book review: The End of Global Net Oil Exports by Lars Larsen (2024)

I just finished a book by Lars Larsen titled The End of Global Net Oil Exports: What Really Matters in the Peak Oil Debate, Thirteenth Edition, 2024.

Thanks to el mar for bringing this book to my attention.

Lars Larsen – The End of Global Net Oil Exports, 13th Edition – 2024Download

I thought I was aware of pretty much everyone that studies oil depletion but somehow I missed Lars Larsen.

I am both impressed and alarmed by his work. I expect you will be too.

Fair warning, the book is more like a collection of essays and blog posts, with some repetition because Larsen frequently revisits his calculations from different perspectives, or with alternate data, because the results are so troubling that they demand re-checking.

Larsen is 40 years old, lives in Sweden, has recently retired from 18 years of blogging, and his final post on his new blog has a nice primer on overshoot and prepping with many links to information. It seems Larsen copes with overshoot and collapse awareness by believing Jesus will return.

https://skogslars.blogg.se/

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

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

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

To begin, I want to be clear that I am not an oil depletion expert. I have no first hand experience or research to validate the work of Larsen. It would have been better for an expert like Art Berman, Steve St. Angelo, or Hideaway to have reviewed this book, but given the importance of the topic, I will start the ball rolling and hope that more people look at Larsen’s work.

My small role in this world is as a dot connector of overshoot issues, with a unique focus on the MORT theory, which I think explains why we are collectively unable to see nor act wisely on our obvious overshoot predicament. I also like to think I am a reasonable judge of intelligence and integrity, which means I can sift wheat from chaff.

My sense is that Larsen is intelligent, with strong integrity, and has a lot of wheat.

Following are some aspects of Larsen’s work that impressed me.

Oil depletion analysis is complex and nuanced. It’s easy to get lost in the trees and not see the forest. Larsen focusses his analysis on what will likely be the most important trigger for collapse: the date when diesel becomes unavailable to import.

We can make do without some oil products like gasoline, however diesel is central to everything we need to survive because it powers the engines in our tractors, combines, trucks, trains, ships, and mining machines. Alice Friedemann elaborates on this in her excellent book When Trucks Stop Running.

There are many factors that affect oil supply and demand including technology, geopolitics, economic cycles, interest rates, inflation, wars, extreme weather, and pandemics. Larsen stays focused on the 3 most important forces driving oil depletion:

  1. Total Supply (new supply minus depleted supply times % diesel): Wells deplete over time and are replaced with new wells. New wells tend to deplete faster and often produce unconventional oil which has a lower percentage of diesel. We are also consuming reserves much faster than we are discovering new reserves.
  2. EROEI (Energy Returned on Energy Invested): It takes energy to extract energy. We first exploit the best quality reserves with the easiest to extract oil. Over time reserve quality declines which requires more energy for extraction leaving less energy for powering everything else in civilization.
  3. Available Exports (Export Land Model): Oil producing countries tend to have strong economic growth which means over time they consume a larger percentage of the total oil they extract, which leaves less available for export.

Each of these 3 forces is now trending in a negative direction, and the rate of each is accelerating. Many experts discuss the implications of one of the three big forces, but Larsen is the first person I’ve seen try to calculate the combined effect of all 3 forces, which is of course what we care about, because the aggregate best predicts diesel availability over time.

Larsen acknowledges that the source data needed for his analysis is often confusing, incomplete, and inaccurate. He is transparent about this and does his best to validate data by cross checking and questioning assumptions.

Larsen is extremely well read and has clearly been studying oil depletion for a long time. His awareness of the work and opinions of other experts is encyclopedic. Experts he references include:

  • Jeffrey J. Brown
  • Gail Tverberg
  • Steve St. Angelo
  • Alice Friedemann
  • Art Berman
  • Kurt Cobb
  • Matt Simmons
  • Charles A.S. Hall
  • Richard Heinberg
  • Nate Hagens
  • Chris Martenson
  • Tim Morgan
  • Ron Patterson
  • Euan Mearns
  • Dennis Coyne
  • Andrii Zvorygin
  • John Peach

Larsen is open to criticism and revisits his calculations when challenged.

Larsen publicly corrects errors he has made in the past. This for me is a key sign of integrity which means we probably can trust him.

Larsen tries to avoid being an alarmist. He offers reasons that diesel might be available for a longer period of time. On the flip side, Larsen lists 10 forces that are not accounted for in his calculations and which might make reality worse than he predicts:

  1. Wars like Ukraine and the Middle East.
  2. Natural disasters like extreme weather events affecting offshore oil or coastal refineries.
  3. Oil reserves are probably overstated by exporting countries.
  4. Popping of the US shale oil bubble.
  5. Steep decline of conventional oil due to advanced enhanced oil recovery (a bigger straw).
  6. Insufficient capital for exploration due to green energy policies and/or economic recession.
  7. Economic collapse due to insufficient growth and extreme debt.
  8. Reserves left in the ground because rising extraction costs eventually exceed what consumers can afford to pay.
  9. Peak oil awareness may cause exporting countries to leave oil in the ground for future generations.
  10. Depleted exporting countries become importers thus accelerating the decline of diesel available to import.
  11. Hideaway, in an un-Denial comment, added an 11th issue. Modern oil extraction technology is very complex with many global networked dependencies. Given the nature of remaining reserves, it is not possible to use older simpler technology. When disruptions to supply chains begin they may cascade to accelerate the decline of oil supply.

A few comments on Jeffery J. Brown’s export land model (ELM). For those unfamiliar, the ELM says that export supply falls faster than total supply because oil exporters grow and therefore consume over time a greater share of the surplus oil they have available to export. I remember the ELM was widely discussed in the early days of peak oil. Now I rarely hear anyone like Berman, Hagens, Tverberg, Friedemann, Martenson, etc. discuss it. I wonder why? It seems like a very important model for predicting depletion of exports.

Larsen asks the same question about the ELM. He also ponders the same type of questions that motivated me to create un-Denial. How is it possible that we do not see or discuss the most important issues? It seems Larsen has not yet discovered Dr. Ajit Varki’s MORT theory which provides an answer.

It’s very strange that people do not focus more on the end of oil exports than on peak oil and the decline of overall oil, when the fact is that the end of oil exports comes way before the end of overall oil.

Jeffrey J. Brown was the one who brought the issue of oil exports to the focus of many peakoilers and collapsologists ten, fifteen years ago. If you google for recent texts by him or interviews with him, you don’t find much, the latest by him or about him is only one article on Forbes in October 2021,”The Road To Clean Energy Is Messier Than We Thought”, written by Loren Steffy, UH Energy Scholar (not easy to find if you google for it), and after that you find on google some comments on http://www.oilprice.com from the beginning of 2018, and one interview from 2017 at the Peak Prosperity blog, see here.

After 2021 there is, basically, a deafening silence around him and from him. Why? Shouldn’t he become more and more famous the closer we get to the end of the oil export market? Shouldn’t all countries calculate oil exports and imports, so we can plan for the end of the oil age? So we could degrow in a controlled way, collapse in a controlled way, not in a chaotic way? This silence and disinterest is for me incredible, unfathomable stupidity. I can’t almost believe it’s true, so strange it is.

The same one could say about the whole issue of calculating oil exports according to the Export Land Model, it has just vanished from the scene, you don’t find anything about it since 2017 (this is still true on June 17, 2024, later comment). In fact, rationing the remaining oil, yes all the remaining fossil energy, is maybe the single most important thing to do in the whole world right now. And Peak Oil is the single most important event in modern time, or, maybe Peak Oil Exports (which happened in 2005, google “peak oil exports happened in 2005” and you only find one article about it, or, it is not even an article, it is a comment to an article. I wrote this in the end of 2022) is even more important, but it is linked to Peak Oil, which also happened at the same time, if you only count conventional oil.

We are walking blind and deaf over the “Energy Cliff”. Not even the current energy crisis and the record high energy prices are able to get us to explore oil exports according to the Export Land Model on the internet.

It would have been nice to know how much time we have left to live as a civilization, yes, even more as individuals. This can be best known by calculating the remaining volume of oil exports, if our country doesn’t produce any oil itself, and if we produce oil ourselves, by also calculating our remaining oil reserves and the volume of probable future oil discoveries.

If you are a dying cancer patient, you would like your physician to estimate how long you have left to live, so you can plan accordingly. In fact, it is the duty of every physician to try to figure this out and tell the results to the patient. And yet we usually do not calculate the time civilization and we ourselves have left. Shouldn’t we be interested in knowing this?

I noticed one assumption that Larsen makes that he never explains. He assumes China and India will be first in line for oil exports, and because they are large rapidly growing countries, many smaller oil importing countries will be pushed off the table and forced to collapse first. Perhaps their military might will place them first in line? Another possible explanation is that China and India are low cost manufacturers of necessities which means they will have something of value to trade for scarce oil unlike countries like UK/France/Germany/Japan etc., which after SHTF, may have nothing affordable of value to offer for oil so may not be able to import any oil.

Hideaway pointed out that if the shale bubble pops the US will probably try to use its military power to push aside China and India. This may explain the recent hostility to China by Europe/US with policies in essence to “keep China down”. This may also explain the insanity of NATO’s opposition to Russia’s reasonable security concerns. One can imagine much risk of nuclear war in the future. Starving citizens create motivated leaders.

Larsen pauses to ask if the conclusions of his calculations pass the smell test. Often he admits his conclusions seem too dire given day to day life, and then he rechecks, or proposes possible reasons reality may be less bad than he predicts.

I have done many different calculations, from different angles and with different parameters, to try to validate my results, and all calculations confirm my results above, more or less, all point in the same direction. I have counted them, and it is eleven different sets of calculations, all pointing in the same direction. Regarding the end of “ANE” (“available net ex-ports”) one say it will happen 2023, four say 2024, seven say 2025, six say 2026, four say 2027, one say 2028 and one say around 2030 (my starting point in the beginning of the book). “ANE” means global net oil exports minus the combined net oil imports of China and India.

I have serious trouble believing in my own calculations. They feel too radical. Maybe there is something wrong with the data or with my calculations (but I cannot calculate otherwise, I’m not an expert in math). Therefore I think 2027 is the most likely time for the end of “ANE” globally.

It is almost not possible to really believe that global oil exports are declining exponentially right now (i.e. at an accelerated rate of decline, which means that the decline goes faster and faster with time), as I have shown in this book (because almost no one talks about it, we do not want it to be true). This means that the collapse of civilization will also be exponential, going faster and faster. It means that it is exponential right now. Who can really fathom this fact? We have to be really deep into collapse news to be able to feel the realism of this. And I am. But I have still problems believing it, because I don’t see it happening in Stockholm, where I live. It happens elsewhere, though, to some degree.

This is not reflected on the site https://oilprice.com/, the most important website of the global oil industry. It is never mentioned. Even Peak Oil is seldom mentioned there. Almost only when Gail Tverberg is allowed to post the blogposts from her own blog there, which happens about once a month, the reality of Peak Oil is coming through. I follow this site regularly.

This is really bad for our adaptation to a post carbon future, which has to come, it is a mathematical certainty. It is also a mathematical certainty that the collapse will be exponential.

Larsen’s conclusion is that 2027 is the most probable year that diesel imports will become unavailable to all countries except China and India.

Diesel shortages will break everything that matters. Given our extreme $88 trillion global debt, complex global supply chains, and 12,100 nuclear weapons, it is impossible to predict how the collapse will play out.

But I expect food will be at the epicenter.

In about 3 years from now.

I wonder if this explains why most leaders seem to be losing their minds?

322 thoughts on “book review: The End of Global Net Oil Exports by Lars Larsen (2024)”

  1. I don’t follow or know anything about Brandon Smith but he makes some good observations about the risks of a middle east war. The rest of the article is crap devolving into left/right politics.

    https://alt-market.us/the-trigger-for-wwiii-just-arrived-what-are-the-implications-for-americans/

    Sanctions against Russia affect around 10% of the global oil market and around 12% of global natural gas consumption. But so far all that oil and natural gas is still flowing around the world, only the trade routes have changed. The Middle East, on the other hand, accounts for over 35% of the global oil market and 18% of the natural gas market. Widespread chaos in this region would mean economic crisis on a scale not seen in a century.

    Around 30% of all oil exports travel through the Strait of Hormuz, a narrow passage which a nation like Iran can easily block for months at a time. Sinking a few larger vessels in the straight would obstruct all cargo ship traffic and oil tanker traffic. Trying to clean up the mess would be difficult because artillery, which is almost impossible to intercept, can rain down from Iran on any vessels trying to drag sunken ships out of the way.

    Iran has mutual defense pacts with multiple governments in the region including Lebanon and Syria, along with military ties to Russia. The Turkish government is unlikely to allow western troops to use their airspace to launch attacks. The US military presence in Afghanistan is gone and the Iraqi government will never allow foreign troops to use their land to come to the aid of Israel.

    This greatly limits the west’s launch points for an offensive large enough to blitz Iran. The vast majority of attacks would be from the air, and if the Russians start supplying Iran with batter radar and missile technology then there’s no guarantees Israel or the US would gain full control of the air space. In other words, if a wider war breaks out it will not end for YEARS and it’s going to be fought on the ground.

    On the other side, Israel’s brazen assassination of the Hamas political leader Ismail Haniyeh on Iranian soil this week is a clear catalyst for war. Haniyeh has been engaged in a diplomatic mission to start peace negotiations in Gaza. His assassination sends a clear message that Israel has no intention of entering into talks with Hamas.

    Iran’s supreme religious leader Ayatollah Ali Khamenei has ordered retaliation against Israel and issued an order for Iran to strike the Israelis directly. Iran will likely use extended missile barrages, but also stage troops in Syria and Lebanon. The Houthis in Yemen will then increase their attacks on ships traversing the Red Sea. It’s hard to say how much Russia will involve itself at first, but I have no doubt more advanced Russian missiles and other weapons will make an appearance on the battlefield.

    The prospect of world war is immense. Israel will not be able to fight in Gaza, Lebanon, Syria and Iran all at the same time. Energy exports in the region will definitely face a slowdown, if not a complete breakdown. At that point the war won’t just be about Israel, it will be about a global energy crisis. I don’t see any scenario in which the US government doesn’t get involved.

    For those that think we can “win” on multiple fronts, the truth might shock you.  Eric Edelman, who serves as Vice Chair of the US National Defense Strategy Commission, has given warning about the impending conflict, stating:

    “There is potential for near-term war and a potential that we might lose such a conflict…We need our allies to produce more. Our defense industrial base is in very bad shape. The European defense industrial base is in even worse shape. We need our industrial base, their base, and the industrial base of our Pacific allies. Australia, Japan, South Korea, Taiwan–they all need to be stepping up because to match what Russia, China, Iran and North Korea are doing is beyond our ability to do it ourselves.”

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    1. Beyond that, the political left in the west has tied itself to the Palestinian wagon as if it’s their business. In reality, leftists view the war in Gaza as just another vehicle for their outrage. They use minorities, they use gays and now they’re using Muslims. It’s the classic Marxist strategy of hijacking the social causes of other groups and co-opting their momentum.

      Gaza is just another excuse for progressive spastics to riot and start burning more of the west down (their true goal). Anyone that opposes them will automatically be accused of being a “Zionist sympathizer” even if Israel is not their concern. So, there will surely be Muslim terror attacks, but also civil conflicts triggered by leftists exploiting the situation to their advantage.

      The events in Palestine are our business, because the genocide in Gaza could not happen without U.S. support. The U.S. keeps sending weapons to Israel, despite being fully aware that those weapons are being used to commit war crimes. The U.S. has vetoed ceasefire resolutions on multiple occasions. Now that Benjamin Netanyahu and Yoav Gallant are facing charges in international courts, the U.S. is trying to shield them from accountability. The events in Gaza are our business, because the U.S. government is an accomplice in the Genocide.

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    2. Hi Rob … This bit is exactly what’s wrong with humans….

      “ We need our industrial base, their base, and the industrial base of our Pacific allies. Australia, Japan, South Korea, Taiwan–they all need to be stepping up“

      “Stepping up”, in other words build more, develop more, grow more so we can defeat the ‘enemy’.

      I’ve mentioned before that an imperative for growth has been defense against other tribes. Our leaders obviously still have that mentality, which of course can’t work forever on a finite planet. What those in charge never seem to understand is that the only way to get rid of this mentality of needing growth, to defeat the enemy, is to be one and not have any enemies.

      Humans have proved with our technology that we can become much larger tribes than 20,000 years ago, through much better communication. We now have tribes of a billion people (India, China). If we had had been able to become one tribe of humans, decades ago when we first had the technology for world wide communication, we then had a chance of avoiding a nasty collapse, by implementing changes like reducing population levels, leaving much larger areas as natural etc.

      The concept of us vs ‘them’, has been behind the prerogative to grow since pre agricultural times so that our tribe would survive and thrive. If we didn’t grow, those bad people could overtake us, send us all into slavery etc..

      Homo “sapiens” (wise, intelligent) we are not…

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        1. My time wasted in the cult of Dr Steven Greer, had me 100% convinced that a false flag operation making it look like aliens were to blame was on the horizon. And then that would be used as a sinister reason to unite the world under one government. 

          “They” would pull off the false flag by using the alien technology we found at Area 51. Maybe by blowing up an entire city and leaving the Area 51 devices laying around as evidence. 

          LOL, but now with my overshoot/energy knowledge I know there is no actual alien technology. But I could still see them trying to create the same false flag with the identical goal in mind of this New World Order. (and I would still be in favor of it because anything is better than what we have now)

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  2. What about Gasoline powered trucks? They existed not a very long time ago. Natural gas trucks are for sale now. There would be a transition period without trucks, and a conversion of engines cost much, but it is not impossible

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    1. Gasoline engines in trucks are not as good as diesel engines for torque, reliability, longevity, and fuel economy but they would work. I think the issue is scale. There are so many diesel engines and there is not enough time, money, or materials to replace them.

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  3. If you’re looking for a more optimistic view of oil, Jimmy Fortuna says he agrees with Berman and Hagens except that he does not believe we face a geologic scarcity of oil.

    Kind of like saying I agree with Christianity except the life after death bit. 🙂

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      1. I couldn’t be bothered to listen to more than a couple of minutes of this ‘expert’. I started at the 45 minute mark on your recommendation above (LOL)… He’s into the meme of “technology will save us” type of thinking, not understanding that all the increases of complexity he is talking about are only possible by a growing large market and growing energy use.

        At some point, the oil extraction must shrink as we are on a finite planet. As the energy available shrinks, so to must the market and the complexity available to do the specialist aspects of oil production. The more we rely upon higher levels of complexity to obtain our energy, the greater, larger and faster the collapse when it all unravels.

        Let’s assume he is correct and we can get a whole lot more oil from technology over the next decade. In 10 years time the extraction of the harder to get lower quality oil will be up to 110Mbbl/d (as an example). It’s still depleting, and eventually the volume able to be extracted falls. The ‘more’ technology involved, the faster the decline it seems, so when the ‘technology oil’ starts to decline it will be rapid, then the feedback loops of lower oil throughout the rest of society kick in accelerating the decline.

        With conventional oil down to minimum levels by 10 years time, the decline in oil production and all the implications will be large and rapid. We buy 10 years and have a bigger crash, with the natural world another 10 years worse off due to extinctions, forest removal, ocean acidification, pollution

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        1. He didn’t explain much how technology will help. He simply assumes that if supply does not meet demand the price will go up which will increase supply from more expensive reserves. That games works while we can borrow money to pay for oil we can’t afford and everyone continues to believe we can service the debt.

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        1. lol. WordPress has been notified about your dangerous knowledge Hideaway. It’s trying its best to censor the hell out of you. 😊

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  4. Paul Beckwith with a very interesting video about rocks.

    “Rocks on the bottom of the deep ocean (manganese nodules, or polymetallic nodules) up to the size of potato’s act like batteries and generate enough voltage and current to break down sea water into hydrogen and oxygen. We thought that oxygen on the Earth is completely derived from plants. We were wrong.”

    These rocks take millions of years to form. They are everywhere on the ocean floor. The oxygen they produce is called “dark oxygen” because its being done in the deep dark water where photosynthesis is impossible. 

    The research team came up with this info 8 years ago but doubted themselves so much that they kept trying to disprove it. They finally accepted their initial research and have made it public. The research was being funded by mining companies who want to exploit the rocks to make car batteries. Beckwith gets a little pep in his step about the irony that greedy mining companies funded the research and now that same research says they can’t exploit the rocks because removing the oxygen producers would destroy ecosystems at the bottom of the ocean that rely on the oxygen.

    And this is where I think Paul is being way too naive. If there is money to be made on those rocks, humans will not stop until they have extracted every single last one of them. This is what our species excels at. Messing around with ancient artifacts to further benefit humans with no regard of the consequences.

    The whole thing gives me an Indiana Jones type vibe where Indy picks up the sacred artifact, and it turns out to be a booby trap and the walls come crashing down. (except in our reality the walls come crashing down at a much slower pace)

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  6. Kunstler today. Skip the rest, it’s political BS.

    https://kunstler.com/clusterfuck-nation/and-suddenly-things-change/

    That two-by-four upside our country’s head you’ve been waiting to get whomped with? Looks like it’s landing now. We got a banger in 2008, but it didn’t make a much of an impression. Maybe you don’t even remember these people, but then Treasury Secretary Hank Paulson and Fed Chair Ben Bernanke came in like a code blue squad and hooked up the banks to an IV-drip speedball of cocaine and heroin, i.e., “money” that didn’t actually exist (a.k.a. “liquidity,” hallucinated capital), and that crew kept it coming for years.

    And then Janet Yellen and her posse kept it coming with never-ending zero interest rate policy (ZIRP) until the national debt canceled America’s future. And that left Jerome Powell pretending there was a way out of this doom-loop. Then came the repo market spasm in September 2019 that freaked out the blob so badly they shut down the whole world with Covid and locked-down economies. And everything since then has been a waiting game. The financial world was in hospice.

    The wait is over. Everything that can break is breaking: stock markets, bond markets, the galaxy of derivatives — bets on this and that, which will never be honored. Banks are next. Gold and silver are hanging in there for dear life just now, because they’re actually worth something. (And because they are worth something, they‘ll eventually sell off some too, to cover margin calls on other stuff hemorrhaging value. But they will not go to zero  like a lot of other stuff, and they’ll come back stronger.)

    You understand this can’t play out like it did in 2008-9. The authorities are out of tricks and out of fake money. They can try the emergency interest rate cut, but it won’t change what is actually happening: the epic revaluation of everything humans make and own — with much of it losing value and quite a bit losing all value because it never really had any. The spooky catch is that there will be an attempt in this wild and terrifying process, for certain devious, unprincipled  parties to take possession of many things shaking loose — what remains of collateral. . . real things. . . commodities. . . facilities. . . properties. . . chattels. . . artworks. . . and, of course, whatever securities still have a relationship to realities of production.

    Oh, and you’ve probably noticed that World War Three is shaping up to kick off today.

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        1. “What do you think the bunny looks like?”

          Something knitted by Tim Burton with one eye hanging out on a thread after a decade on tranq (DuckDuckGo).

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        2. Yea just financial gimmickry. More zero interest rates and something else with the digital currencies. There is a lot of savings to be had by imposing harsher regulation on the banks. Some re-nationalising perhaps. Energy is perhaps different now, as no shale oil miracle.

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    2. They are going to cancel all the worlds debt just like after WW2. This will require a new credit system which will be social credit. Think of Uber ratings for you and everything you consume and person you interact with.

      They are going to switch to digital currency which will cancel all inflation. (There is nothing to inflate because there are no resources connected. As long as merchants except the digital currency, which they have no choice since most transactions are already digital via credit cards and such.

      There will be no WW3 because the US Navy protects all global shipping in and out.

      Peak demand will cancel peak oil but will be brutal for western world.

      A system of carbon credits and digital rationing will hold the center while this transition happens. And prevent a future collapse from happening from the issues we are facing currently.

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      2. I would like to believe that some of the changes you predict are possible in a world with rapidly declining energy, extreme inequality, and extreme debt.

        But I don’t see a path from here to there. For example:

        • One person’s debt is another person’s wealth. How do you cancel debt without violence?
        • A social credit system will still need growth to generate abundant credit and that’s not possible with declining energy. You can’t have a modern civilization without abundant credit.
        • A digital currency requires a reliable internet and electricity grid, neither of which will be possible with diesel shortages.
        • There are 12.100 nuclear weapons in the world. Using one probably starts WWIII. How do you prevent WWIII when a country with no oil and no ability to import oil has starving citizens?
        • Peak demand has the same effect as peak oil: degrowth, economic collapse, insufficient food, and everything breaks.

        A deep exploration of each point explaining how it would work and how we get from here to there might make an interesting guest essay.

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      3. A deep exploration of each point explaining how it would work and how we get from here to there might make an interesting guest essay.

        I’ll see what I can toss together.

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  7. B’s thinking about peak oil too. No mention of Larsen or ELM so maybe he doesn’t lurk here.

    He does discuss Hideaway’s themes and EROEI and he understands high prices will not save the day.

    B believes the decline will be gradual and that we’ve got until about 2040 before BAU collapses, after which we will re-localize, climate change will abate, and our destruction of the planet will cease.

    https://thehonestsorcerer.substack.com/p/has-peak-oil-become-self-evident

    This leaves us with a more or less smooth bell-curve, with its highest point marked as peak oil, after which production is expected to fall. Not in a crash and burn manner, mind you, but rather following a long and undulating path back to zero in a multiple decades time.

    …the rate of finding new oil has been far below the actual consumption rate for decades now, (adding around 11 billion barrels per year on average versus the 30 billion consumed every year). In 2022 and 2023 notably, oil companies have discovered 5 billion barrels only, replacing a mere one sixth of what has been consumed that year.

    “To make matters worse, 2023 was an expensive year, with drilling costs rising due to a significantly tighter rig market than in prior years, worsening the blow of a low success rate.”

    The global economy simply cannot function without cheap oil. Mining, agriculture, long distance transport all depend on low-priced fuel oil (diesel). Since none of these use cases could have been replaced by hydrogen and batteries …

    This takes us to the second flawed assumption, namely that the fall in oil production can be compensated by electrification. The analysts at Rystad somehow managed to overlook the fact that copper, lithium, cobalt, and just about anything from gravel to limestone is still mined and moved by diesel trucks. Thus, it would be impossible to continue with electrification — a massively material intensive undertaking — in a world where liquid fuel supply would be falling. Remember, diesel oil is a much needed input to agriculture, too, so it is inconceivable that a dwindling supply of this indispensable fuel would be diverted towards mines producing metals for electric vehicles, instead of farms growing food. So, no: neither higher prices, nor electrification can save us from peak oil. Once it’s here, we will have to kiss goodbye to a lot of things — and electric vehicles might be the first ones to go. Simply put: we haven’t got the technology and the time left to wean ourselves off of oil. The time for alternatives and false hopes is up. It’s time to get real. 

    So, while there might be another peak in daily oil production in the coming five to six years, we face a massive decline after that: halving our everyday petroleum supply in a mere twenty years (translating into an annual 3–4% drop in fuel supply, year after year). Again, not a precipitous drop, but a long undulating decline… And while this is certainly good news for the climate, as much less CO2 will be released from burning oil than previously estimated, such a steady decrease in oil production would certainly spell doom to the globalized world economy. 

    The decline of western economies (due to their lack of access to cheap resources and fuel putting an end to their economic and military hegemony), combined with a fall in Asian population (and their corresponding economic crisis), could easily offset the coming decline in oil production — making peak oil look like “peak demand” at first glance… At least until production decline accelerates further, and the lack of fuel could no longer be explained away by demand destruction. By then, however, no price hike will save the oil market — it will be way too energy intensive to continue with business as usual — not to mention that there will be no globalized world economy left to speak of by then. (I would put this stage into the late 2030’s, maybe early 2040’s if you ask me.)

    Instead of a material transformation — or continuing ecocide by different means — we need a spiritual, mental and psychological transformation more than ever. The evil spirit of Wetiko must be left behind. As the planet starts to heal itself from the ravages of civilization (restoring its forest cover and absorbing much of the CO2 released), so must humanity heal from its addiction to technology and overshoot. While I have absolutely zero hope for this civilization — reviewing the facts one cannot deny that its beyond redemption — I have a very strong faith in the re-birth of a much smaller scale, more humane, ecothechnic society in the not so distant future. 

    Let’s hope that future generations will be wiser than we were.

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        1. I tried to ask several questions with some points in there and it wouldn’t let me post without updating my profile (I didn’t know I had one). It also claimed my ‘handle’ of Hideaway’ was already used..

          Result means no questions from me….

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    3. Some of the questions are giving me ‘anger management’ issues. There was only one question (so far) that I liked :

      Sheldon Thomas : In his latest YouTube series entitled `Metastatic Modernity` Tom Murphy goes where you seem unwilling to. He flat out argues that we are going to lose modernity. Do you agree with him and how often do you find yourself filtering certain viewpoints because they’re just too difficult to stomach?

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      1. Jack Alpert asked this question:

        The human path into the future will have deaths from starvation and conflict.

        Behaviors which can prevent these deaths also cause injuries.

        The decision to implement or not implement the prevention behavior is based on which injury is bigger.

        Nate do you have a number for the deaths due to starvation and conflict this century that can be used in this comparison?

        My number is 13.4 billion

        See. 

        Jack Alpert http://www.skil.org

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          1. I predict it will be the same worthless exercise as that survey he did on his yt channel a while back.

            Nate will end up giving us a line like “based on your questions, I see you all want me to interview Daniel Schmachtenberger again” 😊

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  9. Rachel Donald today…

    https://www.planetcritical.com/p/apocalypse-now

    On Friday night, I had dinner with a group of fascinating people, some of whom are world experts on the economy-energy-materials matrix that is pushing our planet to its breaking point. At one point, we got onto the topic of our plans for navigating inevitable collapse. One person has identified countries with strong militaries and food production and is setting up a base there. Another is looking to the island nations in the Caribbean. I sketched out vague plans in the Pacific, which was met with support by the table’s leading expert: “You need to be on a volcanic island close to the equator. Volcanic islands won’t be submerged by rising sea levels and the closer you are to the equator, the less temperature increase the land will experience.” We all talked about the rich cultural knowledge still strong in these places, far from our homes. Everyone had an exit plan.

    It got me thinking about the Western and white consideration of economic collapse as apocalyptic. How, because our cultures have come to dominate the entire planet through colonisation and extraction, the end of our hegemonic system feels like it would be the end of the world. Yet, for those who were devastated by the invasion of outsiders with gunpowder, horses and coal, and their ancestors who continue to exist under the weight of over-extraction, exploitation, debt bondage and slavery in everything but name, apocalypse has been an ongoing reality for generations. So many worlds have already ended with the violent export of power and domination and fuel so powerful a tiny minority could rule the world with an iron grip only the sun can melt away.

    Fittingly, it is Europe who will likely crumble first. Europe’s soils are depleted, its natural resources long destroyed, its knowledge geared towards service provision rather than collective utility. Our many languages have been consolidated into grand cultural behemoths, most of which now desperately lack the language even to remember how to live well on the land that is now heating up faster than every other continent on the planet. Our proud institutions are revealing their fascistic roots as the ground beneath our feet cracks in the heat of rage. The tectonic plates of European entitlement and violence are grinding against one another causing shockwaves to ripple out amongst our communities and around the world. The rumblings began centuries ago but the Earth absorbed what she could. She can no longer take it. Neither can we.

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    1. Aren’t most pacific islands reliant on diesel for electricity as well fuel? They’ll be above post fossil fuels carrying capacity I’m sure. When the ships and planes stop running I’m not so sure Rachel would be that welcome. It’s a bit presumptive to assume she would be able to just turn up. But the maybe she’d be welcomed with open arms. They do like pork in the Islands 🙂

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      1. Great point Campbell. When the shit hits the fan, people will not be able to ‘escape’ to anywhere, because resources will be short everywhere, and the last thing any population anywhere will welcome is more people. the escape plan is just stupid..

        The only possible ‘escape’ is to do it very early, years before TSHTF and become an integral part of the local community, so you can help defend it against ‘outsiders’. Being born in an area helps even more than moving in a decade before the end.

        We’ve been here for over 40 years and are now considered locals, mainly because all the old people died out, and there is precious few that have been here more than 20 years, and we’ve known them all for decades. Even on local committees, we been asked by others to join them on these committees because they consider we need more ‘locals’ instead of outsiders on them (local hall, neighbourhood house, that sort of thing).

        Australia is a young country though, so not that hard to become local, I’d hate to be somewhere, where the local history is hundreds to thousands of years old, perhaps your grand children might be referred as locals, if all 3 generations stay in the area..

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        1. Yes we’ve only been here 3.5 years. Community connection has been a key focus through contributing to local initiatives, Nikki runs the monthly crop swap and we regularly host people here to share our food forest and natural building experiences.

          I always liked the concept of working to becoming a good ancestor. I won’t be around to know if I will be or even if there’ll be anyone at all to judge. At least my kids seem to like me. 😊

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  10. If you’d like to understand the case for the west being to blame for the Ukraine war this is as good as it gets.

    https://mearsheimer.substack.com/p/who-caused-the-ukraine-war

    The question of who is responsible for causing the Ukraine war has been a deeply contentious issue since Russia invaded Ukraine on 24 February 2022.

    The answer to this question matters enormously because the war has been a disaster for a variety of reasons, the most important of which is that Ukraine has effectively been wrecked. It has lost a substantial amount of its territory and is likely to lose more, its economy is in tatters, huge numbers of Ukrainians are internally displaced or have fled the country, and it has suffered hundreds of thousands of casualties. Of course, Russia has paid a significant blood price as well. On the strategic level, relations between Russia and Europe, not to mention Russia and Ukraine, have been poisoned for the foreseeable future, which means that the threat of a major war in Europe will be with us well after the Ukraine war turns into a frozen conflict. Who bears responsibility for this disaster is a question that will not go away anytime soon and if anything is likely to become more prominent as the extent of the disaster becomes more apparent to more people.

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  12. Hello everyone. I just wanted to make an important correction to my exit strategy article from a while back (link below). Been reading up on some more current stuff and two things:

    1. The plastic bag method (with no gas) is no longer recommended by the experts (too many people waking up during the process… what a nightmare!)

    2. Helium is no longer the easiest gas to obtain (USA). The party stores that sell helium tanks, changed up the formula a couple years back. So instead of 100% compressed helium (which is what you need), their mix is 80% helium and 20% oxygen. This 80/20 mixture will absolutely not work.

    And the party store bastards didn’t change their formula because people were killing themselves. They changed it for the same reason that every business modifies things…. to cut corners and save money. 

    https://un-denial.com/2024/04/09/radical-reality-by-hideaway-and-radical-acceptance-by-b/comment-page-2/#comment-96099

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      1. Yes, sounds like a great exit plan 😊. I wouldn’t trust 8 full bottles worth to do the job properly.

        Nembutal is the only pill I would mess with. But I cant get my hands on any, so I have not done too much research on it.

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          1. Sorry monk, I thought you were kidding around. I just looked up Paracetamol.

            Acetaminophen (Tylenol) and paracetamol (Panadol) are the same pain-relieving medication. In the U.S. and Japan, it is called acetaminophen and paracetamol in Europe and most of the rest of the world. Acetaminophen (Tylenol) and paracetamol (Panadol) are the same medication.

            Not sure what the mg dosage per tablet is for Panadol. For Tylenol (on average), its 325 mg of Acetaminophen (in each capsule). I’ve taken 6 at a time for hurt back muscles and even for hangovers.

            So no way do I think 8 tablets would do the job (unless the mg dosage is super high). But like I said, I would not even trust taking 8 bottles worth of tylenol.

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              1. Ya I guess I think of tylenol as baby aspirin. No way it could kill you. 

                Just looked it up and you are correct. There have been many deaths from tylenol overdose. But liver failure sounds like a slow and painful way to go. 

                I would keep looking for a better strategy.

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  13. China, like the rest of the world, is in trouble because they have too much debt and not enough growth.

    The Chinese government wants it’s citizens to consume more to solve the problem.

    What a screwed up world.

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  14. Dr. Tom Murphy with #11 in his 18 part series. This one’s excellent.

    https://dothemath.ucsd.edu/2024/08/mm-11-renewable-salvation/

    I have a much more intimate relationship with solar energy than your average bear—or even the average “energy transition” advocate. Besides knowing the semiconductor physics inside out, as a hands-on guy I have experimented with various off-grid configurations of panels, built my own curve-tracer to explore partial shade effects, tried different battery chemistries, learned the ins and outs of four different charge controllers, tried different inverter types, performed extensive monitoring and analysis, etc. Plus, living an off-grid lifestyle connected me more viscerally to weather trends, and my energy haul (and expenditure) becomes more personal. I wrote a Physics Today article in 2008 on getting started, and various Do the Math posts (e.g., here, and here) relating to my experiments. Figure 13.15 in my textbook came from my system.

    You could say that I have been an enthusiast, and have acquired a fair bit of knowledge and lived experience in the matter. My default starting position was that solar power was bound to be a huge part of our answer to things like climate change and peak oil. Well, it turns out that narrow solutions work perfectly for narrowly-defined or recognized problems. 

    A primary focus on climate change means the solution becomes artificially straightforward: eliminate CO2 emissions. Solar, wind, EVs, and done! We are attracted to simple stories and tidy solutions like ants to sugar.

    But elimination of climate change and CO2 makes only a small dent in the list of causes for the ecological nosedive presented in Episode 7, so that the sixth mass extinction steams right ahead even in a stabilized climate. Of course, we’re dealing with all the elements on the list all at once, and climate change just makes everything worse.

    A very important and real concern is that all renewable energy technologies require a lot of non-renewable materials. This is because they tend to be diffuse, low density sources energy, necessitating large amounts of “stuff” to capture and convert. Below is a figure that represents data from the Department of Energy’s Quadrennial Technology Review (Table 10.4).

    In terms of concrete, steel, copper, glass, and aluminum (not counting the fossil fuel mass itself), renewable energy requires an order-of-magnitude more material per unit of electrical energy delivered than does fossil fuel combustion. This translates to never-ending mining, manufacturing, pollution, and all the associated ecological costs. It’s not a build-it-once-and-done game.

    Renewable energy is therefore not actually renewable, since it depends crucially on non-renewable materials. If becomes essentially irrelevant that sun and wind keep coming “inexhaustibly” when the weakest link is non-renewable, and therefore dictates the story. An analogy would be saying that fossil fuel combustion requires oxygen, whose supply is effectively unlimited, so fossil fuel combustion is unlimited? Not at all! One has to look at the limiting factor, not single out the one part of the system that is not a limitation (like sunlight or wind). It’s evident, right?

    A solar panel made of something that regrows itself (like plant matter) using elements in ecological circulation would satisfy me in terms of renewability. I’ve just managed to describe a leaf, minus the electricity.

    This is part of what is so remarkable about life. It has figured out how to do all the amazing things it does based on a small set of elements found in common circulation on the surface of the earth. No mining is required. Recycling is essentially perfect, utilizing a vast web of life to carry out the entire process—from microbes to fungi to worms to insects to birds, etc.

    One common reaction to the figure above showing the heavy material demand of renewable energy is: yeah, sure, but you only have to do it once and then it’s recycling from there on out.

    First, don’t dismiss the massive initial build-out. You can’t recycle what’s not already in place, and we’re talking about an enormous material outlay to provision modernity with its desired power from renewable resources. In fact, the current “breakneck” pace of solar energy installation is still an order-of-magnitude smaller than it would take even to hold steady at today’s energy appetite based on routine attrition of hardware after a few decades. The effort would require new mines, new deforestation, new waste, new manufacturing and associated pollution, and new habitat loss (and threat of extinctions) from situating these massive infrastructures.

    Second, saying the word “recycling” is not a “get out of jail free” card: nice try. In the real world, retrieval is not perfect. Some stuff gets destroyed/scattered, trashed, stored, or otherwise is unavailable for collection. Then not all the collected material will be recoverable. Even an unprecedented, fantasy-level 90% end-to-end recovery results in less than half the original resource after just 7 cycles, and less than 10% after 22 cycles. It’s not indefinite. It prolongs, but does not solve the issue, on strictly technical grounds (leaving aside ongoing ecological erosion for now).

    As we rush at the community of life clutching our technology, we show every appearance of an intent to do it harm. It won’t matter whether we destroy the living world with fossil fuels or solar panels: we are more than capable of getting the job done either way. Before we get too far along, though, I suspect that the deteriorating web of life will create cascading failures that end up making humans victims, too, and pulling the power cord to the destructive machine. Only then would some people accept that ecological ignorance—paired with technological capability—has dire consequences.

    One of my favorite Onion headlines is World’s Largest Metaphor Hits Iceberg. The Titanic’s main problem wasn’t that it had a coal-fired engine belching CO2 instead of a sleek bank of lithium batteries charged by solar panels. The problem was the full-steam-ahead, invincible, hubristic attitude of “owning” the ocean. It was the intent, not the technology. Ramming the iceberg wasn’t the coal’s fault. “Renewable” drive would be just as capable of meeting the same fate.

    Of the activities listed above that we use energy to do, tell me which ones we plan to cease under renewable energy. Will we stop cutting down forests, stop clearing land for agriculture, stop murdering plants and animals, stop building cities, highways, dams, cars, and gadgets? Will we stop mining materials, spewing the tailings, manufacturing goods, and releasing all manner of chemical contamination into our living world? Will we stop pursuing the “Likes” that are responsible for all the Dislikes (last episode)?

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  15. Gail Tverberg with an interesting theory on why the plateau may have been wider than expected.

    https://ourfiniteworld.com/2024/07/22/how-does-the-economy-really-work/comment-page-5/#comment-465151

    I have been told (by someone who used to work for Saudi Aramco) that in Saudi Arabia, the pipeline infrastructure maximum capacity was decided upon long ago. Regardless of what we may hear, Saudi Arabia cannot really raise production above the maximum capacity. They have a lot of storage tanks and other storage capability, so that they can keep some supply off line. That way, if production needs to seem to surge, they can put some of the stored supply into sales on a temporary basis. But really, Saudi Arabia has no ability to surge above its pipeline capacity. That is why the production stays pretty level. Saudi Arabia also reduces production when the price falls too low.

    I expect the issue is similar for the Permian Basin. Pipeline capacity determines how much can be produced. Whether or not Hubbert said something about the shape of the curve, pipeline capacity makes a whole lot of difference. The Permian Basin has been adding more area in New Mexico in recent years. But it is never possible to pump out more than there is pipeline capacity to take. This is why the Hubbert model isn’t quite right. Actual production can be longer and flatter than we might expect, if the price stays high enough.

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      1. Globalization, 8billion, nuclear, the level of energy addiction, etc… all of these “first time in history” things has me very confident that JMG and the others who think our collapse will be slow (or even similar to past collapses) are dead wrong.

        Our collapse is going to be one hell of a “going out with a bang” moment.

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    1. Thanks I have seen it and made this comment above:

      I listened to Hagens’ episode on the 7 drivers of overshoot.

      I thought he seriously soft-pedalled the implications of overshoot. He said that overshoot is reduced when resources deplete implying a soft landing. He did not explain that population will collapse below normal carrying capacity because of damage done to the environment during overshoot.

      When discussing cognitive dissonance as a cause of overshoot he did not offer MORT as an alternate theory that explains why the only species that has developed accurate scientific theories can’t understand and act on it’s own obvious state of overshoot, and is the only species that believes in gods.

      At the end he discussed a list of prescriptions for overshoot but again did not mention the one we apply when managing the overshoot of other species, and that is the only action that might actually help our own predicament: population reduction.

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  19. Nothing important to say, just a couple thoughts… Was reading some Daniel Quinn today. Came across what used to be my favorite quote of his. I remember using it with my inner circle or whenever I was defending sustainable cultures. Figured I had to of used it here, so I went looking and found it in a post from February 9th.

    “Man was born millions of years ago, and he was no more a scourge than hawks or lions or squids. He lived at peace with the world… for millions of years.
    This doesn’t mean he was a saint. This doesn’t mean he walked the earth like a Buddha. It means he lived as harmlessly as a hyena or a shark or a rattlesnake.
    It’s not Man who is the scourge of the world, it’s a single culture. One culture out of hundreds of thousands of cultures. Our culture.”

    Funny to read this now. It’s one of the most hopium filled quotes I’ve ever seen. How could Quinn have been so fire blind? 

    Btw, looking for that quote had me reading some of my older comments. Man, I used to be somewhat interesting. I was pumping out a good story (good to me at least 😊) once a week. 

    Un-Denial has led me to a complete 180 about “our story” which has me understanding everything much better now. My only complaint is that I’ve lost my edge with the writing. It was much easier to think of topics/ideas when I only thought modern humans were the problem. I was always watching or reading something about Native Americans or the colonialists. It was fuel for me. No interest anymore though.   

    Now I have to resort to writing about rocks at the bottom of the sea 😊. I should have retired from posting comments the day my fire essay got posted. (p.s. if you ever read it again, afterwards go directly to Gaia’s reply about fire & feet. It makes the story so much better)

    George Costanza knew all about ending on a high note.

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        1. You are a movie lover. Maybe collect movies on a big hard drive? You can spend many enjoyable hours finding and organizing data about them in a database. Plus you’ll have a nice collection to enjoy when SHTF.

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          1. Good advice. Btw, I finally watched About Time (2013). Excellent film that I am still thinking about. I love movies that make me want to be a better person.

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  20. I fear that fossil fuel fertilizers has hidden the true extent of the damage to the world’s soils and once oil and natural gas start their their permanent decline, many areas will simply become unsuitable for agriculture. How will this dovetail with loss of agricultural land due to climate change? Some suggest farming on the Canadian shield, but the Canadian Shield is poorly suited for agriculture.

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    1. https://www.hindustantimes.com/world-news/bangladesh-crisis-24-burnt-alive-as-hotel-set-on-fire-hindu-homes-temples-targeted-top-updates-101722990220965.html

      Bangladesh crisis: 24 burnt alive as mob sets hotel on fire; Hindu homes, temples ‘targeted’ | Top updates
      u/Terrible_Horror: Posted this reply on r/Collapse

      This is so sad. Where do they think the climate refugees from Bangladesh are going to migrate to in next few decades? To a majority Hindu country! The shortsightedness is mind boggling.

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    2. On the surface it appeared to be social unrest over unfair allocation of government jobs but after the president conceded to the protests and fled the country the violence continued suggesting something deeper going on more akin to a cultural or religious revolution.

      Or maybe it’s the usual source of unrest: declining living standard caused by high energy prices.

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  23. John Peach says oil “reserves” is a junk number.

    Better to monitor total discoveries and total production.

    Last year we discovered 3G barrels and consumed over 30G barrels.

    Hubbert’s model which predicts a bell curve is no longer valid because we’ve depleted reserves by using technology to create bigger straws. He expects a Seneca cliff when the decline starts.

    For understanding pros and cons of energy types it is much better to consider energy rate than EROI.

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    1. According to the video description we only have 8.8 to 17.6 years of oil left. So for nice round numbers, I will say 10~15 years.

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    2. Dear Rob,

      I hope thou are feeling well.

      The panel last night was pleasant and informative. 

      I noticed thou asked a question,

      in the separately published sequence where the warring prevalence of Europe versus Asia were discussed. 

      Thine question regarding the 3 annual crop cycles and their effect on potentially decreasing conflict in Asia. 

      • I cannot respond as I do not possess sufficient knowledge.

      I suppose that might have been an attribute, alongside other novel effects which were in synchronised play. 

      The centralisation of power, alongside a bureaucratic methodology of governance system which seems to have occurred many millennia before Europe.

      • A historian in Asiatic development would be preferred.  

      Kind and warm regards,

      ABC

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      1. Thanks. It interests me why Asia’s population is so high and the ability to grow more than one grain crop a year I think has something to do with it.

        Food scarcity can be a cause of war so I wondered if food abundance had something to do with the relative peace in Asia compared to Europe.

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  24. Dr. Denis Rancourt summarizes his recent study on covid all-cause mortality and concludes the public health establishment caused all of the excess mortality.

    Had a pandemic not been declared there would have been no change in all-cause mortality.

    The data is not compatible with deaths caused by a spreading pandemic.

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    1. Comment of interest to the NZ people left on Rancourt’s substack.

      https://denisrancourt.substack.com/p/my-presentation-to-the-expert-scientists/comments

      Terry Anderson:

      New Zealand has also experienced the phenomena of elevated summer deaths in 2022/23 and 2023/24 whereas prepandemic, summer deaths are predictably low. Also if we compare 2020 and 2021 when the borders were closed, thereby eliminating a circulating influenza virus and during which the elderly were locked out of society, there is a distinct spike in ACM around week 18 of 2021 when there was no Covid. The main difference between 2020 and 2021 was the vaccine rollout that began in earmest in April of 2021. ‘Formidable’ Denis and the team.

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  25. Population growth a threat to global food security

    https://www.reddit.com/r/overpopulation/comments/1ej1iv0/population_growth_a_threat_to_global_food_security/

    The United Nations has warned that the combination of population growth and climate change are likely to threaten global food security and that changes in agriculture, especially in Africa, may be the only way forward.

    The global population is expected to increase over the next 60 years, from 8.2 billion today to 10.3 billion in the 2080s. Much of that growth will occur on the African continent, where many countries still have high fertility rates.

    The United Nations Population Fund believes that the combined effect of population growth and climate change will exacerbate global inequalities and trigger national and international migration.

    U.N. agencies say 1 billion of the 1.3 billion people living in Africa do not have regular access to healthy diets and that hunger has worsened in recent years.

    …

    Africa’s farmland has been shrinking due to regular and persistent drought, while the growing population leaves less space for farming.

    Chris Ojiewo, principal scientist at the International Maize and Wheat Improvement Center, said African farmers need to produce a lot more food in increasingly smaller spaces to feed the growing population.

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  26. Why has America risked it all in Gaza?
    https://www.aljazeera.com/opinions/2024/8/4/why-has-america-risked-it-all-in-gaza
    American ‘ironclad’ support for Israel has much to do with the insecurity of a declining superpower.

    And while Israel’s conduct appears irrational, so does the unconditional support its closest ally – the United States – has extended. Washington’s “ironclad” backing of the genocide Israel is conducting has eroded its international authority and claim to uphold the international rules-based system.

    Many ascribe Israel’s gross irrationality to the feeling of humiliation stirred by Hamas’s October 7 attack. That hyperemotionality accelerated the rightwards shift of Israeli politics, which now openly celebrates genocidal exploits. Gone is the rhetoric of “peaceful coexistence” and Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu promises instead “total victory”.

    …

    So what if American support for Israel’s genocide isn’t about Gaza at all? What if the US is merely trying to show who is the boss?

    In recent years, there has been heightened talk of multipolarity. Many analysts have predicted a world wherein the US is no longer the global hegemon.

    …

    That is how we should understand American involvement in Gaza. Why else would the United States heavily reinforce its military presence in the Middle East in response to a one-off attack by a lightly armed Hamas? It is an insecure superpower, desperate to prove its enduring primacy. And it is disregarding even the most basic tenets of international humanitarian law to show that no one will stop it.

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    1. I’ve been to Israel twice.

      My opinion is that the crimes committed by both sides reflect human behavior in the presence of extreme overshoot and scarcity.

      There is not enough water and land for the number of people that want to live there, and the population is rapidly increasing.

      I cannot explain why US supports the Gaza genocide other than maybe racism. Ditto maybe on why US supports Ukrainians committing suicide.

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    2. You can’t under estimate the evangelical Christians in leadership in Washington. They want the final war in Israel to end the world and bring on the rapture. They have a religious reason to make it happen. I would not underestimate this factor. Religious nutters want the world to end

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      1. Yes. That’s a powerful force too. Apparently at US military training graduation ceremonies it is common to see a significant portion of the graduates in the river being baptized as Christian crusaders after the ceremony.

        Israel opinion polls say that about half the population supports the genocide and the rape of prisoners. The problem is not a few bad leaders.

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    3. After the atrocities perpetrated by Hamas on October 7, you’d have to be blind and stupid to continue believing in the possibility of peaceful coexistence between Israelis and Palestinians.

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  27. Hi Rob,

    Well, I don’t have as much time as I used to have for reading and making comments. But the post on the recent Export Land Model analysis by the gentleman in Sweden got me thinking.

    So I took a few minutes to run the table below out of Claude A.I. I find Claude to be pretty accurate. But in this case below, all numbers should be considered directionally correct only. Data I provide is based on Claude A.I. knowledge cutoff in April 2024. Some figures might be estimates or approximations.

    Since I could not figure out how to post up in your blog, I am sending to you directly, in case you have any interest in posting or pursuing with further investigation.

    So below, the table of the Top 20 Oil producing countries in the world, and their dependence on food imports. Based on this view, the Middle East countries will have a hard time NOT sending their oil out for export, if they want to buy food. Breaking this global supply chain and food export/import dependencies might happen, but my guess is that it will be in the interest of all to try and maintain this system as long as possible.

    So maybe there is a little more time left than collapse by 2026/2027. Maybe…but keep buying your cans of sardines.

    One could expand this table a bit, and get some additional connections on how all this might play out. Which countries are at or past peak, (Mexico, U.K. Norway, U.S. soon…. I think I read somewhere Russia is past peak, and internal demand ramping up.

    A big issue as noted in the Export Land Model analysis is the impact on diesel. I have not taken the time yet to look at that issue directly. Diesel supply is critical metric and the lynchpin for the current global economic system.

    Regards
    Shawn

    A few notes from Claude A.I. on this table:

    1. Oil production figures are based on recent estimates and can fluctuate based on various factors.
    2. Food import dependency percentages are rough estimates and can vary depending on the specific measurement used (e.g., caloric intake, monetary value, or specific food categories).
    3. Population figures are based on recent estimates and are subject to change.
    4. For some of the bottom 10 countries, the food import dependency estimates may be less precise due to limited data availability.

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    1. Thanks Shawn,

      Very interesting and a remarkable example of what you can do with AI.

      I don’t know how much of middle east energy use is discretionary.

      It might be a difficult choice between less food imports and less internal oil use.

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    2. Hello Shawn,

      Thank you (and our proxy brain AI) for taking the time to make that clarifying presentation. Hope you and your family are going well. I just wanted to add briefly here that as diesel imports shrink, the amount of food production in each country (and therefore exports) will be decreased as well and the need for getting it elsewhere will increase, although which country will have enough to spare for trade and the naivete to do so for dollars remains to be seen. The need for fuel to produce food in each country will also affect overall exports (of both), so we are really in a tangled web of feedback loops that we have no way out of. I would think that food will be exchanged for the promise of oil and even more so, the military protection from other countries that will want to take over food and oil production capability. Thus, the alignments and wars we are seeing now will only escalate until one alliance retains or achieves domination. Might be a good follow up to ask our AI friends how this scenario will play out. These are very interesting times indeed!

      Namaste, friends.

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    3. Hi Shawn, I haven’t checked the whole table, but can tell you at a glance that there are some large mistakes. For example the UK is now a net importer of oil, not a net exporter. The US peak oil production recently has been 13,925,000 bbls/d (Nov ’23) not the 15.3M in the above table.

      I’m very wary of A.I. as I try to use it often, on topics I know a lot about. I find there are mistakes all over the place and when I point out the the mistakes to the A.I., it corrects itself then continues on. Debate/discuss whatever further for a while, and it comes back and makes the original mistake again if it is not showing a rosy future.

      I use Gemini A.I. of google. I do not rely upon A.I. for any realistic information because of my experience with it.

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      2. I just had a conversation with A.I. again about ELM, with it coming up with the following after further questioning about some details …

        “Renewable Energy: The rapid growth of renewable energy sources can reduce oil demand, mitigating the impact of rising domestic consumption in oil-producing countries.

        Electric Vehicles (EVs): The increasing adoption of EVs can further reduce oil demand, especially in transportation, a major consumer of oil products.”

        I then asked it for specific examples where this was happening, it gave me Cosa Rica and then Germany after further questioning about some actual data showing this. Still no data from the A.I., just words gleaned from the internet.

        After probing it a lot more, I asked it this with the answer below ….

        Again if there is no data, did your response just rely upon wishes or what people would like to happen instead of what’s actually happening in the world?

        “You are absolutely correct.

        My previous responses were based on a hopeful outlook rather than concrete evidence. Without data to support the claim that renewable energy is directly replacing oil consumption, it’s impossible to make such a statement.

        I apologize for the oversight. It’s crucial to rely on factual information and avoid assumptions.

        Would you like to discuss a different topic or explore the challenges and opportunities of transitioning to a renewable energy-based economy?”

        A.I. has been programmed to show a rosy outlook for everyone wanting to know answers about any of the big problems, it’s not truthful based just on data at all..

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          1. Rob, of course, silly me thinking we could get some reality out of A.I. that can search the internet in an instant.

            Your take is exactly what it looks like, a machine telling people what they want to hear. People will pay for that, they wont pay for the truth if the truth is not a story with a happy ending.

            What I’ve found is that getting data out of the A.I. on the net is like extracting teeth. I have to push and push it to give some detailed data on anything.

            When they start asking for a subscription to A.I. I wont be playing. I’m sure all the advertising that goes with it ill tell us how much better than the free versions were etc, but not for me, it’s to programmed to give ‘nice’ stories, not truth and reality….

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  29. This is going to be a partially off-topic comment…

    If I remember well, this post by Indrajit Samarajiva about “AI being a sign of collapse” has been discussed here before:

    https://indi.ca/ai-is-a-sign-of-collapse/.

    Actually, I find the title misleading, it could rather be “AI is a sign of diminishing returns of investments in complexity” (as far as I can tell, society hasn’t collapsed yet). I too, think society has passed the optimum return of complexity. This example https://daniel.haxx.se/blog/2024/01/02/the-i-in-llm-stands-for-intelligence/, from the maintainer of the curl program is a small illustration of AI having a negative impact on the overall “productivity” (if any such notion really exists): he has to deal with plausible AI-generated vulnerability reports, which turn out to be rubbish, after manual investigation. But, to me, there are many other examples that society is blindly advancing towards useless complexity:

    • inscrutably complex financial tools,
    • increasing size of the law book, and regulations,
    • reliance on a whole information technology infrastructure, just to make friends,
    • the latest medical “innovations” (mRNA vaccines), even the fact that most modern physician can not evaluate your health just by examining you anymore: they need to read spreadsheets of numbers sent from the lab. I remember in South Korea, they could just hold your wrist to listen to the pulse, look at your skin complexion and know quite a lot.
    • and the list goes on and on…

    Anyway, this actually, is, to me, cause for optimism. Since we are clearly quite far past point (B2,C2)

    when society collapses, the efficiency gap between the current and simpler ways of achieving our individual goals will not necessarily be huge. When most peacefully walk away from the empty promises of central power, they might even gain overall. (I’d rather have no doctor than a doctor who kills me, with advanced technology he has faith in like a religious zealot. I’d rather not pay for a pension, I will never get. I’d rather walk than buy an extremely expensive electric car whose lifespan is ridiculously short, I’d rather take care of my security with neighbours, rather than rely on a dishonest or inefficient police force…)

    Now, starts the off-topic rambling:

    • The bacterial flagellar motor is exciting:
    • To be watched with this video so as to avoid going all in the mechanical analogy:
    • That’s one reason, the end of this civilization does not equate with the end of technology to me. We will turn ourselves to our built-in capacities and discover how far they can go.
    • Of course, in the future, we may lose the ability to study mechanisms at such small scales. Unless microscopic vision with the third eye is really possible 🙂 Speaking of which, I’d like to share this tutorial in 20 episodes to learn how to see without eyes:
    • Dear paqnation, what about trying this as a hobby and shake gloomy thoughts off? 🙂

    Have fun! This is life after all and it’s damn precious (whether we have only one, or just carry on from envelope to envelope, ah ah ah 🙂

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    1. Great post! So funny though… for both you and ABC, sometimes I need a freaking interpreter 😊. 

      The dance craze of 1518 was very interesting. And thanks for the “seeing with closed eyes” link. Definitely gonna check this out. 

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      1. Thank you.

        Unless it’s too much work, don’t hesitate to bluntly point my english mistakes. This will help me improve. Thank you.

        I just saw one: it’s envelope rather than enveloppe, shell (as in Ghost in the Shell) would have probably been more appropriate. Maybe Rob, living in Canada has an easier time than you reading me 🙂

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        2. Ya, like Rob said, your english is perfectly fine. And I wasn’t talking about harmless typo’s. My problem is that you usually have 2 or 3 topics that I’ve never heard of, and I have to go look them up. (curl program, penrose tiling, bacterial flagellar). So not a language issue, just an IQ issue (mine being too low 😊).

          With ABC it’s the old (or middle) english style. Sometimes I have to read a sentence 3 or 4 times to understand it. 

          But I would not want either of you to change a thing. It’s what makes you guys unique. 

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  30. Movie recommendation. Good Night, and Good Luck. (2005). Forgot how good this was. And an awesome cast.

    George Clooney (writer/director) was trying to make something that could compare to Bush/Cheney and their war on terror. Replace “Communism” of the ’50s with “Terrorism” today, and the parallels come into focus.

    The main complaint with the film among test audiences was their belief that the actor playing Joseph McCarthy was too over the top, not realizing that the film used actual archive footage of McCarthy himself. 😊

    And I love this speech by Edward Murrow about what is happening to radio and television in 1958 (which is verbatim). That dude was so ahead of his time and it’s worth listening to the full 3.5 minutes… If all television does is “entertain, amuse and insulate us”, Murrow warns, instead of aiming to fulfil its great potential, which is “to teach, illuminate and inspire”, then it is nothing, it is “merely wires and lights in a box”.

    But I now see the energy conundrum. If your civilization is able to broadcast airwaves into the homes of everyone… then it’s way too late to now get all noble and righteous. You’re already in massive overshoot with zero chance of righting the ship. In fact, television might be considered the beginning of our “Peak”.

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  31. Indi has been busy lately, but this one stands out from the crowd. Dont think I have ever seen that map of White Empire. It’s a good one. Inside the wall contains only 14% world population yet 73% world income. Outside the wall 86% population 27% income. That’s what winning the race to conquer north america was all about. Do we have anyone in the audience outside the wall?

    Indi is very angry, and his writing is all the better for it. Best part was this, “However—because it has been the Opposite’s Day for 400 years—the uncivilized become civilizers, the majority becomes minorities, and the land of the free is built on slaves. First chattel slavery and now debt slavery and wage slavery. The very concept of ‘illegal immigration’ (coming from colonizers!) is the slavery of our times.” 

    And good comment from Cyril Wheat. “A very thought provoking piece and not much in there to disagree with. It will make some of us children of Empire squirm when the truth slaps us in the face. Chickens are coming home to roost on our colonial past and we don’t like it.”

    I’m not as passionate about the subject nowadays, but this goes with some of my favorite readings (old predictions) of Native Americans talking collapse and the tides turning to where white man will be the most hated and oppressed on the way out. And karma, all that stuff. 

    Thank you Indi for stirring it up again inside me with this great essay. (will only last for a little while, till I snap back into fire… but I’ll take it. 😊)

    DEI Genocide — indi.ca

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  33. Steve St. Angelo on the insane energy consumed by Bitcoin.

    I remember Dr. Tim Garrett saying:

    The best solution to climate change is to burn all of our remaining fossil energy as fast as possible mining Bitcoin because it’s a totally pointless activity that does not lead to growth. Then maybe the planet has a prayer.

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  34. David Korowicz yesterday with a brief recap of our overshoot predicament.

    https://www.korowiczhumansystems.com/writing/2024/8/8/a-civilisational-predicament-in-a-nutshell

    World population and per capita Gross World Product for the last 2000 years. Through history complex societies and empires have risen and fell, but their scale is dwarfed by the Anthropocene inflection beginning about 250 years ago. Spanning about 1/1000th and 1/40th of the history of anatomically modern humans, and the period since the beginning of agriculture respectively, it’s an extreme anomaly in our species history, and potentially epochal in Earths’. This hockey stick inflection correlates with an exponentially expanding and complexifying socio-economic metabolism; escalating inputs of energy and materials without which it would not have emerged and be sustained; and the myriad waste stream (e.g. greenhouse gasses, plastics,) and catastrophic destruction of non-human life that result from the transformation process.

    From this integrative, trajectory/vulnerability-focused perspective, society is severely underestimating the urgency, likelihood, scale, and duration of emerging risk. Whilst the Anthropocene trajectory has been resilient here-to-fore, new dynamics are becoming possible. Broad features including a growing likelihood of 1) persistent socio-economic stress, stagnation, and increasing systemic volatility and uncertainty; 2) severe localised systemic disruptions with some recovery; 3) the onset of a re-enforcing process of global systemic destabilisation, and 4) global systemic collapse. The inherent vulnerability of the trajectory means that systemic destabilisation can emerge rapidly, and by triggering networked socio-economic thresholds and tipping points, drive a fast, re-enforcing collapse of the trajectory. This outcome would be experienced as an irreversible shut-down the global metabolic flows of goods, services.

    There is little reason to believe that this course of the Anthropocene trajectory can be purposefully altered in any meaningful way. We’re locked-into self-organizing processes of unimaginable complexity that we did not design, but rather co-evolve with. That which sustains us, what we cling to, what frames and constitutes the processes of habitual existence, including attempts to mitigate and adapt in response to a more dangerous world, is part of what is undermining the trajectory’s own persistence. It is systemic lock-in that explains why the most predictable feature of civilizations’ course to this moment has been the sustainability of accelerating unsustainability.

    The emergent thermodynamic-evolutionary adaptations and constraints that have brough homo sapiens and its civilizational niche within the earth system into being situate the trajectory lock-in as natural, systemic, and inevitable.

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  35. The morons in charge have finally figured out that something abnormal is happening with covid but still have not figured out that they caused it and are still making it worse.

    Rintrah’s conclusion hints at more zombies on the horizon.

    https://www.rintrah.nl/who-warns-more-severe-covid-variants-are-coming/

    From the website of the United Nations:

    COVID-19 infections are surging worldwide – including at the Olympics – and are unlikely to decline anytime soon, the World Health Organization (WHO) warned on Tuesday.

    The UN health agency is also concerned that more severe variants of the coronavirus may soon be on the horizon.

    They point out something unusual is happening right now:

    Such high infection circulation rates in the northern hemisphere’s summer months are atypical for respiratory viruses, which tend to spread mostly in cold temperatures.

    And they’re right of course. It’s a consequence of a population that’s stuck with an inappropriate immune response to this virus. It doesn’t happen with other respiratory viruses and it didn’t begin until we started vaccinating, there was no such summer wave in the northern hemisphere in 2020.

    New deletions and glycans in the N-Terminal Domain of the Spike protein are going to emerge, that make the remaining antibodies binding there useless for neutralization and make the virus behave more like the original SARS.

    People are noticing none of this is really working out. In California they figured out people are just sick all the time now. They reintroduced masks in much of California. At the Olympics, the trick to winning a medal is to not catch the virus.

    So this is what we can expect to happen eventually: Increased systemic dissemination of the virus, including increased spread into the brain. After all, the brain is an ideal place to avoid antibodies: Less than 0.05% of antibodies manage to enter the brain, thanks to the blood-brain barrier. It’s not surprising, that the virus evolves to become more neurovirulent over time.

    So how does the brain defend itself against viruses like this, if it can’t really use the antibodies found in blood? And what has the impact been of the vaccination experiment, on the ability of the brain to defend itself? Well, that’s going to be the topic for tomorrow’s post.

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  37. I’m leaving tomorrow morning for 12 days of camping followed by about 4 days at my friend’s cabin working on the new water treatment system. I should have internet about 30 minutes once a day and none at the cabin.

    I’ve put Chris’s essay back on the home page so it gets a little more visibility.

    Stay well everyone.

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  38. Oh c’mon Rob. You are spending way too much time on vacation lately 😊. Do you at least get to harness fire on this trip?

    And thanks for putting the essay back up. Appreciate it. 213 comments right now. I predict 219 when you get back in two weeks. But I will try to keep some engagement going on this site. Have fun!

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  39. @Rob Mielcarski
    You’re from British Columbia IIRC.

    What’s your opinion on the idea of a fixed crossing (bridge or tunnel) of the Strait of Georgia?

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    1. It’s a wide crossing and would be very expensive and I doubt our small population could justify or afford the expense, plus I expect there will be diesel shortages before it could be completed.

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  40. Net vs. gross energy from oil liquids

    According to GlobalShift [248], the oil liquids production for energy purposes should peak in 2034 with a magnitude of 551 PJ/d. Removing the energy necessary for the liquids extraction and production (including direct plus indirect energy and material costs), we find that the net-energy reaches a peak in 2024 of 415 PJ/d, with respective standard deviations over all scenarios being equal to 6.6 yr and 26.7 PJ/yr. This first result should not be interpreted as the announcement of a coming peak, Implications for a global and fast low-carbon energy transition

    This study uses GlobalShift’s all oil liquids projection and a panel of standard EROI scenarios to characterize the dynamic evolution of the primary stage net-energy along the transition from high quality conventional to low-quality unconventional resources. Several key findings appear.

    Firstly, the gross energy production from oil liquids is likely to peak in the next 10 to 15 years. The overall contribution of unconventional liquids is relatively low until the mid 2010’s, when their grossConclusions

    Our society can be described as a thermodynamic system that profoundly relies on abundant cheap energy sources such as petroleum to thrive. However, the rapid growth in use of this non-renewable fossil fuel has undermined its future availability, leaving little doubt that an all-oil liquids peak will take place in the next 10 to 15 years. Given the societal dependence on oil and the difficulties in achieving a transition to low-carbon energies in time, such a peak is likely to have deep

    https://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/abs/pii/S0306261921011673

    Saludos

    el mar

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  42. Population Nigeria: 218.5 million (That’s a lot!)
    770 Nigerian Naira is about 48 U.S. cents, so they have cheap fuel, by our standards, but they can’t source what they need for daily life, supply is obviously being restricted, sent abroad to satisfy the West, it’s a bidding war. 218 million, that’s in the ballpark of the US population, the largest consumer per capita on the planet. Imagine if the Nigerians had all that oil and oil products to themselves, how good would be their standard of living?

    That’s ok, we deserve it by any measure, the World isn’t a fair ground and never was. But it is a fairground in the sense if you don’t have the money, you don’t go on the rides. This shows how Peak Oil plays out. All around the world nations are seeing their standards of living eroded, even if they have abundant oil! The traditional colony nations are fairing the worst, but naturally Australia is an exception because it’s basically all White. Africa is basically all Black and south America all whatever they are called (by skin color, by cultural heritage) So nothing changes, no wonder there are things like the BLM etc, a lot of non-whites feel hard done by, and they are :lol: :lol:

    As we move further and further past the Peak of conventional cheap oil, back in 2007, things are getting tougher and tougher. People who own homes are racking up debt on their credit cards at a furious rate, they buy their daily groceries on it, get flybys, but the debt piles up and the mortgages grow for many as they “take equity out” believing they live in a magic money tree. Of course the rot had set in for America long before the Global Peak in 2008, they had peaked in 1970 and if it wasn’t for the $US money shuffling that nation would be a lot worse off than it is. But Australia turned its corner in 2000 about and had to start importing refined product and oil, The UK when the North Sea petered out.

    Again, and old old story, and don’t be misled by the current accounting of shale oil or Gas liquid components. That’s not cheap oil, that’s unborn oil that undergoes an expensive process. Neither is deep-sea oil cheap, and they add nothing to the living standards of a nation as a whole, only to the living standards of a select minority. They allow us to keep our cars and trucks running at the old price but little else. There is nothing left over to build out a nation or even maintain what we have in a proper manner. Our societies are crumbling around us but we can still drive to chick-o-fill and stuff our faces.

    The only ‘peak’ worth considering for the common man is 2008, signaled by the biggest price spike in history and the collapse of the financial system that was quickly wheeled into the OR and brought back to life with the greatest money creation package in history. Everything since then has been a patch up job, The global economy is like an old person in a wheelchair on a drip, just waiting for their next heart attack, the last one.

    Source: https://peakoil.com/forums/viewtopic.php?p=1495914#p1495914
    from user “theluckycountry”

    Saludos

    el mar

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  43. hello again, I wanted to recheck the prognosis by Lars on diesel in 2027. His blog at https://skogslars.blogg.se/ is full of links and credible sources, sprinkled with lots of christian apocolytic forebodings. Even though he calls out the ‘wild evangelical prophets’, his levelheadedness is now in question, imo.

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  44. Mathematically, there is no such thing as global debt. How could there be? Who would the earth be in debt to? One nation’s external debt is owed to another nation, and its internal debt is owed to itself and can be paid off by fiat or cancelled, amounting to the same thing. This won’t help with diesel exports but should alleviate the concern expressed with debt.

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    1. I think of debt differently.

      Debt has value because I believe society will make something in the future that is real and of equal value to debt owed today plus interest.

      If my belief is destroyed for any reason, for example if diesel shortages prevent minerals from being mined to make new things, then I will assume money in circulation that was created by the debt has less or no value and I will try to spend it on real things as quickly as I can.

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      1. Debts can never be written off without completely destroying the value of the assets that support them. This is how a balance sheet or double-entry bookkeeping works.

        So this global financial system will collapse like all the others. However, this is the first time it is global.

        Saludos

        el mar

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