By paqnation (aka Chris): Humans Are Not a Species

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:

  1. Predigesting food by cooking allowed resources to be shifted from the gut to the brain (see Richard Wrangham). 
  2. Increasing productivity beyond what muscles alone can accomplish. 
  3. Disrupting the natural carbon cycle to influence the climate. 
  4. 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:

  1. 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.
  2. 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).
  3. Gloriously and stunningly separate & superior. 
  4. 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.

821 thoughts on “By paqnation (aka Chris): Humans Are Not a Species”

  2. https://consortiumnews.com/2024/09/01/scott-ritter-on-a-highway-to-hell/

    SCOTT RITTER: On a Highway to Hell

    Successive U.S. administrations have eschewed arms control in favor of maintaining American strategic advantage over real and/or imagined adversaries.

    This is accomplished by embracing nuclear weapons employment strategies that deviate from simple deterrence into war-fighting at every level of conflict, including scenarios that don’t involve a nuclear threat.

    At a time when the U.S. advocates policies exacerbating already high levels of tension with nuclear-armed adversaries Russia and China, the Biden administration has signed off on a new nuclear employment plan that increases, rather that decreases, the probability of nuclear conflict.

    Left unchecked, this policy can have only one possible outcome — total nuclear annihilation of humanity and the world we live in.

    However, the Biden administration is now confronted with the possibility and or probability of a much larger, capable Chinese strategic nuclear force capable of surviving a limited U.S. first-strike and delivering a nation-killing nuclear payload to U.S. soil in retaliation.

    To adjust to this new reality, the U.S. would need to allocate nuclear warheads currently targeted against Russia onto China. This would require that the U.S. not only develop revised target lists for both Russia and China, but also rethink targeting strategies in general, looking to maximum physical destruction over political impact.

    More dangerously, the U.S. would have to look at employment strategies that maximized the element of surprise to ensure all targets were hit by their designated weapons. This would require a change in the readiness posture and operational deployment areas of U.S. nuclear forces.

    With increased readiness comes the need for vigilance against any preemption efforts by a potential nuclear adversary, meaning that U.S. nuclear forces will be placed on a higher alert status.

    In short, the risk of nuclear war, inadvertent or otherwise, has become exponentially greater.

    In March the Biden administration reportedly issued a new Nuclear Employment Guidance document reflecting this reality.

    Nowhere in this guidance is there consideration for using arms control as a means of managing the nuclear equation, either by extending the New START treaty, or working with China to prevent a Chinese nuclear breakout.

    Instead, the U.S. appears to be concerned about the erosion of nuclear deterrence that will be brought about by diverting weapons dedicated to non-Chinese contingencies. When seen in this light, the answer to the problem is more, not fewer, nuclear weapons.

    This is why the U.S. is going to let the New START treaty lapse in February 2026 — once the treaty goes away, so, too, does the cap on the number of deployed warheads, and the U.S. nuclear establishment will be able to build up the U.S. operational nuclear arsenal so that there are enough weapons for every designated target.

    The world is becoming a very dangerous place.

    Nuclear weapons offer the illusion of security.

    By allowing the U.S. nuclear posture to shift away from deterrence toward warfighting, all we guarantee is that eventually there will be a warfighting scenario where the U.S. will end up using nuclear weapons.

    And then we all die.

    We are, literally, on a Highway to Hell.

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  5. Movie recommendation: 25th Hour (2002). I forgot all about this monologue where he is talking to himself in the mirror. One of the best ever. (and kind of how I felt last night during the Tucker/Means interview)

    This yt comment sums up the scene for me. “There’s never been a more visceral representation of self-hatred being projected outwards.”

    Was trying to write a similar monologue focusing on collapse/overshoot. I’ll post it if I can ever get it right. (embarrassingly bad right now😊)

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  6. 100 days above 100 °F in Phoenix Arizona.
    https://www.reddit.com/r/collapse/comments/1f8bipd/hottest_summer_ever_recorded_in_phoenix_99f_on/

    The temperature hit 102 F (38.9 C) in Phoenix on May 27 and has made it to triple digits every day since.

    The streak of remains active after Phoenix experienced its hottest climatological summer (June through August) on record, with an average temperature of 98.9 degrees. Both its average high temperature of 110.4 and average low of 87.5 were also record-setting.

    Last year, heat deaths increased 50 percent from 2022, reaching a record of 645 people in Maricopa County, which includes Phoenix. This year, 150 heat deaths have been confirmed by the government and an additional 440 deaths are under investigation.

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    1. The local news people are the worst about it. Giggling and enthusiastic about breaking another record. Or having a hard-hitting segment where they tell you to drink water if you’re outside.

      There is a news story everyday about someone getting a rescue helicopter from Camelback Mountain because they went hiking and overheated… uh-oh, I’m getting that 25th Hour hate vibe brewing again. I better stop thinking about it.

      Found this clip from the reddit link, and it’s so true:

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  7. Thanks to Sam Mitchell for finding this essay by reasonably aware Andrew Nikiforuk.

    https://thetyee.ca/Analysis/2024/07/15/Enshittification-Everything/

    The Enshittification of Everything

    Cory Doctorow, a clever fellow and Toronto-born internet dude, invented the term to characterize the declining service and products made by IT monopolies that generate armies of algorithms to bully people like storm troopers.

    But I think the descriptor has far broader applications. Everywhere you turn, it seems, civilization is facing a massive and cumulative failure of excessive complexity. Enshittification explains the state of just about everything.

    Enshittification, of course, can also be found on the food shelves even when they are stocked because whole foods are being replaced by ultra-processed stuff the same way TikTok or Facebook has replaced and debased human communication. The results aren’t good either way. One changes the metabolism of the human body while the other reduces the brain to its tyrannical bits: the left hemisphere.

    Only five brands of appliances now dominate the market the same way the Big Five (Alphabet [Google], Amazon, Apple, Meta and Microsoft) now rule the internet. Like their digital brethren, the appliance monopolists don’t keep spare parts for longer than three to five years. Some companies even restrict access to parts and service information. Or use proprietary screws.

    As a result of this planned obsolescence, appliances crowd our landfill cemeteries. Appliances make up half of the world’s electronic waste, which is growing by leaps and bounds.

    What’s happened to appliances is a pretty good metaphor for how complexity undermines society. The Utah anthropologist Joseph Tainter has argued that civilizations tend to collapse when they can no longer afford the social and energy costs of maintaining their complexity or, for that matter, their appliances. In other words, societies die when they can’t fix things in an affordable way.

    One hundred years ago it went like this: roughnecks drilled a hole, found a rich pool of oil and then pumped away. But those big milkshakes have been drained. As a result, the quality and quantity of energy is getting worse and more expensive.

    The technology today used to pry bits of oil and gas from underground formations is called fracking and is one destructive innovation. It requires assembling hundreds of trucks, plundering lakes of water, mining mountains of sand and mixing tons of chemicals to blast rock two kilometres underground at such high pressures that the industry causes earthquakes from Argentina to northern British Columbia. Then the industry has to bury Olympic-sized pools of toxic and radioactive wastewater, causing more earthquakes and changing bacterial communities to boot.

    Think about it. The industry that keeps planes airborne and cars on the road now depends on a platform that makes earthquakes, poisons groundwater, leaks methane, fragments agricultural land and defies regulation as arrogantly as Meta or Google. Most of us “users,” meanwhile, can’t understand why the costs of flying, driving and heating our homes are rising.

    Here’s a hint: according to a recent study, the amount of energy needed to frack and mine petroleum products now cannibalizes about 15 per cent of what is produced. Thanks to the intensification of LNG, fracking and bitumen steaming, half of petroleum production will be consumed by energy-intensive mining processes by 2050. That means less energy for homes, schools and the whole AI madness.

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    1. Seeing more and more of the complexity angle lately. (or maybe it’s always been there, and now I know how to spot it better). Of course we always see it in Hideaway’s work. But this Enshittification essay was all about it, as well as Calley Mean and her focus on the specialization in healthcare.

      Would not mind seeing this trend continue. Maybe complexity is an easier thing to grasp than overshoot. No, that statement is wrong…. maybe the denial is less for complexity than it is for overshoot.

      p.s. To Sam Mitchell; I have tried to leave comments on your yt channel but they always get deleted or disappear. You should read my fire essay for one of your videos. Your audience seems even less hopeful than un-Denial’s. I bet they would dig it. (maybe not though, based on the comments over there, they are a hard group to please. They hate everything😊)

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    2. I’ve followed Doctorow for a while now, and also have been aware of complexity as a symptom/attribute of overshoot. Complexity has grown and pulled down past empire cycles, but this one seems a bit different in one respect.

      One lens I am using more lately to observe collapse is that of emergent behaviors. In the same way that an ant colony builds an anthill, but the hill is beyond the ability or understanding of any one ant to change or prevent, humans have created an entity that has moved beyond our control. Call it Hagen’s superorganism,. or Orlov’s technosphere, but this mindless, relentless chase for the best return by money has supercharged the race to the cliff.

      Yes, corporations composed of humans are the main instrument of this entity, but they are powerless to change their behavior. Any CEO or corporation that tries to shift to the common good will be eaten up by competitors as investment money goes to the better return.

      Enshittification is simply one manifestation of profit at all cost, just like externalizing negatives and corruption of the political process.

      Not looking forward to any of the likely outcomes.

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      1. It does feel like no one is driving the bus. I understand the power of profits but I think our leaders should have the integrity and courage to stand up on public health and nuclear war issues because they are powerful short term threats to their children. Unfortunately they are not.

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        1. I think our (real) “leaders” are addicted to power. So, one could say, “evil” in a way. When power is your only goal, anything goes, everything becomes a means, and knowledge of truth evidently not to be shared.

          We can’t really blame them for that: it’s difficult not to be addicted to something when living in the affluent world. There are both the sources of pain (many forms of emotional distresses, unhealthy society of isolation based essentially on formalised relationships of power…) and temporary relief (drugs, alcohol, sugar, screens, junk food, sex, torture, you name it…) in abundance.

          A sad species out of context running hamok. Or, to spin it another way, an ideal training ground towards wisdom.

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  8. Hideaway on the problem with moving everyone out of cities to work in the fields…

    #288: Without the elixir

    Just to add to Joe’s great comment up thread, some highlights here…

    “But how much can we actually do to effect such a transition? We are barely managing to keep modernity going as it is. How and where will we get the resources to abandon modern cities, move everyone to the country and create a new world of low-energy agrarianism?”

    It just can’t be done on a scale commensurate with a worldwide urban population measured in billions. In rich countries 80% of the population lives in cities and even those who live outside cities need the same supply chains a city dwellers. We’ve spent centuries burning huge amounts of fossil fuels to build the system of habitation and support almost all of us depend on for our very lives. We won’t get the opportunity for a redo. No small farm future for any but a tiny minority of ‘lucky’ ones.”

    Adding to the misery of any thoughts of solutions, is the work done by Prof Geoffrey West on scale. Apparently the huge size of cities with the complexity that comes with it, save both energy and resources compared to everyone spread out in the countryside. So to undo modernity with the existing population to a ‘small farm’ type of civilization, and I assume small towns everywhere as well, can only happen with a lot more energy and materials than we currently use.

    This of course means it can’t happen at all except for a few lucky survivors of the ‘short term’ future where energy availability rapidly declines.

    We are in a predicament, we don’t have a problem that’s solvable for 8B plus humans. We have been in overshoot for the last couple of centuries, since using and relying upon fossil fuels, but even before that time, were also possibly in overshoot, relying upon imports from the ‘New World’ for many materials and foods..

    Once we get into freefall of available energy, material availability also quickly falls, which means even repairing and maintaining existing machinery becomes a major problem. Everything suffers from entropy, so the breakdown of supply lines of food, all relying upon vast complex supply lines of parts and fuel, will be fast, and the civility in cities with it.

    Human civilization can only go forward, doing more environmental damage, or collapse, but the collapse part comes anyway when the oil supply is declining rapidly, which is a certainty because we live on a finite planet.

    I often call it deep overshoot, not just overshoot, because we have only left ourselves one way out, rapid collapse, which 99.999% of people want to deny. There are no possible solutions for this to end well.

    Even J.Alpert’s plan, of near zero population reproduction and population falling rapidly from natural decline with a ballot for 1 in 2,000 women having a child each year to get the population down to under 100M in 3 cities, while rewilding most of the planet, wont work, and will never be implemented by governments.

    Collapse will catch just about everyone unawares as they constantly look for ‘solutions’ to a predicament, that by definition does not have any solution.

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    1. Later on at 1:50’ish it gets a bit more technical and the reading of the article with an asterisk every few words was an eye opener. I’ve been using Telegram for a few years and didn’t have any problems initiating encrypted chats, though it is somewhat obtuse – with the caveat that it is only one-to-one and not groups. But I am way above average in the tech-savy department.

      I’m now likely to switch to Signal.

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  10. Kickass interview of RFKjr by McElroy at Limitless Conference this week.

    He gets free rein on vaccines, captured regulatory agencies, ultraprocessed foods and, surprising to me, he names names of criminals in FDA, CDC and others. He lists companies he’s won litigation lawsuits against, and what he intends to do if the Trump ticket wins the WH. I would play my cards a lot closer to my chest!

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    1. RFK Jr.’s an amazing leader. The democrats should have chosen him as their leader. I’m so glad he’s teamed up with someone that might win and give him the power to make some changes. Or maybe not. The deep state/corporate alliance is powerful. We’ll see.

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  11. A rare update from Fast Eddy.

    He’s reversing the trend of doomers moving to New Zealand.

    https://ourfiniteworld.com/2024/08/21/todays-economy-is-like-that-of-the-late-1920s/comment-page-4/#comment-467129

    Fast Eddy exited the doomed NZ in Feb… having sold the goat ranch… and withdrawn every last cent from the soon to be failed state.

    It’s a tossup as to what brings me more SCHAD… watching as influencers and celebs drop dead from the Rat Juice… or tracking NZ’s rapid descent into bowels of hell.

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    1. Where is he going LOL?

      NZ has a lot of fossil fuels, but our supreme authorianate Jacinda banned any further development of oil and gas. Coal has been in trouble for years. However, I suspect that NZ will develop our oil offshore oil field in the future – give it 10 or 20 years. When the energy crisis is really biting.

      The energy decisions made by our previous government have been mind-boggling stupid: close our refinery, ban further oil/gas, plan to ban nat gas completely, invest in hydrogen and pumped hydro and subsidise EVs/solar/wind.

      End result was us relying more on our coal electricity plant and importing oil from Indonesia (with questionable human rights and environmental protections). We call it dirty oil in NZ.

      I would have been fine most of these changes if it coincided with reduction in laws and regulations and more affordable housing. But what the lefties of today do is destroy the current system and make it impossible to do anything else to build out alternative local systems.

      We added 1 million people to New Zealand in 10 years. Yet we don’t build any houses for them to live in…. 😦

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  12. The last week has been a very interesting one, we’ve had a series of storms go through, with the worst on Sunday night.

    Last week we had the power out for 30 hours, then on for 6 before going off for another 10, back on for a couple of days then off for another 5 times of varying duration between 10 minutes and several hours. Funnily the on/off was more frustrating as I’d wait for a period then turn the generator on, only to find grid power was back, so went down to the shed to turn generator off, to have power go off again…

    We didn’t have any storm damage on the property but did have many trees down, 4 or 5 on our own driveway, and 4 on the minor road we are on. Our family cleared them all. I have some close neighbours in their late ’80’s nearby, not capable of doing any of that type of work. Several of the trees down were between 2-3 foot diameter and over 120 ft tall. We also have over a dozen down in various parts of the bush on our property, and lots of large branches and even heads of trees snapped off at anything from 20ft to 70ft in the air. I suspect some tornadoes just from the way some were ‘twisted’ off..

    I often think of the work done by Gail Zawacki on the damage being done to forests from ozone and/or other pollutants, when these events happen. A lot of the trees downed were not that healthy. If trees are declining in health overall and storms increasing in strength, both due to fossil fuel use, it’s possible that the 6th mass extinction we are causing could be a really big one, with ‘life’ on the planet being totally different in a few million years, with the atmosphere also being different to present. We’ll have been as effective as blue green algae in the course of Earth’s life’s history…

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      1. Nope, there were visible trees across lines all over the place, with them re-routing power in all sorts of directions. They even had a crew in the local town giving out water bottles, cups of coffee, updates, co-ordinating repair crews, etc. Because we supply our own water, no power means no water to all the rural properties.

        How about you pick a nic, Nony, it makes everyone easier to have a conversation with. Nothing worse than a couple of Nony’s discussing things without being able to separate which Nony said what…

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    2. Thanks for the update. Glad you’re ok. There have been more windfalls here recently than I remember 50 years ago as a child. I usually see rot at the center suggesting the tree was not healthy. I also think about Gail Zawacki when I see them.

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    3. We had the power go out for nearly 80 hours from last week’s storms. Some parts of Tassie are still without power.

      We’ve got gravity fed water so at least we could run the taps but the water was cold within 24 hours. Thankfully it was cold so all the freezers didn’t thaw.

      The good thing is that least all the rain has ended the drought down this way. It was looking pretty dire. We had lots of trees die in the Huon valley this year due to the drought. On some hillsides nearly every tree in the forest died. Tragic.

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  13. I read Dr Morgan’s article on the miracle of oil and what it does for the society. He mentions that the energy cost of energy is increasing remorselessly and now stands at 10% from 5% a few decades back. I have seen it mentioned here several times and also by B that by 2050 half of the energy produced by oil will have to go back into extracting it. Wouldn’t that mean an EcoE of 50%? How can EcoE go from 10 to 50 in just three decades? Is there some other metric that I am missing ?

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    1. Hideaway probably has something better to say about your question but I don’t think we should focus on EcoE in isolation.

      We should consider the combined effects of our growth dependent economic system, exponentially rising public debt, complex extraction and refining technology, complex global supply chains, falling EROEI, falling mineral ore grades, falling diesel content, falling fracked well productivity, falling oil reserves, the export land model, and the risks of war.

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      1. Darn I wish Euan had kept Energy Matters going. It was an excellent resource to cut through BS, and many of the articles and comment threads are still quite relevant, like the one you have shared.

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    5. Kira, the ECOE that Tim Morgan uses is really just EROEI, yet he insists in putting it in his terms. It is an exponential curve and we are still in the relatively flat parts of that curve. At some point in the near future we get the increase in overall energy availability contracting, instead of expanding.

      This downslope will also be an exponential curve downwards. The EROEI curve will also continue, so we have 2 exponential curves closing in on each other dramatically reducing the available energy for all other uses…

      We also have an exponential curve of growing energy use, to gain the metals and minerals we need to just maintain the existing civilization let alone any ‘growth’, because of declining ore grades in more remote locations, deeper in the ground with a higher ore hardness index (means more energy needed to break the rocks to tiny grains).

      Once oil production declines really accelerate, the effect on everything else multiplies and any of the calculations of what ECOE will be in 2050 are just bunk, because it assumes the rates of increase will be the same in a world economy of shrinkage as it was in a world economy of growth.

      It’s the shrinkage vs growth that nearly everyone in the future prediction business, can’t get their heads around.

      Growth enabled, a lot more education, invention, and technology improvements as everything became more complex. The world market continually grew allowing all sorts of minor factories to thrive making the most intricate little parts that were used in making lots of machines of all types, to do our work, in a world of growing machines.
      Growth, allowed extra complexity, that fed back to allow mining of lower grade ores, plus allowing better production of food per acre. Growth, complexity and efficiency gains are in feedback loops with each other, allowing the civilization to grow while using less energy and materials per person. These feedback loops have allowed us to overcome lower ore grades, and limits on production per acre of food and fibre.

      A simple example of this growth and complexity, allowed mining trucks to go from 40 tonne simple trucks to 400 tonne highly complex trucks at mine sites, to mine the ever lower grade ores. The much larger trucks are a lot more efficient than the smaller ones, saving energy on a per tonne basis of dirt moved. Likewise for everything else throughout modern civilization. The entire civilised world has a vast economy of scale, saving energy and materials, compared to the same number of people living the same lifestyle spread out, with ‘localised’ production of everything.

      The complex 400 tonne mining truck relies upon a world wide chain of parts, for new trucks, maintenance and repairs. Whereas the old 40 tonne trucks could be repaired by a handy mechanic and relatively simple tools. Without the world wide scale, the huge mining trucks become historic relicts. Mining becomes vastly inefficient, so does farming, all transport of goods and all new building.

      Not one commentator I’ve come across considers the complexity is as important to maintain, for civilization to continue in the downslope of oil availability. Everyone considers we will be able to repair just a little less, have a bit less new, and build a huge number of dwellings for people as we spread out from cities. It’s all incorrect..

      Simplification of everything means less efficient, which means more energy to do things like mining, just when we run into huge energy availability constraints. It means it physically can’t happen. If the mining can’t happen due to lack of energy and simplification, then the factories making parts for both new and ‘replacement parts’ doesn’t happen either, which effects machines of all types, around the world.

      Another aspect of mining not known about is that with the more remote mines, the workforce is often FIFO, or fly in fly out. People work in 2 week shifts, living in camps. Without jet fuel, this can’t happen, likewise with workers flown by helicopter to oil rigs, which means falls in oil availability have all sorts of far reaching effects never considered..

      Enough about mining. The whole world relies on every other part of the world to maintain our complex civilization. Any type of downsizing or regionalisation becomes vastly inefficient, right when we have less energy, that’s only available because of the current complexity. To provide for everything ‘locally’ takes a huge increase in energy and materials to build everything that’s needed, when we wont have the energy or materials.

      IMHO all the talk of what’s going to happen in 2050, is by people that have no idea of how much we rely upon the complexity of our civilization and they don’t understand how it has to unwind with less energy at an exponential rate.

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      1. So much of your excellent content is scattered across hundreds of comments.

        No one else in the world is speaking about these issues.

        It’s time for you to assemble all of your comments into one definitive essay. I’m willing to help you.

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      2. Thanks for such a detailed answer.

        I figured that it is probably the exponential EROEI decline curve that he is talking about but it was difficult to wrap my head around the fact that we go from 20:1 to around 2:1 in just a span of three decades. I guess the most difficult thing for humans to understand really is the exponential function. It is probably the scariest graph ever.

        The mining truck example is a really good one as it perfectly explains how scaling everything up has given us unbelievable efficiency gains in practically every area imaginable. I would presume that the truck example can be applied to cargo ships too which are massive in size but carry enormous amounts of cargo.

        I agree with Rob, even people who are overshoot aware can sometimes fall into the trap of simplification when thinking about parts of the civilization in isolation. It happens to me quite often. The problem is that it is difficult to think about all the moving parts together. Reading your explanations can provide a new perspective and promote systems thinking. It would be immensely beneficial if your content was available in a more structured format addressing key areas like agriculture, mining, shipping, metallurgy.

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      3. Hello Hideaway,

        I agree with everything you say. And I understand very well. It means, at some point in the near future, all modernity stops almost at once. I personnally, say to whoever wants to listen, we will inhabit a very different world by 2030. And they just stare at me, like I am crazy. (you know like this guy: https://tintin.fandom.com/wiki/Philippulus_the_Prophet)

        But, in a way, focusing on what will stop working presents a somewhat “closed” outlook of reality.

        I’d like to encourage you to try to think of how we are going to “make it work”. (By make it work, I mean the range from survival to thriving)

        To me this will be fun. No guarantees, of course. And there are very dark ways to “make it work”.

        For instance, would you agree, that for sake of survival, many will move to the country-side, and be ready to accept very rough living conditions (packed in old houses/tents/huts out of wood and mud, no heating, minimum food intake and hard manual work)?

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  15. Liked by 4 people

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      1. By steady state I assume you mean both no-growth and long-term sustainable?

        I’m not sure.

        I’d like to say medieval with a two-child policy except we know agriculture is unsustainable unless you’re lucky enough to live in a rare location that naturally replenishes what’s removed from the soil.

        Hunter-gatherers are a candidate, provided you could enforce a two-child policy across a thinly distributed population which seems improbable. Otherwise they grow and wipe out the mega-fauna.

        I’d personally love to replay the tape at the start of the industrial revolution but constrain the population to zero growth. I know it would still be unsustainable but there was a LOT of fossil energy and minerals that could have lasted many hundreds of years maybe giving us time to figure something out a la Jack Alpert’s plan.

        Maybe someone else has other ideas.

        Queue Hideaway to remind us that modernity requires growth and is fundamentally unsustainable and therefore steady-state is impossible.

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        1. No idea what a steady state economy would look like… I just wanted to play the rewind game. I’d love to replay the tape just prior to Columbus setting off for India. With one caveat. I would rig it so that it was no longer possible to go deep sailing in the ocean (for a few hundred years). 

          Then we could see what happens to the Native Americans when left alone. Sustainable cultures & living in harmony with nature for millions of years… Oh wait, that’s the old me talking.😊

          Something tells me that within a couple thousand years the Natives would be desperately sailing the planet in hopes of resupplying their dwindling resources. Then accidentally stumble onto the Old World and end up genociding the primitive and technological inferior savage Europeans. And to feel better about themselves for stealing all the land, the Native Americans would concoct a story that involves God and Destiny.

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        2. Any civilization that uses nothing more than a little bit of iron as the only metal, plus bans growth, has a chance of long term success, providing world population remains below 10 million.

          Each group would be a little hunter/gathering society, with a little farming, using mostly natural renewable resources of plant products, stone, earth, with possibly a blacksmith for ‘industry’, to make basic tools for carpentry.

          Iron is plentiful, so if used sparingly will not cause too much damage to forests in gathering wood for charcoal.

          Unfortunately we have this thing called human nature, that promotes growth, or someone somewhere will invent a religion that promises the locals that they can all be better off if they grow and take from the neighbours, or more from the system around them.

          I see a future after collapse, where civilizations form again, maybe basically, but an attempt to grow continues, plus all the usual damage to the environment and other humans trying to live a quiet sustainable life. In other words an ongoing cycle until we go extinct due to vast climate change, or a virus/bacteria/asteroid destroys all humans.

          There will never, ever be anything like our level of civilization again, though a lot of resources remain in Antarctica for when that thaws out and is discovered as a new world by some distant in the future sail boats. (10,000 -50,000 years time). All those ‘new’ resources might get them to a 1950’s style civilization before they again use up all the fossil fuels and collapse…

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  16. This was Dennis in response to a comment on POB that price is dependent on supply, while demand knows no limits supply is finite. Demand cannot create new supply.

    Dennis – The price will be determined by both supply and demand, regardless of what you believe. I agree supply is limited and demand is not. However demand is dynamic, in 1915 there was a significant demand for buggy whips and saddles on a per capita basis, today the per capita demand for those items is much smaller. In 2015 there was a significant demand for ICE vehicles on a percapita basis, the per capita demand in in 2115 will probably be far lower for ICE vehicles. Suppy of C plus C will fall because oil prices will be low due to lack of demand for oil so that it will no longer be profitable to produce much of the existing oil resource.

    He is actually comparing horse and buggy to internal combustion engines and thinks they will be replaced by EVs before decline of oil catches up and civilization will be around in 2115!!. The fact that this is coming from the admin of a site called “Peak oil barrel” and not some politician is frightening.

    This is his projection about future of oil production. I honestly don’t know if he is serious or this is some elaborate inside joke that only he is in on.

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  17. https://www.aljazeera.com/news/2024/8/30/why-is-namibia-culling-elephants-and-hippos-for-meat

    More than 700 wild animals, including hippos and elephants, are being culled in Namibia’s game parks to provide meat for the country’s hungry, the government has said, as the arid Southern African region battles its worst drought in 100 years.

    A spokesperson for United Nations Secretary-General Antonio Guterres described the situation in the country as a “humanitarian crisis we’ve never spoken much of” at a media conference on Friday.

    Note that Namibia is one of the world’s most sparsely populated countries. I fear what will happen on the downslope of the carbon pulse in more densely populated countries.

    https://www.voanews.com/a/conservationists-threaten-namibia-with-legal-action-over-wildlife-cull/7770593.html

    Windhoek, Namibia — 

    Wildlife conservationists, scientists and researchers in Namibia and Southern Africa have warned of impending legal action to halt the culling of wildlife as a “mitigation strategy” to address hunger.

    Hunger affects about 700,000 people in Namibia, according to the United Nations Food and Agricultural Organization — especially in rural Namibia — and it has worsened because of the drought facing the southern African region.

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    2. It seems I will have to relunctantly admit that Hideaway is even right about total ecological devastation on the downslope.

      Reality trumps theory.

      😦

      So be it.

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        1. It is tempting to think about North Korea as a case study of a nation managing to sustain a high population density (at least when looking at arable land per capita- more than 100 people per hectare) with essentially pre industrial methods but it is a fundamentally flawed assumption.

          North Korea imports a lot of fertilizer from China which essentially acts as a leverage for the CCP to rein in the rogue state. Also North Korea unlike the south is rich in minerals and also has a reasonable amount of coal. They have set up coal gasification plants to generate ammonia from coal as an additional source for fertilizer. North Korea produces more than 5 tonnes of rice per hectare which is close to international norms despite harsh, unfavorable weather and depleted soils. On top of all these it also imports huge quantities of grains to make up the shortfall.

          So even North Korea may not survive the incoming collapse without China.

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          1. They definitely won’t be able to maintain their population levels. But it is shocking how low their standard of living is, even for the wealthy

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      3. You have no idea how much I wish I was incorrect. There are people around the world doing great conservation work in a myriad of areas, by putting conservation covenants on property titles, to rewilding large areas.

        Yet in the big picture, when civilization collapses, none of this work will matter. Hungry, cold hordes will not spare anything for food, shelter and warmth. Property ‘rights’, conservation notices/orders will be meaningless.

        The entire problem is 8 billion strong, and when we go to 7B, then 6B, then 5B all fairly rapidly, vast swaths of the natural world will be decimated.

        Of course the climate changing and warming rapidly, with all the human built fences and greatly separated wild areas, will just exacerbate the overall problem.

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        1. Thank you for your reply.

          Yes 🙂

          To be frank, I don’t know how it will play out. Too complex for me.

          One sure is certain, right now, it’s pedal to the metal with a headband and chanting outloud not to listen.

          On my little plot in the countryside, the beaver(s?) takes down more trees than I am able to with my limited time, axe and saw. He seems to prefer felling poplars. Maybe I should learn how to inoculate and grow oyster mushroom 🙂

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    1. Sick. I saw another video with a American Jew suggesting all the Palestinians should just move to Europe. She was about as white as a person can be too. The irony

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    2. Different topic, but same ballpark. While I was reading Indi’s newest piece about how american slavery still exists, your video and monks comment were ringing in my head.

      Useful idiots, that’s all the monetary system creates. This comment by Marco was good: 

      “Indeed, there is no one more hostile to the poor man at the door than a rich man’s servant.” (Indi quote)

      My goodness. As the child of an undocumented worker who manages a 100+ unit tenant property for barely-above-minimum-wage, yet kicks down on the tenants who use public assistance to feed their children, this pierces through my heart. That slave mentality is real.

      How America Still Has Slavery — indi.ca

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  19. Sorry, this post is going to be quite speculative. I initially planned it very short (3 sentences), but an idea led to another. (Read it like fiction, if you find me crazy, and feel free to tell me 🙂

    I was wondering about something.

    Do you think there is a relationship between age and overshoot awareness? And about overall denial?

    Funnily, if I had to answer my own questions (not based on data, but feeling only), I would say the younger, the more overshoot aware, and at the same time, the younger, the more in denial (because of the impact of education, sorry, propaganda)

    Maybe, that is because some aspect of overshoot (fear of climate change) is currently being used as a mass control mechanism.

    I believe that the human mind has multiple “vulnerabilities”. The knowledge to exploit these vulnerabilities is very ancient. Trauma, especially on young children, is a way to alter consciousness and split personalities. With mass media, that is now being done on a massive scale. And it works a lot more that we can fathom. Most of us aren’t aware because of the strength of the spell (myself included, just scratching the surface).

    When I think something, say something, write something, do I know where the thought comes from? Is it really mine or was it brutally hammered inside my brain or subtly induced?
    I think that is the reason we get the impression to talk to robots when trying to explain some issues. The programming takes over.

    Although, it is true the majority accomodates and is quite lenient about it (does not actively oppose it), the system is still run by true psychopaths. (Maybe, they are old über-psychopaths, the winners of non openly documented wars which were waged during the 20th century between various sect-like groups.)
    Now, I have no doubt the handling of covid was no accident and was operated purposefully to maximise trauma. I think the reason is to manage collapse in a way, that the power structure remains (not to minimize suffering or even keep modernity).

    That’s also why I feel, the second stage of the drama will begin just after the olympics (at least in France): covid was the first shock, the olympics is the soothing, only to increase the brutality of the next shock.
    Strangely, I also think any strategy to keep central power is bound to fail in the long run, because a central power requires a centrally controlled source of energy (fossil energy) and a centrally controlled way of distributing it (monetary system). But who am I to know, aren’t psychopaths devilishly clever and the population at large excruciatingly inert?

    Isn’t one function of money today to act like a labelling tool (the same way radioactive isotopes are introduced in a biological system to be able to trace them through imagery)? The central power has a way to know exactly who owns what and evaluate the relative powers of structures. Then interest rates and monetary inflation is a way to inflate the balloon of some actors to the detriment of the other players. Following the money, climbing the social ladder ultimately amounts to do what one is told by the central power and get owned through the rapid acquisition of enormous amounts of debt.

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    1. Hi Charles. Good questions.

      If I had to guess (based on feeling), I would say the older are more overshoot aware. I think it’s similar to all those bumper sticker slogans that I paid no attention to as a young buck, but now I see the wisdom behind it… Respect your elders, you don’t know what you’ve got till its gone, what doesn’t kill you makes you stronger, etc, etc. I don’t know exactly when I started to see the truth in these stereotypes. Probably around age 40.

      The other thing I base my guess on is the typical age of most doomers. I’ve never seen a young person (under 30) being interviewed by Nate Hagens. The audience here at un-Denial all seem to be over 40. Stellarwind72 is an exception. (Stellar might be the youngest aware person on the planet😊). Not sure who else is young here. Maybe monk?

      As far as who has more denial… I’d say it’s a tie. Regardless of age, we are all oozing with MORT.

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    2. I remember being overshoot aware as soon as I was old enough to think about such things. Unfortunately I am severely pessimistic so it was not easy for denial to save me from the troubling thoughts about the future. Being well-educated in history and growing up “off grid” probably helped me a lot as well.

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    1. Thank you very much for sharing and recommending this excellent video (I wouldn’t have listened to it otherwise)

      I liked it very much: my thinking is quite aligned with Daniel Christian Wahl’s. It’s somewhat comforting to know there is an increasing number of people trying to walk the path of connection/life/regeneration (even though it’s so late). Especially, when, like me, you live in a too densely populated suburb of an authoritarian and adverse society.

      I particulary liked the first part on regenerative culture and participatory worldview https://youtu.be/L3zTAv-JWi0?t=310

      Then this quote (https://youtu.be/L3zTAv-JWi0?t=2023):

      It’s really difficult to speak about the new without the language of the old bringing the old back in

      And then the whole section “Transition period”:

      Bizarrely, I think, if enough of us, all of humanity, reaches the point of maturity, of caring more about life and less about individual lifespan or our species survival, and we find our peace with maybe living the end day of a relatively young species. I think exactly in that point, we will find the maturity to develop the patterns that will take us into not dying an early death as a species.

      […] the way we see the world, the organizing ideas we take, the stories we tell actually makes the world show up to us in a certain way.

      […] about the separation, the age of the enlightenment, the world as other and what that brings: science and technology, the capability of being detached enough so you actually hurt your own skin, your own larger being, and exploit its resources. […] there’s a final participation stage […] how do we come back in […] of course, everything is fundamentally interconnected

      As my brother says in different terms, we are in the apocalypse, or the age of revelation.

      And more towards the end (Bioregional First Steps):

      you have to be an animist to understand that what I do to this world, I do to myself, to some extent […]

      it’s just as scientifically valid to understand life as a planetary process that manifests through species and individuals, but is one whole unfolding in a kind of bohmian way than it is to map that complexity through individual and species and their characteristics

      (kind of like the Alan Watts’ “flowering of the field”)

      the story we tell about the nature of reality is highly limited and limiting

      Note, that once one frames reality as a planetary process expressing itself through species and individuals, then what’s going on currently is suddenly not really a problem, but rather a transformation, an evolution (whatever the number of species, including humans which may disappear in the doing).
      Within this brutal transformation, the humans species is undergoing an epistemological and cultural revolution with an undecided outcome.

      One thing is for sure: the next doubling is not going to happen.

      (And I now have to look into salutogenesis, never heard that word before…)

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  21. Hideaway crushes another widely held belief.

    https://peakoilbarrel.com/open-thread-non-petroleum-august-28-2024/#comment-780762

    Hickory…. “When oil begins to decline those regions who can
    1- afford it, and
    2- have access to it
    will begin to divert a higher and higher portion of the burn to the critical uses. I’d put food production, certain petrochemicals, and energy production enabling industries in that critical category, for example. Many places will have plenty of oil for critical industries for quite a long time.”

    I agree that will be tried, and is consensus type thinking.

    However we live in a 6 continent supply chain world of immense complexity, so which country or region can be self sufficient as oil declines?? If your region or country cannot import the necessary parts to keep machinery going, that originated in areas now with oil and supply line constraints, how is this overcome?

    The concept of we’ll just build the necessary factories, assumes your area can still get the machinery needed by those factories and the raw materials.

    We have a whole world complex system of complex interrelationships for highly complex modern machinery. The complexity of everything is the problem, it wont be just an oil shortage in some places and not others. Oil allows the mining and delivery of the raw materials for every factory around the world, which make their own parts which go to many other factories, again spread around the world.

    If your region or area still has access to some oil, and it’s just everywhere else suffering, how do you maintain machinery that has relied upon parts from around the world??

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  23. Steve St. Angelo reviews the latest oil production numbers and concludes the collapse will likely be delayed due to shale oil surprising to the upside.

    I found it odd that he did not mention the implications of Art Berman’s research which shows the total production of new shale oil wells is about 20% of wells from 3 years ago.

    Andril Zvorygin calculates oil will go to zero between 2035 and 2040. He also introduces an interesting idea that food prices reflect net energy and since food prices were at their minimum in 2015, that’s when net energy was highest. Zvorygin predicts we will track the St. Matthew Island reindeer overshoot collapse when their population fell from 6000 to 40 in 2 years.

    St. Angelo countered with optimistic hope that we will figure our how to degrow the economy and grow more food on unused land.

    Zvorygin then veered off into woo and I tuned out.

    When the conversation returned to earth St. Angelo said the biggest issue we face is depreciation, meaning that everything falls apart and needs to be replaced, and high tech falls apart faster than anything else. I noted to myself that this explains the mysterious factor in Dr. Tim Garrett’s model that he has so much trouble explaining.

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  24. @Rob Mielcarski
    You might like this video. It is about response the to the covid-19. It is by a guy named The Mysterious Mr. Enter, who was first known for reviewing cartoons.

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  25. Denial layered on denial layered on denial…

    I read a lot of crap and at the top of the crap list are technology predictions by academic institutions.

    Nuclear fusion is one of the most important up-and-coming technologies, and contrary to jokes, it is indeed coming closer. But how long will it take to get a nuclear fusion reactor to put power in to the grid? According to two recent reports, the technology won’t be ready until 2050, too late to contribute to our net zero goals. If you look at national strategy plans, the situation looks different. What are we to make of such wildly different perspectives?

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  26. Hideaway on ramping up mining…

    https://ourfiniteworld.com/2024/08/21/todays-economy-is-like-that-of-the-late-1920s/comment-page-4/#comment-467231

    Most silver mined is a by product of gold, copper, zinc and lead mining, with the mines set up to run a certain throughput tonnage of ore per day. There is no ramping up any of these mines..

    I’d also suggest the profitable silver mines are also running at capacity already, as that is the most efficient way to run any mine..

    Higher prices might bring more production in a few years, if lucky, with the higher prices making some currently uneconomic deposits, economically viable, but it takes prolonged higher prices relative to everything else to do that.

    If costs go up 50% but silver prices only go up 30%, then no new mine production.

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  27. I’m planning to buy a 5 year supply of vitamin B12 in case I am forced to switch to a vegetarian diet. Are there any other must have supplements other than D, C, magnesium, and the multivitamin I already take?

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    1. I would recommend b12 as methylcobalamin – Solgar brand at iherb is good.
      I would also recommend L-Taurine, NAC and nattokinase. Helps with immune system and clotting from covid virus.

      I get them on eBay and the nattokinase at iherb.

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      1. Dear God, maybe I am just over reacting and I’m in a weird place right now or —

        That site is complete shite. In Ubuntu, Firefox doesn’t like the absence of HTTPS and the HTTP version leads to a totally blank page. In Windows there is a popup (borderline demanding) to install a different Search.

        Addendum – don’t click anything and wait a few seconds, the popup / tab appears to auto forward to a search of “!ducky flccc”. And the ‘back’ button appears to have lost it’s history!

        That is an exemplar of someone shitting the bed.

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      2. Thanks. I think I was unclear on what I was asking. I hoped someone with first hand experience of a vegetarian diet would know if there was any supplement other than B12 required specifically for that diet. I am trying to prepare for the day when I may be forced to live on rice and beans.

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        2. Hello Rob,

          You are very clear in your request and I think it’s a great idea to have some supplemental B12 on hand no matter what one’s primary diet as functional deficiency can happen whether one eats animal products or not. It is my intuit that if our gut and gut microbiome are healthy then we should be able to absorb the B12 that is made by our own bacteria (I think I mentioned this before) but so many factors preclude this ideal, including antibiotic use.

          Increasing intake of naturally bacterial rich foods such as through fermentation is another way to help the microbiome and also boost b12–how did you go with your bumper harvest of crops this year, did you manage to put away any of it as pickles? This could be a very worthwhile and interesting hobby, learning the art of fermentation. I highly recommend the book with that title “The Art of Fermentation” by Sandor Katz, it’s an encyclopedic journey of the history and processes from around the world, every culture has learned to ferment for food preservation and increased nutrition. This treasure trove discusses fermentation of just about any foodstuff, including beverages. Another book that I have and refer to often is Joy of Pickling by Linda Ziedrich, it’s probably out of print (published 1998) but it’s worth looking for secondhand, over 200 recipes for pickling all kinds of fruits and vegetables from the garden. I can imagine you Rob getting into it and creating batches of wonderful ferments from your own produce!

          The other supplement that I would recommend everyone should have on hand in one form or another is iodine, which is usually supplied in iodized salt but can be lacking in vegetarian diets as the usual main primary food sources are seafood, dairy and eggs. I supplement through using seaweed which is very high in iodine, a pinch of kelp powder with every pot of soup/stew seems to be a good baseline. Rob, you living on the coast is very fortunate for being able to harvest your own sea vegetables, although you did say the quantity has decreased significantly over the years.

          Thank you for bringing this up, I had gotten a bit lax with my b12 supplementation as of late (I am on a relative energy high after the Covid bout, just feeling so good to be back to my usual health and trying to get ever more things done with the extra boost) but I will get back into it–you don’t need to take it every day, I usually take 2-3 times a week (when I remember) but it’s a significant dose as that’s what’s needed for absorption, at 1000micrograms. Now the next question is which form of B12 should one take–the two most available are cyanocobalamin which is a manmade form that your body converts into methylcobalamin, which is the other main form and considered the most bio-available as it’s the natural form from animal foodstuffs (usually extracted from dairy or eggs). The jury is out on which is the better, some studies show that cyanocobalamin is slightly better absorbed, whilst the methylcobalamin is retained in the body longer, but the main takeaway is cyanocobalamin is cheaper (being manmade) and more stable and the possible benefit is that it is converted by the body’s enzymes into 2 active forms of b12, methylcobalamin and adenosylcobalamin, whereas if you just take methylcobalamin you may be missing the adenosyl form which is a co-factor. So perhaps the best is taking methylcobalamin along with the adenosylcobalamin form, if you want to increase the chance of bioavailability and full spectrum of benefit. The supplement I use is one formulated for vegans so it uses the cyanocobalamin form but I have used methylcobalamin in the past. In the end, any form is better than not taking at all, and the ultimate is to future proof b12 intake by increasing naturally bacterial rich foods and encouraging your own gut microflora to produce and your intestines to absorb it.

          At least it’s good to know that if you had to eat nothing but beans and rice (and that’s what many on this planet consume daily) you will most likely be alright anyway in terms of b12 as you will be eating insects (see how prescient the WEF is!) and not worried as much about cleaning all the dirt from veggies which will also be grown in composted manures. Without any highly processed foodstuffs, our guts will be happy powerhouses of ecology and churning out all kinds of beneficial compounds for us to reabsorb.

          Now that is a proper Gaia length response you know and love! I hope you can take from it whatever is useful and just leave the rest.

          Namaste, friends.

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          1. Thanks kindly Gaia.

            I have read the Katz book but was missing and have now added the book by Ziedrich which looks like an excellent resource.

            I did not do any homemade fermentation this year in part because I’ve found a reasonably priced source of organic fermented sauerkraut which I eat most days. I should get back into doing my own ferments.

            I have a surplus of beets and have been making refrigerator pickled beets which are super easy and very delicious (but not fermented).

            Thanks for the tips on B12 and iodine. I purchased 5 years supply of sublingual methylcobalamin 1200 mcg.

            Glad to hear your energy and health is back to normal.

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  28. An analysis and breakdown of the themes and ideas that make Falling Down such a fascinating movie, and even more relevant today than it was in 1993.

    One of my favorite films, I really enjoyed this guy’s analysis. If you’ve never seen the movie, skip this video and come back after you’ve seen it. (trailer below)

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  29. Found this link on Megacancer. Reminds me of the suicide phone booths in Futurama. I want one of these pods for christmas. Per the FAQ’s:

    • Not for sale and never will be. The plans will be published in The Peaceful Pill eHandbook.
    • Takes about a month to construct with 3D printing
    • Cost is around $18,000 (US)

    Sarco – Assisted Suicide Pod (exitinternational.net)

    p.s. I have an idea to get a bigger audience here. Un-denial, Megacancer and Collapse Chronicles should all merge into one. All three have roughly the same theme going on: “There is no saving modernity, and humans need to perish with it. So let’s start the rapid depopulation in order to reduce suffering.”   

    Since undenial is by far the best of the three, Rob will be the head honcho. Sam & James will be the assistants in charge. 

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    1. I doubt it would work. We each have a different focus on what is important.

      James is not impressed with MORT. I think his RNA model is less enlightening than the MPP.

      Do you know why Sam Mitchell has remained silent on the covid crimes? Not talking about the murder of millions is kind of a big deal.

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      1. Ok, at least I can work with that. I thought you were gonna say it can’t happen because you’ve gotten into a big fight with James and Sam in the past.😊

        I did not know that Sam has been silent on the covid crimes. My guess would be he probably made a poor choice and now cannot break through the denial so he really does not see any “crimes”. Or he is aware of the crimes but doesn’t want to explore that scary rabbit hole because he knows he fu#ked up. 

        You have zero tolerance with this issue. I can let it go. (not saying I’m the correct one here… the crimes are so heinous that you are probably correct in not “letting it go”)

        p.s. where the heck is Gaia?

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        1. No, something happened in the early days of covid long before we were sure of the crimes to cause Sam to clam up. It might be that he thought humans were crazy to get worked up over a mild disease while ignoring their terminal overshoot.

          Let it go? I don’t think so. More than twice as many people were killed by our elected leaders as were killed by Hitler in the holocaust. And it has not stopped. They are still killing people to this day. No one has been held to account for anything: engineering the virus, blocking safe & effective treatments, destroying the careers of expert dissidents, ignoring obvious safety signals in the data, and coercing billions, including children who were at zero risk, to transfect themselves with an unsafe, ineffective, and untested new technology.

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          1. Not trying to be a pain in the ass (for once😊). Just want to try and explain my thought process for why I choose to let it go.

            No one has been held to account for anything

            • Slavery
            • All of those Native American treaties that the US reneged on. 
            • False flags that have started many wars.
            • Banks.
            • Defense contractors.
            • The prison system… cocaine vs crack penalties.
            • Government… and their genocides and CIA covert stuff.
            • Dupont, Monsanto, Dole… pretty much every corporation ever.
            • Big oil knowing and suppressing climate change info.
            • Big tobacco and their bullshit.
            • 9/11.
            • Financial crisis of 2008.
            • Big pharma… opioid crisis
            • Covid.

            No one is ever held to account for anything. I’m numb to it. I’m also numb to how deep the corruption is and always has been. And now that I see fire-harnessing humans the way I do… it’s even easier for me to let it go. 

            I’m sitting here with the A/C on full blast, television and lights on, and typing away on my computer. I’m drowning in the energy addiction (which only creates massive destruction to get to me). I just got back from the grocery store by driving my fossil fuel car (pumping out more poison for everyone to suck on). Soon I will be eating some of that grocery store food (a straight up tortured life for most of the animals involved). And nothing I’m doing is controversial let alone illegal. No, it’s taught and promoted as the way to live life.

            It goes back to the first paragraph of ‘My Final Act’ guest essay where I was saying “Every action a person takes in this civilization already has loads of evil baked into it”. Also kind of ties into Hideaways thing the other day about “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”

            I still fall into the trap of getting emotional about certain things, but when I’m on top of my game and thinking clearly, I have zero chance of being outraged about the way humans treat other humans. 

            So I guess that’s how I see it with the covid crimes. Or as Indi would say, “same shit, different day”.

            I know you guys are probably getting sick of this Leave the World Behind quote, but its too good to not use the last half right now to wrap up my babbling:

            And the sick thing is, I think deep down we know we’re not fooling anyone. I think we know we’re living a lie. An agreed-upon mass delusion to help us ignore and keep ignoring how awful we really are.

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            1. Thanks for explaining. I understand but don’t agree with your perspective.

              For me there is a fundamental difference between:

              1. A corrupt politician supporting something he does not understand so that he can obtain enough donations to maybe win the next election; and
              2. A health minister telling a family doctor to tell a mother she should inject her baby with a novel permanent gene therapy that is exhibiting obvious flashing red safety signals to protect her baby from a disease that poses zero risk to her baby.

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        2. Hello there friends,

          Thank you Chris for the call out and please accept my sincerest apologies for being missing in action for these past weeks. In great haste now but hopefully will be back in communication very soon.

          To summarize the reasons for my absence:

          I finally got Covid after visiting a friend at a nursing home where an outbreak was just beginning, in fact my friend was patient zero and he just started showing symptoms that morning and I was with him for 4 hours so that was a pretty good exposure. I’m not inoculated and starting to wonder if I was already immune from previous unknown exposure as I’ve never had it in the four years but I certainly got sick. Thankfully, it was a mild case but definitely different to all previous illnesses I’ve ever had (however, the last time I had a cold was over 12 years ago, so hard to compare), will share more about it when I write properly.

          My husband came back up to Queensland for another 2 week working session on the property and he promptly got Covid, presumably from me. He was inoculated (2 doses, needed for his Uni job) but this was also his first case. Also relatively mild symptoms all in all, the main thing we both experienced was extreme exhaustion and muscle aches. This set back our working schedule (one of the main tasks was planting 30 fruit trees and caging from wildlife) but we got into it as soon as we could and have been working diligently ever since, we just finished planting the last tree this morning.

          He leaves back to Tasmania tomorrow and I’m still here for another month to wrap up never-ending jobs, but when I’m by myself I’ll have some space again to do my usual activities which of course includes a daily check-in with all of you at un-denial (I have missed it very much and boy what a lot of catching up I have to do!)

          I trust all have been well and doing your good thing wherever you are and enjoying every moment you can. After being ill for even 10 short days I have a renewed appreciation for just being alive and able to partake in life, we still have countless choices in every day and like Rob says, it is just an indescribable miracle that we are here at the peak and able to bear witness with a fuller awareness and reverence.

          All the best and namaste, friends.

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          2. Thanks for the update Gaia. Sorry to hear, but glad you’re feeling better. Your story about no cold for over 12 years is impressive. Is there a reason you know of for why that is? 

            I used to get sick a lot. 5-10 times a year. Usually a cold, but sometimes more serious like strep throat or even pneumonia. Most of the time it would last 1-3 months (even the colds). Doctors had no clue. One Dr was positive it was because I have a severe deviated septum. He kept pressuring me to get surgery to fix it. Could not afford it at the time.

            But then (about 10 years ago) I changed one thing about my habits. I stopped smoking marijuana and started eating edibles instead. Been smoking since high school. The edibles made it so I don’t enjoy smoking anymore. I still puff, but instead of ten times a day, it’s more like once or twice a week. (and I still smoke tobacco cigarettes at the same pace as always)

            In the last ten years, I have been sick only a handful of times (knock on wood). A few colds that lasted a couple days and what I think was covid in 2021. Lasted three weeks and like you said, extreme exhaustion and muscle aches. 

            As far as the edibles, something to do with the CBD effects that you don’t get from inhaling, but do get from digesting… I dont know, just a theory. I don’t go to the doctors anymore for myself, but when I was taking care of my mom with her chemo, I had a few conversations with multiple doctors (4 or 5) and none of them took my eating vs smoking theory one bit serious. Bunch of condescending pro-pharma pricks!

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          3. Glad you are on the mend Gaia. Covid knocked me back for a week when I had it. Also lost my sense of smell and taste which was sad – luckily it came back. I haven’t been sick since covid (2021). I am double-jabbed.

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  30. The title obviously caught my attention, was only 12min long so I watched it. Pure garbage.

    This ass clown thinks he has it all figured out. (but then again, the same could be said about me😊). He has almost 2mill subscribers so that has to cement his views that he is right. The video has a combination of a Daniel Quinn type philosophy and that weak-ass argument that doomers are the true scared ones and in the most denial, and by claiming WASF, it gives us the excuse to not do anything.

    Also has that “useful idiot” vibe that I was talking about upstream. These are the types that I want to kidnap and force to read hundreds of comments and essays on un-Denial until their head explodes.    

    Humanity is at a crossroads. Down one road we have the genocidal accumulation of capitalism and extinction. Down the other road we have survival and the birth of a new socioeconomic order. We get to choose. Make the right choice. Choose to work for a better future. Ignore that insidious voice in your head that says “this is just how things are”. You think like that and there’s nothing separating you from the feudal serf kissing the ring of his lord. 

    Doomerism is a lie. Let’s work to prove it.

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    3. Why do so many people assume doomers don’t do anything? Talk to your average doomer and you will generally see: successful in their chosen career, a person who takes care of their family, someone who values relationships, responsible with money, materially modest by choice, into gardening, farming and ecology etc.(actively trying to improve the situation), kind (taking time to share knowledge). Prolific – a doomer’s sense of truth motivates them to keep pushing to improve their own life and that of society. Doomers are great people

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  32. Ted Postol describes a new fuse the US has secretly developed that doubles the effectiveness of existing submarine based missiles to destroy enemy nuclear missile silos.

    The only reason a country would develop such a fuse is if it intended to initiate and win a nuclear war.

    Russia and China know this.

    Skip to 15:05.

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    1. Ted Postel and Lawrence Wilkerson’s presentations back to back made this one of the most frightening presentations. I’ve heard. The chances that the US will start a nuclear war are frighteningly high. The US is led by hubristic fools.

      AJ

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    1. I listened to that podcast.

      Darryl Cooper is an intelligent well read historian. I am now following him and am learning a lot.

      If you listen to the podcast you will see the article you linked is a hit piece without integrity.

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      1. This episode by Darryl Cooper on the history leading up to the Ukraine conflict is the best I’ve heard and a must listen if you’d like to understand what caused Russia to attack Ukraine.

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  35. Found this link over at Indi’s comments. There are so many moments from the last 500 years where it seems so obvious that things could have been drastically different. This one is about the insane evolution of corporations. Some evil shit. This comment is what got me to commit to the 3-part essay.  

    this amazing and rigorous analysis of how our fictive “corporate” beings took over the human world and are now temporarily in charge of our imaginations, our values and our individual and collective futures.

    New to the author. Seems like one of the good guys for sure. Heavy into Native American culture. More than likely overshoot blind.

    Good essay. Huge trap & waste of time… but still fun to get worked up once in a while.😊 

    (1) Corporate Personality and Human Commodification – Part 1 (substack.com)

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  36. Awfully dead around here. I’m bored as hell. Gonna wing it with some of my thoughts right now. So try not to flame me too hard if you don’t like what I’m saying.😊. (but still let me know if you hate it) 

    Rob used to get annoyed with me for calling this site the killer of hopium. I was mainly doing it get under his skin because he crushed my precious sustainable (living in harmony with nature) fairytale. But now I say it as a genuine selling point for this site.

    Now of course in this upside-down world, the more truth you learn, the more hopium is killed. And a typical overshoot person like me who got their knowledge from people like Dowd, Hagens, Quinn… will have great understanding of the why/how of collapse. Most of their hopium will be killed off during these red pill times. But they will still have major flaws in what they believe is possible.

    So coming over here will help get them where they need to be (by killing the last bits of hopium that they thought was untouchable). And there are different ways of doing it. Let’s say it’s for the Star Trek stuff like aliens, star fleets, and galactic wars. I could start rambling on about how there is no purpose for complex life in this universe beyond fire. Rob could break down the ultra-low odds & probabilities of everything. Hideaway could get into the energy limitations. And Stellarwind72 could break down the enormous size of space and impossibility of interstellar travel. Either way, we are going to crush your fairytale once and for all.

    I needed all of those for my hopium to be killed off. But hopefully most overshoot people can already see that the only way for a species to get to space exploration, is by destroying themselves, the planet, and almost all life forms.  

    But MORT/un-Denial is not even the final stop. After stripping down all hopium, there are different roads to go down. Most are gonna lead roughly to the same story. Except for one little detail; To cheer or not cheer for human extinction.

    I’ve been cheering ever since I read Zinn’s ‘A Peoples History’ almost 20 years ago. It’s always been that toxic hate stuff though. So much different and peaceful when equipped with the right combo of deep knowledge in overshoot, energy, human supremacy, MORT/denial.

    I know I’m stuck in a tough worldview right now. I’ve used this analogy before and although it’s very basic and simpleton, it does a pretty good job of explaining where I’m coming from: 

    I see humanity the same as I see a group of Nazi’s sitting around the dinner table. Yes there might be plenty of good at that table. Good husband, good father, good wife, good mother, good neighbor, good friend, etc… but the evil outweighs the good by a factor of a million to one. So even though they might be somewhat “good” people, they still need to go away ASAP, extinction style.  

    My spiritual sources like Dowd, Richard Rohr, and Joseph Campbell, as well as other sources that are full of wisdom/stoicism… it’s all great but the evil factor still outweighs it a million to one. And I’m not necessarily talking about evil of any ideologies. I’m talking about the evil it takes just to get the intelligence level up to a point where a species can even grasp, contemplate and create this kind of wisdom / stoicism. 

    Nowadays, when I try to focus on the wisdom, all I see is that quote I keep using: 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.

    Cheering for humanity to not go extinct feels the same to me as cheering USA! USA! USA! (and we all know the usa cheer is the wrong side of history to be on)

    And since I have no link to attach, I’m gonna leave you with a good song I’ve been listening to while writing this.

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    1. Fascinating how people get different feelings from looking at the same thing.

      You feel un-Denial kills all hope.

      I feel un-Denial provides the only sliver of hope.

      An aware intelligent observer might go crazy knowing:
      1) We are doing exactly the opposite of what we should be doing.
      2) 100% of our “solutions” have either failed or are making things worse.
      3) There is zero discussion about anything that matters including why all of our “solutions” are failing.

      Even of our best intellectuals can’t see the problem.

      MORT provides an explanation for all this insanity and tells someone that wants to try to make the future better where to focus.

      You can’t fix something if you do not understand the problem.

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      1. Ya, I should clarify my take on this. It’s not un-Denial that kills the hope… it’s the truth that kills it. 

        When I first found this site I was not doing cartwheels because now I understood why humans need to go extinct. LOL. No, I was doing cartwheels because now I understood why Noam Chomsky and Carl Sagan types did not have the word overshoot in their vocabulary. And the “why” of your three bullet points finally made sense to me.

        Without understanding denial/MORT, you can only get 3/4ths of the way to the top of collapse mountain. To make it up that final quarter, you have to understand the importance and role that denial plays in everything. So by getting that education here at un-Denial, I have incorrectly assumed all hopium goes to die here strictly because of this website. Definitely not true. The remaining hopium gets killed off as you (the individual) evolve and expand on your own knowledge level of denial/MORT. (which is kind of just saying how much you power through the scary/hopeless stuff because you understand that denial is what’s making you want to turn away)

        I guarantee that Hideaway is not nearly as good (with his collapse story) as he is today if he never came across MORT/un-Denial. Technically, you can have a firm grip on denial and still believe in sustainable cultures and that humans did it right in the past, and can do it again… But you cannot be at Hideaways level and not have a firm grip on denial. 

        Boy, I’m kind of pulling this idiot logic out of my ass right now, but it makes perfect sense to me.

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  37. A most interesting explanation of the covid crimes.

    Maybe our anger should be directed at the security state and not health care professionals.

    “What we’ve lived through has been a fifth-generation propaganda war fed from the top level of the U.S. security state that took command of the pandemic on day five after the emergency was declared in 2020.” (Tweet 1/4)

    Professor Emeritus of Epidemiology at Yale Dr. Harvey Risch (@DrHarveyRisch) describes for Gary Null of http://PRN.live how the U.S. security state—specifically the National Security Council (NSC)—took command of the national COVID-19 response, and executed on a “scam.”

    “[N]othing changed in public health [in 2020],” Risch says. “What changed is who was telling the public health infrastructure what to do. And terrorizing the public health infrastructure into carrying this all out.”

    Risch specifically notes the U.S. public health system “Did the exact opposite of all established public health protocols for managing a respiratory virus pandemic.” He offers former CDC Director Rochelle Walensky as an example of how the U.S. security state intimidated public health officials:

    Walensky was told if she “didn’t comply with the security state requirements of what she had to say and what her policies were, that she would be responsible for killing millions of people. And, unfortunately, she believed that,” Risch says. He notes other officials were “convinced” or “threatened” to “make policies and actions that were exactly scientifically contrary to everything that was known about managing the pandemic.”

    As for the motivations, Risch speculates that the U.S. security state was “attempting to cover up our role in creating this virus in the first place,” “shilling” for pharmaceutical companies, and enforcing a state of “fascism.”

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  38. I’ve always been bad at hearing or understanding the lyrics to songs. All I care about is the toe tapping and head bobbing that the sound gets me into. Getting better now that I am looking more for meaning in things.

    Been listening to this song for 10 years and never noticed the great life advice here at the 1:58 mark, until today.

    Mama, mama won’t you look at me
    I grew up fast and my mind is free
    I don’t know everything
    But I do remember what you said, you said:
    Life is all about balance and redemption
    Moderation, love and affection
    This meditation and inner reflection
    Keep the faith with your soul’s intention
    Let the truth shine through with your actions
    Make your dreams come true with attraction
    Always live your life with no regret
    And don’t look back but never forget

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  39. I’ve been expecting a serious recession/depression for so long I’m kind of numb.

    It should have happened long ago but our “leaders” are determined to kick the can and each time they do it worsens the inevitable reckoning. I suspect when it finally gets away from them it will be really bad for a long time, maybe forever.

    Lots of people I follow seem to be calling an imminent recession. We’ll see. An election is nearby so the timing is inconvenient. My guess is they’ll find a reason to print a gazillion dollars like they did for covid to try to prevent it. War is a good reason to print. So is monkeypox or whatever they decide to call the next one.

    Which means best case a lot more inflation in things I care about like food.

    Corn on the cob is selling here for $1.00 per cob!

    https://peakoilbarrel.com/open-thread-non-petroleum-september-5-2024/#comment-780958

    HHH @ POB:

    Judging by say the last 100 years when the yield curve inverts. The recession doesn’t hit until after it un-inverts. And the yield curve is just starting to un-invert.

    Only other time the yield curve was inverted for this long and this deep was right before the Great Depression. Nothing else to compare it to.

    The inversion prior to 2008 is nothing like it is now.

    .

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  40. Did you notice NATO leaders were talking peace today? I did.

    How can they make peace when the 980 million energy poor people of NATO are losing against 144 million energy rich Russians? I don’t think they can.

    How can the US lose when an existential election is near? I don’t think they can.

    Canadian Prepper says when they talk peace, expect war. He also discusses the new nuclear weapon fuse disclosed by Ted Postel, and other evidence that NATO is preparing for a first strike.

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  41. Finally listened to this 2020 post doom interview with Sam Mitchell and Michael Dowd. I recommend it if you like those guys. Sam is funny as hell. And as a bonus, Rob/un-Denial gets a great plug at the 11:33 mark.

    Saw this comment from Dowd (talking about his relationship with Sam).

    A few years ago, when I was half drunk, I inadvertently pissed him off and now he will have nothing to do with me. Saddens me to this day. 

    LOL. Doomers are always fighting with each other. Wish he would’ve given the details.

    p.s. They were both praising Carlos Castaneda. The movie Cloud Atlas mentions Carlos also. I know nothing of him. Anyone in the audience ever read his stuff? 

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    1. I had one long phone conversation with Michael Dowd. It was quite painful. I don’t think he liked the implications of MORT on religions. He also believed strongly that some pre-industrial humans lived sustainably. I asked for evidence. He had none. I asked for the names of a couple sustainable tribes so I could check if he was correct. He refused and it got quite heated. Later he apologized.

      Sam Mitchell contacted me several times to be interviewed as part of the excellent interview series he did 5 years ago. I lacked confidence and declined. I check in on his channel once in a while. I hope he’s ok. His health seems to have declined since covid.

      Here is one of Sam’s best interviews with Gail Zawacki.

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      1. Ya, I got that video from you a few months ago. I still listen to it. I think its one of the best collapse interviews out there for rewatchability. Right up there with Rees/Hagens. Info might be a little more crisp with Bill and Nate… but the entertainment value is off the charts with Gail and Sam.

        I dont blame you for not doing the interview. Video, I know I’ll choke and look bad. But even audio only I don’t trust myself. I’m a typer. I need some time to come with these bullshit answers.😊. Thats why I’m liking Sams videos right now. Him bumbling around and reading while ad libbing never appealed to me. Now it looks like a prime gig.

        And funniest part of this interview is when Sam goes out of his way to interrupt Michael just to make sure everyone knows he is rooting for human extinction.

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      2. I’ve half listened to that interview before, but just properly listened to the lot this time. I do get frustrated when Sam interrupted Gail early on, before letting her finish her answer which is probably why I only have listened to it before.

        I’m sure I’d have liked to have known Gail, we obviously think very much alike. The part that particularly gets missed or ignored by pretty much everyone and most likely why every religion was invented, is that life has no purpose and no meaning.

        Life is just another way of increased entropy in the universe. All life is using an energy gradient, taking higher forms of energy and turning them into heat.

        Because of the geologic processes here on planet Earth along with early life increasing complexity (helping to concentrate metals and minerals as part of the overall process of entropy, in the bigger picture), more complex life, as in humans are busily increasing entropy and dissipation in the overall process of entropy.

        After watching some Robert Sapolsky videos, I’m fairly certain that there is a lot of life in the universe going through exactly the same processes as here on Earth, with even a few intelligent beings out there capable of doing exactly the same as we have done. I also wouldn’t be surprised if whatever life exists in the universe would look similar to something on Earth or in Earth’s past, developing completely independently, as that’s just the way the patterns of chemicals develop when they find an energy gradient that allows reproduction, with evolution following a natural path.

        I’m also pretty sure we will never find life elsewhere because of collapse long before we go to the stars, but maybe we find signs of life on Mars, before collapsing.

        Live for today and be kind to people and the natural world, is a good mantra to live by..

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        1. Yes, that’s another good reason religions exist. In addition:

          …the human species succeeds in large part due to social cooperation, and religions serve to define, unite, govern, motivate, and entertain groups, and (especially in times of scarcity) define outside groups as enemies.

          The interesting bit for me is:

          The one and only thing common to the thousands of religions is that they each have some form of life after death story. Religions can and do tell every conceivable story, but religions do not need a life after death story to define, unite, govern, motivate, and entertain a group. It might be reasonable for a few random religions to include life after death in their stories, but it is not reasonable that every religion has a life after death story.

          Unless the need for a life after death story has an important genetic foundation.

          https://un-denial.com/2016/11/14/on-religion-and-denial/

          I agree with you that life will be common in the universe. Life with an extended theory of mind and religions not so much.

          I disagree that we’d visit the stars if it were not for our imminent collapse. The distances and limitations of available transportation energies make star travel impossible I think.

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          1. Rob … “I disagree that we’d visit the stars if it were not for our imminent collapse. The distances and limitations of available transportation energies make star travel impossible I think.”

            That was just lazy typing on my part, I agree it’s not close to physically possible and Prof Tom Murphy has all the maths on this.

            There may be a possibility of life on Titan and Europa, moons of Jupiter and Saturn, which theoretically we could get to eventually, but collapse is far more likely in the shorter term before plans are enacted to go there and check (unmanned ones).

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  42. Not positive that this will be a hit like the other nostalgic song/videos, but this one has always done it for me when I’m in the mood. The parents out there will probably feel it the most.

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      1. LOL. Thats why I won’t let people tell me there’s no good music anymore. Hard as hell to find, but it’s out there. (not movies/tv though, that industry is almost dead). Music is too easy to create. As I type this, some 13-year-old in Sweden is making a great song all alone in his/her bedroom and the only equipment is a cellphone.

        But finding the good music is similar to Hideaway’s stuff about the super heavy machinery needed for today’s mining compared to the good ole days of only needing a pickaxe.

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      2. Rob you have not heard of Ben folds?

        Wow, you definitely need to listen to a few.

        His best are

        The Unauthorized Biography of Reinhold Messner (1999)
        Rockin’ the Suburbs (2001) (his best)
        Songs for Silverman (2005)

        Do you know Cake?

        nikoB

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          1. Some of my favorite’s from Cake: Never There / Rock ‘n’ Roll Lifestyle / When You Sleep / Friend Is a Four Letter Word

            While searching, I came across this funny Primus song that I had forgotten all about. One of the strangest (and best) music videos of all time.

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    1. I love how these type of videos that explain short term possibilities never go into the long term.

      For instance start with 1 dollar around 2,000 years ago. Assume a ‘real’ 2% interest repayment compounded. After 35 years the $1 has turned into $2. After 350 years the $1 has turned into $1,000. After 700 years the $1 has turned into $1,000,000. After 1,050 years the $1 has turned into $1,000,000,000. After 1,400 years the $1 has turned into $1,000,000,000,000. After 1,750 years the $1 has turned into $1,000,000,000,000,000.

      This is in real terms. The last number is 10 times the world’s total GDP, so impossible for anyone to have that amount of money. The 2% growth rate is far beyond what we have done for the last 2,000 years in real terms.

      There was slow growth until we came to really use fossil fuel energy 1750-1800. The growth rate of the human enterprise to put it in prof W. Rees terms, accelerated throughout the period from the beginning of the industrial revolution, until energy started to become a limit in around the early 1970’s. By then world growth rate was up to a decadal average of just over 5%/yr.

      That was clearly unsustainable on a finite planet, and the world was told about this in 1972 with the Limits to growth publication. Since then the growth rate has on average declined with a slight bump up because of all the coal burned in China increasing rapidly between 1990 and 2014. It’s ‘officially’ (world bank numbers), now around 2.7%/yr over a decadal time scale.

      The extreme growth rate, has only been possible because of fossil fuels, as in adding energy available for the system to use to grow. What’s often not spoken about is that we need 97.3% of the energy just to maintain the existing system, the part not used in growth. The energy and materials needed to keep our now world wide 6 continent supply chain going without any growth is 97.3% of the energy we currently use. But wait there is more. We need growing energy because the materials, metals and minerals have lowering grades, so more energy is needed every year on average just to maintain the existing built civilization.

      We have had a Faustian bargain in energy efficiency gains helping us over the last couple of centuries, but these gains suffer from the laws of diminishing returns on the increased complexity of more efficient machines and systems.

      When energy production can’t be continually growing at the rate needed for maintenance of the system of civilization, then the complexity starts to unwind, and with it the energy efficiencies we’ve gained over time, leading to more energy needed to just maintain a slightly shrinking system. Relocalisation which seems to be all the latest rage is a de-complexification of the overall system and is less efficient than a fully globalised world.

      What does any of this have to do with owing the US a lot of $US? Everything, because the above video assumes it can all be paid by growing economies forever, where history shows us clearly that just 2% growth over time is an anomaly, so assuming something like 10% projected forward forever (the interest rate) could only happen in the mind of an economist, that has no idea of how the world really works, nor what lies ahead in the very near future…

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      2. Hello Hideaway,

        Tell me if I am understanding well. When you say:

        • growth is at 2.7%
        • and we need 97.3% of the energy just to maintain the existing system

        Is it the same as (or is it implied by) Tim Garrett’s relationship (https://www.inscc.utah.edu/~tgarrett/physics-of-the-economy.html):

        • energy consumption and accumulated wealth (time integral of inflation-adjusted GDP) are tied by a constant factor
        • i.e every 2005 dollar requires 324 kiloJoules be consumed over a year to sustain its value

        Thank you.

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        1. Tim has put it in dollar terms, but I’m fairly certain that the energy part is the accurate part and probably what he was most interested in. Of course it’s an average over time, because of entropy in the system. Not everything needs to be replaced every year, but overall maintenance and new for old replacement must happen for the system of civilization to continue normally.

          Important to me though is the materials part, where we need a growing energy supply to gain access to the same quantity of minerals and metals, even if we tried a steady state, no growth economy. Steady state is impossible for this very reason of lower ore grades.

          Once energy starts to fall overall, which I’m constantly suggesting is going to be due to oil decline first, then the existing system can no longer be maintained, so parts of it decline and fail rapidly.

          Civilization looks and acts just like an organism, which is also a ‘system’. When an organism is starved of the energy (food) needed for maintenance, then parts get stressed, the entire system starts to break down in a variety of ways, with self consumption of some internal tissues when the system is weak enough, rapidly weakening it further. Eventually if not enough energy comes into the system it has a catastrophic sudden failure, where all the internal networks shut down, which we call death.

          I suspect civilization will be the same, which we see signs of already as more energy is being spent on energy gathering to the detriment of the rest of the system (falling EROEI).

          Even though we need 97.3% of the energy for maintenance, we are probably not getting that as a growing overall percentage is going towards the energy sector, to keep the rest of civilization supplied. Once we are in energy decline, the ‘starvation’ of the rest of civilization outside energy collection will be rapidly accelerating, as the energy required by the energy sector will continue to grow, despite the overall fall in energy availability.

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      3. Hi Hideaway. I appreciate you sharing that information. However, this video absolutely does not assume it can all be paid by growing economies forever. The YouTube channel is dedicated to discussing real limits. The point of the video is political, in terms of understanding what other countries think they are doing. Not what they can actually do.

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  44. el gato malo today discusses something that I notice every day and that troubles me a lot.

    The competency of people in leadership positions has fallen dramatically over the last decade.

    The complexity of our problems is increasing and the ability of our leaders to address them is falling.

    https://boriquagato.substack.com/p/the-mediocrity-downspiral

    how do whole agencies, companies, and cultures that were once high function succumb to mediocrity and then collapse into incompetence and nepotism?

    A’s hire A’s and B’s hire C’s. (and you seriously do not want to meet the people C’s hire).

    that’s it. that’s all we need to extrapolate and plot it.

    the essence of this is simple: the highly competent (A’s) wish to be surrounded by other highly competent people. an organization of mostly A’s (or at least A’s in management) thrives and gets lots done. it innovates. it rewards achievement and ability. it’s a meritocracy. because that’s what A’s want.

    and B’s hate this. they cannot get ahead and they live in fear of A’s beneath them coming for their jobs and hatred of A’s above them who prevent advancement and who make demands for performance.

    they do not want their jobs taken, so they respond to this by hiring only those less competent than themselves to work under them (C’s). this is how they hold position and avoid challenge and threat.

    ideally, they’d also like to clear any A’s above them out of the way so they can generate some upward mobility. they cannot do this on a meritocratic axis, so they seek another one to supplant it.

    they seek to move hiring and promotion to some other quality than ability then reinforce it with doctrine.

    the pretext itself is incidental to this process. it does not really matter what it is.

    it just has to be “something other than competence” and you land in this self-referential recursive trap.

    the dirty secret of any large organization is this:

    most of the meaningful work and direction comes from just a few people.

    it’s these high function, high competence A’s that keep the gears turning and the wheels from falling off.

    and it’s VERY easy to wreck an organization beyond function by purging them or driving them out.

    and once you have, it’s incredibly rapid and widespread systemic failure and such failures cascade until complex or even simple systems cannot function.

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    1. On the one hand, the “A’s hire the B’s and the B’s hire the [very incompetent] C’s” looks a lot like a stereotype or cliche – i.e. it looks somewhat true. The description of – avoiding merit based hiring and substituting something/anything else also hints of Diversity/Inclusion/Equity. That seems reasonable, but I don’t agree it is the best explanation.

      Cory Doctorow enshittification – is much better. Corporations get so big and entrenched that they stop caring and seek increased profit from all sources regardless of risk – resulting in abuse of their :

      • employees
      • customers
      • suppliers
      • the environment
      • their own shareholders

      Then add Tainter’s complexity with the nexus of Corporations / Government / Media (fascism) and a population of sheep – we have painted ourselves into a corner and have nearly completed the process of cutting a circle in the floor around our feet.

      The following video might help to illuminate one aspect of modern life that we are all subject to, but are rarely cognizant of: We Put 7 Uber Drivers in One Room. What We Found Will Shock You. (YouTube.com)

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      1. Agree there are probably multiple factors in play. Public health is in decline and may also be a factor. Ditto on social media and screens dumbing us down.

        You may have misread the article I linked. He said A’s hire A’s and B’s hire C’s. I believe this to be true and is a very powerful force in a company if the CEO is a B.

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    2. In the same vein, I got this link from Indi’s newest essay. Hilarious but not surprising. I used to react to these just like the average person of “this is terrifying!” or “I’m speechless!”. 

      Un-Denial has helped me to see the light. Humans today are phonies. Why wouldn’t we be? Our entire way of life is based on the most fraudulent/incompetent designs you could ever dream up.

      God bless infinite growth on a finite planet… Oh wait, I mean god bless the Great Reset.

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      1. A quote by me from the sidebar:

        Economists are confused about inflation, the thing they should understand better than anyone, because they do not distinguish between the price of stuff rising due to depletion vs. the price of stuff rising because the money supply is growing faster than stuff. When the stuff is energy needed to make other stuff they get really confused.

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    3. Rob- Last decade?? Maybe more pronounced lately, but the decline, as with other trends, has been a long time coming. I think there are other drivers more important than el gato’s ABC concept, but I’ll save that for another time.

      The book club I’m in just happens to be reading “Founding Brothers” by Joseph Ellis right now. It covers the years after the American revolution, and just grabs vignettes from their lives to give a deeper but less comprehensive view of the precarious time of the nation slowly getting on its feet. Things were by no means certain that the U.S. would be what it is today. This “hinge of history” was therefore much more dependent on the character and competence of the leaders than after institutions and norms had solidified.

      Reading excerpts from their correspondence, and contrasting it with the erratic and emotional blather of the recently concluded presidential debate was stark. We are well over half way to idiocracy.

      As the U.S. (and the world, really) enters into another phase of existential precarity, we will once more be relying more on individual character and competence of the leader class, so we are screwed. Each of us will need to look to our own situation to prepare, there will be no rational responses to the predicament from higher up in the hierarchy.

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      1. The ABC idea appeals to me as an explanation for the extreme incompetence in the public health system. But I agree there are many other drivers.

        I could not watch the debate. It’s too upsetting for me to see those two idiots blather when intelligent articulate people with integrity like RFK Jr. are blocked from the debate and ballot.

        This topic would make a great guest post if you are interested.

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  45. For anyone else using Firefox / Windows 10 / UBlockOrigin :

    WordPress (the tech behind Un-Denial.com) or something in the list above, has changed. Ublock is reporting greater than 1k of things blocked. If I go directly from Thunderbird (News Feed) to a post here, it initially no longer goes directly to the post, but stays at the top of the page. A ‘refresh’ gets to the correct position.

    It is the same in FireFox / Linux-Ubuntu / Ublock.

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    1. I’ve determined what is going on :

      If an un-denial article and the comments are free of embedded YouTube videos then all is fine.

      This page and the majority of others on un-denial are littered with YouTube videos. Google (and YouTube) via WordPress have XML HTTP Requests (XHR) that are firing off requests at about every 2 to 3 seconds. uBlock blocks the requests.

      There are also multiple (blocked) tracking requests to googleads.d.doubleclick.net

      Brave Browser is likely blocking the same things.

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        1. Yes the embedded videos work well. That is not the issue.

          Rob uses Brave (it has integrated advert blocking and tracking blocking) and I use Firefox with the uBlockOrigin plugin to block adverts and trackers.

          Blocking adverts speeds up pages (less to download), uses less computer resources (mostly RAM) and is awesome for YouTube – I see almost no adverts across multiple sites.

          Blocking trackers is about privacy and making it difficult for Facebook, Amazon, Google, etc. to profile us. Any web site that has the usual collection of social-media links (Twitter, Instagram, YouTube, et al.) gets the icons for those links from the respective web sites – so even without a Facebook account, or visiting Facebook.com – you are being tracked.

          Microsoft and Microsoft Edge are not known for their respect of privacy. After decades I am now leaning completely towards Linux-Ubuntu (Linux-Mint is great for non-techs).

          We live in an insanely complex society – most people have no idea.

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            1. It is so much more than ‘location info’.

              The Joe Rogan Experience #2201 – Robert Epstein (YouTube 2.5 hours 2024.9.11) shows how Google has been wholesale influencing elections (and much more) since 2012. Lacking from the discussion was how does Google know which people are liberal, conservative, etc.

              The adverts that most people are subject to, take into account not just what they like to buy, but also when they are most likely to buy and their price point.

              To fully understand what the above entails – one needs to understand that IPV6 addresses have a machine’s MAC ID (Wiki) encoded within it. On Windows I’ve turned off IPV6 (knowing that IPV4 will soon be going away).

              On Linux-Ubuntu the MAC ID can be ‘spoofed’ which means it can be assigned or changed at regular intervals. Note, one would self defeat this action by ‘signing in’ to an account (GMail, YouTube, Amazon, Facebook et al.).

              That video above is a must-watch for anyone that wants to be informed. So is the video I linked earlier about 7 Uber drivers.

              It is more-or-less an impossible task to stay private on 3 different platforms (Windows, Linux, Android) using more than one browser (FireFox, Firefox-Tor, Chrome, etc.) and various plug-ins (UBlock, Ghostery, etc.) but still I try.

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              1. The tech knowledge some of you have is way beyond what I can grasp (or want to grasp). But in your good post here, all I see is ungodly amounts of complexity and a total waste of Earth’s one and only “peak”. Not saying we could have been good. Just saying we could have at least been cool.  

                Manufacturing consent with hyper – algorithms, manipulation, advertising, hijacking brains, stealing data, etc… all to churn out the perfect consuming robot. Gotta be others out there in the universe that were able to churn out a cooler type of robot.

                I try to picture what that would look like, but it’s almost impossible to imagine a “peak” that does not all boil down to money.

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                1. “Manufacturing consent …” sounds almost quaint, compared to what Google has actually been doing (treason). Like so many other things (e.g. creation of money) if the general public actually understood what was going on, then the 2nd amendment would be demonstrated with extreme prejudice.

                  People in general are : innumerate, illiterate, technology ignorant, energy and environmentally stunted, legally dumb and so much less – and they breed.

                  The more I read, the more ignorant I understand myself to be. I see Tainter’s complexity everywhere. More than 330 million in the USA and Harris and Trump are the choices!

                  The Joe Rogan video above is not technical. It should however induce anger.

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                  1. More than 330 million in the USA and Harris and Trump are the choices!

                    I struggle to find words to convey how this makes me feel.

                    Trump, Harris, covid, Ukraine, Gaza, nuclear war, etc. etc.

                    They all prove citizens are morons and we live in an idiocracy.

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  46. https://www.cbsnews.com/losangeles/news/heat-wave-power-outage-grid-los-angeles-county-usc

    The dangerously hot weather strained the power grid to failure throughout Los Angeles County on Friday, the peak of the record-setting heat wave. 

    “Extreme heat has caused power outages in some neighborhoods. @LADWP crews are working to restore power quickly and safely,” Mayor Karen Bass posted on X. High temperatures are expected to sustain for the next three days.”

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  47. https://www.wfaa.com/article/news/politics/inside-politics/texas-politics/texas-agriculture-commissioner-sound-alarm-says-texas-is-running-out-of-water/287-f9fea38a-9a77-4f85-b495-72dd9e6dba7e

    DALLAS — Texas is losing water.

    And the problems facing our state now and into the future are real, and getting worse.

    “We lose about a farm a week in Texas, but it’s 700 years before we run out of land. The limiting factor is water. We’re out of water, especially in the Rio Grande Valley,” Agriculture Commissioner Sid Miller told us on Inside Texas Politics.

    Miller, and at least two other state lawmakers who’ve appeared on Inside Texas Politics recently, tell us the water shortage issue is about to take center stage in Texas.

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    1. “We’re out of water, . . . ,” (Texas)Agriculture Commissioner Sid Miller told us” 

      Sue and Gary Price at 77 Ranch in Texas have spent the past 50 years build ponds and other water management landforms. When Hurricane Harvey hit, they lost no soil. When there’s drought, they can water the animals in their care. They are building resilience to whatever comes along.

      While you might think they can only afford to do this with high ‘foodie’ prices, one of their customers is mcdonalds.

      Weogo

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  48. From Reddit.
    https://www.reddit.com/r/collapse/comments/1fat8nt/if_industrial_society_collapses_its_forever/

    The resources we’ve used since the industrial revolution replenish on timescales like 100s of thousands of years. Oil is millions of years old for instance. What’s crazy is that if society collapses there won’t be another one. We’ve used all of the accessible resources, leaving only the super-hard-to-get resources which requires advanced technology and know how.

    If another civilization 10,000 years from now wants coal or oil they’re shit out of luck. We went up the ladder and removed the bottom rungs on the way up. Metals like aluminum and copper can be obtained from buildings, but a lot of metal gets used in manufacturing processes that can’t be reversed effectively (aluminum oxide for instance).

    It makes me wonder if there was once a civilization that had access to another energy source that they then depleted leaving nothing for us.

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    1. Hi Stellarwind72 … “The resources we’ve used since the industrial revolution replenish on timescales like 100s of thousands of years. Oil is millions of years old for instance. “

      This is a common misconception, it’s not hundreds of thousands of years to millions of years, it’s mostly many millions to billions of years old. Some of the main types of minerals we mine come from the Archaean period, like banded iron formations deposited on ocean floors 2.5-3.7 Billion years ago, due to life oxygenating the atmosphere.

      Peat deposits are one of the few ‘deposits’ formed over thousands to hundreds of thousands of years.

      You are correct, there will never be a second type of civilization based on metals and minerals, other than in the next 100-50 thousand years based on scrapping, once we collapse.

      I use to think that perhaps humans were needed to respread the carbon around the planet so that life could again flourish instead of Earth going to another snowball phase, but that would imply there was an over riding force of purpose and meaning to life, which there isn’t.

      It’s a hard concept to accept, but in the scale of the universe, it doesn’t matter one iota what we do, whether we turn the planet to uninhabitable, by burning every skerrick of fossil fuels, or decide to burn none and allow nature to flourish for a few hundred million more years.

      We really just need to work out what’s happening in the immediate future to make our own lives and those we care about ‘better’. I care for my family but also the Wallabies that eat the grass, and the koalas eating the Manna gum leaves outside our back door, but my ‘caring’ has no meaning in the big scheme.

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      2. Hello Hideaway,

        I use to think that perhaps humans were needed to respread the carbon around the planet so that life could again flourish instead of Earth going to another snowball phase, but that would imply there was an over riding force of purpose and meaning to life, which there isn’t.

        Somehow, I find it funny that this statement is coming from somebody extensively studying system dynamics.

        So how do you know that? Stated otherwise to try and make it a little bit more precise, how do we know there aren’t stabilizing feedback loops in the life system? (I’d like to get the vague word “meaning” part of the statement out of the equation) Isn’t this precisely Lovelock’s Gaia hypothesis and true for some systems such as his daisy world?

        How can one prove or disprove such a statement? Has it been disproved?

        Why are some things accepted to be out yet to be understood and others not?

        Thank you.

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        1. Charles,

          I’d call The Gaia hypothesis as just a religious type of belief. Its base assumption is that each lifeform has a purpose in the big scheme, which it doesn’t.

          The follow on from even a Gaia hypothesis is that to save life in 600m years from the sun expanding, some lifeform would take life away from this planet so it ‘survives’.

          It’s just another self delusion. Life is just another form of entropy. Once the sun expands enough, then all life on Earth will be extinguished, just like it has probably happened billions of other times throughout the universe when other Earth like (in terms of enabling life to form), came into existence then were swallowed up by their star.

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          1. Thank you for your answer.

            I was not talking about what will happen in 600m years.

            I just wanted to gently show you that you are expressing some kinds of beliefs too. To believe in black is still the coin of belief, just one of the sides. It has white on the other side.

            To be more explicit, to recognize a system in the human enterprise as a whole, but not to recognize the system which is comprised of all life on Earth, seems inconsistent to me. (not saying either are true or false, here. Like I knew 🙂

            How can we claim to truly know (anything), if only after seeing the history of knowledge evolution?

            But that’s OK. I respect the way you decide to see the world. It’s your choice and your freedom.

            To me, the ultimate denial, is to believe we can understand anything, when all we are doing is telling stories (which seem somewhat plausible), after the fact to justify our actions. Or to make sense of some of the things we experienced or feared.
            Let’s agree that the Gaïa’s hypothesis is a way to deny death. It might be, for some. Then, what’s the purpose of your story? What’s the purpose of your way of seeing the world?

            If I am honest with myself, that is what I am truly interested in (when I interact with you). The personal root of your story.

            🙂

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            1. Hi Charles ….. “Let’s agree that the Gaïa’s hypothesis is a way to deny death. It might be, for some. Then, what’s the purpose of your story? What’s the purpose of your way of seeing the world?”

              I’m just trying to work out what’s real and what’s not. If any of us walk off a cliff edge, then we fall, due to gravity, it’s real and not a belief. Walk out in front of a large truck going 100km an hour, and you will get smashed to pieces, it’s real and not a belief. Throw you computer into the fire for a couple of hours then try to to use it. It wont work and probably looks a lot different, as the damage is real, not a belief.

              Before I was a child, of which I still have some memories, there was nothing as I didn’t exist, once I’m gone, it will be the same, nothing. Sure the molecules that make up my body will continue to exist, but whatever form they take, it wont be me.

              It’s obvious to me that pretty much everyone wants to believe their life has meaning and/or purpose, which is why religions of all forms have thrived in humanity, and it is just humans with these beliefs.

              It’s really hard to accept that our lives have no meaning just like an ant’s life, or a tiny green spec of algae, have no meaning in the big scheme. Sure my life has a lot of meaning to other humans that also have emotions, and perhaps the pet dog’s life as well (I hope!! LOL), but overall we are just breaking energy down to a lower form by our existence, which is what’s happening throughout the universe, higher forms of energy going to lower forms until heat death of the universe occurs.

              I’ve come to my conclusions from research over decades, and it’s only the last few years, that I’ve looked at reality with certainty. The belief in the continuity of civilization is exactly the same as the belief in any religion, it’s a denial of the reality going on in the world around us throughout the universe, which scientists have a very good handle on.

              Higher gradients of energy breakdown to lower forms, but sometimes complexity emerges as a byproduct of the overall larger process, which then later undergo their own breakdown from the higher complexity to lower complexity following the energy gradient down.

              What happens in 600M years is just as relevant as what’s happening now. It will all be gone by around then when the oceans boil off, some bacteria may survive a bit longer. What was the point of life on Earth if it’s all going to be extinguished anyway? Apart of course, with the exception of trying to enjoy as much of being alive, in the ‘now’ as possible…

              Trying to make some type of sense out of the existence of life, leads to religious types of beliefs, of purpose and meaning. It’s a comfortable place for people, to believe they are significant, they will be rewarded, they have meaning…

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              1. Very well said Hideaway. I also am trying to understand what is real.

                As I age I have become much more tolerant of some beliefs that are not grounded in reality. For example, I know religions are not grounded in reality but I also know religions can provide significant benefits to society and to the peace and happiness of individuals.

                I sometimes wish I had a religious belief.

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                1. Is there no chance of you and Hideaway seeing MORT as a religious belief? Or overshoot, energy, collapse, or any of this stuff that we spend so much time on and get better with because we have been “practicing” everyday?

                  It sounds funny I know. Dowd got me into this way of thinking because of how simplified it was. Whatever you spend most of your time doing (or thinking) then that is your god/religion.

                  And yes, it gets even sillier when you break it down. I have friends whose religion is video games, or watching sports, or being a day trader.

                  If I spent all day trying to prove a flat earth or that we never landed on the moon, that’s my religion.

                  I spend 8 hours a day with data entry for commercial insurance. Is that my religion? No, what I’m thinking about and can’t wait to get off work to go do…. That is probably the religion.

                  I know…. dumb and simple. But that’s the way I like it.😊

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                  1. I think you may be confusing obsessions with religions.

                    Overshoot is an obsession for many people that write about it. Once you see it, you can’t unsee it, and everything else becomes insignificant in comparison.

                    Religions are different. Wikipedia tries to define religions but misses the point. I think a religion is a set of stories and beliefs built around a core life after death story.

                    https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_religions_and_spiritual_traditions

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                    1. Good point. Was thinking about it and ya, “Your addictions are your religions”… I dont think I buy that.

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              3. Hello Hideaway,

                Thank you very much for this deep and well thought answer.

                It’s funny, how I would express things totally differently, but rougly get to the same conclusion:

                Apart of course, with the exception of trying to enjoy as much of being alive, in the ‘now’ as possible…

                Except, personally, I would (now) get the “trying” out of the sentence.

                This sentence sounds interesting, yet I am having a hard time understanding it:

                Before I was a child, of which I still have some memories, there was nothing as I didn’t exist, once I’m gone, it will be the same, nothing

                Does “before you were a child” mean when you were a baby, or even before that? How can there be memories of a time when there was nothing? If there are memories, it implies, there was at least an observer, or something to record memories on? Or do you mean these memories have been fabricated later, even if they reference a previous time?

                To me, there is no need of meaning to live. It’s upside down. I live and then fabricate meaning (for myself and others). It’s one of my abilities. We “give the world all the meaning it has.”

                the reality going on in the world around us throughout the universe, which scientists have a very good handle on.

                This sentence could have been said 200 years ago and proven wrong. Science is changing all the time. It’s not even necessarily a refinement process. Sometimes there are so-called “paradigm shifts”. The stories I was told at school and the stories I am told now, allegedly all coming from scientists often paint a radically different picture of reality.

                As an aside, I studied mathematics and theoretical computer science and hold a PhD. I published some papers and saw how science was practiced. I left science (in the attempt of getting my boots on the ground and away from the chapel wars). None of what we are seeing now in the deviant behaviour of medical science (and others) surprises me.
                From the inside, science surprisingly looked like a hierarchical religious organization.
                I am extremely defiant of anything I am being told but did not directly experiment with. Reality is often subtly different from the “scientific truths” we are being told: they are not necessarily entirely untrue, but they often do not really say anything useful in practice about our individual reality.

                To me, there are many mental models and they inherently are wobbly structures. All general truths are doubtful and that is a general truth. All Cretans are liars. (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Liar_paradox)

                It’s a comfortable place for people, to believe they are significant, they will be rewarded, they have meaning…

                Systematically, focusing on personal death, end of all earthly life or necessarily dark and painful outcomes full of suffering, is similarly a comfortable and lazy place to be. It closes the range of possible. The mind can not imagine what it has never encountered before. Yet reality if full of surprises and nuances.

                In a nutshell, for me, to claim life has no purpose is the twin belief of claiming life has a purpose. As if I had an answer. I decide to stay on the fence and just live.
                This, I find, is the most simple, yet challenging and fulfilling stance.

                As a last note, from a different angle, it’s easy to exploit people who have no self-worth. This hierarchical culture encourages the destruction of all purpose and meaning. I know this is not your objective, but how much of what you say is you and how much is a product of your time? I wonder.

                Nice chatting with you 🙂

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              4. That’s more or less how I see it,BUT………..

                At the instant of the big bang (if that is what really happened) the laws of physics already had the inherent ability to let atoms and other sundry particles interact in ways to take advantage of the energy gradients and express life as one more phenomenon of the universe.

                It didn’t have to be that way, and so I think it is so cool that it did, and we even got enough consciousness to be amazed and appreciative about it.

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      3. Exactly!! Many of the elemental ores were the result of the great oxygenation event and will never come back even in a billion years. Coal will also never come back as it was the result of tree trunks not being broken down by bacteria for millions of years, again a one time event. Since we had access to everything we can safely say that we are the first and the last advanced civilization this planet could produce. It is also safe to say that any planet out there with intelligent life can probably produce one advanced civilization before the minerals are used up. Also the minerals we have pulled to the surface will last around 10,000- 20,000 years before they are buried because of sedimentation.

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        1. My understanding of the one-time nature of coal is that the carboniferous period that produced coal was preceded by plants inventing lignin which enabled large plant structures which created the biomass for coal deposits.

          Lignin is difficult to break down and it took quite a while for bacteria to figure out how to eat lignin and so there was a period when large quantities of biomass did not decompose thus creating coal deposits.

          This event could not repeat in the future because plants are now mostly decomposed when they die.

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    2. Thanks, good link. I got sucked into the comments for over an hour. Liked this one the best from dumnezero who was responding to this:

      “That magnitude of exploitation is only possible under industrialism. There is an inherent dominance hierarchy that industrialism creates and maintains because it allows for otherwise impossible things like the industrial manufacturing of artillery munitions.”

      There is inherent hierarchy in specialization. The good society is the one where you can either control and compensate for that specialization or you keep a society that’s so low tech that everyone can learn all there is to learn and everyone’s a generalist. It seems to me that the healer and shaman specialization is somewhat easy to manage in certain cultures. Not ours. In ours, you’re supposed to become a doctor to earn shitloads of money. So it’s not easy to say for sure that any specialization is bad.

      Again, the group that dominates thanks to industrialism is in continuity with the past. Capitalism is the descendant of feudalism, not some alien thing that popped up suddenly. And industrialism is the descendant of pre-industrial technology, education and labor practices & culture. This entire fucking civilization is horrible, it’s not just the most recent centuries. It goes back at least 6,000 years. (chris here. I dont like the 6k. I say closer to 1.5 mill😊)

      Look, I agree that the lack of fossil fuel powered machinery would severely limit the capability of humans to destroy the surface of the planet quickly. What I was pointing out is that the destroying was already going on at a lower rate, a slower speed. If you can’t imagine what another 10-20 thousand years of “medieval life” would’ve done to the planet, that’s on you. I will point out that before coal was being burnt, people also figured out how to mine peat. 

      Pastoralists in many parts of the world turned vegetated landscapes into deserts, in complement with empires that wiped out forests (no fossil fuels). Even hunters fucked up countless ecologies, especially when/where hunting became a status symbol (hunter/warrior patriarchal cultures); see “Overkill theory”.

      There’s really no guarantee that if the first industrial revolution didn’t occur, a climate and biosphere systemic collapse would’ve been avoided. My only point is that if you’re just anti-modern or anti-industrial, you’ve missed the core problem. That’s a fatal error.

      And from a different thread, I even liked dumnezero’s meaning of life:

      In the optimistic case of survivors, they’ll be mining the waste dumps we’re so carelessly producing. I often get the feeling that the main purpose in life now is to be a waste producer, a manufacturer of garbage, an artizan of detritus. Better sort that trash if you want to leave a nice dense deposit for any survivors. That’s why I do it at least.

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      2. Birth rates are tied to “Social optimism”

        Think Post WW2 (Happy Days) created the baby BOOM.

        This is very well known with countries that go to war often like Israel for example. The birth rate always crashes when at war.

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  49. https://www.rintrah.nl/youll-miss-us-when-were-gone/

    The issue of low birth rates is lately coming up again in my country. The leader of the party I reluctantly voted for brought up that our fertility rate is well below replacement level, whereas Africa’s population is exploding.

    Well the thing is, none of you people really deserve Europeans. That’s why we decided to die out. The politicians won’t solve it, they can’t even practice what they preach.

    Europe spends its days trying to save the world from global warming, while Americans spend their days setting up ponzi schemes. But we are rewarded with a Russian invasion, whereas the Americans are rewarded with the whole world buying their inflated tech stocks.

    The Indians are going full steam ahead building coal plants, the Brazilians chop down their rain forest, the Indonesians are building a new capital city in the middle of the pristine rain forest of Borneo, the Africans say that God will provide for their children.

    Well I’m flattered you consider us God, but it’s over. We’re done. Sorry kids, dad is off to buy a pack of cigarettes.

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  50. I found this essay from the un-denial home page, which I found thanks to a comment on Tom Murphy’s do the math site, which I found from a posting on Nate Hagens’ The Great Simplification discord server.

    And the crazy thing is that while studying Genesis, I had just reached the awful conclusion that the apple was fire. That the tree of life refers to evolution, and the tree of knowledge of good and evil refers to awareness of mortality. The original couple were always surely going to die. They just didn’t realize it until they stole the fruit of evolution’s 4 billion years of accumulated intelligence – the tree of knowledge of good and evil. Eating its fruit doesn’t endow you with wisdom. Eating its fruit here means consuming the world, which is exactly what we have done. For the world was the fruit of that tree of knowledge, a fruit full of sugar, which is chemical energy, which becomes fire when you break its bonds.

    Fire, the original sin.

    If I believed in Fate or something like it, I’d marvel at finding this article (and from here, the Ajit Varki chapter explaining eToM and MORT) just after having come to this conclusion. Well, no, this website was probably lurking in links in my various explorations all along, but I had to figure out MORT in order to be motivated to see the relevant chain of links and follow them.

    Thanks, guys, I’m now a fan. Do you have a podcast? I need something to listen to while weeding my little quarter acre of Eden.

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    1. PS, I posted before creating my account. Future postings will refer to me as Carroll Lewis.

      Only nonsense makes sense any more since the borogoves went all mimsy.

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      1. Hi Carroll. Great post! And thanks for mentioning how you found un-Denial. Nice to know that leaving comments and links to this site actually works sometimes.😊

        I’ve been obsessed with fire lately so I love all of your fire references. I’m ignorant as hell to organized religion. I don’t even know what Genesis means (is it the bible?). But if studying that is what got you to the conclusion that fire is the apple… then Genesis is ok in my book. Sounds like you have a lot to say. Looking forward to your contributions here.

        And just a heads-up regarding spirituality/religion on this site. The majority here are not into that stuff… but there are a few of us that are. Rob and the audience are pretty cool about allowing and accepting those conversations (as long as we don’t overdo it and turn this place into a full-blown religious forum😊). So don’t be afraid to “go there” in your post’s.

        Last thing, my advice to you about MORT is to stick with it. When I was new, I only understood it as denial is way more important than everyone else out there in the collapse world gives it credit for. And also go back into older essays and browse all the comments (which is usually where the real gold is hiding). When I found un-Denial 9 months ago, fire was not even on my radar. And although fire is not talked about much here, MORT (and some contributors) is what got me to eventually see the light.

        And here is a must read from Gaia gardener. It was in response to my fire essay and just makes the overall story so much better:

        https://un-denial.com/2024/07/30/by-paqnation-aka-chris-humans-are-not-a-species/comment-page-1/#comment-103408

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    2. Welcome Carroll. So nice (and rare) to meet someone new interested in MORT.

      I’ve said most of what I had to say in essays and the community here has stepped up to fill the vacuum by submitting guest essays. It sounds like you have something new and relevant to say about our overshoot predicament. You are most welcome to contribute a guest essay to elaborate on your idea. Just send me a message via the contact form in the About menu and we can talk privately via email.

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      1. Thanks, Rob, I will in time. Right now I’m working on an un-denial Talmudic interpretation of early parts of Genesis. Okay, I started working on it before I found un-denial or the Varki/Brower denial book, so it didn’t have un-denial in the title. Okay, backing up a little more, I only just had started putting words into bits and bytes a few days ago, right before I found un-denial! But I’d been thinking about it for months. The other night, I kept my poor husband up for a good half hour babbling about it, which is what led to finally sitting down and writing. It’s hard to make myself sit and write while the weather demands that I go outdoors and wipe aphids off my pollinator-friendly natives and pull multi-flora rose weeds. It will be even harder if the application I just turned in to get onto my borough’s Comprehensive Plan Steering Committee gets accepted. Jeezz, what is an un-denialist doing, trying to get onto a Comprehensive Plan Steering Committee? Oh, well, I happen to like to be fed, and since, like all the rest of suburbia, my borough is overpopulated relative to the amount of food we could grow genuinely locally, I’d like to try to keep development in-fill to a minimum, and make it easier to demolish without then building.

        Still, my favorite rabbi knows I’m working on this interpretation thing, so it does have to get done, whether it’s for him or for un-denial. Because he knows what I’m working on, he recommended a book, The Pearl and the Flame: A Journey into Jewish Wisdom and Ecological Thinking, by Natan Margalit. I got the book but refuse to read it until I write up what’s in my post-evolutionary brain, so I don’t have to credit him for my own original thought. So arrogant of me.

        Arrogant of me to even undertake this interpretation because I’m not even a bat mitzvah and don’t even know all the Hebrew letters. I’m a Bhagavad Gita sort of Jew, and have no qualifications for any of the stuff (5 letters, eh?) I’m into.

        There, a long-winded way of saying Thank you! I will, but in good time.

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    3. Hi Carroll,

      I always interpreted “the tree of knowledge of good and evil” as referring to our tendency towards a dual thinking. To me, this is upside down: mortality arises once we consider ourselves as separate. The mental model of “self” (a separate, autonomous entity, which is bound to the body) implies mortality. We want to see the world as separate, but we reject on of its implication: death.

      There are two ways out of fear of death: fantasize about some kind of immortality (denial) or recognize the separation.

      Nice interpretation by the way. Thank you.

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      1. I see what you mean about duality. Yet the tree has one trunk, one root. Duality arises out of unity. The Upanishads talk about that, too. Duality is not necessarily an illusion or even a delusion, so much as it tends to mask the underlying unity.

        There are many ways to look at the fruit, too. The fruit is full of chemical latent energy – fire – but it also is a physical tree’s reproductive system. Once you’re aware of death, you also have to become aware of birth, and therefore sexuality, which has to do with their shame at their nakedness.

        Yet nakedness isn’t just about sexuality, it’s also about vulnerability, which becomes a thing when you’re aware of death, so you have to cover it up, which is to deny your vulnerability, and in doing so, deny death. The way out of fear of death isn’t so much recognition of the separation or duality as it is to rediscover the underlying unity. But we can’t do that as long as we’re addicted to the fruit.

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        1. Yes.

          There are some things I do not quite understand in your answer, or maybe that I would not quite express the same way as you.

          Doesn’t recognition of duality immediatly leads to unity? No need to look for unity, just see duality is a product of our doing, and then bam! That’s how I understand: “Once the cloud goes away, the sun is visible.”

          Yes, unity and duality are both possible ways of seeing reality. That’s how I understand: “mountain, no mountain, mountain.” That’s also why non-duality does not claim 1. It simply states not 2.

          I don’t quite see the relationship with the addiction to the fruit. Do you mean that while we are addicted to what fire gets us, we refuse to see the consequence of using it? As recognizing unity would let us see that what we do to others, we ultimately do to ourselves too? (Or alternatively, we would recognize the futility of it?)

          Thank you for the explanation.

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