that he defended in 1941 (with the title Om det tragiske, “On the Tragic”). Zapffe presents his thoughts on what he considers “the error of human existence.” He believed that existential angst was the result of humans’ overly evolved intellect. Ironically, in Zapffe’s view, man’s survival is possible by a more or less conscious suppression of this surplus of consciousness. In The Last Messiah, Zapffe elaborates on the four suppression or defense mechanisms that human nature disposes of: isolation, anchoring, diversion, and sublimation.
https://ia801707.us.archive.org/25/items/the-last-messiah-read/The%20Last%20Messiah%20-%20screen%20v2.pdf
Saludos
el mar
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Indi with another good one. I don’t miss being this angry, but I still love reading it because I despise USA (and always will).
“Trump is the last honest American just as Hitler was the last honest European. These men were honestly evil representatives of honestly evil empires. The other ‘good’ rulers were (and are) just lying.
From a foreigner perspective, Trump is better because he simply has less attention span for couping us and what you see is what you get. Trump is an asshole and America is an asshole country, this is something most Americans don’t get. Trump isn’t an American anomaly. He’s them.
What really bothers American liberals is that Trump embarrasses them, and Americans should be embarrassed. Not by one candidate or another, but by their whole country.“
The ‘Nice’ Nazis — indi.ca
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Also found out about Richard Medhurst being arrested because Indi mentioned it.
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https://www.vox.com/world-politics/367258/globalization-shipping-economy-houthis-russia-air-travel-internet
Armed conflict is stressing the bones of the global economy
From shipping lanes to airspace to undersea cables, globalization is under physical attack.
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Finally watched season one of The Terror. Excellent. It’s on netflix (US). I love movies/shows that take place in ice/snow weather. And I know I’m not the only one. It’s gotta be something in our DNA (kind of like how we are still afraid of the dark). We fossil fuel sapiens still fear the cold and it captures (or commands) our attention.
The best episode of X-files (Ice), The Sopranos (Pine Barrens), and Band of Brothers (Bastogne) all have this ice-cold weather setting. The best part of all the Star Wars movies is the first half of Empire Strikes Back when they are on the ice planet Hoth. The outdoor/camping youtube videos that are done in the heart of winter always have much higher “views” than canoe season. Heck even my favorite Werner Herzog documentary is the one in the ice ‘Encounters at the End of the World’.
Great movies that take place in the cold: A Simple Plan (1998), Misery (1990), The Ice Harvest (2005), The Thing (1982), Insomnia (2002), The Last Winter (2006), Fargo (1996), Eight Below (2006), Arctic (2018), Winter’s Bone (2010), Wind River (2017), The Revenant (2015), Everest (2015), The Grey (2011), Togo (2019), The Hateful Eight (2015).
Even shitty movies can turn into good ones with this setting: Wind Chill (2007), The Day After Tomorrow (2004), 30 Days of Night (2007), The Big White (2005), Cliffhanger (1993), Frozen (2010).
If anyone has any other recommendations (doesn’t have to be a movie), please share. Thanks.
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You’d make a good professional movie critic.
I really like Liam Neeson’s Cold Pursuit.
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Thanks. It would have to be only 80’s, 90’s, and 00’s that I critique. The new stuff is god awful. Back in the day I’d have to watch 3 films to find one good one. Nowadays it’s more like 30 to 1. I live in the past with movies except for an occasional guarantees like Oppenheimer or Killers of the Flower Moon.
Good to have you back. Hope you are rejuvenated, because no more camping trips allowed. This site was doing good without you for a while but then we ran into a brick wall. I dont know how you do it everyday… and for 10 years! I was done trying after the 2nd day it went dead. 😊
And thanks for the tip. I’ll get around to Cold Pursuit one of these days. I’m scared of Liam Neeson films because they all have the same plots. But the cold weather setting definitely looks like my kind of movie.
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Thanks for keeping the site going while I was away.
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To all dear participants,
I hope thou are feeling well.
Posted on Peak Oil Facebook group.
Mr. Zvorygin, paragraphed.
0 will occur between 2034 and 2040”
Mr. Peach, paragraphed.
Reserve data is not trustworthy, as it is easily manipulated.”
Kind and warm regards,
ABC
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Kind and warm regards,
ABC
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https://www.btselem.org/publications/202408_welcome_to_hell
https://www.btselem.org/sites/default/files/publications/202408_welcome_to_hell_summary_eng.pdf
Here is the Full version for anyone who is interested.
https://www.btselem.org/sites/default/files/publications/202408_welcome_to_hell_eng.pdf
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@Rob Mielcarski,
RFK Jr. dropped out of the race and is now endorsing Trump.
https://www.politico.com/news/2024/08/23/rfk-drops-out-election-00176206
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Sorry, I know you were only talking to Rob, but I can’t help myself. 😊
Yes, this was a bummer to hear. Not because RFK had a chance of winning (he had zero, a 3rd party candidate will never ever have a chance) but because I wanted to see him take votes away from Trump so that the chaos factor might increase.
I’ve heard that he was offered a job in the Trump administration if they win and that’s what helped broker the deal for him to drop out. Sickening, yet par for the course with all of these rich assholes. Always looking out for numero uno.
And Kennedy will spin this like they all do. Something like “Yes I know what I said about Trump being a horrible person, but now I’ll be in on the administration so that I can keep an eye on any shenanigans going on. That way I can do what’s best for the American people.”
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Well, as much I hate to admit it, another pandemic is needed sooner rather than later.
We hate these “evil overlords” for trying to eliminate “us”, but deep down, you know it needs to be done. There is a reason the world has gone to shit and the biggest part of that there are just too many people.
Tough problems require tough decisions..
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Do us all a favor and go kill yourself so that there are less of people like you and the rest of us don’t have to go through that bullshite.
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I am guessing you’re new to this site, or you are just a troll.
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Another pandemic means more vaccine BS which shall be forced upon us and I don’t wish to die just yet. If anon 1 is wishing for that then fuck them. The world is full of idiots and I don’t want to be dragged down any faster than I have to be.
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“All the nations will be gathered before him, and he will separate the people one from another as a shepherd separates the sheep from the goats.”
-Matthew 25:32
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So is he a sheep shagger or a goat fucker?
What use is this quote?
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I think there are only two ways to get to the top of collapse mountain. The productive way is through MORT, or at the very least, understanding how important denial’s role is. The 2nd is through hatred of humans, but you’re not going to understand anything about it, so you’ll never truly “believe” it. It’s just gonna be that dark and ugly stuff like, “I hate humans because of what we’ve done to other species, so I hope we go extinct.”
I have a feeling this audience is split down the middle about human extinction. If I’m wrong and it’s much more pro-human here, then I’ll back off from pushing my agenda so hard. What is my agenda, you ask? The same goal as always; to get the collapse crowd on the same page in hopes of narrowing down the activism to something that actually makes sense and is at least technically possible… rapid depopulation methods, decommissioning nuclear pp’s, helping trees plants and animals.
In a roundabout way, I brought this up on Tom Murphy’s newest episode. Feels like I’m actually making a tiny bit of progress with chopping him down😊. He’s close enough that if he gave MORT a chance, he’d get to the top of the mountain within a month. Here is my exchange with him.
My comment: Great series Tom. I’m gonna nitpick two quotes from the video: “I want to be clear that humans are not the cancer. Humans are inflicted with this disease of modernity but are not the villains necessarily”
I know you have to tread lightly here or else you’ll have an angry mob with pitchforks coming after you😊. But humans are most definitely the villains. We didn’t start out that way, but every species in the universe that conquers the 1st energy constraint of fire is instantly Public Enemy Number One to their planet.
Modernity is not the cancer. It’s just the guaranteed eventual stage that harnessing fire (the real cancer) will lead to.
Many overshoot aware people think that using fire and some form of “lite” agriculture is completely sustainable and non-destructive. The MPP factor will not allow your species to maintain this “lite” ag. You’ll end up getting too good at it… or the parable of the tribes will come into play and you’ll be forced to keep up with the Joneses.
Yes, the Native Americans were saints compared to the wetiko Europeans, but only because they were a few thousand years behind them on the broken energy constraints schedule. That’s it.
2nd quote. “Ironically it was in separating ourselves from animals that we became monsters”
I agree, but what is the more logical starting point for this separation? When we busted through our 2nd energy constraint of agriculture (modernity)? Or at the 1st constraint?
The evil apple that gets it all started is fire, not agriculture: (provided link to fire essay)
Tom’s reply: You could be right that control of fire is a bridge too far in an evolution/ecological context. I hesitate to declare so because humans have been managing fire for nearly 2 million years, and that’s long enough for some degree of evolutionary adaptation. It is not clear that the way humans lived 20,000 years ago would execute a sixth mass extinction, and could not be ecologically accommodated. Again, maybe. But not conclusively so.
If you are correct, then there’s really nothing for it: fire was well in hand before our particular species of humans came along, so this position declares us an ecological blunder that has no long-term business here. Maybe, but I’m not ready to sign up if I think there’s a reasonable chance we *could* live in “right relationship” with the community of life, even with fire. A few million years of doing roughly that gives me enough to hang my hat on—at least offering a potential way forward without simply concluding there’s no point trying. It’s not a matter of knowing what’s correct (we never will), but of asking what might be worth trying at this stage.
Chris here again. I do like Tom’s thought process that we were already living in “right relationship” (even with fire) for 2 million years, so it feels like we could do it again. Now of course that’s just a fancier way of saying we had not figured out how to dramatically increase our EROEI yet.. But I think most people here do not agree with him that we could ever purposefully live in right relationship with the community of life. And I bet some of that comes from your denial understanding. So that brings me back to the start of this post with the only two ways of getting to the top of collapse mountain. Without that MORT knowledge/belief, I don’t think it’s possible to get there… (besides the unhealthy path of hate)
We are so “off grid” and destructive, it’s hard to imagine I’m incorrect about humans needing to go. I do tell myself that I could be dead wrong. I see only a couple ways (probably many more though). MORT theory being wrong or being super rare (compared to conquering fire). Or there is actually some divine plan involving humans. I assure you it wont be what our sci-fi brains imagine… “Neo, you are the chosen one to save the world”… Hell no! It will be more like some species that actually matters needs an emergency mass protein injection. The great question through the eons will finally be answered. Humanity’s almighty “purpose” is to be food for someone else for a change.
MM #16: Recap and Mythology | Do the Math (ucsd.edu)
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I watched Bill Rees latest interview, with the interviewer allowing Bill as much time as he wanted on any point.
After watching this, I’m still not sure if Bill’s number of 2 billion humans at most is something he really believes in or just a number he comes up with to keep audiences ‘happy’ about it not being the end of the (modern) world, so there is ‘some’ possibility of reaching this number in the future with great effort.
From my perspective he misses how much we totally rely upon the complexity that comes with the modern world for our mining of everything, because we have used up all the easy to get metals and minerals. I’m not sure if he just doesn’t understand this, or deliberately leaves it out, as he knows that even his 2B is not supportable without modern complex technology.
He does mention we’re going back to real renewable energy. Overall though, his argument is so correct about the reality constructed in people’s minds, which they follow religiously….
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Bill Rees is probably my favourite to watch / listen to. The latest article from Jem Bendell is pretty good. The 9 lies of the fake green fairytale.
“Self-deception is rife within the environmental profession and movement. Some denial or disavowal is not surprising, due to how upsetting it is to focus on an unfolding tragedy. But our vulnerability to self-deception has been hijacked by the self interests of the rich and powerful, to spin a ‘fake green fairytale’. Their story distracts us from the truth of the damage done, that to come, and what our options might be….
The ‘fake green fairytale’ claims humanity can maintain current levels of consumption (a lie) by being powered by renewables (a lie) which are already displacing fossil fuels (a lie) and therefore reach net zero (a lie) to bring temperatures down to safe levels within just a few years (a lie) to secure a sustainable future for all (a lie) and that the enemies of this outcome are the critics of the energy transition (a lie) who are all funded or influenced by the fossil fuel industry (a lie) so the proponents of green globalist aims are ethical in doing whatever it takes to achieve their aims (a lie).”
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I had some alone time at my friend’s cabin and the weather wasn’t great so I played solitaire on my phone while listening 4 times to this Dec 2023 discussion on oil by Art Berman and Nate Hagens.
If you haven’t already listened to it, you should. There’s a lot a substance, and some of it new from original research by Art Berman.
He explains:
Then the denial kicks in.
Berman thinks production will only be down about 20% in 2040 and that we’ll be ok if we just use less.
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James @ Megacancer with a new one line post that nicely sums things up:
I really like this comment by JT @ POB that James discusses. It captures the most important short term aspect of our predicament:
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Radagast describes the implications of natural gas shortages that he thinks will begin next year in his home country the Netherlands.
https://www.rintrah.nl/the-upcoming-blackouts/
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I love to get my hands on old home videos, photo albums, yearbooks, etc. Comparing then vs now is always interesting. I got a great example of this by accident last night.
I watched the classic Ghostbusters (1984) and was still in the mood for more, so I followed it up with the newest one, Ghostbusters: Frozen Empire (2024). Of course the new one was garbage, but it was still worth it. Watching them consecutively really highlighted the increased awfulness of humans in the last 40 years. (what we now consider comedy, how we talk, how we act, our addiction to technology, the obsessive pandering for the teenage demographic, etc).
We all know the digital age has ruined us by hijacking our brains, but you kind of forget how quick and drastic it was. I highly recommend this double feature because of how easy it is to see the results of the idiocracy.
p.s. Speaking of movies, saw an article about E.T. (1982) where Steven Spielberg edited the guns out of the film and replaced them with walkie talkies. He did it back in 2002 for the twentieth anniversary dvd but he regrets it now. Just reminds me of cancel culture and how they have been editing/removing older media content that is not up to pc standards. Certain episodes have pretty much disappeared. (Seinfeld – puerto rican day parade, The Office – diversity day).
At this pace I’m gonna lose three of my favorite comedies from the 80’s. Back to the Future (85) because Biff is a raging rapist. Major League (89) because Tom Berenger’s character is a psycho stalker. And Teen Wolf (85) because there’s a scene that implies that being gay is even worse than being a werewolf.
Btw, Teen Wolf’s hilariously famous scene at the end where an extra (as a prank) has his “junk” hanging out and the editing room missed it… turns out that was a girl. Bummer. Someone pointed it out to me recently when I was trying to make a joke about it. (I hate this digital era where anyone can “fact check” you in an instant. Way better back in the day when these types of rumors could swirl around for years😊)
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Richard Heinberg today with his take on what a wise society would do.
https://richardheinberg.com/museletter-377-what-would-a-real-renewable-energy-transition-look-like
Looks like it has the same zero probability of success as my prescription from 8 years ago:
https://un-denial.com/2016/06/27/what-would-a-wise-society-do/
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I wish it was different but these types of plans can’t work, it’s way too late for that..
Look at the first point, cap fossil fuel production and reduce it every year, evenly.
OK, assume every farmer gets an allocation of fuel this year going down by x% next year, and the year after etc, etc.
Everyone that has no knowledge of grain farming, would think this would work, yet ‘weather’ happens on farms all the time. The exact amount of fuel used to plant, fertilise and harvest is not known or knowable in advance. If a normal year where everything goes to plan, then they could guess that amount approximately. Every year is slightly, or greatly different. There could be a huge rainfall event just after spraying for example, so the paddocks need to be sprayed again. The early crop could fail because of a sudden frost or dry patch or flood and the field need replanting/refertilizing etc.
If the farm usually used 40,000litres of fuel a year/season, they are not going to risk being short 2-4,000 litres during harvest, because they had to repeat ‘something’ during the year, so instead will plant say 20-30% less if their fuel allocation was 10% lower than before. Likewise for every year of reduction.
How will mineral production cope with reduced fuel/energy each year, when lower ore grades are already diminishing production with the same quantity of energy input? Again the decline would be much greater than proponents of the scheme envisaged.
I suspect that anyone in power, (probably military top brass) that have worked out any of these scenarios, know it can’t work, so pedal to the metal it is, until we can’t grow anymore.
My thinking is increasingly that the direction we are heading, as in a large sudden crash, was always unavoidable because of the nature of Homo sapiens and how we survived to dominate in the first place. Like every other species we have occupied our niche to the maximum until natural forces quell our numbers.
Because we had the extra boost of using fossil fuels, similar to reindeer on an Aleutian Island where there was plenty of food and zero predators. We are so deep in overshoot because of the extra energy gift, by magnitudes, not just a little bit, that the damage we have done and will do on the way down, is likely to make our environment unlivable for humans, by killing off every other species we need to survive.
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Two perspectives on the seneca cliff:
https://www.dailymotion.com/video/x2obevk
Saludos
el mar
Rob here: I changed video embed to a link because I could find no way of stopping it from auto-playing on every refresh.
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The argument for rapid collapse is also strong when considering only our monetary/financial system and its need for growth.
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I am often critical of my writing, for example, when seconds after posting I notice that I used ‘there’ when I should have used ‘their’ (my earlier reply to Hideaway). It is easy to remember the difference; places all end with the same three letters : here, there, where. Characteristics, attributes and possessions, are all theirs.
Most of us, are aware that good writing is difficult. The same is true for ‘good reading’. There is a sub conscious habit that we all likely have of glossing over, watering down, discounting, applying optimism, and various other mechanisms – when reading.
Hideaway, uses the well-applied and good teaching techniques of repetition and persistence, to get us to understand that depletion of energy also means the depletion of all minerals – and that the attenuation itself is exponential.
Karl Denninger today wrote on The Housing Problem (I’m not linking to excrement):
That sentence is epic in it’s combination of poor understanding, poor writing and (highly likely) poor reading. The second half is somewhat true. The first half is total shit – which completely undermines the extrapolation.
We have tides because (the moon is present and) the earth rotates – not because of the moon ‘orbiting’ the earth. Equally, when we look at the moon, we always see the same face, this gives the impression that the moon is not rotating. It does rotate, the time taken is the same amount of time that it takes the moon to orbit the earth (about 27 days). From our ‘relative-perspective’, it appears to not rotate, even though it does. Did you notice that tides happen way more frequently than every 27 days? (That’s rhetorical).
Though his writing is riddled with ill thought out concepts that are reflected in equally poor writing, I picked on only one sentence from Denninger and (will be picking on) only one word from Rob’s post above. The word “need”.
Please re-read Rob’s post above, but this time put enormous emphasis and effort into understanding the significance of the word ‘need’, no discounting, no optimism, no glossing over. It is equal to our ‘need’ for oxygen. It is an absolute. The foundation of our economy is money loaned into existence. The ‘interest’ can only be paid in an economy that grows. Without sustained growth, the collapse is TOTAL.
It is going to be TOTAL. It is going to be FAST. And it is going to be SOON.
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Regardless if Denninger’s writing in an area of expertise or ignorance, he’s always 100% sure he’s right. I prefer people with humility that acknowledge the complexity of the world.
I did choose the word “need” carefully. I have never heard anyone that argues for degrowth explain how we get from here to there without a destructive crash.
Reducing the deficit and our debt might reduce the size of the explosion and collateral damage but I never hear anyone except me argue for that either. I remember when covid started, Nate Hagens was freaked out and argued for massive new deficit spending to kick the can.
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When I read your post, I saw it as:
I suspect few people understand that the (economic) collapse can happen :
The economic collapse is followed very quickly by everything else.
Money loaned into existence, has its interest paid with more money that is itself loaned into existence, repeat ad infinitum … if (e.g.) Tom Murphy (Do The Math) really understood this, he should have emphasized it.
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Dr. Joe Lee today outs RFK Jr. for staying silent on String Theory despite claiming he wants to protect children from vaccine harm.
https://josephyleemd.substack.com/p/rfkjr-i-will-out-you-forever
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Is India a ticking time bomb?
https://www.reddit.com/r/collapse/comments/1eyv2ww/is_india_a_ticking_time_bomb/
Sorry for the spelling errors. This was quoted verbatim from reddit.
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from u/jbond23 in the same thread.
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Another comment on the same thread:
from u/og_aota
https://www.reddit.com/r/collapse/comments/1eyv2ww/comment/ljhbubg/
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There are two sides to the story.
First is that Indians have a very high threshold for taking punishment from authority figure, first from the British during colonial rule and now from their own government. The latest example was during lockdown which was hastily announced with just four hours notice in a country where most people live hand to mouth and on daily wages. Millions of migrant workers were forced to walk hundreds of kms triggering the biggest migration since partition. Many people were concerned about food riots that might happen but nothing of the sort happened. People are just too intimidated by the authorities. Will this hold true during a societal collapse? Well the British did preside over devastating famines without any pushback from the population so it might be possible. Is this a positive in the face of oncoming collapse? It might provide some resiliency that countries like US with its gun culture cannot even imagine. I feel this is an aspect that is very rarely discussed when talking about collapse.
Second is that India’s coal reserves may not be as high as the government claims. They may have around 80-90 billion tonnes but the easy to get reserves may run out within next few decades making any mitigation plans using CTL plants quite difficult. But India might be in far better situation the say Japan,South Korea and even most of Europe which have no fossil fuels at all.
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Countries like Japan, South Korea, the Netherlands and the UK show that overpopulation is not only a problem in poor countries. The aforementioned import resources from outside their borders to maintain populations and living standards far above what their resource base would actually support.
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Again the situation is a bit nuanced than it appears. The populations of Japan, South Korea and that of Europe is in decline (in the case of Europe it is being compensated by immigration). But is it declining fast enough to keep up with declining resources? Probably not.
Also Japan and South Korean populations are homogeneous and cohesive which means they can co-operate effectively in times of crisis. On the other hand populations in countries like UK, France and Germany are divided on basis of religion and ethnicity. We just saw in UK how it can explode and get out of hand. This would make it very difficult for the government to get people to work together.
But on the energy front I agree with you in that these countries are in the same boat as they lack any fossil fuel resources and are completely import dependent.
Also on the topic of energy the question everyone has on their mind is when will it become absolutely clear that civilization is on its last legs? I think the answer lies in the past. The Nazis were able to fuel their war machine with liquid fuel made from lignite which is the lowest quality of coal. So when we see countries with largest coal reserves setting up CTL plants on a war like effort it means that the end is near. This was the plan that US had for dealing with peak oil until fracking came to the rescue. This will work upto a point for the following reasons-
I am curious to know what others here think about this.
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CTL is a negative energy return, so only a country in serious decline would do it. And they won’t be able to do it for very long I should think
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Hi Kira,
I use to think about how we would turn to CTL as a solution and even how governments would justify it as a short term measure as they built ‘renewable’ systems etc. Then I did the EROEI calculations on it from everything I could find about setting up the technology.
The EROEI is very low because it is hugely material expensive to set up fully. To get anything like the quantity of oil and oil products we have today would take a significant boost in mining and materials processing to make the required specialist equipment needed to run the process. most of the metals being stainless steels of varying grades, plus huge pressurised containers for different phases, catalysts etc.
It was all much easier to build back in the ’30’s with increasing oil production providing the increasing mining of high grade ores. The Germans might not have had access to the oil, but did have access to metals and trade of metals.
Once we are in decline, the ability to build the CTL facilities will be reduced, because the energy needed has to come from an existing energy use. Will it come from farms, existing mines, long distance transport, military?? In other words incredibly difficult, as I assume that most frivolous uses of oil will have already ceased long before ‘they’ think of making CTL plants, plus the large lag time from inception of idea to having a built plant.
Also in so many countries we have shut down all the heavy dirty industries already and rely upon heavy duty industrial goods from overseas, with specialists of all types making this equipment in places we wont be able to access anything from, due to bunker fuel becoming harder to obtain. Again it’s all rapped up in the 6 continent supply chain and complexity of everything.
BTW, lignite is one of the best sources of coal for a CTL plants as the process uses huge quantities of water and lignite has a high content of water that is an advantage for the process IIRC. (it’s a couple of years since I looked up CTL in detail).
17 years ago, in 2007 there was talk of building a CTL plant using the lignite coal in Gippsland Victoria. The initial estimated capital cost was $A8B for a 50Kbbls/d plant, which everyone knew was an underestimation of the cost, just like every other large project. The point being that the 50Kbbls/d, was not a lot, and was only ‘worth it’ (economically) if the price of crude went to $150/bbl or higher..
This part of it only being worth it if oil price goes to $XXX/bbl is the catch 22. If oil goes to that price, then the cost of building and operating the plant also increases, needing oil to go higher to be viable. It’s all just chasing our tail.
I suspect plans will be tried to build a lot of CTL around the world, but these will also end up being statues as collapse swamps the ‘late’ attempt to build them.
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Most interesting, thanks!
Eliminating demand for oil with a few well placed nuclear missiles will probably be attractive someday to some citizens and leaders.
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Off topic. Hey Rob, I wanted to reply to someone on a different site with a quote by you regarding nuclear war… but I cant find the damn quote now. (and I’ve looked everywhere here for it)
You said something a while back about how we will probably end up with nuclear war because then we won’t have to admit we were wrong about limits or energy or denial (or maybe you said wrong about “everything”)
Do you know what I’m talking about, and do you remember how you said it?
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I’ve said something like that many times but am unable to provide a link.
I’m pretty sure we’ll never collectively acknowledge that overshoot, resource depletion, and ecosystem damage caused the collapse of modernity. We’ll probably blame another tribe, or the unbelievers, and fight for what remains.
These relevant quotes by me are in the sidebar:
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Oh, what a relief! I found it finally. Was back on 5/23. And thanks for providing the other ones. But this is the one I want to use:
p.s. Damn you el mar. That scary Melancholia music is playing every time I open this site. 😊
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I just edited el mar’s comment to stop the video playing every time.
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Thanks for such a detailed answer.
My slight optimism for CTL was based on two factors- One was the operations of Sasol, the South African energy and chemical company which has been running CTL plants since apartheid days and has made the process as efficient as possible. Their secunda plant produces 160,000 barrels per day and has been operational since the 80s. They have achieved an efficiency of close to 1.7-1.8 barrels of oil for every ton of coal. Their synthetic fuel business seems profitable as long as oil stays above 70-80 dollars per barrel according to this article.
https://www.barrons.com/articles/SB119526441032496583
The second factor was the asinine spending on ‘renewables’ that is happening all over the world right now. In 2023 alone spending on Solar generation projects reached 400 billion dollars. Even taking the cost numbers that you mentioned that could have allowed a ctl setup of more than 1.5 million bpd. These solar projects produce electricity not liquid fuels and will be useless after 2 decades. So its a complete waste of money and materials.
I agree with you that when we are on the downslope of collapse we will not have energy to build these plants which require 5 years to be completed but if we start now or within next few years we could add quite a bit of capacity to buy a few years. I think the article mentions that oil importers who have lot of coal like India and China have shown interest in these plants.
Thanks for that little info about lignite, guess that explains why the germans were so successful in CTL production. Yes water availability is crucial for the plants which poses problems for china as their coal in in the dry northern region.
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2 more comments from the same thread
from u/MarzipanTop4944
https://www.reddit.com/r/collapse/comments/1eyv2ww/comment/ljhynpc/
from u/JeffThrowaway80
https://www.reddit.com/r/collapse/comments/1eyv2ww/comment/ljirgwl/
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The ruling party has adopted the time tested politics of hatred as this seems to be the trend all over the world. They seem incapable of providing economic prosperity except to a few crony capitalists and so have chosen to distract people with polarization. Being surrounded on both sides with Muslim majority countries certainly helps in creating specter of Islamist takeover even though muslims are only 15 percent of the population. I suspect as climate change and resource depletion further push people into poverty these things will get worse not just in India but everywhere in the world.
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Mike Roberts with a nice little article about how denial seeps its way even into the doomers and people who should know better.
Impossible to get to the top of collapse mountain if you are stuck in the place I used to be (because of my sources). The education I got was basically: “And now for the topic of denial. Everyone has denial, it’s an important and normal trait. Ok, let’s move onto the next topic.”
My only gripe… C’mon Mike, a paper like this has to have at least a mention of the only site that ranks denial properly.
Denial Runs Deep | What Are We Doing? (wordpress.com)
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Mike’s a good and wise person, except on covid evil/incompetence that harmed and killed millions for which no one has been held to account.
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Thanks for the plug, Chris. Why do you think this site needs a mention in that post? It’s about denial being theere even for those who seem to get it (about the collapse of our biosphere and civilisation). This site isn’t really about one blogger or scientist but the commentators combined do exhibit denial in some of the same ways mentioned on my post.
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Hey Mike. I think anything pro-denial should include a mention here so that others can explore if interested. And it adds credibility. Even if they end up not believing in MORT, they’ll still be much better off than if they had never come over (because of their knew denial importance awareness).
What denial do you see here? You got me thinking. The belief in a slow drawn-out collapse. And pro-human (wanting our species to continue). But that’s probably more about me wanting to be right😊.
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We had a storm come through yesterday around lunchtime, the grid power went out. Restoration time was estimated at 3.30pm yesterday. Then by around 3.30pm, they upgrade the time to repair to 8.30 pm, then at 8.30, they upgraded the time of repair to 1.30 AM, then during the night to 7.30 AM. Then just a short while ago (it’s now 8.30 AM, to 5.30 PM this afternoon.
In other words they knew it would take a long time to fix yesterday, but didn’t want to upset customers by having too long a wait, until after the storm damage was no longer in the news cycle. It’s all part of the pretend, extend and distract nature of the modern world where business and govt cannot keep up because if energy constraints.
The company in charge of ‘supply’ is paid and under contract to keep the lines ‘clear’ so that large outages don’t happen, yet they are getting more frequent.
Our house is still connected to the grid as I haven’t fully set up the off grid battery system for the house and we get a premium tariff for sending power into the grid from our solar system. I do have a changeover switch so we are running off a diesel generator. My off grid system is associated with a shed, with pumps, freezers and other aspect of running the farm over 200m from the house.
None of it is close to sustainable, but it’s the frequent outages and my knowledge of my own system to just keep a little electricity going to the house that makes me so negative on everything we modern humans do just to survive from one day to the next in this modern world.
The weakness of all the renewables and battery systems is that we can run machines off them in houses that make it look good and relatively cheap compared to grid power, but we run simple electric machines, we don’t make anything involving heavy energy use metal production and shaping in houses, so people get this false sense of renewables being great, provided we can buy all the ‘stuff’ from a shop and not think about how it’s made and moved across oceans to us.
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Art Berman today with a nice takedown of renewable energy.
Berman missed Hideaway’s impossible mineral supply constraint, and he missed that genetic denial is central to the story because there is no other way to explain the extreme stupidity in well educated energy transition advocates.
https://www.artberman.com/blog/tom-steyers-impossible-dream-of-a-renewable-future/
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One can perhaps understand why there is no discussion about big issues with no “solutions” like:
However there is no excuse for not discussing other big issues that we could do something about like:
I know nothing about this person so please don’t flame me if she has an evil background but I did enjoy her monologue.
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There are things we could do to mitigate the situation, but due to denial, we don’t.
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Israel Invades West Bank – Declares Will Be Treated Like Gaza
https://youtu.be/O_1r8_My6zE
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Lake Shasta and Lake Oroville Dropping Twice as Fast as Last Year
https://youtu.be/ySbQEXCKuEs
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Beckwith has a new video showing how to measure wet bulb temperature. Living in the desert, it’s a topic that interests me. I must have asked M Dowd 4 or 5 times to break down this subject in his videos (instead of just mentioning it). He would always reply with some links, but it was like rocket science for me.
Its a tough subject because even Paul is stumbling a bit… but god bless him for making the video. I now know how to measure the wet bulb temp and it only costs $5 to make your own.
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Oh good, I beat anyone to the punch of calling me stupid for comparing wet bulb to rocket science.
That post made me look up some old comments to Dowd and its not wet bulb that I am confused about its phase change and latent heat.
So I take it back about Paul stumbling a bit… he was just being his normal quirky self. 😊
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I’m going back to work on my friend’s off-grid cabin water treatment plant and will be offline until late tomorrow night.
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Mike Benz is my favorite expert on how the deep state operates to maintain the empire.
This is a very interesting interview on censorship.
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I hate to admit this, but if Elon Musk got arrested, I would feel quite a bit of Schadenfreude.
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Mike Benz claims to be “non political”, a quick look at his twitter posts show that is clearly not true. I also suspect that he is a climate change denier as well (i.e. an enemy of the Biosphere).
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cc denier = an enemy of the Biosphere… I like it, never heard that before.
Now I know why you couldn’t give Brett Weinstein a chance in that interview from a week or two ago. If they dont believe in man made cc (i.e.10k years worth in one human lifetime) then that’s a dealbreaker for you.
Btw, I agree with that dealbreaker clause. Brett is the only person I can think of that I make an exception for… but ya, pretty hard to take anything someone says seriously if they deny the man made climate stuff.
As far as this interview, I hate Tucker so the fact that I enjoyed the full two hours means Mike was really good. But then again, I’m bias because it’s easy for me to listen to how corrupt USA is.
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We are all enemies of the biosphere. You sitting there typing on your computer and all the energy it takes up – makes you an enemy. Ever think about the absurd amount of hypocrisy we all spout constantly.
Stellar never post here again and I will consider you are no longer an enemy of the biosphere, otherwise with every post you make, you show your contempt for the natural world and how your little thoughts are worth burning it to the ground for. Same goes for me. But I don’t care because change is always going to happen. Not much I can do about it but at least I don’t bang on about it.
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Wrong!
Many on the “Right” deny climate change because that is what their tribe tells them to. I just ignore that. On other issues they can be spot on. if Elon Musk loses, the last vestiges of free speech will disappear from the internet (so you can probably say goodbye to un-denial).
I might not like all of Tucker’s political positions and choices, but he has been an enabler of Truth when it comes to war and the stupidity of the US government and its rulers (he mistakenly makes an exception for Trump, who is stupid also). Tucker appears to support true, little “d” , democracy in the US. As opposed to the Democratic party, which is all about establishment control of the populace. And to think that I was a ’60s anti-establishment voter for Democrats my entire life.
Just goes to show how far empires will go in their waning days to stay on top, they’ll probably resort to nukes before this is all over.
AJ
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I am just tired of that cretin (Elon Musk) screeching about “population collapse” (the population is still growing by 80 million per year), and “the woke mind virus”. He also regurgitates white nationalist talking points on a regular basis.
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I agree with you on some level. Musk is like all of the rich people, they got there because of luck and a certain “criminality”. and of course they have a certain genius too. But they then think everything they prognosticate on is correct. I read somewhere recently that the reason that Musk is for increased population is because as somebody who’s on top of the pyramid you want to add as many to the bottom so as to keep wages suppressed and profits flowing upward. And his Mars sthick is preposterous (he should talk to Tom Murphy).
BUT, he is personally pushing Free Speech on the internet (X) and is risking a lot. I think without him Western “democracies” will go completely authoritarian with speech/information control. And like I suggested we would then probably lose this web site (because we know there’s no free speech in Canada;) ).
AJ
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I can’t think of a single “famous” expert that is not wrong on some important issue. I’ll bet Benz also denies overshoot and peak oil.
If we want to understand how the world works we have to chose our expertise a la carte.
On how the deep state and corporations collaborate to secure natural resources from other countries and to maximize profits by influencing politicians and public opinion I have found no one better than Benz.
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Did anyone else see this? From Alice Friedemann….
“Ah, peak oil has arrived. Exxon predicts it will decline at a rate of 15% a year, nearly twice what IEA (2018) thought (as explained in my book Life After Fossil Fuels). Investment will not help much, new projects are mostly in very deep water which takes 10+ years to build before production begins (many other kinds of oil projects too), the energy return is lower, 80% of remaining oil is OPEC and they will likely keep much of it for their own people and export less. Since there is not much oil left to be found in the U.S. the “Drill Baby Drill” solution won’t work. Sure there is oil in the arctic, but we cannot get at it: in the ocean ice bergs will mow down oil platforms, on land the permafrost will break roads and tip infrastructure over. The solution? Consume less. One or zero children per woman. And prepare to go back to the past, to Life Before Fossil Fuels.”
https://oilprice.com/Energy/Energy-General/Exxon-Joins-OPEC-in-Warning-of-Looming-Oil-Supply-Crisis.html?fbclid=IwY2xjawE-YQVleHRuA2FlbQIxMQABHSkdYhEcd2q-dWRtNyfVmBTSgL_VBj0of629OmQiwigG-nGJfKAqQELjIg_aem_KC3kuRmOGdr1BBhxC4P4Kw
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Yes, more bad news for our Owners, the Big Club we don’t belong to, the financiers that own the NATO West through debt… Russia/BRICS, send us more oil… what, the answer is no? Time to sic Ukraine harder on Russia, to bleed Moscow and do regime change on Putin, because we don’t own Russia through debt… Hmm — what to do — Great Reset or Great Taking? Russia/China/BRICS want nothing of the Great Reset, so it’ll be — Door No. 2
https://gaiusbaltar.substack.com/p/repost-ww3-for-dummies
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Some of us will be lucky and get to participate in both. After the Great Taking, the survivors will eventually perish at the end of the (real) Great Reset… as well as nuclear fallout.
p.s. I only read a little bit, but I love the confidence level of this guy (talking about his own essay):
I think I’m gonna steal this quote and use it for my fire essay😊
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I agree with Baltar’s theory that the great reset is a “plan” to deal with the end of growth, and I agree that global tensions are primarily about control of depleting resources, however I disagree that BRICS and other independents will be ok if they disconnect from the west.
Given our complex global supply chains, modernity will end everywhere, and food will be scarce everywhere.
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Non collapse. I love DiGiorno frozen pizza. Just came across this clip and it made me laugh hard.
Also included my all-time favorite, Colon Blow cereal. SNL used to be so good with these commercial spoofs.
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Ilan Pappé: The Rise and Coming Fall of the Israel Lobby | The Chris Hedges Report
https://youtu.be/4m6S1iXlsqw
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I recently helped my friend plumb four 2500 gallon plastic water tanks for an off-grid water treatment plant using HDPE plastic pipe. The last 2 days we buried the tanks under 90 cubic yards of pea gravel delivered by a slinger truck via nine 10 yard loads.
Each load required a round-trip hour of highway travel to the gravel pit where a diesel machine loaded the truck in a couple minutes, and 10 minutes of the driver operating a remote control joystick to place the gravel exactly where we wanted it. No one had to do any physical work except for 5 minutes of light raking at the end to smooth the gravel.
Oil is magic.
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Nice. Can’t remember all the figures about energy slaves… I think its something like every person in the USA has the equivalent of 180 slaves.
I’m trying to guess at how many slaves you would have needed to get this job done in 2 days without oil. 500? 1000? Probably even more with how far they have to go back and forth for the gravel.
Yes, oil is fu#king magic. 100Mb of magic per day… we are such cheaters in this game of life. God bless the Great Reset.
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The project as designed would be impossible without oil. There is much more advanced technology that I have not discussed.
The irony is that 50 years of daily consumption have proven the water is safe to drink without treatment but the community of cabins are being forced to spend about $250,000 on unsustainable materials to build an unsustainable system because government bureaucrats are not rewarded for weighing costs against benefits, and only worry about the risk to their jobs if someone someday gets sick because they accepted some risk.
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The covid virus has mutated in a direction that Rintrah predicted 6 months ago.
His message is similar to Bossche’s in that our experts screwed up by discarding a hundred years of scientific wisdom by transfecting billions in the middle of pandemic with a substance that does not stop infection.
https://www.rintrah.nl/the-glycans-are-coming/
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Dr. Philip McMillan explains how the criminals are trying to hide their crimes by changing how excess deaths are reported so that it looks like excess deaths are declining despite remaining higher than pre-mRNA.
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I’m not allowed to comment on this stuff but I urge people to think about things like cherry picking, non-sequiturs and “looks like” as well as considering what these data actually are, and why it might vary throughout the year and between years.
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There is something deeply broken in your brain on this issue.
My guess is you transfected your children and MORT has kicked in to protect you from having to acknowledge the damage you did to them for zero gain.
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If this is left up, let me go through some points.
Dr McMillan was right to point out the change in calculating excess deaths and it would be reprehensible to include data from different calculations in the same graph (it’s not clear that’s what was done, though Dr McMillan assumes it was). Seeing different levels of expected deaths for the same month in different years is not an indication of deception but an indication of population and demographic changes.
Cherry picking. Dr McMillan compared July 2024 to July 2023. A single month comparison is not going to tell us much as deaths will never follow a clean pattern where month boundaries are honoured. It’s much better to use averages over a period to do comparisons. I have no idea if that would yield the same story but July versus July is of little use, particularly since this early on (less than a month since July ended) would have used preliminary data. He also didn’t investigate to see if something odd was going on in one of those months.
Non-sequiturs. He used hospital admissions as a proxy for deaths, without explaining the thinking. One doesn’t necessarily follow from the other, though one can understand it would be something to investigate.
Looks-like. He used the term (or something similar) “looks like” when explaining some of the data points on the graph. This is an unscientific term, especially as he seemed to have the data and could have been explicit.
If you think someone is deeply broken for not just accepting what someone says on a video then I don’t know what to say. Beware confirmation bias. It may be that Dr McMillan just forgot to show his working and that everything he said is reasonable but that can’t be determined from the video alone.
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It’s fascinating to watch. You are completely missing the big picture. You are very bright. It must be MORT.
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So the details don’t matter, in the big picture? Are any of the points I raised valid? I think they all are but am open to why, if any are not.
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Worth checking out the comments over at Tom Murphy’s final episode of the series. Nine so far and they’re all great. Frank and Ric were my favorites. And I hope he replies to Mike. (I’m tellin you, we are slowly chopping Tom down like a giant Redwood😊)
Been trying to think of something witty to say so I can sneak in a plug for un-Denial, but I got nothin. I dont wanna be the first shitty comment over there. (it’s like breaking up a no-hitter)
MM #18: What Can I Do? | Do the Math (ucsd.edu)
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Thanks. I read all of the comments. What stood out for me is not one person mentioned the only action that will help all species including our own: population reduction policies. Everything else is blah, blah, blah.
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I actually added a comment about population reduction (with an embarrassing grammatical mistake).
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Ok, I give up. I’ve read your comment a couple times and I dont see the grammatical mistake. What am I missing?
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Maybe it’s that the comment doesn’t flow well due to insufficient editing. “and” and “to” shouldn’t be next to each other in the last sentence.
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https://9to5mac.com/2024/08/30/x-blocked-in-brazil-apple-app-store/
X officially blocked in Brazil; court demands Apple remove it from the App Store
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A cartoon from Carlos Latuff
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Was wondering if anyone here has seen the show Revolution that came out in 2012.Have watched just a couple of episodes.Premise is that a mysterious event causes a global blackout and everything electrical stops working after that pushing the world into a post industrial age.
The show gets a surprising amount of details right about how things would playout after collapse like the complete breakdown of any central government and rise of militias that take over after that, how they collect a percentage of crops as taxes from small communities, ban private firearm possession to prevent any resistance(resulting in people keeping crossbows and long bows) and enslave and put violators into slave labor or execute them.Of course there are also scavengers who loot, rape and kill anyone they want almost making the militias seem like good guys keeping order and preventing anarchy.
Knowing that this is inevitable by the end of this century makes the watching experience surreal. It’s like looking into the future, realising how truly amazing and special this time we are living in is, but also feeling a hint of sadness along with a feeling of futility as nothing that we accomplished really matters. Even the great Einstein will be forgotten as theory of relativity will be useless for growing potatoes in the field, smelting metals with charcoal or tending to draft animals. But it is also humbling as we realise that for everything that we have managed to build with fossil fuels our greatest achievements never needed them in the first place wether it was the bonds we share with one another, the stories we tell one another, the songs we sing. These have endured for millennia and will continue to do so long after the collapse.
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Never heard of the series. Thanks for the tip. Downloading now.
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While the setting itself is realistic the core of the plot is shaky like all post apocalyptic shows. It relies on the standard trope of something gone horribly wrong with technology and survivors trying to restore status quo even though once complexity is lost it will be impossible to restore it back simply due to entropy and decay. But if you can get beyond that disbelief it’s not such a bad show. Of course there are a lot of things that are just taken for granted. For instance traveling large distances is done on foot which would take weeks or months without automobiles, the implications of lack of modern medicine where even a scratch could be deadly are just some of them.
But it is better than many other shows where power grid is still working, food just appears without significant percentage of population involved in its production and complex technology is still functional without replacement parts.
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Thanks for the info!
I noticed the reviews are polarized between lovers and haters which does not surprise me.
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Luckily in the chaos everybody in this horrendous future gets to have very clean pressed clothes and personal hygiene is better than when the electricity was on. Once you notice that the show becomes unwatchable.
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LOL. True, but somehow I’m indoctrinated to Hollywood keeping those pretty faces going for the idiocracy audience. Survival movies do it all the time.
My problem is that I’m slowly losing good content. I’ve already mentioned Tales from the GV. The latest one is a heartbreaker. Sagan’s Cosmos series (1980). I’ve watched it at least once a year for almost 20 years.
Gave a couple episodes a try last week. Not into it. Kept getting annoyed with his infatuation with space. But I’m not too worried. Carl is so good that he’ll eventually get me to love it again. (even though I now know space is completely off limits. It’s for suckers… but its so damn beautiful, mysterious and hypnotizing)
But ya, we all have different criteria that can ruin a viewing experience. Another way of saying that is we all have different things that we no longer enjoy because of our overshoot/energy awareness.
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The most enjoyable sci fi Tv for me in the last decade were The Expanse and Altered Carbon. Just great sci fi ideas and stories and don’t dig to deep into the thermodynamics of it all. Just enjoy the ride. I also enjoy Foundation.
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What put you off on Tales from the Green Valley?
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Last time I tried it, all I could focus on was the domestication of animals and it turned me off.
Its ok if sci-fi content is less good now that I know how impossible it is… but if my human supremacism awareness dictates my viewing habits… I’ll be down to nothing. Will have to start watching the home shopping network.😊
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Good post Kira. I watched this show back when it aired (when I was not overshoot aware). I remember liking it overall but thinking it would have been much better on a non-network channel like HBO or something. I might have to watch it again.
These type of shows only have two directions to go when you finally have some overshoot/energy knowledge… the series will be much better if I can tell the creators somewhat understand collapse. Or much worse if they dont. (when I see shaved heads, spiky collars, and big modified vehicles like the Mad Max stuff… it’s usually a bad sign).
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Hideaway on the implications of rationing diesel.
https://peakoilbarrel.com/open-thread-non-petroleum-august-28-2024/#comment-780655
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Hideaway was prolific while I was away camping. Here are a few of his best posts.
https://peakoilbarrel.com/open-thread-non-petroleum-august-4-2024/#comment-779492
https://peakoilbarrel.com/open-thread-non-petroleum-august-11-2024/#comment-779579
https://peakoilbarrel.com/open-thread-non-petroleum-august-11-2024/#comment-779550
https://peakoilbarrel.com/open-thread-non-petroleum-august-11-2024/#comment-779629
https://peakoilbarrel.com/open-thread-non-petroleum-august-11-2024/#comment-779740
https://peakoilbarrel.com/open-thread-non-petroleum-august-11-2024/#comment-779734
https://peakoilbarrel.com/open-thread-non-petroleum-august-21-2024/#comment-780448
https://peakoilbarrel.com/open-thread-non-petroleum-august-21-2024/#comment-780363
https://peakoilbarrel.com/open-thread-non-petroleum-august-21-2024/#comment-780551
https://peakoilbarrel.com/open-thread-non-petroleum-august-21-2024/#comment-780543
https://peakoilbarrel.com/opec-update-august-2024/#comment-780579
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Very good.
I expect people to leave cities though, gradually at first and then increasingly fast. I don’t see what would prevent people from moving, when some place becomes unlivable. (Even with bicycles, cart or on foot) Unless military sent by government confines them (which could be a nasty possibility)
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I don’t post very often, mostly others have said already what I have to contribute. but here you say you ‘can’t see how…” and that is our common lack. I turn to the fiction writers (not the ones posing as engineers or policy wonks or banksters) to get a glimpse of possible futures. To your point, try Aric McBay’s Kraken Calling for a near future vision of how lockdown could descend right here in the Great Lakes basin.
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Thanks for posting.
I just discovered Aric McBray co-authored Deep Green Resistance with Derrick Jensen.
The novel Kraken Calling looks like a good one:
FYI : I think Charles is in France and might not understand the Great Lakes basin reference – I had to use Google to realize it refers to the Great Lakes on the border between USA and Canada.
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Thanks for the info, Ian and Hamish. Kraken looks promising. Good/realistic collapse fiction might be the right avenue for me.
Reading about our collapse is no longer as stimulating for me. I’ve heard it all. Bill Rees, B, Tom Murphy, Indi… I’m just going through the motions when I read these guys nowadays. Hideaway is one of the few exceptions.
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Sorry, I didn’t reply before, because I hadn’t noticed your answer.
Thank you for the reading recommendation. If I understand correctly what you are saying (since I didn’t read the book): some humans could prevent other humans from moving around.
Yes, I would agree with that. It’s totally plausible, entirely possible.
But, it’s not a certainty. It’s also possible for humanity to choose the path of cooperation rather than the path of antagonism. This is not the kind of thing which can be predicted (or is it? Has it?)
I am not saying I know for sure how it will play out. That’s exactly my point: nobody can claim to know how it will play out. And imagining the worst tends to reduce our options and make the worst a reality. “The body goes in the direction the head is facing”
When making extrapolations using a model, I find one should be extremely careful about the portion of reality which the model can address, and which it can’t. And changing model on the fly is not proper thinking.
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Hideaway you are just brilliant.
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Yes, brilliant stuff Hideaway. And good eye Rob with plucking this for us.
Was checking out the comments and some people over there accuse Hide of having FF interest. LOL. But this one made me laugh the most from Huntingtonbeach:
Reminds me of the bullshit argument that doomers are the real scared ones and are in the most denial. And by claiming WASF, that gives us the excuse to not do anything.
I actually heard Paul Kingsnorth spouting this nonsense in a more recent interview. I like Kingsnorth and he was a huge source for me at the beginning of my overshoot journey. Not sure what caused me to stop following him. But hearing him nowadays is almost sad. He sounds the same as he did 20 years ago and has not updated his “story” at all.
That bullshit argument about doomers being the scared ones is powered by MORT.
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Holy shit! I need to check my sources before I accuse people of stuff. I just went back to that interview with Kingsnorth and I couldn’t be more wrong. Paul is criticizing the people who use this bullshit argument against doomers. Sorry Paul. Jeez, makes me wonder how many other times I have gotten it completely wrong like this😊
I still stand by my statement about his “story” needing to be updated though.
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HHH @ POB…
https://peakoilbarrel.com/april-non-opec-and-world-oil-production-drops-2/#comment-780127
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Looking at all the points made by Hideaway it is pretty clear where the civilization is headed but I sometimes wonder whether we can pull off another trick like the shale revolution, especially when I see articles like these.
https://www.sasol.com/oryx-gtl-inauguration
If we run the numbers we see that if we divert around 1 trillion cubic meters per year (which is about 22 percent of annual gas consumption) we can produce around 7.5 million barrels of diesel and other middle distillates by using Gas to liquids plants. This is around 25 percent of what we consume. And since middle distillates are the life blood of civilization that means that even if crude and condensate drops from 83 to 60 mbd it may be managed. According to article the plant only uses energy from the gas supplied for the conversion. Also the plant is in Qatar whose natural gas has high EROEI so the process seems viable at least energetically. Would this be ace in the sleeve of humanity? Even if we pull this off it would trash what’s left of the planet.
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Good question. It’s hard to imagine we won’t try this to extend BAU.
It took 4 years and $1B to build this plant that produces 34,000 barrels per day.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Oryx_GTL
I lean towards things breaking faster than we can build work-arounds like GTL.
It also looks like we’re headed for a big smash in the middle east so that supply chain seems to be at risk.
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Hi Kira, Art Berman wrote a good piece on why GTL wont take off with the exception of the stranded gas like Qatar have. For most gas reserves LNG makes sense and is profitable.
https://www.artberman.com/blog/doomberg-embarrasses-himself/
I’m not sure if you have looked up details of Pearl in Qatar, but is cost $20B (in 2011), and used up huge quantities of raw materials to build.
From the Shell web pages on Pearl…
“The Pearl GTL plant has 24 reactors, weighing 1,200 tonnes a piece. They each contain 29,000 tubes full of Shell’s cobalt synthesis catalyst, which speeds up the chemical reaction. If placed end to end, the tubes would stretch from Doha to Tokyo, while the combined surface area of the catalyst is almost 18 times the size of Qatar. The catalyst comes in the form of pellets that are as small as grains of rice. The vast surface area is due to the catalyst’s many nano-sized inner channels, which make it highly porous so that huge volumes of gas can be exposed to the catalysts’ chemically treated surface, accelerating the speed of reaction.”
This plant that produces around 140,000 bbls/d has a lifetime expectancy of a total 3B bbls of synthetic liquids. If we built 500 such facilities it would give us 70M bbls/d of oil equivalent and we would have used up the entire worlds gas reserves in 22 years, with no other use of gas anywhere..
The Pearl plant uses 1.6Bcf/d so 500 of them would use 800Bcuft/d or 292Tcuft/yr. The world has around 6,650Tcuft of gas reserves.
However despite the numbers not adding up, I’m sure you are correct and some places will start building them. How many actually deliver liquids when the price of gas also goes through the roof is a different question.
My overall take is we will end up like the Easter islanders, with lots of these built and half built statues around the world, with whatever people in the world remain in a thousand years time, wondering what gods these strange statues represent…
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Wanted to hit the like button only because I’m commenting way too much lately… but that last sentence about Easter Island is a beaut. I’ll be thinking about that for a minute.
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I read the details about the Pearl GTL plant and was stunned by the material needs for the whole project. The pearl plant was planned after the success of the Oryx plant by Sasol which proved to be quite profitable. There were a few reasons for that- First was that the Oryx plant was commissioned in 2002 when raw material costs were still quite low so the entire plant cost only a billion dollars.
Second reason was the wide gulf between gas and oil prices. By the time the plant came online in 2007 the oil prices began to creep upwards and eventually went through the roof while gas prices fell which allowed them to recover the investment costs in just a few years.
But the situation has changed since then which is why even the oryx plant which was supposed to expand capacity from 34,000 barrels/day to a 100,000 has put the plans on hold. In fact Qatar has put a moratorium on all GTL projects.
Here are just some numbers which are interesting- For CTL plants the input energy in form of coal is 24GJ yielding about 10-11GJ going by the 1 ton of coal for 1.5 barrels of oil number.
For GTL it is 10GJ yielding 6GJ going by 10,000 cubic feet to 1 barrel ratio.
When the energy costs of construction of the plant like Pearl GTL are added even high EROEI gas of Qatar will begin to seem like a pretty bad prospect.Its clear that the plants absolutely destroy the energy value of the fuels adding conversions and construction cost.
I wanted to put myself in the shoes of the guys incharge and see what they might do when oil starts year on year decline. Most experts including Art Berman believe that there is still some headroom before gas production reaches its peak as the full production potential has not been tapped in countries like Iran,Russia Turkmenistan and Qatar. There is no way that people at the top would just accept reality of the situation, I am sure they will do everything they can to continue BAU even if it makes the long term outcome exponentially worse. Another frightening fact is that the Secunda CTL plant run by Sasol is the largest emitter in the world producing 56 million tons of CO2 in a year for a yield of 160,000 barrels/day. If these morons start setting up the plants all over the world and run them even for a few years then 4 degrees by the end of this century is a very real possibility. Let’s hope for a quick collapse.
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Kira, are you able to explain in a couple sentences how the CTL process works?
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My understanding is very basic so if there is any mistake feel free to correct it.
The most commonly used method is the Fischer-Tropsch process which involves converting Syngas into desired hydrocarbons. The reaction takes place at high temperatures of around 200-300 C at pressures of 30-40 atm in presence of a catalyst. Syngas is composed of Carbon monoxide and hydrogen, which is obtained from either using Coal or Natural gas as feedstock. The process of getting Syngas from coal or natural gas is called gasification and can be done via several methods. All of these methods are very energy intensive and therefore use a part of the feedstock as fuel. Different companies have developed their own proprietary methods of doing this with different catalysts but the basic process remains the same.
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Thanks! Sounds similar to the Haber-Bosch process which reacts a gas at high pressure and temperature in the presence of a catalyst.
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Its just as intensive as Haber process too which is why it truly will be a last resort when the fools in charge realise that the end is near.
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Latest from Alice Friedemann.
https://energyskeptic.com/2024/giant-oil-field-decline-rates-and-their-influence-on-world-oil-production/?fbclid=IwY2xjawFBr8VleHRuA2FlbQIxMQABHdmeC9HXJt7ZsyFm5VKFVyjXnqr8qOTIZ_cYdlqzxoWZM7_kJUzGh91yKg_aem_a8T6OO7EFznu2vhv-Y_laA
“Of the roughly 47,500 oil fields in the world, 507 of them, about 1%, are giant oil fields holding nearly two-thirds of all the oil that has ever been, or ever will be produced, with the largest 100 giants, the “elephants,” providing nearly half of all oil today. Since the 1960s, the world has consumed more oil than what has been discovered, and the average size of new oil fields has declined, leaving us heavily dependent on the original giant oil fields discovered over 50 years ago(Aleklett et al. 2012).
Since giant oil fields dominate oil production, the rate they decline at is a good predictor of future world decline rates. In 2007, the 261 giants past their plateau phase were declining at an average rate of 6 % a year. Their decline rate will continue to increase by 0.15 % a year, to 6.15, 6.3, 6.45 % and so on. By 2030 these giants, and the other giants joining them, will be declining at an average rate of over 9 % a year (Hook 2009; IEA 2010). At this exponentially increasing rate, it will take just 16 years to have just 10% of the oil that existed at peak production……
…. World peak crude oil production happened in November 2018. It won’t be long until decline rates reach 6% and exponentially increase by 0.015 a year. That’s great news for climate change, because oil is the master resource that makes all others possible, including coal and natural gas. Hip Hip Hooray, we’re on the way to net zero.”
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When fossil energy is too scarce and/or expensive to heat homes and we chop down and burn all the forests to keep warm I wonder what the net effect on climate change will be?
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If fossil energy is too scarce and/or expensive to heat homes, what will happen to industrial agriculture?
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That process may be self-limiting because once the trees have been depleted, and if the climate hasn’t warmed up enough, the remaining people will simply freeze to death. Deforestation will also cause desertification in semi-arid areas, leading to agriculture no longer being viable, and as a result the population will plummet.
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I had that exact thought this morning. I dismissed it by thinking people will probably starve to death and kill each other before they can cut down lots of trees.
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The way I imagine it…
Won’t happen. If anything, as soon as energy becomes scarce, overall forest cutting will decrease. No point in cutting a tree, if you can’t bring it home. So most operations relying on train/trucks (coal/electricity/diesel) will downscale/bankrupt. Then there is rust, the cost of oil to operate chainsaws.
I don’t worry about any of this: overall, forests will grow faster than people’s ability to cut them down. (maybe not locally, though, but this doesn’t matter much)
Cutting trees without chainsaw is a tough job, takes time and the effort is not linearly proportional to the age of the tree and trunk size.
Yearly growth can be easily harvested and dried. That will be done, most probably. Many places don’t really require heating in the winter anyway (that has been a luxury). Heating individuals will be drastically more effective than heating whole houses. Collapse will be very tough during the first years (maybe decades) for every one.
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Good points.
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This is a remarkable interview. Many important issues are discussed including the environment, climate change, public health, war, corruption, censorship, etc.
It brought a tear to my eyes.
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Thanks. Not in the mood for it right now, but I’m sure I’ll check it out soon.
I forwarded it to my mom (because she loves RFK) and can already here reactions coming from her bedroom. It must be a good one. 😊
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“The reason that we protect the environment is because there’s a spiritual connection. There’s a love that we have…I got into the environment because I wanted this connection to the fishes and the birds and the wildlife and the whales and the purple mountains, majesty. And I understood that the way God talks to human beings…there are many vectors, through each other, through organized religion, through the great prophets or the wise people, the great books of those religion but nowhere with the kind of detail on texture and grace and joy as through creation. And when we destroy nature, we diminish our capacity to sense the divine, understand who God is and what our own potential is and duties are as human beings.”
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That quote stood out and touched me too.
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Fun bedtime story. It’s one of those future history stories. I enjoyed it very much.
Tip: its a member’s only story, but the link Frank Moone provides on Tom Murphy’s site lets me read the whole thing. But when I copy and paste it, I do not have full access. If you are having the same problem then go to my “do the math” link and then click on Frank’s link.
Dystopia Future History Politics Society Culture Fiction Fall of Civilization | ILLUMINATION (medium.com)
MM #18: What Can I Do? | Do the Math (ucsd.edu)
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Hideaway on the end of growth…
https://peakoilbarrel.com/open-thread-non-petroleum-august-28-2024/#comment-780671
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The dinosaurs died because they grew too big, and the world changed too quick.
Seen any dinosaurs die lately?
Netflix’s ‘Elite’Star Julian Ortega Dead at 41 …Cardiac Arrest on Beach
https://www.tmz.com/2024/08/29/netflix-elite-julian-ortega-dead/
Miss Lebanon Dima Safi dies from heart attack at 30
https://www.msn.com/en-xl/lifestyle/other/miss-lebanon-dima-safi-dies-from-heart-attack-at-30/ar-AA1pyO2B
US rapper Fatman Scoop dies after collapsing on stage
https://www.bbc.com/news/articles/clyn0z93p11o
“Once life evolves, it tends to cover its tracks.”
-John DelaneyLikeLike
A couple weeks ago I wrote a brief book review on Material World by Ed Conway and highly recommended it.
This interesting thread by Conway on the importance of salt will give you a sense of why I like his book so much.
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Here’s another thread on the failed attempt to make Lego “green”.
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That was an interesting read! But Jesus he can’t be serious with the following part:
“In some cases the replacements for fossil fuels are actually BETTER than what they’re replacing. 80 per cent of the energy in petroleum is wasted when you drive your car (mostly as heat). But an electric car loses barely 20 per cent of the energy along the way.”
(This is not to say there aren’t challenges with EVs. They’re much more mineral intensive to build than than petrol cars. Range & charging speed are still too low and they’re not good enough for carrying heavy loads. But in certain thermodynamic respects they’re better.)
Maybe, just maybe, there is more energy wasted before the electricity magically appears in the EV?
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I thought his book presented one long compelling argument for why the energy transition will never happen and why overshoot collapse is inevitable.
Only at the end did he draw a more optimistic conclusion.
I concluded his book is yet another case study for MORT. Nevertheless, everything leading up to his conclusion is superbly interesting.
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One of the arguments often used is how inefficient both coal and gas are at creating electricity, only 30-50% efficient depending upon age and type of plant.
They also argue that solar and wind are free. The point I’ve often made at POB is that coal, gas, nuclear, hydro are also free to mankind. We build machines to harvest the energy in the form of electricity.
All the EROEI calculations are about the energy we humans use creating the machines to make the electricity as the ‘input energy’, while the electricity is the output. It doesn’t matter what the original content of the energy going into any of them is, as in solar, wind, coal, or gas. These inputs are free to humanity.
What matters are the costs of the harvesting machines and the usefulness of the energy coming out.
Coal, gas and oil also provide a huge range of products, which is never included in the discussions about renewables, as if it would just magically happen anyway without fossil fuels.
MORT is just part of the problem, thinking in terms of the entire system instead of separate subsystems is also needed and extremely rare in all energy discussions..
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For about 14 years Dr. Tim Morgan has written over and over a variation on the implications of energy depletion on the economy. Today he seems to be expanding his perspective to include the broader overshoot implications on materials and population.
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As with every other reality we do not like, silence.
https://kirschsubstack.com/p/the-new-zealand-covid-vaccine-data
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https://kirschsubstack.com/p/legal-updates-us-and-new-zealand
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I just took part in another BBC survey and told them exactly what I think of them:
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Blimey Hamish did you have to soft soap it so much – particularly liked point 4. As someone said it’s the hope (optimism) that will kill you.
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Snorts! That was the toned down version. I’m wishing they would just kick me in the nuts to get me finally over, what is obviously some kind of perversion.
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Ditto on CBC. When I was young I listened to CBC radio every day. Have not touched it for over 10 years
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This is exactly the same complaints we have with every mainstream media outlet in New Zealand.
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I left MSM the moment podcasts became a thing over 20 years ago.
Never looked back, podcasts were far more interesting.
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Ditto for NPR and PBS here in the states. To think I contributed money to them for 20 years. Gave up on them during Covid as all they spewed was propaganda.
AJ
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These are they : Prof. Nate Hagens. Prof Sabine Hossenfelder. Prof Tom Murphy (Do the math). Dr. Tim Morgan. et al.
They don’t talk about or consider the following (below the quote), because either it is too shocking to the conscious or they don’t want to see it (denial), or my thinking is wrong.
That concept is not limited to ‘economic’. Fossil fuels created better than 90% of our culture and also the ability to send surplus grains, medicines, etc. to third world countries.
The things that are not talked about at all are the hardest concepts to grasp.
Here is an original thought:
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What happens when the global north is no longer able to send surplus grain and medicines to third world countries?
Also, the global north receives a lot more from the global south than vice versa.
https://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/pii/S095937802200005X
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I would characterize it more as takes.
Regarding, what happens when the largess is no longer available and 99% of the global supply chains are gone forever – sincerely and very seriously – bad things happen.
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Nice. Plus all that money loaned into existence is a claim on energy and materials that do not exist.
Many people think a solution to low growth is to tax the wealth of the super rich and spend it on things that the poor need. This will create a lot of inflation chasing energy and materials that do not exist. Much better to confiscate the wealth of the rich to pay down public debt (and somehow prevent it from being borrowed again) to reduce the size of our bomb.
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Several people I respect including RFK Jr. said this podcast was a must listen on how corrupt and/or incompetent regulators and health care “experts”, plus unhealthy food, are the root cause of disastrously poor public health.
I finally got around to listening to it while working at the farm today and agree it is superb. I like their clear and direct explanation of the problem, and what needs to be done. I also like that they are agnostic on diets saying it doesn’t matter if your body prefers vegan or keto or whatever as long as you stay away from processed foods like sugar, white flour, and seed oils, and avoid foods laced with pesticides and herbicides.
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Yes, this is excellent. I’m halfway through and needed to take a break. Dont know why this is getting me so triggered. I already know we are the only species on this planet that intentionally poisons our air, water and soil. And it’s all done for monetary reasons. Peter Joseph dives into this stuff all the time. About the shadow incentives and how the whole system is designed to keep you coming back to the doctor… But Casey and Calley have been working on their “story” for a while now and it shows.
Been telling myself that this is no big deal and it’s just how the end of the Great Reset should look for everyone who busted through fire. I already knew how corrupt everything is, but their story is so tight and connecting so many dots that I am sitting here stewing in anger likes its day one of my awakening journey.
Lobby groups, the food pyramid, vaccines, Coke & Cadbury funding millions to the american diabetes assoc., Anheuser-Busch funding Alcoholics Anonymous, Ozempic, corporate interest’s… fuck it all.
Ok, got that off my chest. Ready to finish the 2nd half now.😊
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It makes me angry too. The people in charge have no ethics or integrity. What happened to basic decency?
Covid is another example that makes me crazy when I think about it.
I just queued Casey Means’ book Good Energy as my next to read.
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Rob …”Covid is another example that makes me crazy when I think about it.”
That’s precisely why I stay away from, or diet and medicine in general, there is so much wrong everywhere. It all comes beck to self interest. People doing whatever necessary to keep themselves and ‘their’ kind ahead of the pack of everyone else.
To me it’s one of the overall tell tale signs that those at the top whether government or business know that prosperity for everyone is not possible, so grab what you can while you can, while ignoring everything/everyone else.
I suspect that many of the written research on renewables, nuclear, batteries, EVs etc and the bright green future, know it’s not close to possible, so are grabbing as much as they can now as in funding for their research, to continue telling the lies.
Doctors just have to go along with the mainstream to be well rewarded, while those taking a slightly different course of action get disbarred or whatever the term is. A Dr near me had his credentials for being a Dr revoked, because he was writing a lot of ‘exemption’ letters for people that didn’t want the covid vaccine. He was also charging a lot for this and people were paying it.
Get into any of it and it makes you angry inside, and keeps you distracted from the big picture that this civilization is going down in a big way sometime soon, and as soon as the energy is constrained then it’s a certainty in a very short period.
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The last time I got that angry was when you posted the crazy evangelical Christians documentary.😊 My favorite part is Calley’s breakdown of the “why” (41:30 – 44:42 mark). Sounds like David Graeber’s “Bullshit Jobs”.
Now of course, it’s all just the guaranteed end result of having too much complexity because of too much fossil energy. If Tucker, Casey, and Callie knew what we knew, they’d probably go insane. But the whole world would be better off because they’d be more likely spending that high IQ energy on something that matters. Hideaways last paragraph about staying away from it all because it distracts from the big picture… so true. I had to keep repeating my mantra throughout the interview, “God bless the Great Reset”.
From the overshoot worldview, pick a subject and the end result will always be like this interview; everything we are doing and how we are doing it is wrong. So yes, a case can be made that it’s all a waste of time, but then we’d have nothing to talk about here😊. Not wasting emotion on it is a good idea though. I have to teach myself from falling into that trap.
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