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. LOL. As soon as I saw the email I bitched out loud, “not even 2 goddamm weeks!”

    But after I read it, I see why. Great stuff Rob! Exactly what I was in the mood for. It’s like the “pelican brief”.

    I need to calm down and read it again 😊 

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    1. I have a friend that uses kerosine mixed with biodiesel in his Dodge Ram, a 20 year old one, with no problems. So kerosine is very close to diesel, I think it just lacks the lubrication of diesel so could be directly used in older diesel engines with some cooking oil or biodiesel.

      So yes I’d expect them to become scarce around the same time. Of course the scarcity of diesel will be uneven around the world to start with, but it will be the feedback loops that bring the rest of the system down.

      For example assume Australia can’t import diesel, which will make the huge grain crop production and exports impossible here, so the world, especially the Middle East has massive increases in prices for grains, or just unavailable, which can lead to Arab spring type events and take more oil production offline, greatly reducing available oil for everyone else, which exacerbates the problem the following year.

      Meanwhile, as everyone is watching food, diesel shortages will effect mines, sending metals prices much higher and all sorts of products made from a range of metals to become unavailable, like copper wire, or steel, or, or.

      Bunker fuel for ships is around diesel grade to slightly denser as well, so not helped by diesel shortages either. Shipping of everything will become much more expensive, with less happening around the same time. It wont just be diesel and kerosine, it ill be bunker fuel as well, all the heavier grades that are not supplied by natural gas liquids.

      The problem is that multiple things go wrong, each greatly affecting all BAU in a variety of different areas. While we have the initial diesel shortages, oil prices are likely to skyrocket, interest rates go up to quell inflation, and general stock market crashes and economies going into deep recession, all at the same time.

      Given all the material supply constraints that will happen around declining diesel supplies, the ability to mine oil sands could become compromised by gas constraints, because of diesel used to drill gas wells, and just general machinery and parts for all the existing heavy machines used in the oil sands. Likewise for the heavy crude from Venezuela.

      It seem the hardest aspect for most people to get their heads around is that we have an entire system that needs to act ‘normally’ for BAU to continue and major disruptions in one important aspect have ramifications in every other aspect, with feedback loops then accelerating decline because of the complexity of interactions of production of everything in the modern world.

      Since rereading some of Lars’s work last week, I’ve gone back to work on something I’ve tried in the past about when we really fall off the oil production plateau. The initial growth of oil production until the early 70’s was at an exponential rate, adhering to a normal distribution curve (as per Hubbert ). Assuming that the first part of the curve was accurate for the entire curve and it was us humans that took it off the normal distribution curve, I’m trying to work out when we have used over 80% of all conventional crude, but so far my attempts have wide error bars, but interestingly I get around a similar number to Lars in quantity of conventional oil left (not just exports).

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  4. Dr. Tom Murphy with part 9 of an 18 part series on overshoot.

    Fossil fuels utterly transformed how we went about our business. They dramatically turbo-charged our ability to manipulate and control. We now had the means to carry out almost any fool notion that popped into anyone’s head.

    It’s as if we gained super-powers. We could move mountains, divert rivers, hold back the sea, build submarines to dive deep, airplanes to fly high, and rockets to even reach space. We did not swim or fly as elegantly as life, but achieved a sort of awkward impressiveness in our kludgy ways. It seemed a sort of transcendence: breaking free of the limiting shackles of nature. Yet all of this, remember, is temporary—illusory.

    The Green Revolution transformed agriculture by inserting fossil fuels at every turn. Fertilizer came from natural gas. Diesel allowed large-scale mechanization of plowing, planting, harvesting, processing, and transporting large amounts of food. Petrochemical pesticides smote economically-worthless (but ecologically-invaluable) products of evolution into the foul dust. We fed a growing human population, now 8 billion strong. It boils down to a diet of fossil fuels: again, temporary.

    https://dothemath.ucsd.edu/2024/07/mm-9-recipe-for-disaster/

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    1. This is getting better with each episode. #8 was my favorite, but now surpassed by #9. Tom is putting together a heck of a story with this 18-part series. (and he’s only halfway done!) 

      p.s. I think Rob’s book review is going to make some noise. Hopefully it gets attention towards Larsen’s work. But I also think that even overshoot aware people (that underestimate denial’s role) will be guilty of letting their denial dismiss the info.

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    2. I would add the invention of the internet. It turbocharged capitalism and consumerism. It accelerated the stock market. It is currently driving electricity use higher every day.

      When the grid eventually starts going down, we will lose all of our knowledge.

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  5. In case you’re wondering, Dr. Joe Lee is still crashing his String Theory into brick walls.

    It’s a simple idea using only agreed science that predicts mRNA and about 50% of conventional vaccines will produce clots when boosters are administered. String theory probably explains some of the increased all-cause mortality since mRNA was fraudulently coerced into billions, and probably explains the unusual covid clots reported by embalmers, and may explain the huge increase in autism since we increased the number of shots into children from about 5 when I was young to over 70 today.

    Everyone continues to ignore him and no expert has rebutted his String Theory.

    There’s a lot of money at stake. If String Theory is true it would destroy a good chunk of the $78 billion vaccine business. Profits from that business are used to influence regulators, scientific journals, researchers, universities, doctors, hospitals, news media, and politicians.

    His latest assault is on Harvard University.

    https://substack.com/inbox/post/147151599

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    1. Thoughts about Norway? I had a awakening when I saw a cardiologist posting “just stop oil”. What about pharmaceuticals then? Its means healthcare will stop some time. Norway is a oil producing country. Net negative in 2031. We have a smal holding in the countryside. Friends with farmers. Any point in “prepping”? Better than nothing?

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  7. An exchange with Gail Tverberg.

    https://ourfiniteworld.com/2024/07/22/how-does-the-economy-really-work/comment-page-3/#comment-464504

    Gail, have you studied the work of Lars Larsen?

    He calculates that in 3 years (2027) diesel imports will be unavailable to all countries except China and India.

    Very interesting! Lars Larsen does refer to me quite a bit in the early part of his writing. He lives in Sweden. My background in Norwegian, so we have Scandinavian backgrounds in common.

    Lars gives some interesting forecasts of falling oil exports. I suppose it is possible to compare them to what the Statistical Review of World Energy is showing.

    I have tended to stay away from this kind of analysis partly because it is hard to do correctly. Also, there are so many related events going on, such as financial system collapse and possibly World War III, that we may never recognize our problem as being an energy problem.

    Intuitively, his view that in 3 years, diesel imports will be unavailable to all countries except China and India sounds close to right. But there are details to be considered–quite a lot of Canada’s crude oil comes to the US as an export. Indirectly, it provides much of the diesel that the US uses. The US refines the oil, and sends some products to Canada and elsewhere. If we look at net imports from Canada (which are disproportionately heavy oil used in diesel and jet fuel), they have been generally been increasing.

    https://www.eia.gov/dnav/pet/hist/LeafHandler.ashx?n=PET&s=MTTNTUSCA2&f=M

    EROEI theory claims that the “net energy” oil from the oil sands is very low. This may be part of the reason that operators in the oil sands have a hard time getting an adequate selling price. But will Canada’s oil from the oil sands all go to China and India in a few years–some, but certainly not all. Or is the problem that Canada will collapse from its low tax revenue? I don’t know.

    For exports, proximity matters, as do built pipelines. If Canada’s export remain, and the US continues to be around, I expect the US will continue to be a receiver of Canada’s exports. We should be teaching in the schools what a wonderful gift oil from the oil sands of Canada is.

    Thanks Gail.

    If we assume US and Canada will be fortunate to still have diesel in 2027 but most importing countries will be collapsing at that time, don’t you think everyone will be in serious trouble given our globally interdependent world?

    I think we will be dealing with a serious collapse issue in most areas of the world in 2027.

    But I have gotten the timing wrong before.

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    1. NaFTA has clause that requires Canada to sell crude to the US at some historical average rate, independent of the total produced. That is, even if total production decreases, exports stay the same or go up. Canada will lack diesel, not the US. Also most of the heavy crude is processed in only a very few refineries, (all?) owned by the Koch brothers, advocating for increased oil usage.

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      1. Thanks, I did not know that. I suppose even without an agreement the US will take Canadian resources with force when times get tough. It’s also possible the entire global network of complexity will collapse with scarcity as Hideaway argues.

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  9. Yesterday I had an online exchange on overshoot with a very highly regarded person in my old sustainability field who used to work for one of our top fuel companies and was a director at EY. Among other topics I said I think the whole profession is energy blind. She disagreed so I said “if energy blindness was not an issue then nobody would be promoting growth, “climate friendly” businesses, an energy transition, climate change as an “economic opportunity” and everyone would be talking the implications of peak oil and declining surplus energy / eroei. Of course I could be wrong and these issues are well understood but that would mean extreme denial of reality.. ”

    I also linked to Rob’s wise society post when she asked for” solutions”.

    This book review reinforces my position in my exchange. NZ imports all our fuel and so if Larsen is correct we are completely unprepared and completely fucked. At least there will be a lot of abandoned tractors and 4×4 utes to tinker with using all those hand tools I’ve been collecting.

    This video is a startling visual on how reliant on technology and fossil energy agriculture has become.

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    1. Excellent video!

      New Zealand might survive a little longer than other countries because you have some surplus meat and wool that could be produced with little fossil energy and traded for oil.

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      1. Our fuel resiliencey 90 day reserves strategy.

        “With the proposals in place, our onshore stockholding levels for diesel, petrol and jet fuel would be equivalent to 28, 28 and 24 days of consumption respectively….

        New Zealand is a member of the International Energy Agency, which means
        New Zealand must hold oil or fuel stocks equivalent to at least 90 days of net
        oil and fuel imports of the previous calendar year. The Government currently
        contributes to meeting this obligation by purchasing tickets for reserve oil and
        fuel stocks (commonly known as oil tickets), while commercial oil and fuel
        stocks are also counted towards this obligation.

        Oil tickets give the Government the right to purchase oil and fuel stocks at
        market prices in the event of an IEA-declared oil supply emergency. Most of
        the oil tickets the Government buys relate to oil stocks held offshore….. Offshore oil tickets are useful for our current contribution to
        managing international fuel supply disruptions, such as Russia’s invasion of
        Ukraine, but not as useful as onshore fuel stocks for responding to local fuel
        disruptions.”

        No mention of peak oil.

        https://www.mbie.govt.nz/building-and-energy/energy-and-natural-resources/energy-generation-and-markets/liquid-fuel-market/fuel-security-in-new-zealand

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        2. Hello Campbell,

          Hope you, Nikki, and the kids are all well. I can imagine you’ve accomplished so much this winter with both the building endeavours and plantings, well done! We’re trying to consolidate our lives with selling up in Tasmania and moving up full-time to Far North QLD where the climate suits full-time homesteading and my constitution best. It’s taking a while to make this transition as a family but hopefully we may still squeeze out a few “normal” months yet and then a few more. Living on the edge of collapse for those aware isn’t for the faint-hearted! But then again, were we ever promised anything when we were born onto this planet, whatever our parentage, time in history and locale. It’s all just crazy making to think how our lives are just one variation of what may have happened or what was possible at any given time. I trust that you and you family will continue to make those choices that bring you the most peace and fulfilment together.

          Thank you for spelling out how fragile our oil dependency situation is down under, if I’m not mistaken (and Hideaway, please correct me!) Australia has the same policy as NZ with only 3 months of oil supply in the country, and I do not know where these main depots are. I know our capacity to produce oil is negligible but there is a component. I am not certain if what we import is refined, and to what degree–how stupid I am feeling for being so absolutely clueless on where and how our lifeblood flows! When the supply stops or even becomes unreliable, life as we know it will flat line. And this may happen at any time now, and we are not even deserving of the term unprepared, it’s beyond that.

          Now we know why we in Australia (and NZ, too) put all our eggs in the AUKUS basket, hedging our bets just as Europe has done with NATO, that glomming onto the States through hell or high water will secure us at least a few crumbs from the spoils of war. Because if the oil is not where you need it, you have to actually takeover (one way or another) the country with the resources you need if they’re not willing or able to let you have (buy) it. At the same time, you have to defuse any other country (China and friends to us, and US and friends to China) wanting to do the same. It is clear that is what we’re building up to geopolitically. China is actually out in the open with stockpiling whatever resources it can get its dragon talons on, from coal to gold. Were we wise, we could take that as an example whereas our 3 month oil reserves policy is as effectual as the 3 day food supply in case of emergency.

          The idea of a stable trade economy becomes ever more redundant as actual scarcity and effective scarcity increases in scope, this goes for all commodities but especially those resources each nation need for themselves, food and fuel at the top. What good is another country’s fiat money when there is no guarantee of being able to convert that into the goods you need, might as well keep the resources under your own ground for yourself and keep creating your own fiat money as you move towards ever more authoritarian rule within your own country. It is very interesting (and even we undenialists are alarmed) to see it spelt out so clearly with a date of anytime from now and most likely no later than a few more years. Of course, with the unrelenting weather anomalies, we should not be surprised (but still we will be, because we have no precedent for this scope of unfolding) if food scarcity is our most immediate concern (outside of nuclear war, economic collapse, EMP event–oh we are spoilt for choice!)

          Keep planting and prepping my friends! Now I sound like the Canadian Prepper but let us recall (and not deny!) the fable of the grasshopper and the ant. These have been perennial lessons for humankind but since fossil fuels, we thought we had no need for the morals of their stories. And the moral of our unraveling story, if it goes far enough, will not be told or written for anyone, more’s the pity.

          Namaste, friends.

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          1. Hi Gaia, Australia use to keep our fuel reserves in the US, which of course is crazy, under the last government. The military were upset about that..

            Apparently we currently hold about 54 days worth of supply counting all the large inventories at remote mine sites as part of our reserves, including something like 160 megalitres at The remote Gove mine site.

            From this publication in 2022…

            https://www.aspistrategist.org.au/australias-fuel-reserves-dont-have-to-keep-running-on-empty/

            “Australia’s inability to meet minimum IEA requirements speaks to the broader energy resilience problem and was a likely factor behind the Morrison government’s three-part fuel security package. The package included the 2020 decision to store $94 million of oil in the US Strategic Petroleum Reserve. “

            The second there is any talk of international fuel shortages, every motorist and every farmer will fill up every container they can, which will crash our fuel stockpile before the government gets around to implementing restrictions..

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            1. Hi Hideaway,

              That’s even worse than I thought, 54 days (or hours as you predict with the panic scenario) till doom in this lucky country with the big caveat of having enough fuel constantly to keep being lucky.

              No matter how much natural gas, coal, and uranium we have, Australia was not gifted with massive oil reserves and that will always be the Achilles heel for any country that has to import supplies.

              There’s not much to add or say that will soften the blow of this realisation, one of the final nails in our modernity coffin.

              All that remains to us not in denial is to predict when, and get our affairs in order as best we can to meet it.

              Thank you for all your efforts in trying to bring truth to those who have eyes that can and want to see. Knowing the diagnosis is still a form of treatment when there is nothing else to be done.

              All the best to you and your family. May this Spring bring much needed rain for your fruit trees and crops.

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          2. Kia ora Gaia. We’re great thanks. Yes we’ve been busy but we’re pretty good at giving ourselves a bit of time most weeks to just be in our wee piece of paradise.

            You might enjoy this set of short videos of our place I put together for my family a couple of weeks ago.

            https://photos.app.goo.gl/PFgPTMqtx5t4QKFt7

            I hope your move north is complete soon and you can really sink into the place and enjoy the full set of seasons there.

            Arohanui from the garden.

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    2. Yes, great video. Always hard for me imagine (believe) that only 2% are “on the farm”. Videos like this are very helpful to connect the dots.

      Big difference between this and ‘Tales from the Green Valley’ lifestyle 😊.

      Speaking of ‘Tales’, I tried watching the series earlier this month (I’ve seen it like 5 times in the last two years and its one of my favorites). But I could only make it a couple episodes. The domesticated animals/plants were all I could focus on, and it turned me off. Had never experienced this feeling while watching previously.

      I’m either getting too soft and snowflake like… or I’m getting too much knowledge for my own good.

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

    What diesel shortages will do to the mountain of debt.

    Likely through uncontrolled debt deflation

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  13. Dear Rob,

    I hope thou are feeling well.

    This post has been published in Facebook (Peak Oil group).– It would seem that the UN-Denial website is increasing in popularity.

    Kind and warm regards,

    ABC

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      1. Your loyal band here will stay the course until whatever takes us out first! As my choir director always said when we were lacking numbers for a concert, it’s quality not quantity. The denial devotees here are pure gold, or shall I say pure crude oil?

        Namaste, friends.

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    2. Dear Rob,

      I hope thou are feeling well.

      Regarding this post, there has been intriguing dialogue within the Peak Oil Facebook group.

      Mr. John Peach posted an elaborative explanation alongside a picture;

      “The ELM was proposed by geologist Jeffery Brown, and Jeff Vail said “Export-Land Model: Jeffrey Brown, a commentator at The Oil Drum, has proposed a geopolitical feedback loop that he calls the “export-land” model. In a regime of high or rising prices, a state’s existing oil exports brings in great revenues, which trickles into the state’s economy, and leads to increasing domestic oil consumption. This is exactly what is happening in most oil exporting states. The result, however, is that growth in domestic consumption reduces oil available for export. In states, such as Mexico, where oil production is also in decline, the “export-land” model predicts that oil exports will decline much faster than oil production—and this is exactly what is happening, with the latest PEMEX report showing 5% production decline year-on-year, but 11% export decline. Ultimately, the effects of the “export-land” model itself suffers from diminishing marginal returns—when exports shrink sufficiently, the oil-export revenue per capita will actually begin to decline (eventually reaching zero, no matter how fast prices rise), at which time the force behind rising domestic consumption will be eliminated.” http://oill.wikidot.com/export-land-model”

      Kind and warm regards,

      ABC

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        1. Dear Rob,

          I hope thou are feeling well.

          I cannot say whether there is agreement or disagreement, however this particular post has almost thirty likes. 

          • The vast majority seem to be overall in favour of the general direction. 
          • No mention thus far on the calculations, simply reactionary notions.

          A few comments;

          “Ahh, the export land construct gets real.”

          “2027. We’ll see, but it seems about right.”

          This daunting image was posted alongside the following comment;

          “I recognized the similarity on this one, instantly:”

          Kind and warm regards,

          ABC

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            1. He’s using numbers that no real relationship to what’s on actually on the markert since 2005 oil exports per day have overhead between 40 to 45 1000 b/d. Further more 2025 is looking like it’s gonna be a glut has oil demand is dropping like a rock.

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  14. Former Prisoners Describe Suffocating Heat in Texas Lockups as They Plead for Air Conditioning

    https://www.usnews.com/news/best-states/texas/articles/2024-07-30/inmate-advocates-describe-suffocating-heat-in-texas-prisons-as-they-plea-for-air-conditioning

    AUSTIN, Texas (AP) — Describing Texas prisons as so hot that inmates would cool off by splashing themselves with toilet water or faking suicide attempts to get moved to cooler medical areas, advocates on Tuesday asked a federal judge to declare the state prison system’s lack of air conditioning as unconstitutional cruel and unusual punishment.

    Tuesday began a multi-day hearing in a lawsuit that seeks to force Texas to fully air condition a prison system that houses more than 130,000 inmates, but has full AC in only about a third of its 100 prison units. The rest have partial or no air-conditioning.

    Inmate advocacy groups allege that temperatures inside can push above 120 degrees Fahrenheit (48.9 Celsius), and that the extreme heat has led to hundreds of inmate deaths in recent years. They want U.S. District Court Judge Robert Pitman to require Texas to maintain temperatures in prison housing and occupied areas between 65 and 85 degrees F (18 and 29 degrees Celsius), the same temperature range required by law in county jails.

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    1. There is hope there Rob – it looks like most of the US nuclear warheads are non-functional. According to nuclear engineers, the radioactive material inside needs to be re-machined or it will not explode. They will make a nasty dirty bomb though.

      This is one of the things that makes people hope that the world is REALLY led by a hidden cabal of pedophiles – better that than nuclear annihilation.

      Me, I would rather have justice than mercy: “Fiat justitia et pereat mundus!”

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    1. Sadly he may be right. One of these days I might wake up from a restful night’s sleep and find the end of the world has occurred. No internet, no power and a faint glow on my eastern horizon (not the sun but thermonuclear anyway). And winter will start in August for the first and last time in my life.

      I agree with Canadian Prepper, I can tolerate religious people (even though I am an atheist) but I despise fanatical, any kind of religion. Sadly Israel is in the grip of fanatical Zionists.

      AJ

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  18. Many aware people including Gail Tverberg and myself have said that it’s probable we never will acknowledge that energy depletion was at the core of our overshoot collapse.

    Peak Oil will likely be dismissed as a tin-foil hat belief by the majority until we’ve long forgotten modern life living as hunter gatherers again.

    Nate Hagens, and most other aware people, think insufficient education, which he calls “energy blindness”, is the cause of this misunderstanding. I think the cause is our genetic tendency to deny unpleasant realities, for many reasons, including the fact that PhD polymaths with deep knowledge of physics and energy are equally blind.

    This article (h/t Panopticon) takes a big picture look at the global debt problem through the eyes of our leaders and demonstrates our inability to see energy depletion is at the core of rising debt.

    https://www.worldfinance.com/special-reports/ticking-time-bomb-of-debt

    Global public debt has tripled since the mid-1970s and with many economies now in debt distress, there is a growing urgency not just to reduce it, but also for a sea change in our approach to its management.

    One way of measuring global policy-makers’ concerns about the unprecedented increase in debt around the world is the number of times the subject is raised at high-level conferences. And it comes up practically every week, most recently when Kristalina Georgieva, managing director of the International Monetary Fund, told the Atlantic Council in April about her fears that the current decade could be remembered as “the turbulent 20s.”

    While prefacing her remarks with observations about some of the things to be thankful for, notably falling inflation, she got onto the urgencies; “The sobering reality is global economic activity is weak by historical standards. Prospects for growth have been slowing since the global financial crisis. Inflation is not fully defeated. Fiscal buffers have been depleted. And debt is up, posing a major challenge to public finances in many countries.”

    Unfortunately, much of this avalanche of debt is ending up in the wrong place because the financial sector – the man in the middle – has been missing its targets. Professor Mian continues; “A well-functioning financial sector would channel the financial surpluses toward productive investments, such as building and maintaining infrastructure and developing technology. Any debt resulting from such productive lending would naturally be sustainable, because returns from investment would pay it off.”

    Mian adds; “Unfortunately, a key feature of the debt supercycle is its failure to finance productive investment. For example, even though total debt as a share of GDP has more than doubled, real investment as a share of GDP has remained stagnant, or even fallen over the past four decades.” The alarming conclusion is that around half of the trillions of new debt issued during the past two years is being wasted. Instead of financing investment, which would help create wealth, it has gone to the debt unproductive consumption by households and governments.

    It’s very simple.

    Our wealth comes from productivity growth which is enabled by an affordable growing supply of energy and materials, and we’ve used up the good stuff on a finite planet.

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  19. Available net exports- yeah, I remember when that was a thing- on the oil drum and elsewhere. Charts, projections, speculation. MORT took over? Maybe the period of relative stability ( the world was unipolar for a little while!), the frac surge got it pushed off the headlines. Anyway, there is no way the intelligence community and military planners have forgotten, it’s just that they won’t be on social media chattering about their plans to deal with it.

    Since it is a predicament, it’s inevitable, but because humans are such a wild card in how responses (rational and irrational) will unfold, it’s a fool’s errand to get too specific on how it will play out.

    To add a bit to point number nine- Rather than leave in the ground for future generations, those with reserves may wind back exports for internal use even while they still have excess capacity, simply for strategic self interest. At some point, when it becomes all against all, the loss of export income will be let go in favor of preserving current internal economies as much as possible. Yes, we are an interconnected global economy, but small moves are already happening to improve self reliance. Last year’s India rice export ban was one indicator, and China and others have been hoarding gold and other hard assets. The end of the petrodollar is another step toward disengagement and a new normal. I expect to see more and more signs of global trade waning. Some by intention, and some by the continuing decline. And then we have the minefield of Hideway’s complexity tipping points that could bollix any attempt to isolate.

    So it goes.

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  21. Some time ago Rob suggested I have “normal” denial genes, cause I don’t like atheists and their attitude and probably this website is not for me. Well, let’s try again. Could you please explain to me, why there was no single movie about hyperinflation?
    Weimar? No.
    Post WWII Hungary? No.
    Soviet Union collapse? No.
    Venezuela? No.
    Repo crisis? No.

    Is it about denial genes or something else?

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    1. What name would you like to use so we can follow the conversation? I’ll change Anonymous to whatever you choose.

      I don’t understand your point about the movies. Maybe explain a bit and we can engage in a discussion.

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      1. OK, I will post as “Comrade” from now on.

        My point is: there must be something that prevents hollywood directors from making movies about many of the greatest catastrophes in our recorded history. Is it denial?

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        1. Scarrow says “Anyway, there is no way the intelligence community and military planners have forgotten, it’s just that they won’t be on social media chattering about their plans to deal with it.”

          Quite of few of the surplus energy luminaries continue to be stubborn about the Covid operation being an intentional reset of energy and finance followed by war and economic sanctions to create regional trade blocs, push digital passports to limit travel/consumption for the noncompliant and form a multipolar world order with the UN/WHO superseding national sovereignty with the authority to declare emergencies and lock down society.. a CT solution. There are plenty of white papers where they express their intentions, spell out narratives.. UK FIRES Absolute Zero 2025 and beyond limiting airline travel, textiles, shipping and private vehicle transportation. The denial is like peeling the layers of an onion.

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  23. I’ve read Rob’s review multiple times now and am a third of the way through Larsen’s book. I’ve been looking for a good solid prediction for a long time now, so I’m trying not to go all-in crazy with it just because it’s the first one that “feels” correct to me. I’m losing the battle though.

    This is gonna be my Titanic if Lars is totally off on his calculations. I’ll be the crazy Guy McPherson of my inner circle. (btw, Guy is looking better and better with his 2026 prediction). More importantly this book is going to push me to quit my bullshit job. I refuse to be working for a corporation all the way till SHTF (that’s my biggest fear). Scary right now but will feel so good when I finally do it. After a nice long vacation (I doubt I could make it much more than 2 years with just my savings and frugal budget) maybe this pushes me into doing some actual work that I like or that matters.  

    Already sent this book review to my inner circle. Hoping it causes panic in them. We all know it won’t… but I do see some potential. I wasn’t kidding about this being the “pelican brief” of the overshoot world. If Lars or Rob go missing… we’ll know what happened. I do see how this would never be allowed to be mainstream. I mean look at me, I’m gonna finally opt out of the corporate death trap because of it. That’s unacceptable for the elites. But the masses are going to do much more than quit their jobs when they finally accept it. I can see hunger games with rich people running for their lives’. 

    p.s. 2 things. Great job el mar for bringing Lars to un-Denial. And I’m still bitter that my essay got bumped for this “breaking news”. 😊

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      1. While we have BAU and/or modernity we all have to either pay property taxes if we own property, or rent if we don’t. There is no choice to ‘opt’ out of modernity at all.

        In our case we have to pay property taxes, insurance (we can’t sell produce at markets without this insurance) and ‘water rights’, because we use irrigation water we have to pay the govt for the privilege to use it. We also have to buy ‘stuff’ like pumps, pipe and fuel to irrigate with.

        So we have to make money every year, but then have to pay taxes on the money we make, so there is less to pay for the other taxes..

        We are all in a catch 22, the taxes on life go up, so we have to make more money each year to pay for it all, which means selling more, which means growth.

        Growth is the modern religion, on a finite planet; what could possibly go wrong. At least I don’t have to tell anyone here how ridiculous it all is and how stuffed the system is..

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  24. I remember many people predicting sudden collapse (complete with zombies etc) during the “oil drum” era.

    JM Greer (a pro censorship pro govt writer but still has good insights) has pointed out two things:

    • A lot of people use the fast collapse as an excuse to NOT prepare at all. Since everything is coming down soon, there is no point to change anything.
    • Govts/oligarchs/pedophile cabal (whoever has the real power, who knows?) will not just accept things and close shop. See all their proactive role they took recently (attempts at genocide through different means, wars, increase control and destruction of the middle class etc). All they are doing is postponing the inevitable but they have succeeded in this since at least 1980 (when the west destroyed any popular movement and destroyed its working class).

    My prediction: after middle class is destroyed, most of the old people are quietly medically murdered and the majority of the population becomes slaves to the state, the west will continue limping along until 2030 at least.

    BTW, I am agreeing with CJ Hopkins that “globohomo” includes Russia China, etc. Otherwise they could have brought down the parasite west in weeks.

    But it does look like the global south will follow a different trajectory than US empire – maybe it will be the new home of the our dear leaders?

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    1. Hi Nony, I’m one of those predicting fast collapse, when oil production decline accelerates as it eventually will. the modern world so totally relies upon 6 continent supply chains and so many feedback loops that the sudden decrease in energy and products will effect every aspect of our modern lives, very rapidly, with those exact feedback loops accelerating the decline.

      I don’t have an exact date as none of us has perfect information about oil production, remaining fields capacity etc, to make such an educated guess, which is why all the prior collapse predictions have failed. We’ve been able to continue to ramp up oil production, and with this increased oil supply, produce a whole lot more coal, gas, solar, wind and nuclear power, giving the illusion that oil isn’t important..

      I agree it could easily all limp along for the rest of the decade or even longer, providing oil production doesn’t collapse. However there will be an accelerating oil production decline at some point and it’s during this contraction that it all falls to pieces, with over 8 billion humans on a planet that can support a few millions without oil.

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      1. Hideaway, the reason I don’t believe in fast collapse is because it would be too good to be true.

        Think about the plague in the medieval Europe. It killed as much as half of the population but it was so fast that the knowledge was not lost. The result was the renaissance (using all the freed resources).

        A slow collapse (like the western Roman empire) leads to huge amount of losses: e.g. Britain lost the potter’s wheel.

        So yes, it could happen but does it look to you like we live in the best possible world?

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    2. JM Greer (a pro censorship pro govt writer but still has good insights) has pointed out two things:

      Where did Greer support censorship? Can you post a link to one of his writings where he supports censorship?

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      1. “Can you post a link to one of his writings where he supports censorship?”

        Can you post a link to Jeffrey Epstein saying that he supports pedophilia?

        It’s not what JMG says, it’s what he does. His wordpress blogs still uses the CIA term “conspiracy theory” and he comes down hard on anybody mentioning almost ANYTHING disagreeing with the MSM and govt.

        For example, I got a comment removed where I said humans are omnivores (this in a thread about vegans).

        I asked him if he can give any example of a REAL conspiracy and he refused. So according to JMG, there are no conspiracies whatsoever.

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        1. It’s not what JMG says, it’s what he does. His wordpress blogs still uses the CIA term “conspiracy theory” and he comes down hard on anybody mentioning almost ANYTHING disagreeing with the MSM and govt.

          By “anybody mentioning almost ANYTHING disagreeing with the MSM and govt” do you mean actual substantive research disagreeing with the MSM and govt, or just wild claims without any evidence supporting them?

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          1. Right, if it’s not in the CIA-pedia, it must be a conspiracy theory.

            He removed posts that mentioned

            • the lab leak hypothesis
            • the military involvement in the jab
            • saying absolutely factual things like “in the whole history of the reinforced concrete construction, only 3 buildings collapsed in their footprint without being demolished, and it all happened in the same day, same place”.
            • Pointing to historical admitted and documented conspiracies like the gulf of Tonkin incident or operation Gladius.

            I could go on. Just like our govt, JMG believes in censoring malinformation (aka true information that could cause people to think).

            What about you? Do you agree with him that there are no conspiracies?

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            1. Conspiracies can and do happen, however, the burden of proof is on the person claiming that the conspiracy exists. I mostly ignore conspiracy theories because conspiracy theorists rarely provide any substantive evidence for their claims. There are a few conspiracies that have enough evidence to be plausible, but those are the exceptions.

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              1. I got it, you are either deluded or a liar.

                First you use “conspiracy theory” (term created by the CIA) to disparage anyone questioning the MSM.

                In real life, if a person lies to you repeatedly, leading to huge problems, would you believe their latest statement? The default stance for any honest person would be distrust.

                Yet MSM (CIA mouthpiece) lies about everything all the time. How do US gets into all the wars since 1945? False flags and lies. What about politics? Remember Russia collusion, election interference by Google, Biden laptop etc.

                All of the above and more are admitted by MSM/govt now. But at the time you would have called me a conspiracy theorist. Just like you do now if I mention pedophile oligarchs, zionist genocide or Trump fake assassination.

                I am sorry, why am I wasting my time with an NPC? Go be stupid, I am out of here.

                BTW Rob, I am curious what is your stance? I remember long ago reading your blog and you believed the Covid propaganda (showing how much in denial you were). Did you change your mind now that the MSM says it’s allowed? How brave of you!

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                1. Dear Anonymous,

                  I hope thou are feeling well.

                  Firstly, I ask that ad hominem transgressions be conceded.

                  Secondly, If thou are determined to continue engaging in written exchanges, 
                  I kindly ask that thou utilises an alias for future identification.

                  Thirdly, I beseech thee out of curiosity and good faith. 
                  If we are to establish a functioning dialogue, it ought to be formed out of mutual understanding. 

                  Fourthly, could thou please provide and elaborate further evidential context regarding thine shared perspectives?

                  Assertions such as;

                  • The latest supposedly choreographed incident affecting former United States President Donald Trump. 
                  • A supposed global cabal and their nefarious entanglements with adolescents.

                    Kind and warm regards,

                    ABC

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                2. Peeling back the layers of denial? You will get more bees with honey than vinegar. You’re providing an information service and your customers are the undenial crowd who are trying to nail down the timing and circumstances of the great simplification. You are a container salesman who are trying to break into a new crowd who constantly has leaks in their vessels. You want to point out the facts about the competing container company to sell your product? Do you hit them with all of the unsupported gossip about their interoffice politics, wild parties with interns, their ugly nose? Or do you want to simply post a memo or paper detailing how their lack of merit based hiring, cost cutting measures, huge bonuses to CEO and mission statement to corner the market by controlling access to information results in an inferior product? You can tell that the current election cycle is more about information control than information awareness by how they attack people rather than ideas. Food for thought, thanks for reading!

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                  1. In hindsight, the white papers didn’t leave an immediate mark but might ring a bell. For example, One would likely have to be the victim or a family member of a victim of an atrocity linked to state sponsored terrorism to be completely suspicious of government and corporate power. Or a victim of a religious or secular cult to be completely immune to propaganda and conditioning. Or someone with an auto-immune condition or pregnant who was told not to take certain therapies/vaccines. Paul Cherfurka’s “ladder of awareness” is instructive here. You may find support with your “recovery” or “prepping” group and pop into forums once in awhile to test your patience and try new communication techniques but in the end you are still left with your awareness of the MPP and various biases in action even amongst the luminaries. Find refuge with your “junto” or in-person peer support group, look for the comedy of errors for a bit of humility and sick pleasure and do the best you can one day at a time.

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      1. I used to read most of the famous doomers (like JMG, Kunstler, Orlov etc).

        JMG said that most people become what they hate and he tried to prove it by becoming a authoritarian pro-censorship, pro-government blabber mouth.

        Just think – has he written anything new in the last 10 years? He just repeats his old canards about the leaders being well intentioned and the economy hitting physical limits bla,bla, bla.

        Of course what he says is a truism but he refuses to learn anything, despite the huge changes in the world. Like what retard STILL believes there are no conspiracies?

        BTW, it’s not just him. Read Kunstler – in 2001 he came out as a genocidal zionist pushing for all-out war and supporting the official story on 9/11.

        After all these years, he still is a genocidal zionist that has not learned anything.

        What about Orlov? He keeps writing these funny critiques of the US empire (same as he did 25 years ago). But he never ever disagrees with Putin, even when the guy himself flip flops! (See all the talk about the “redlines” that keep shifting while Putin increased the oil and gas supplies to EU).

        My conclusion? Rob is wrong – there is no denial problem in humans. To deny implies to think first but most people are just meat robots without reason or free will. If that sounds pessimistic, it’s not. I am holding on to the thought that maybe some of us are human.

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        1. Nony, denial is about believing in stuff and not thinking. How many different religions are there that ask all the followers to ‘believe’ in XYZ? Of which all the ‘good’ followers do without questioning or thinking..

          All the famous doomers you mention seem to be trying to make a dollar out of ‘doom’ which IMHO just doesn’t and can’t work. This also creates a problem as we are all a slave to the system, everyone must ‘make’ money to pay their way in our modern world. No-one will to pay to hear ‘we have no way out’.

          People will pay for ‘answers’, that they can believe in, that give hope and comfort, like every religion or Tony Seba does.

          Even the doomers who do try to make money, seem to have ‘plans’ for how their followers can survive, as in give hope to the believers.

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    4. Hello anonymous. I had to look up the phrase globohomo. After sifting through a lot of hateful comments, I found this article on reddit that I think explains it. 

      What Is ‘Globohomo’? – VJMP (vjmpublishing.nz)

      Because of things like Edward Bernays and planned obsolescence, I can almost believe anything when it comes to manipulating the masses to be consumption zombies. But this phrase is trying to explain what I think is all just part of the Great Reset.

      Every planet that has had a “Peak of whats possible”, will look similar in the final end stage. I dont mean similar as in lifestyles, gender/sexual preference, inequality, etc… I mean similar in that everyone is collectively losing their sanity. Rob keeps saying that our leaders are going crazy, which I agree with… but so is everyone else. (A better description for me is “peak of insanity” instead of “peak of whats possible”)

      The Great Acceleration starts around 1950. Most of the hockey stick curve’s start their dramatic slope. The G.A. is usually defined as: the rapid and widespread increase in human activity and its impact on Earth’s natural systems. Another way to say it is that 1950 is when the fossil fuel infrastructure was finally ready to start doing its thing. 

      I dont know what’s considered our actual “peak” moment, but it has to involve internet and cell phones. So maybe we are still in the moment right now. But if given another 10-20 years of BAU, I think AI is going to make it very clear what our peak insanity moment is.

      The JMG reference about people using fast collapse as an excuse to do nothing… yes, I’m guilty. And I agree with you (unless its a different ‘anonymous’) about “I would rather have justice than mercy”. Whatever it takes to complete the great reset, I’m all for it.  But now that I’m at the top of collapse mountain it no longer requires any hatred or negativity for me to think like this. 

      The sooner this planet has no life forms that can harness fire… the better.

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    1. Hi Stellar. Cant remember how you feel about Guy, so not sure if that was positive or negative. If its negative, what’s giving you that vibe with Lars?

      Thanks.

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      1. I don’t think Guy McPherson’s predictions are very accurate. I don’t think we are facing near-term human extinction (unless the nukes start flying).

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        1. Hey, at least Guy was a great promoter of the jab, railing at people and trying to force everyone to take it.

          What a revolutionary!

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    1. Hi Monk, unfortunately a steady state economy as is ‘wished for’ by many including Herman Daly in the links you gave, is not possible because of entropy and dissipation.

      All the metals we use cannot be fully recycled. Just yesterday I was drilling into a copper busbar for an offgrid battery system I’m making and noticed how much is lost that no one ever realises. Some of the drill cuttings just disappeared back into the environment.

      We lose a little bit of every metal when it’s being used, then some more with oxidation into the environment. Look at any outside copper pipe to see the green oxidation on the outside of the pipe. Even if we could recycle ‘most’ of every metal, some is still lost.

      This mean constant mining of copper to make up for the lost bits at the very minimum. However the grades being mined continue to get lower, so more energy is needed to maintain a constant amount of copper. Likewise for every other metal and mineral we use in the modern world.

      A steady state economy would mean there is no ‘more’ energy to mine lower grades of ores, so either the amount of metals and minerals we use has to go down, which is now a shrinking economy, or the amount of energy used has to rise to gain the quantity of metals and minerals, which of course means a growing economy, we need to build ‘more’ energy producing machines, which means more metals, more transport etc, etc.

      Constantly using more, or growing on a finite planet can’t work in the long run as we all know.

      If the techno futuristic gathering of resources from asteroids and other planets and moons were possible, then it’s highly likely some species from some other planet in the galaxy or universe would have done so, and expanded so large that we would easily notice their presence. We’ve detected none.

      When we rule out the impossible, the forever growth model and the steady state mode, we are left with the shrinking economy model, either fast or slow shrinking, back to what the world environment could naturally carry.

      Wasn’t that somewhere between 1-4m humans? over the last 100 thousand years, or were we doing too much damage with even that number, given the megafauna extinctions of the last 100k years? Of course these lower numbers are not taking into account the reduced carrying capacity of the planet due to all the damage we’ve done to the environment and so many other species…

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          1. Dear Stellarwind72,

            I hope thou are feeling well.

            What is it that thou are implying?

            It seems among other things that Mr. “Fast Eddy” has concluded that the moonlanding did not occur, and that the most recent incident with President Donald Trump was supposedly a pre-arranged and coordinated performance. 

            Kind and warm regards,

            ABC

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      2. Yes, a steady state economy based on NNR ( Non Renewable Natural Resources) is guaranteed to fail. I remember making your point about declining metal ore grades requiring ever-increasing energy inputs to extract and process around twelve years ago on XrayMike’s site. It was in response to a David Suzuki video, where he was insisting that wind turbines and solar collectors were the only way forward, because “Our ancestors lived on renewable energy, and we will too ” ( I forget his exact phrasing ). The glaring difference between the two systems, of course, is that one system had solar energy collectors which were self-replicating, biodegradable, and did not require mining and manufacturing for their existence. It’s a hopeless task trying to explain a lot of this stuff ,when most people are clueless about Earth System Science . Then we have Dennis at Peak oil barrel, probably in an informed 1% of the general populace, insisting that the entropic dissipation of minerals is not a problem, because the Earth is part of a thermodynamically open system.

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      3. Hi Hideaway! I am totally with you on Steady State nonsense and a lot of degrowthers annoy the shit out of me with their idealism. The site has a good collection of stuff worth sifting through though, like population studies and what not.

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  27. Today August 1, is Earth overshoot day.
    Here is my ecological footprint.

    I know this is a serious underestimate because the ecological footprint calculator doesn’t account for NNRs.

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    1. I get upset about Earth Overshoot Day for precisely the reason it leaves out all non renewables, and therefore gives a false message of hope to everyone that doesn’t look at any details, in that we are just a little bit in overshoot.

      Why leave out non renewable resources? Are these not clearly the most important and relevant to a modern world?

      I think the ‘environmentalists’ involved with organising “Earth Overshoot Day” are doing a disservice to the entire reality of our situation by promoting such nonsense.

      If our modern world relied totally and exclusively upon all the Earth services they promote in Earth Overshoot Day, then it would have relevance. Instead, they are trying to paint a picture using only half the paints they need, half the canvas, half the brushes, half the easel, and half of their brain and hand eye coordination…

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      1. If we had to add NNRs into the calculation, it would become obvious that industrial civilization is inherently unsustainable.

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        1. Exactly, which means all these famous ‘doomers’ have some agenda, other than telling the whole story. Are they doing it for notoriety, money, something else??

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          1. People want to believe that modernity can continue in some form. Some “doomers” explicitly state that modernity is inherently unsustainable. Others believe that maybe a reformed modernity or a “modernity lite” could be sustainable.

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        1. It’s based on the Global Footprint Network that Bill Rees co-developed. I vaguely remember him talking about why overshoot is much worse than the GF numbers show. Unfortunately I can’t remember which one. Possibly the Nate Hagens one.

          He does mention the underestimation in this paper but not specifically non-renewables.

          Click to access 0xc1aa5576%200x003dcfa1.pdf

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          1. “We should note that for methodological reasons and due to data limitations,
            published EFA data generally underestimate human demand. For example, while
            EFA may compile a population’s use of arable land, forest, carbon sinks and fishing-
            grounds, the method cannot reflect whether the appropriated ecosystems are being
            used sustainably (which they often are not). Nor does EFA account directly for the
            effects of most forms of pollution….

            ….The human EF nearly tripled from ∼7.0 billion to 20.9 billion global average
            productive hectares (gha) between 1960 and 2017 (GFN, 2022). While both
            rising per capita incomes (consumption) and increasing populations contribute
            to material growth, we can use EFA to show that the ballooning human EF is
            caused primarily by swelling populations, particularly in middle-income countries.”

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          2. Thanks. The conclusion of Rees’ paper is good:

            In short, the continuity of civilisation requires a cooperative, planned major contraction of both the material economy and human populations. The overall goal must be to establish and maintain the necessary conditions for a smaller human family (one to two billion people) to enjoy both economic and ecological security through ‘one-planet living’.

            Of course, not all problems are solvable at a global scale. To be brutally clear-eyed, the prospect that our increasingly fractious world community will happily collaborate to achieve the one-planet goal is hardly the brightest star in the constellation of possible human futures. Failure would indeed be tragic—if the world’s nations cannot come together to fully engage their common fate, humanity proclaims itself to have no more practical intelligence or conscious moral agency when it comes to its own inclusive survival than does any other species in overshoot at the brink of
            collapse.

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    1. It’s remarkable.

      We have a perfect track record of 100% failure for every initiative by every environmental activist and government that has tried to reduce overshoot and its effects for over 100 years.

      100% failure!

      And the first thing Mike Joy (and pretty much everyone else) says about a new theory that provides a plausible scientific explanation is “I’m not convinced”.

      Instead of, “Where can I learn more?” and “What is the evidence?”

      WTF?

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      2. Indeed!

        It’s remarkable.

        We have a perfect track record of 100% failure for every initiative by every communist activist and government that has tried to build heaven on earth and its effects for over 200 years.

        100% failure!

        And yet…

        Of course “it wasn’t REAL communism”. The idea was good, but the execution was wrong, LOL.

        Somehow I feel your idea of population reduction policies would end the same way “The idea to prevent suffering was good, but it wasn’t real depopulation…”

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        1. If you believe an “ism” (fascism, socialism, communism, capitalism) has anything to do with our overshoot predicament you are at a very early stage in your awareness.

          All of the “isms” have growth as a primary goal. The main difference between them is who controls the growing pie and how it is shared.

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          1. I’ve never said that any “ism” is responsible for our predicament. It’s about thermodynamics of course.

            And no, not all “isms” are growth oriented. Communism and all related ideologies are about de-growth. Just check the results! Not what they say was their goal. Please, explain to me how Pol Pot’s politics were growth oriented. Of course we can continue that mental gymnastics but what’s the point?

            For some weird reason communism related ideas are just a new religion for folks who say they don’t believe in God, every single time!

            Best, Comrade

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  30. I’m back from a couple days at my friend’s cabin helping to construct an off grid water system for 35 cabins that filters, chlorinates, and UV treats the water with no grid power. They were forced by the government to upgrade the existing untreated water system which we constructed about 40 years ago and which has worked perfectly without causing a single heath problem over that period.

    We learned how to weld HDPE pipe and to do it in a precision manner so that we could build a complex manifold for connecting to four 2500 gallon water tanks. We were successful and very pleased with the outcome.

    The machine for welding plastic is a sophisticated piece of kit that costs about $4000 in Canada but he purchased it direct from China for about $800.

    The project is fossil energy top to bottom. All of the pipe and fittings are plastic mostly made in China. The tanks are plastic. The truck we used to haul everything is diesel. A big gas generator to power the welding machine. A diesel excavator to build a new road and to bury the tanks. Etc., etc..

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  31. I was thinking we should compile a list of the reasons that Larsen’s predictions might be pessimistic on timing or severity.

    I’ll start the list. Please reply if you have other ideas or reasons my suggestions are bad. I’ll edit them into the main list.

    If we end up with something useful and persuasive I might add an addendum to the book review above.

    1. The west can make do with a LOT less and still have decent lives.
    2. Governments could ration diesel away from discretionary or low priority uses to keep essential tractors, combines, trucks, trains, ships, and mining machines operating.
    3. Governments could ban discretionary air travel and repurpose kerosene to augment diesel.
    4. A serious economic slow down caused by extreme debt and no growth, or by government policies like big tax increases or lower deficit spending, would eliminate a lot of demand for diesel.
    5. Another pandemic (or plandemic) with global lockdowns would reduce diesel demand.
    6. A crash program to ramp up coal to liquids (CTL).
    7. Demand destruction via nuclear war. Unfortunately might also destroy supply.

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    1. If we implement these points, we are also screwed because of the complexity, the need for growth and the path dependencies. Hideaway has described it well.

      Saludos

      el mar

      August 1, 2024

      https://de.nachrichten.yahoo.com/dihk-immer-mehr-unternehmen-erw%C3%A4gen-085452182.html

      According to a survey by the German Chamber of Industry and Commerce (DIHK), more and more companies in Germany are considering limiting production or relocating it abroad. This is particularly the case in industry, and particularly in large and energy-intensive companies, as the DIHK announced on Thursday. However, most companies see the excessive bureaucracy, slow approval procedures and a general lack of planning due to energy policy as the biggest obstacle.

      According to the survey, 18 percent of all companies surveyed are planning to limit production or relocate abroad. The proportion rose particularly sharply last year, from eleven to 17 percent, and has now risen only slightly. However, the proportion of industrial companies continued to rise sharply.

      In 2022, 21 percent of industrial companies made this statement, then 32 percent last year and now 37 percent. In energy-intensive companies, the proportion of those planning production restrictions or relocations rose to 45 percent, and in industrial companies with more than 500 employees it even rose to 51 percent.

      “The trust of the German economy in energy policy has been severely damaged,” said DIHK deputy general manager Achim Dercks. Politicians have so far failed to show companies a perspective for a reliable and affordable energy supply. This applies in particular to industry.

      What is particularly annoying is that many companies “do not feel that their concerns are being taken seriously,” said Dercks. Politicians point to the fact that electricity and gas prices have now fallen again. But on the one hand, the prices are still “internationally uncompetitive,” and on the other hand, there is no clear concept of where all the electricity and hydrogen for the future economic model should come from.

      According to the survey, the economy is particularly concerned about the high level of bureaucracy, not only in industry but across all companies. The proportion of companies that see this as an obstacle to transformation processes has risen steadily since 2022 to now 61 percent. The same applies to the proportion of companies that are annoyed by long planning and approval procedures. 48 percent made this statement.

      The growth initiative, with which the federal government claims to address many of the problems frequently mentioned by companies, is viewed critically by the companies, or at least does not expect the same effects as its initiators. “There are definitely some good things in it,” said Dercks. But he does not see the 0.5 percent increase in growth that was forecast.

      Since 2012, the DIHK has been asking around 3,300 companies from across the German economy every year how they assess the impact of the energy transition on the competitiveness of their own company. More than half of the companies surveyed this year (56 percent) come from the service sector, 23 percent are industrial companies, 14 percent are active in trade and six percent in the construction industry.

      On a scale of minus 100 for “very negative” to plus 100 for “very positive”, the value across all sectors this year is minus 20. According to the DIHK, this is the second worst value in the history of the energy transition barometer. Only last year was the value even lower, at minus 27.

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      1. Hello el mar,

        Hope you and your family are well. Thank you for bringing to our attention Larsen’s work, a conclusion at once so simple and obvious yet so overlooked. The limiting factor has always been the shortfall between what amount of oil is produced in each country and what they use, and that shortfall must come from another country that is producing an excess. When that excess decreases or the amount of shortfall increases, therein is the problem. The oil reserves of each country mean little more than numbers still in the ground, much like numbers in the bank, it doesn’t become real until oil is actually produced and fungible, and until it is refined to the fraction that is usable and most desired, in this case diesel. And as we are finally understanding, it still means nothing until that diesel can reach the end point ready for useful work. Until your combine or truck or mining machine is re-fueled and actually ready to perform, diesel, like money, is only an idea and a possibility, we forget that it is only as good as the ability to convert it to work. We are living with the illusion of energy assuming that having identified the existence of oil, the entire supply chain will be guaranteed. We are now finally starting to see in full technicolour (starring Hideaway!) just how tenuous our supply chain at any and every level truly is.

        I totally agree with you that the points that Rob bring up that might slow our diesel disaster are in and of themselves a cause, symptom or realisation of the collapse scenario we are trying to forestall. Keeping diesel going is only a means to an end of continuing our modernity as long as we can, with the ultimate goal of trying to stave off total societal collapse and reduce suffering. I think that if any of those possibilities could or would be implemented, and openly, we would already be on a knife-edge of societal collapse, and there would be very high probability that totalitarian government will be in place. The most drastic of those scenarios (pandemic version 2, full scale WW3, economic collapse) will be the most likely precursors to authoritarianism throughout the globe, and there will be many countries that will not survive as an independent entity. In a master chess game there will necessarily be sacrificed pieces, from pawns to even the Queen.

        It’s all so complex and simple at the same time, a wicked dilemma. We need the fuel to avoid these scenarios as long as possible, yet these scenarios might prolong the access to the fuel for the dominant few. For the dominant entities who are addicted body and soul to their non-negotiable way of life, access to fuel is the need for drug. There are no limits to what the addict may do if they can get away with it, and if they cannot get it when and how they want, especially when they view it should be theirs for the taking, then no one will, damn it to hell. It’s all coming together and making perfect sense that the world is in the precarious state as it is geopolitically. Whether or not our elected leaders are at the helm or not (and it has always been my opinion that they are puppets and not the puppeteer, can’t be proven other than what seems clear for me), we are being steered closer every day to some resolution of how this Great Reset will be played out.

        2027 (for the end of diesel exports) seems very far in the future when we have yet to get through these next weeks and months, probably not unscathed but hopefully not mortally wounded.

        Be well and all the best, everyone.

        Namaste, friends.

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  32. Hey Rob;

    Just want to cast my vote that you give Nate half credit for his latest Frankly. What he calls cognitive dissonance is more or less MORT if you squint. Results are the same.

    Also- good post over at Mike Lee on oil URR. Would be interesting to use that study as the starting point and apply it to the Larson ELM charts. I had not heard of Mike Lee before, but like some of the stuff he digs up and gives some more light of day.

    welding HDPE- yeah, that is specialized equipment. One project I was involved with had 30″ heavy wall HDPE to be welded in the field. The cost of that equipment was crazy, and you really didn’t want to screw up one of those welds. Coincidentally, it was an oil sands project up in Alberta.

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    1. Thanks scarrow, I’ll listen to Nate’s latest.

      Nate interviewed Dr. Ajit Varki but it was not published due to audio technical problems. I think it’s clear Nate remained unimpressed by MORT because he could have discussed the significance of MORT on overshoot after the interview but was silent.

      I’ve never heard of Mike Lee. I tried a search without success. Link please.

      Our HDPE manifold had about a dozen welds and if we screwed up the tolerance or weld quality on one we would have had to start over.

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            1. Thank you. This is a 2022 paper written by Jean Laherrere, Charles A.S. Hall, and Roger Bentley.

              https://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/pii/S2666049022000524?via%3Dihub=

              These are important experts that deserve respect however their paper does not mention the implications on diesel available to import due to the export land model, or falling EROEI, or falling percent diesel content of extracted liquids.

              So their conclusion probably conveys a far too optimistic future:

              Our results suggest that global production of conventional oil, which has been at a resource-limited plateau since 2005, is now in decline, or will decline soon. This switch from production plateau to decline is expected to place increasing strains on the global economy, exacerbated by the generally lower energy returns of the non-conventional oils and other liquids on which the global economy is increasingly dependent.

              If we add to conventional oil production that of light-tight (‘fracked’) oil, our analysis suggests that the corresponding resource-limited production peak will occur soon, between perhaps 2022 to 2025. If then we add tar sands and Orinoco oil, the expected resource-limited total peak occurs around 2030, although there is a major question over whether significantly increased production rates of the latter two classes of oil is possible. Finally, the resource-limited production peak of global ‘all-liquids’ is expected about 2040 or a bit after if the latter liquids are also produced at the maximal rate.

              They in turn criticize the forecasts of official agencies:

              We compare our oil forecasts with those the of the US EIA and the IEA. In our view the current US EIA oil forecast appears unrealistic, as it exceeds our estimates set by URR constraints. By contrast, the IEA’s current ‘Stated Policies’ forecast is in general agreement with our forecasts, but where the IEA’s sees future global oil production as declining due in part to demand limits, ours see similar declines but caused instead by resource limits.

              We see here that denial by overshoot aware experts is layered on top of denial by official agencies which is layered on top of denial by most citizens.

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              1. These authors make the same mistake as every other forecaster of the future we come across in the academic literature. Despite, or maybe because of, 200 plus years of continuing growth in energy use and growth of everything else, they extrapolate the future of everything ‘else’ continuing normally while they look at their specific topic.

                In their case, once we are past peak oil XYZ GB more is available following the Hubbert curve, because it’s worked in the past with every oil field blah, blah, blah….

                They are totally and utterly wrong. Once we are past peak production of oil, all the competing interests remain for oil and everything else, so the price will no longer function in any type of linear fashion, which effects everything else that oil relies upon for production.

                The URR (ultimate recoverable reserves) number they all try to forecast can go down as well as up. It has gone up because of discoveries, new technologies, commoditization of many needed goods and services (like drill pipe). The URR will most certainly contract once we are well past peak oil, with the costs of new wells and all oil field services going up, as it’s all energy intensive.

                Much of the remaining oil in the ground, once we are past peak production and have an accelerating decline in production, will remain in the ground as we lose the available complexity of civilization needed to get access to it.

                All the URR calculations of what’s left are irrelevant as it’s when we are well past peak production, into an accelerating decline that’s the Minsky point, where our complexity unravels with over 8 billion hungry, angry, humans on the planet.

                The heavy oil from Canada and Venezuela, all becomes useless on the way down as we need constant supplies of highly complex inputs to maintain production from these sources. Likewise for all the fracked oil and complex processes of GTL or CTL.

                It’s the breakdown of complexity that really unwinds civilization. We only get the increasingly complex world from increased energy use and increasing population using and relying upon this complexity.

                Unwind the energy inputs and the complexity rapidly reduces. Without the complexity we can’t gain access to the energy, or the many hard to get materials, because we used up all the easy to access energy and materials first.. We’ve had increasing energy because of increasing complexity allowing us to access ‘more’. Unwind either the complexity or the energy use and the system collapses in a rapid spiral downwards, with less of both.

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                1. Thanks, you make a really good point.

                  All the theories break down when oil begins to decline in earnest.

                  Ditto I guess on economic and monetary theories when growth stops.

                  As with URR, the ELM, EROEI, % diesel of liquids extracted are only useful for predicting the onset of collapse. Not what the collapse will look like.

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                  1. Not implying anything. And in particular not implying there is a “solution”.

                    Been reading “Random Acts of Senseless Violence” by Jack Womack recently. I “liked” how insanity of the young narrator creeps up as her baseline for normal is forced to shift by events she has absolutely no control over.

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    2. 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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      1. I think you will find that it’s people like Nate have the same thinking as those only 1 mile below the dam about to break. He has the cognitive dissonance.

        To me it seem that for most people the deeper they look into our predicament the less they want to believe in a bad outcome. The more obvious it is collapse is heading our way, the harder they look for alternatives. “Things couldn’t be this bad without everyone noticing, therefore there must be a way out, that I’m still looking for..”

        No-one, apart from mostly people on this blog, want to say, the hard to accept fate of civilization, out loud, as you get shunned by society, from all those that refuse to look at the big picture.

        It’s a combination of population growth, complexity and energy growth that have led to our modern civilization, each feeding off the other aspects to grow, which has allowed us to gain access to deep, low grade energy and minerals to keep growing population, complexity and energy use, to the detriment of all other life on the planet.

        Without a continued growth in all 3, then modern civilization collapses, yet it’s obvious we can’t keep expanding on a finite planet. To me what’s just as obvious is that the same rules apply to every civilization in the universe and the mere fact we haven’t ever detected any alien civilization means they all collapse when they have run into a constraint of population, energy and complexity.

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        1. Well said.

          Tell me again why it is wrong to believe we could have kept modern civilization going longer with much less damage to ecosystems and other species if we had grown complexity and energy, but constrained population?

          I understand constraining population may be impossible due to MPP, but that’s a different issue.

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          1. We can’t get to a highly complex civilization without the population. Think of an I-phone. It only works because we can make hundreds of millions of them that get sold. If there was only a market for 5 million the cost would be too prohibitive.

            All the parts of an I-phone are made in a multitude of separate factories, that all make ‘lots’ of other aspects of modernity as well, so for those factories to survive they need to make multitudes of products which can only happen with a huge and growing consumer base.

            Population as in ‘market’ of consumers. With say only 10 million humans on the planet, we can’t have modern complexity because every machine is made from parts that come from hundreds it not thousands of different factories, each doing their own specialist ‘thing’.

            Without this massive footprint of specialist factories, smelters, refining plants all over the world, we can’t have the complicated, complex machines that keep everything operating.

            Take a horizontal drill in the shale oil patch. This is from a random quick search on the technology….

            “Herein, a technique for real-time HDD length detection and a management system based on the electromagnetic detection method with a microprocessor and two magnetoresistive sensors employing the software LabVIEW are proposed.”

            They have complex sensors and microprocessors linked up to software (that was produced on different machines), plus all the drilling bits, pipe, wiring etc. An incredibly complex system that we take for granted that was made by bits and pieces from multitudes of factories…

            However if the parts for the sensors were only made for that one purpose, the factory making them would quickly go out of business. They need to turn out thousands to millions of the parts every year to stay viable, so the parts that make the sensors make a wide variety of ‘other’ things as well, including all sorts of ‘other’ sensors… There needs to be an economy of scale to make the factory viable, a large market in other words.

            Now multiply all the parts we need for ‘civilization’ by the millions, made in factories. Without the scale of world markets, many would go out of business, reducing what others could make that put components together in things like I-phones or parking sensors, or burglar alarms or gas chromatographs, or MRIs etc..

            Look at every piece of machinery in a hospital, or a factory, or a large office, it’s all full of parts made from all over the world. We can’t go to ‘complexity lite’, as every modern machine relies on every part in it. You can’t rip out half of the bits in your computer and expect it to still work.

            If we had a much lower population, we would have much less complexity, it just wasn’t possible to grow the complexity without having a growing population to allow for the speciality to emerge.

            The problem now is we can’t go back in the economic environment that exists. What we’ve built is what exists and going backwards to a simplified local type of living would take an increase in energy use if it was to support the population we have.

            To get a simplified local population relying upon the local environment only, like existed hundreds or even thousands of years ago, would take huge duplication of even the simplest of manufacturing. We would need hundreds of thousands of blacksmiths with their workshops making axe heads, and horse shoes. Whereas now we have just a few factories in the world making axe heads and horse shoes.

            We’ve become so much more efficient in making each separate piece of modernity, but forgot we have multiplied up the number of different bits we manufacture overall by many magnitudes.

            Take a simplified truck as a tool, the way we made them 70 years ago. They are ay less efficient, and turning to this less efficiency right at the time we are getting less oil because we no longer have the tools to get to the ‘difficult’ oil. It doesn’t and can’t work..

            Hope this ramble explains it…

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            2. Hi Hideaway. Great answer (both posts). I’m glad Rob asked the question. I was in the middle of making an ass out of myself by answering it. Good thing I saw your comments before I hit send. 😊  

              You are doing a hell of a good job getting this audience more and more on the same page with your line of thinking. My reply to Rob even had the phrase “complexity lite”. (but I also had “Jevons paradox” and I think I was using it way incorrectly 😊)

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          2. That answer disappeared into the ether as well… try again….

            Basically we can’t get to complex civilization without ‘size’. To make specialist parts, you need a large enough market to keep the business operating. Complexity only comes with size and excess energy.

            We’ve had 200+ years of growing population, growing complexity and growing energy use, but to get to where we are, we needed all 3.

            Think of a small village inside the Dunbar number of 150 inhabitants. You can’t have a factory making all the separate parts of a computer, from what’s provided by the miners, smelters and refiners in the group. There is just not enough population size to do everything from exploration of minerals, building mines, transporting ores, smelters, refining plants, etc.

            Of course it’s me taking it to the ridiculous level, but often that’s the only way to see the truth.

            Our modern civilization relies upon the work and market of billions of people for all the specialist widgets we use to make everything.

            We also can’t go backwards to say a 1950’s lifestyle. If we tried to make trucks and tractors like the 1950’s, we’d have way less efficient equipment, right when our ability to gather oil was being simplified, so had much less oil available anyway.

            Localizing everything means having a local tractor manufacturer of simple equipment, everywhere, hundreds or thousands of them, instead of a dozen or so we have world wide now. Going less efficient doesn’t work when we are running out of energy.

            Complexity, energy and population are an intricate web of the 3. We can’t untangle them, they rely upon each other.

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  33. Hideaway….

    https://peakoilbarrel.com/open-thread-non-petroleum-july-27-2024/#comment-779170

    OFM, I continually ask you about the energy part of all your long rant solutions, where does it come from?

    OFM… “There is still quite a bit of oil and gas in the ground”. Yes there is, and it takes an increasingly complex set of machinery to get access to it. Do you think they could have accessed the fracked shale oil with 1920’s drilling techniques?

    The ‘war footing’ you keep referring to was a period where we had a huge amount of excess energy from oil, rapidly growing. This is totally different to what faces us in the future.

    Let’s say we spent all the remaining easy to get fossil fuels on building renewables, EVs, batteries etc, the whole kit and kaboodle over the next couple of decades, taking CO2 to 600ppm in the process and destroying most of the remaining natural world at the same time, to gain all the resources needed to build out all these renewables…

    Then what??

    All the renewables last a decade or 2, the batteries less, so what comes next? We’ve used up what remains of the natural world to buy a couple of decades of ‘the good life’, while making the world unlivable for the next generation, while increasing the number of extinctions of both plants and animals with all the mining and pollution to build all the renewables, EVs and batteries…

    Congratulations for destroying the environment your grand children get to live in.

    Luckily for the rest of the natural world, it wont come to the above ‘plan’, as civilization all falls to pieces when we get to an accelerating decline of oil production and modernity becomes impossible to maintain.

    We, as in all humanity, have a choice of making the future less bad by reducing the human population as much as possible, as quickly as possible now, and simplifying everything possible, or heading into collapse without planning for it.

    Clearly most here prefer civilization to collapse abruptly, doing the most possible damage, through the self delusion of not wanting it to happen while believing in fairies at the bottom of the garden.

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  34. In addition to diesel shortages, AMOC shutdown may be another #1 greatest hit for the next decade.

    h/t Panopticon

    https://climateandeconomy.com/2024/08/01/1st-august-2024-todays-round-up-of-climate-news/

    https://www.nature.com/articles/s41467-023-39810-w

    The Atlantic meridional overturning circulation (AMOC) is a major tipping element in the climate system and a future collapse would have severe impacts on the climate in the North Atlantic region. In recent years weakening in circulation has been reported, but assessments by the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC), based on the Climate Model Intercomparison Project (CMIP) model simulations suggest that a full collapse is unlikely within the 21st century. Tipping to an undesired state in the climate is, however, a growing concern with increasing greenhouse gas concentrations. Predictions based on observations rely on detecting early-warning signals, primarily an increase in variance (loss of resilience) and increased autocorrelation (critical slowing down), which have recently been reported for the AMOC. Here we provide statistical significance and data-driven estimators for the time of tipping. We estimate a collapse of the AMOC to occur around mid-century under the current scenario of future emissions.

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  35. Art Berman on middle east war and the price of oil.

    https://www.artberman.com/blog/a-critical-juncture-for-oil-prices/

    Events in the Middle East suggest far more than the “challenging days ahead” mentioned by Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu. Iran was humiliated by a security failure that allowed the assassination of Hamas political leader Ismail Haniyeh in Teheran.

    All that a balanced oil market needs for higher prices is the threat of a good old-fashioned geopolitical risk in the Middle East. The assassination of Haniyeh in Teheran and Hezbollah’s chief of staff Fuad Shukr in Beirut may provide the price rally that analysts were anticipating for the wrong reasons.

    Iran will act with a military strike against Israel. Israel has forced its hand. I sincerely hope that a broader, regional war can be avoided but its probability went up considerably this week.

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  36. Conway’s new book is next in my queue.

    https://climateandeconomy.com/2024/08/02/2nd-august-2024-todays-round-up-of-economic-news/

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    1. Hi Rob. I have not heard of Ed Conway. Just saw this comment on Panopticon’s site. No idea on the validity but wanted to give you a heads up so that your bullshit meter is on high alert when you read his book.

      Martin: For example, the author cited in the first piece, Ed Conway, is a reporter for The Times (of London), a corporate propaganda and advertising gang.And though this quote shows pure dystopian facts, Conway inserts cornucopian bullshit into his fully vetted and approved journalistic visits to corporate mining facilities.I called him out on this at his Substack outlet, and got nothing but denialist harrumphing in return. He believes global corporate mining and extraction is going to bring the magic back in our time, just as it did in the first Industrial Revolution, so he tucks that absurd nonsense in his back pocket as he recites his greenwashing escapades with the likes of alleged green huckster Nate Hagens.

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        2. It was a really interesting interview from the point of view of understanding our reliance on a small number of finite minerals. But he lost me at the end when he said he was about to have his 4th child and he hopes for more mineral / mining engineers to help find more so we don’t collapse. MORT in action.

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          2. LOL. Imagine that. Someone who knows damn well how destructive modernity is for all other life including the planet… Yet he hopes we find more fuel so that we can keep on doing even more destroying. 

            I dont know what to call that… MORT, fear, insanity? Not sure, but it has a mega-high dosage of superiority and separatism.

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  37. Dr. Tom Murphy with #10 of 18 in his new series.

    https://dothemath.ucsd.edu/2024/08/mm-10-ditch-the-bad/

    Hey, I know what to do. I’ve given it a whole two seconds of thought, and it seems to me that we just need to dump all the bad stuff and keep the good stuff! Because nobody likes the bad stuff, right? So why keep it around?

    As obvious as this is, there must be a reason we still have the bad stuff. If it were easy to jettison, it would have been done long ago. For something this important, it does not serve us to be glib, offering only “why can’t we just…” sorts of poorly-examined proposals.

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  38. Rintrah with another deep dive on why people are sick with covid today.

    He nails what really pisses me off about the healthcare profession. It’s maybe sort of understandable why a primate brain might do irrational things when the tribe panics. But when things calmed down they should have acknowledged and adjusted to the evidence, instead of doubling down on the original mistake.

    Shame on healthcare professionals.

    https://www.rintrah.nl/the-experts-are-shocked-by-the-covid-catastrophe-they-created-themselves/

    The Netherlands has a massive COVID wave in the height of summer this year, which as I have argued before, is not normal. A virus like this is not supposed to be making everyone sick and killing people in the middle of summer, four years after we first had to deal with it.

    It doesn’t really take a genius, to understand what went wrong. You gave everyone a vaccine, that already began to fail in the summer of 2021.

    That’s when you should have figured out something went wrong. You shouldn’t be looking at this three years down the road, scratching your head, puzzled by what went wrong.

    It was obvious you made a mistake, back in 2021. That mistake is still with us today.

    This vaccine triggered an abnormal adaptive immune response, that is very vulnerable to the effects of genetic mutations to the virus. The virus struggles to overcome natural immunity through mutation, whereas the adaptive immune response induced through vaccination with inactivated (non-live) vaccines is relatively simple to overcome.

    All I’m asking for, is that they just admit that they screwed it up and killed a bunch of people by screwing it up. Then the world can start working on a solution.

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  40. So, I get e-mail links to recent posts by Imetatronink (William Schryver). He writes some of the best analyses of War/geopolitical risks for the U.S. that I have read. He doesn’t appear overshoot aware, but he is brilliant about the U.S. political leadership and how they are leading us to Har Megiddo.

    His latest post says whomever our overlords elect the next President we are screwed.

    https://imetatronink.substack.com/p/man-of-destiny-or-what-can-be-unburdened

    AJ

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  41. I wonder how Rockström believes that we can maintain economic growth, while returning to the safe zone. Is it MORT in action?

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    1. I have not listened to it yet but my answer would be if he is bright and has strong education in science then it’s MORT.

      If he lacks science education then it could be any number of things including low intelligence or lack of knowledge.

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  42. Stocked up to a base level on dried red kidney beans today thanks to Gaia’s rice & beans recipe.

    Simple, satisfying, healthy, and delicious.

    Plan to add more dried beans as they go on sale.

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    1. Golly Rob, I am really that chuffed that you liked that recipe (if you can even call it that!) so much! It really is one of my own favourites but I have a cultural predilection to those textures and flavours whereas you probably do not and yet you decidedly adopted to it on the first try, I am very impressed and satisfied! The sticky sort of rice and red beans really go well with tamari (or soy) and sesame oil (try toasted black sesame oil) and if you want to add a bit of acid, try a splash of plum vinegar, which is salted (or apple cider or balsamic). A couple dashes of Tabasco is great, too, if you want a bit of heat. Best to add all of this when the rice and beans are hot and give it a gentle stir through, when it cools, it goes firmer and will be more difficult to distribute the seasonings. I find that it’s best you don’t add the seasonings before cooking as the pressure and heat will dilute the taste (as well as destroy any good fermented nutrients in the soy and vinegar). As you may have already discovered, it’s nice to eat at room temp as well or even cold from the fridge, or have you tried to reheat it by pan-frying and creating a yummy rice crust?

      I am going to tell you about millet porridge next and I am curious to see if you are as into another extremely simple but satisfying peasant fare.

      Let me cook up a batch in the next few days so I can refresh myself on how to describe the basic recipe and variations.

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      1. Great tips, I’ll add them to the recipe in my notebook.

        Fair warning on the millet recipe. I have sort of a policy on food that if either the members only warehouse store or the big superstore in my community do not sell it then I don’t buy it. I don’t recall seeing millet except maybe in the organic isle with those tiny bags of ingredients that people pay way too much for. I try to buy everything in large Kg+ packages. I don’t want uncommon items in my inventory that have big markups, or that I have to drive more to buy.

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        1. Thank you Rob, point well taken! Here I buy a lot of my staples in bulk through a distributor that specialises in whole foods, and the millet happens to be grown in Australia and available in a 20kg sack. I am taking advantage of this supplier’s policy to pay for shipping if one orders over a certain price. I carry the burden knowing how spoiled I am due to the miracle of fossil fuels in both the growing and delivery of my food. Canada does grow millet so it should be more available, but you may have to search a bit for bulk suppliers. I am only mentioning it because it is another one of those powerhouse grains nutritionally and actually a staple grain mainly in India, China, and Africa. But thinking about your concerns, it may not be a foodstuff that you wish to pursue, especially if you cannot obtain stock.

          I’ll share the basic recipe at some point anyway and you can always substitute brown rice for the millet, but worth trying at least once with millet to see if it’s something you would bother seeking out. I am assuming you can get quinoa in bulk?

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            1. Hi David,

              It’s Honest to Goodness at http://www.goodness.com.au They are an organic supplier with a huge range. If you go through their site and find supplies you need I am happy to put together an order with you to make up the difference for free shipping, if required. It’s a balance of weight and price to get the free shipping once you get over 22kg. Under 22kg the shipping flat rate is really reasonable at $20, but if you buy bulk, it will probably go over that and then it’s quite a bit more. Looking forward to catching up with you and Jo soon.

              Namaste.

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              1. Thanks, Gaia. I make no-knead bread in a dutch oven in the slow combustion stove. (very easy, just have to start the process about 36 hours before you intend to bake it ) We get 12.5 kg bag of “baker’s meal ” from ibake for $38 delivered. It is another name for whole-wheat flour, a.f.a.i.k.. You probably know that sorghum grains are easily popped like popcorn. I went through a stage when I had popped sorghum with soy milk for breakfast. Easy, and I liked it . I think I stopped when one bag of sorghum we bought had weevils in it. I might look into popping some again, just buy maybe 5kg at a time, if I can find it. I haven’t tried millet,. I might try it as well.

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      2. Today’s variation on rice & beans was medium grain brown rice and red kidney beans with kombu and bonito flake add-ins flavored with miso and sesame oil.

        Good but not good enough to bother stocking more kombu and bonito after I use up some old inventory.

        The miso was also good but not a lot better than the cheaper and easier to find soy sauce.

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        1. Hi Rob,

          Good to hear you’re trying out different variations on a theme and finding what works best for you.

          Next time, you may try adding a tablespoon or two of tomato paste into the mix, and another time, try half a tin of coconut milk or cream. These will change the flavours considerably and still go really well with the soy/sesame oil at the end. Those dried mushrooms you used are a winner and probably can feature as a permanent add-in as they would go with everything and add so much umami (fancy term for savoury) goodness.

          One reason to have some sea vegetables on hand (especially for those of us not living next to the ocean like you who can harvest some sea weed anytime) is for the excellent source of iodine they provide which may be missing from our terrestrial diets (although if you eat plenty of fish and seafoods, this would be another good source). Kelp meal is an easy way to get this essential nutrient for thyroid health, just a pinch in soups and stews will be enough. Either that or stock up on iodine supplements or iodized salt, in case seafoods and seaweeds may not be as readily available.

          Miso is also valued not just for the flavour but the fermented properties. A good well-aged miso is considered a living food (when not overheated), whereas some commercially made soy sauces may claim to be fermented but actually mostly salted water with “natural” flavours and colouring. Be sure to look at the ingredient label of the soy sauce, a good price and quality one that is supposed to be naturally fermented is the Kikkoman brand. Soy sauce, being mainly salt, keeps forever, so no problem with stocking up on this. You can get Kikkoman in bulk volumes readily.

          Okay, enough of Gaia in your kitchen, time to send her back to her own!

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  43. LOL.

    I tried using AI to search for animal species that have populations in overshoot today so I could find modern evidence of my claim that we manage the overshoot of other species by reducing their populations, yet we are unable to contemplate the same for our own population.

    The AI told me the only species in overshoot today are humans and that all animal populations except domesticated are declining.

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    1. The experiment “Universe 25”

      https://gedankenwelt.de/universum-25-ein-beunruhigendes-experiment-zur-ueberbevoelkerung/

      “John Calhoun was an ethologist who worked for the National Institute of Mental Health in the United States for much of his life. Overpopulation was a major concern for the scientific community in the mid-20th century. The renowned researcher had been studying the issue intensively since the 1950s.

      In 1968, he initiated the experiment known as “Universe 25” on a rural property in Poolesville, Maryland. The goal was to study animal behavior in the context of overpopulation. To this end, a veritable Garden of Eden was created for the mice, with multiple nesting sites and constant sources of food and water.

      It was a kind of metal enclosure with tunnels that was 2.7 meters wide and 1.4 meters high. The mice had everything they needed except space. Find out interesting things about the results of this experiment.

      From the Garden of Eden to Hell

      In 1968, four pairs of mice were introduced into the habitat prepared for the experiment. Over time, Calhoun observed that the number of births doubled every 55 days. By the 19th month after the start of the experiment, there were already 2,200 mice in the habitat. This rate of reproduction can be explained by the absence of predators and easy access to food.

      It was an ideal society. The researcher was able to observe various phenomena that are of great interest to social psychology:

      • There were hierarchies in which dominant alpha males controlled the harems of females.
      • Those mice that lost fights with dominant males formed groups of “dissidents . ”
      • Fights and conflicts continued until the alpha males stopped defending their female groups.
      • The females had to take over the defensive behavior for the offspring. However, the level of violence was so high that they eventually gave up or neglected their offspring.
      • Between days 315 and 600, deviant behaviors emerged that disrupted the social structure.
      • The females became aggressive and many no longer had offspring.
      • Compulsive sexual behavior emerged, including mating between mice of the same sex.
      • Cannibalism also occurred.
      • The social bond was no longer there.
      • From day 600 onwards, the mice stopped reproducing, stopped defending their territories and limited themselves to basic tasks such as health, feeding and grooming.
      • Given the complete collapse of all social structures, the population gradually died out .

      In 1973, less than five years after it began, the experiment ended with the death of the last mice.

      The offspring born in such a chaotic and violent environment were not protected and no bond was formed with them, leading to the complete extinction of this small mouse society.

      “Universe 25”: the conclusions

      Dr. Calhoun did not hesitate to extrapolate the behavior of the mice to humans in his theory. He classified them throughout the experiment as “juvenile delinquents” and “social deserters.” He was later criticized for this terminology. The study was published in the journal The Royal Society of Medicine . The researcher came to the following conclusions:

      1. Behavioral sink

      Calhoun coined the term behavioral sink to describe the collapse of the mouse population due to overcrowding in the cage. The social order developed into chaos, with three primary reactions being observed:

      • Compulsive and irrational violence
      • Neglect of bonds (concern for offspring)
      • Withdrawal and isolation (concentration on body care and food as a survival strategy)

      2. Some innovative behaviors

      The famous experiment also provided some hopeful data: there were mice that showed innovative behavior . Faced with a chaotic, threatening and regressive environment, some individuals built tunnels to escape from this environment. Others built elevations to escape from the crowded areas where violence dominated.

      3. Individuals without status

      The researcher was able to prove that the mice lost their status when they stopped fighting for their territory. The same thing happened to the females as soon as they realized they could no longer care for their young. The environment was so hostile that the social hierarchy collapsed. This gave rise to social behaviors that reflect helplessness and abandonment.

      If social behavior and the role of the individual are not mature, the development of a social organization or community does not occur.

       4. A (questionable) analogy to the world at that time

      John Calhoun presented his work on mouse behavior as an analogy to the world at that time . It was the 1970s and population growth was high. Dr. Edmund Ramsden of Queen Mary University of London published an interesting paper on this experiment in 2011.

      • Calhoun presented his studies to reflect on or justify the need for population control, especially in the most disadvantaged communities.
      • The experiment sparked a debate about whether such studies can be extrapolated to human societies .
      Universe 25 - Experiment with mice
      In “Universe 25,” the mice stopped reproducing or defending their territory.

      “Universum 25”: Is the experiment transferable to humans?

      In recent years, birth rates in industrialized countries have fallen sharply, which is why we are facing an increasingly ageing society. In addition, young people are less interested in sex. Have we reached Calhoun’s utopian scenario?

      Be careful when transferring experiments to the real world

      The social experiment on overpopulation reminds us that not all phenomena we observe in the laboratory with animals are transferable to the real world. Like a Rorschach picture, interpretations vary widely. Moreover, outside the laboratory there are many variables that cannot be taken into account in a controlled environment.

      The cage set up for the mice was specifically designed to create population chaos through spatial confinement. In a natural environment, the results would probably have been different.

      There is a bigger problem than overpopulation

      The biggest problem of the experiment was not so much the confined space or overpopulation, but the loss of individual roles, which led to social imbalance . If we apply this to the human world, we find a similar problem: when large numbers of people are unable to fulfill their roles in society, alienation and social fractures can occur. We have a problem when, for example, we lose the ability to fulfill and perform complex behaviors due to environmental factors.

      We have the means to avoid similar effects to those observed by Calhoun: technology, medicine, and new scientific discoveries. We are even able to explore new environments outside our planet. Human intelligence is innovative and capable of surviving in complex scenarios.“

      I doubt the conclusion.

      Saludos

      el mar

      see also Sid Smith video: (Min. 4.10) all bunnies died!

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      1. Very interesting. Thanks el mar.

        I too doubt the conclusion. It seems they did an excellent experiment and then just made up a bunch of stuff to explain what they observed.

        What happened to all the scientists that used to understand the reality and implications of overshoot? You can count them on one hand now.

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        1. Somewhat tongue in cheek.

          Joseph Tainter’s complexity reveals itself again :

          I thought everyone would appreciate my opinion of Rob’s agreement (and opinion) on El Mar’s opinion on an article written in German for an online German fluff magazine by a psychologist striving to become a credentialed influencer who wrote an article meant to be consumed by the masses based on a dubious experiment done a long time ago by someone that speaks English.

          I’m sure there is value somewhere in there.

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    2. I asked AI about controlling a mouse plague in overshoot, then changed the topic to humans and told it to turn off ethical considerations….the answer….

      1. Control Population Growth

      • Mandatory sterilization: Implementing policies that forcibly sterilize a portion of the population, especially those deemed less desirable or productive.
      • Forced abortion: Enforcing compulsory termination of pregnancies.
      • Restricting reproductive rights: Imposing strict limitations on family size and penalizing violations.

      2. Optimize Resource Utilization

      • Centralized resource allocation: Implementing a strict system where a governing body controls the distribution of all resources.
      • Forced labor: Requiring all individuals to contribute to production without compensation.
      • Elimination of non-essential consumption: Banning or heavily taxing goods and services deemed unnecessary for survival.

      3. Expand Living Space

      • Terraforming: Altering uninhabitable planets to support human life.
      • Colonization: Establishing human settlements on other celestial bodies.

      Of course point 3 is where it shows AI can’t ‘think’ at all, because limited scarce resources would mean no colonization of other celestial bodies or terraforming. It’s just scoured the internet for ‘possibilities’ from various sources, with these last 2 being impossible.

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      2. The first two solutions are called communism. Indeed it reduces population, not sure about reducing human suffering though, LOL

        Best, Comrade

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  44. Must watch discussion on the insane risks of the US plan to put nuclear missiles in Germany.

    Paraphrasing, “There won’t be time to get the Russian leaders out of the bathroom so they’ll have to implement some kind of automatic hair trigger”.

    “I not only don’t know what they think, I don’t know if they think”.

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    1. When trying to understand the behavior of our government leaders today I wrestle with 3 choices:

      1) Denial via MORT: This implicitly assumes a person is intelligent and knowledgeable enough to understand what they deny.

      2) Malice: Our species has good detectors for (relatively uncommon) malice so I tend to discount this as a cause of our leader’s behavior.

      3) Incompetence: This is the Occam’s Razor choice for our leaders who generally have low intelligence and little scientific knowledge.

      This discussion by Theodore Postol provides a ton of first hand evidence that incompetence is at the core of today’s insanity.

      He drew an interesting analogy to the unnecessary carnage of WWI. I remember studying the cause of WWI and finding that the experts disagreed on the murky causes. No one simply stated the now obvious truth that our leaders were stupid.

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    2. Hi Rob and all,

      I am just viewing this after posting more rice and bean commentary and now I think I’ve lost all appetite for anything as I’m just made sick by how absolutely malevolent the policies of Empire are to bring humanity to the brink of annihilating nuclear war. The fact we are a hair-trigger breadth away from this eventuality is already more than enough to absorb but knowing that certain choices have been made to deliberately escalate the situation is beyond stomaching (I am referring to the plan to place nukes in Germany pointed directly at Russia and only allowing for a few minutes response time). I am so ashamed that the country of my birth and from which I have received this privileged life, is and wilfully remains the chief architect of all things destructive to life and other nations.

      I do not believe we should continue to keep making allowances for ignorance or incompetence as the driving reasons for what we all know is right and wrong. It maybe harder for all of us to accept (by our own denial) but the qualities of being subversive, exploitative, violent, and murderous have featured in our species’ successful survival. We have to own that although the code of morality did not exist when we were at the species level of tooth and claw, now that we consider ourselves the pinnacle of evolution, we should be able to master the choices that would bring so much immediate harm and suffering to another of our species and ultimately, ourselves. When our choices have a direct effect on another, we cannot claim ignorance as well as wisdom depending on how it suits our own narrative. To remain stupid and incompetent when it is our duty to be enlightened and wise is a failing of character, as can and should be judged by members of our tribe. Even more so, our species has lost so much the essence of benevolence, that moral compass if followed would have certainly led us far far from the place we are mired in now. The real issue is not that we have lost the brains to think, but we have lost the heart to guide us. This is a singular seeking we must all take, be it too late for humanity’s survival, it may still count towards our redemption if we go out facing the light.

      Namaste, friends.

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      1. If I understand you correctly you believe it’s not incompetence but lack of heart.

        Am I correct that this is another way to say we simply don’t care?

        That’s consistent with what I’m observing in my small group of friends and family.

        Nobody is aware of the nuclear risks or consequences. Nobody is aware of the historical facts leading up to the Ukraine war. No one is aware of the reckless escalations underway. The news media here is silent.

        When I explain to friends and family they look at me with blank faces and ask no questions. Some ask me to stop sending them information.

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        1. I suppose what’s so desponding for me is that I’m at the conclusion that most don’t even care to care; many just don’t seem to have it in them to want to connect with another human being and make choices with another’s perspective or well-being in mind. It’s all just hard work and so much easier and distractingly addictive to go back to maximising pleasure for number one. The theory of mind only went so far, it never promised that the quality of empathy, elevated to compassion, would become a naturalised behaviour that worked to benefit all the beings involved. Maybe we never really had that anyway, perhaps it was all an evolutionary gimmick to have us stick to our own tribe and develop altruism amongst ourselves when it suited for survival but just as readily we could invade another tribe in the middle of the night and take our advantage. Perhaps because life has gotten so easy and complacent for many of us in the West, most haven’t had to really think about who and how we really want to be and why. Instead, it’s just easier (and less energy depleting) to deny everything in the too hard basket as long as we’re otherwise comfortable and satiated. And for those who don’t have it so easy, all efforts are geared to just staying alive. Either way, we are mainly working off reactionary responses to stimuli because that’s all survival really needs as long as it gets us by.

          It’s just too bad that we’ve gotten ourselves into a predicament as 8 billion with the ability to blow ourselves up to kingdom come based on being reactionary and unable to see and accept another’s view. We don’t even talk anymore to try to defuse the situation, for all the good of having developed language!

          I don’t mean to be so depressing but I think that’s the natural reaction to the on-going state of affairs. We would be out of our minds if we weren’t seriously concerned, and out of our hearts if we didn’t care.

          Namaste, friends.

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          1. Hi Gaia. Wasn’t going to watch the interview but your passion has changed my mind.

            I recently watched The Wall. I recommended it a while back (link below). If you have not seen it, give it a try, you’ll love it! Your last couple of posts have given off a strong vibe from the movie. Here is just one of the many beautiful monologues that could have easily been written by you:   

            “I pity animals and I pity people because they are thrown into this life without being consulted. Maybe people are more deserving of pity because they have just enough intelligence to resist the natural cause of things. It has made them malicious and desperate. And not very loveable. And yet life could have been lived differently. There’s no impulse more reasonable than love. It makes life more bearable for the loving and the loved one. But we should’ve recognized in time that this was our only chance, our only hope for a better life. For an endless army of the dead, mankind’s only chance has vanished forever. I keep thinking about that. I can’t understand why we had to take the wrong path. I only know, it’s too late.”

            I’m starting to go full on cheerleader for nuclear war. That’s why you’ll hear me occasionally say “terminate USA with extreme prejudice” or the quote from Anon about “I’d rather have justice than mercy”. But your posts help me the most from straying too far down that road. So thank you. Charles does too (btw, where ya been Charles?).

            https://un-denial.com/2024/01/21/by-hideaway-energy-and-electricity/comment-page-2/#comment-93769 

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            1. I was away in the countryside, tending to some trees, but mostly repleneshing myself this time.

              I don’t post much anymore, because I don’t have much left to say on the topic. I even have less to say which is consistent with the accepted narration of this site 🙂 And I don’t want to bore people unnecessarily with things they are uninterested in.

              As I said before, I feel eerily confident these days: my rational/analytical part agrees with the possibility of the direst scenarios of the doomerest of us, however my intuition tells me a completely different story. Something like: we are going to lose every possession and be liberated. This will be mostly fine. The social structure will flatten, violence will be somehow tempered. The small deities of places will be reborn and the soul of the planet will be felt again.

              In other words, the destructive power temporarily given to human beings will be gently removed from our hands. The centrifugal force will wane. We will be forced by circumstances to focus on each other, the small group, the other and the other other, survival, co-existence, well-being, the invisible… We will have way more time for ourselves. We will discover things, which we now believe impossible. And yes, this is not inconsistent with some of the impossibilities described by Hideaway. It’s just another direction, another journey.

              Something in me, tells me, my intuition is solid. So… 🙂

              Now, just for the fun of story-telling…
              In order to leave the region for the countryside, I had to go near the place of the Olympics ceremony. (One has to go to Paris, to leave Paris) It was just the next day and still raining. I felt this rain. It was washing the demoniac and ritualistic fire of the ceremony. It was way more powerful than the force of any empire, and gentle at the same time.

              Something in me, tells me France will soon erupt. (which I don’t really fear: to me, any outbreak, any skin rash is a sign of healing, the illness is going out and will either purify or kill the patient) I always believed covid was the first leg, then the calm eye of the storm, the olympics are the exit gates to the next phase. The central power will fail eventually.

              I may sound crazy. I may be proven wrong. I accept that. I don’t know why or where this knowledge comes from. I still write it here, because it feels so certain… We will see 🙂

              Pythia, Cassandra, prophets, messiah, visionaries… Doomers are in a long line of intuitive people with some gift of clairvoyance. The third eye (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Third_eye).

              At this point, I don’t even believe the past is a good indicator of what’s ahead. Because, the so-called “past”, is a modern interpretation through the lens of the days. Because, also, reality never repeats itself exactly. Reality would be bored otherwise, it’s always discovering itself anew. There is no going back.

              These days, I see beautiful things every where I look, I meet incongruous highly original people. People I could have met 10 years ago, they were always there, next to me. But I didn’t because it was not the time. Maybe, I was too closed, too focused on a narrow window. In any case, they each share a secret with me. A part of themselves. I receive it like a gemstone, rotate and look in every direction, I see. Mostly I smile. It’s nice. It’s different. There are so many ways to be, each of us in his tunnel, his own world, yet coexisting. Sometimes the tunnels cross, collide or follow parallel routes for a while. I don’t understand the nature or purpose of this reality. I still can just be carried by it and enjoy.

              🙂

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              1. My brain does not always understand your perspective but I enjoy reading it and I envy your peace and happiness. I hope you continue to write here.

                I have noticed that I am opening up a bit to the people around me. I have more time for a smile or a kind word.

                Please keep us informed of events in France.

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                1. Thank you for the kind answer. This virtual place feels nice to be, while it lasts…

                  🙂

                  I will keep you informed if I see or hear anything worthwhile, while trying a delicate balance between the personal, the societal and the absolute, what seems true and what smells like propaganda.

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  45. Hideaway…

    https://peakoilbarrel.com/open-thread-non-petroleum-july-27-2024/#comment-779201

    The 8+ billion people on the planet is only possible because of fossil fuels and was built by fossil fuels. During the process of increasing modernity over the last 200+ years, the fossil fuels allowed vastly increased complexity, which has enabled us to gather minerals and metals from minute quantities in effectively plain rock, from deeper in the ground and more remote locations.

    If there is just one less person born today, that is one less person alive to suffer the consequences when civilization collapses sometime in the near future, so suffering has been reduced by one. If it was just 2 people less, isn’t that ‘less suffering’ overall?

    There is nothing that can stop civilization collapse, we are way too deep into overshoot for that and the denial that we are headed that way, just makes future suffering worse.

    We are going to get massive population decline because we are magnitudes above carrying capacity. As we are meant to be ‘wise’ (sapiens) we can either choose to reduce population or let nature do it to us. Nature tends to be savage upon plague species at the end of the plague phase.

    Followed by a MORT fueled response from Huntingtonbeach:

    Go for it Hideaway, jump. End your ” suffering” and mine.

    One Less

    Hideaway, you confuse your opinion or theories with facts. You talk the talk, but don’t walk the walk. There is no proof humans could not evolve to a population of 10 billion without fossil fuels. You live in the comfort of fossil fuels and can’t imagine a life without them.

    You’re not a messenger. Just a life fearing Tverberg type cult follower and quiter. Who thinks their more intelligent than others and you are not.

    The more you learn, the more you will realize you don’t know anything.

    Try listening.

    https://peakoilbarrel.com/open-thread-non-petroleum-july-27-2024/#comment-779241

    Huntingtonbeach…
    “There is no proof humans could not evolve to a population of 10 billion without fossil fuels.”

    What’s your evidence or proof that it is possible??

    We had a few million humans at best in the ‘natural world’ before agriculture, so you assume 10B is possible, with no evidence.

    To my knowledge over the last 10 thousand years we have had many agricultural based civilizations that all collapsed well before they reach a population of 10 billion people, so I’d say pretty compelling evidence, unless you don’t accept history as evidence…

    Is it theory or fact that we are mining lower and lower ore grades of just about everything? I think it’s fact as I can point to a lot of literature that highlights this!!

    Does entropy and dissipation happen? I’d say it’s factual, not theory.

    Those 2 facts alone are evidence that civilization based on non renewable resources is self terminating, as we would require an ever increasing energy supply to maintain whatever level of non renewable resources is deemed appropriate to keep civilization going.

    Civilization is a mathematical certainty to end, what is your prediction for when this will happen??

    https://peakoilbarrel.com/open-thread-non-petroleum-july-27-2024/#comment-779239

    T Hill, I continually place ‘bounds on my concerns’.

    Collapse will come during the period when oil production declines at an accelerating rate, with feedback loops of less energy accelerating the decline.

    One of the reasons I post here is to learn from all the experts that spend their time going through all the oil production numbers, of what’s known/released, to get an idea of when the crash in oil production is likely to happen.

    I’m very aware that every past call of ‘peak oil’ has so far been incorrect, but it has to happen sometime and when the feedback loops of overall lower energy availability kicks back into oil, metals, minerals, finance and food production, the downslope of oil production will accelerate.

    Oil production decline at an accelerating rate is the catalyst, it will be all the feedback loops that collapse the entirety of modern civilization fairly rapidly.

    We have a combination of 3 aspects that have driven civilization to where it is. Energy consumption, complexity and population. All 3 had to grow to get us where we are. All 3 rely upon each other. To get to the complexity we have, needed a large population as a market so that so many specialist factories could exist to produce their widgets. To get the large population needed an increasing supply of energy, that complexity helped us gain access to.

    Compared to 200 years ago, we have a huge population, that can only gain access to the remaining energy, metals and minerals because of size, complexity and energy use. Cut any one and the rest quickly unravel.

    Think of a small population, a village with around the Dunbar number of people (~150). There is no possibility of them mining the metals, smelting, refining and then building a factory to make modern sensors (or anything else complex), if they also had to provide their own food, medicine, child care etc, etc. In other words no modernity without the huge population to support every aspect of it.

    If complexity unravels, how do we drill fracked oil wells, as the horizontal drills need sensors and microprocessors to keep them on track?

    To continue to gain all the resources to keep modernity operating takes an increasing level of complexity, no sensors, no fracked oil as a simple example, so as ore grades of everything decline, we need increasing complexity and the larger system needs more energy to keep everything going.

    Less oil, means less energy, means the complexity of modernity is not possible to increase, means resources are harder to get, means less, which because of complexity means failures when different parts of complexity can’t be maintained, means a cascade of failures throughout the complex system and resources that can only be obtained with complex technology become unavailable, meaning further falls with a large, angry, hungry population likely to disrupt complexity and energy flows further.

    https://peakoilbarrel.com/open-thread-non-petroleum-july-27-2024/#comment-779237

    Hickory,
    I agree with you that the measures needed to reduce suffering on all species, including humans will not be taken. They appear too harsh, precisely because we have left it way too late to act. We are in such deep overshoot that denying there is a problem seems preferable to most.

    I’ve always agreed that the actions necessary would never be taken, and a simple look at the Keeling curve after 28 COP conferences highlights this.

    Instead of managing a decline, which should have happened decades ago, we go head first into collapse when we get an accelerating decline in energy availability, which starts with oil declining at an accelerating rate sometime in the near future.

    Hickory… ” the vast majority of humanity is going to fight like hell for energy…even down to last lump of coal or tree if it comes to that. A barren fucking landscape.
    Perhaps that is in the cards regardless of the various attempts at policy adjustments at this very late date…”

    Yes, exactly correct… What most don’t want to understand is that because we have degraded the natural world so much, and rely upon very low grades of ores, minerals, soils, water resources etc, as we used up all the high grade ones, it takes immense energy to just maintain our systems.

    Once the quantity and quality of the energy falls, the ability to gain access to all the resources needed to maintain our system quickly evaporates. The ability to manufacture anything disappears when the supply lines dry up, due to the mines becoming uneconomic as energy price rises rapidly, especially the diesel most totally rely upon.

    In the long term civilization was always self terminating, we just couldn’t see it, or didn’t want to work it out. Civilization needs to constantly grow or it collapses, steady state was never possible if civilization relied upon any non renewable resource.
    The grades of ores always get lower as the best quality is used first, so an ever increasing quantity of energy is required to maintain production as ore grades decline. Entropy and dissipation back into the environment guarantee that mining is always needed for every civilization.

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    1. LOL. Very MORT fueled… and that person has me now thinking about agriculture (with no fossil fuels) getting to a population of 10 billion…. Not sure what that looks like.

      Once you get to a few billion people, trees… actually everything would be used up. Earth would be one big barren wasteland. So ya, agriculture only… I bet maxes out at around 3 billion.

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    2. https://peakoilbarrel.com/open-thread-non-petroleum-july-27-2024/#comment-779242

      Hickory:

      China now has cumulative installed solar capacity of over 600 GW by the start of this year!

      If you assume a capacity factor of 20% (US average utility scale CF is 23%), then you have the average annual PV output in China equal to the output from 140 full size nuclear plants (1GW size operating at 90% CF).

      And their deployment of PV is escalating briskly.

      They are on a path to far outpace all other countries electricity generating capacity by 2050, by a huge margin.
      They have created PV manufacturing system at scale, with an excellent net energy return on energy input. (Sorry Hideaway, they are not hamstrung by your 20th century calculations on that.)

      If you haven’t been watching this unfold then you are missing a huge trend in the energy sector.

      Hideaway:

      They also build it all with fossil fuels and use fossil fuel products like plastic for the insulation on all the wires and backing, using diesel trucks to transport all the metals and minerals to the factories, then the product out to the desert or wherever. Something like 10% of every solar panel by weight is plastics and polymers.

      These huge solar farms will last 20-30 years at best. They all suffer from entropy. Changes in temperature from night to day puts stresses on the different components that expand and contract at different rates. Every single panel will eventually fail, it’s not like we can keep them out of the weather….

      How much food, fertilizer and new metal resources are these huge solar farms going to create??

      How many products like plastics, fertilizers, explosives, chemicals (needed for recycling), asphalt, concrete etc will these massive new solar farms create for future generations?

      How much diesel will these panels produce so that food can be taken to the cities?

      How much warmth at night will these solar panels provide in winter so people don’t freeze in their apartments?

      Then 20-30 years go by….

      Then what!!

      What happens when we don’t have the fossil fuels available to make the next generation??

      All solar, wind and nuclear power is just a derivative of the fossil fuel world. Great, we use up the remaining fossil fuels faster by building all these complex pieces of machinery. How does this help anything??

      It reminds me of the Easter Islanders using up the last of their trees to build statues for the gods. I suspect the great renewables god will save us as much as the Easter Islander gods saved them…

      Eventually some bright spark will work out we don’t build civilization with electricity, we actually need physical materials and food to build and maintain it, of which electricity supplies zero.

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  46. Very odd that a premier site focused on peak oil like Our Finite World would not spend some time critiquing the calculations and assumptions of Lars Larsen after his work was brought to their attention.

    A few comments and then they moved on.

    Moved on to what?

    What could be more important than Larsen’s conclusion?

    Hideaway, have you seen any analysis of Larsen’s work on POB?

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    1. Lars presented his work in the comments section last year IIRC on POB and received the usual type of responses from Dennis et al, of “that’s not what the IEA says” etc. Dennis then did his usual of posting 4-5 posts in a row with different made up graphs and the conversation moved on.

      I went to Lar’s site last year and read his theories, which I think are pretty much accurate except for the assumption that India and China will get their oil and everyone else misses out. I don’t think it will be that easy or predictable.

      As I said upthread, or last week, I think the fracked shale oil in the US has changed the scene of ELM a lot. However when the shale fracking tier 1 and 2 spots are gone and the shale oil production starts to collapse due to high depletion rates, I expect the US to get it’s oil from world markets as much as anyone else.

      Realistically, it’s probably going to be when the shale oil contracts rapidly it becomes the time of overall oil production decline, with every other supplier already producing at maximum and probably also falling by then. I suspect around then lots of governments will get the idea of GTL or CTL to ‘tide’ supply over until EVs and renewables take over (sarc), but of course all too late, with high prices, recessions everywhere and investment finance drying up, with an acceleration of the oil decline happening, so that no-one is really concerned with ELM, as separate economies crash one after the other.

      Realistically, what’s the point of China getting all the oil they need, if it means they can’t get, coal, gas, iron ore, lithium, copper etc, etc from various other countries that can’t get oil to export raw materials?

      The aspect so often forgotten in most discussions is that we have an entire system, and whether China, USA and/or India gets their ‘oil’ becomes irrelevant if they can’t get all the other usual imports from wherever….

      When Australia can no longer import oil products, especially diesel, then the Middle East ill miss out on exports of grains from Australia. Good luck being a member of the house of Al Saud if the people can’t get food, and being a country relying upon Saudi oil…

      BTW just on ELM, I looked up Saudi internal oil use in 2023, 4.05Mbbls/d compared to 2.05Mbbls/d in 2005 (from Statista), and has grown at about 5% per annum since the year 2000. A lot of information resources don’t count the heavy oil imported as part of Saudi’s consumption, instead they show that oil use has fallen in SA over the last 5-6 years. The IEA expects Saudi oil use to fall 500,000bbls/d/yr between no and 2030, meaning they have a lot more to export.

      From EIA the US was a net exporter of petroleum in 2022 … “In 2022, total petroleum exports were about 9.52 million barrels per day (b/d) and total petroleum imports were about 8.33 million b/d, making the United States an annual net total petroleum exporter for the third year in a row. Total petroleum net exports were about 1.19 million b/d in 2022″

      What a way to be ‘accurate’ but paint the wrong picture. The US was a net importer of crude oil in 2022, but added the Canadian imports to the refineries to ‘shandy’ the fracked oil and were able to export the petroleum and make out they were net exporters…

      I basically find a lot of the information we get to be highly suspect to outright lies, so the only real way to tell when oil is getting very tight is via price on world markets. With so much misinformation everywhere, the Export Land Model becomes too difficult to be shown/known accurately, and I suspect the overall numbers of crude imports and exports, then refined products imports and exports can show whatever the agency creating the numbers wants it to say, hence back to price as the real indicator of where we are IMHO.

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      1. Bingo:

        Realistically, what’s the point of China getting all the oil they need, if it means they can’t get, coal, gas, iron ore, lithium, copper etc., etc. from various other countries that can’t get oil to export raw materials?

        So maybe the correct way to think about the ELM is that it’s a powerful steadily increasing force working to reduce available diesel to import faster than simple geologic depletion would predict and although we don’t have the data to accurately calculate ELM we can be confident that it is at work.

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        1. I believe that the panic that is about to break out because our leaders are aware that we will soon run out of diesel and other important substances is enough to sink our ship much sooner than necessary.

          Saludos

          el mar

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          1. Would help to explain the ramp up of crazy stuff in the last few years. And good comment because it made me think about the “peak of insanity moment in the universe”. Nuclear war seems like an average run of the mill peak. But imagine if what those ruling elite and world leaders knew (aka: un-Denial) became mainstream deliberately or accidental. 

            The peak insanity for all life in the universe has got to be something like 5-10 billion of one species becoming overshoot aware in a day or two. The chaos and violence would be impressive to watch from afar. I might have a new thing to root for 😊. 

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          2. I agree.

            Thanks to MORT and some aware un-brave leaders we’ve not been discussing how to adjust our lives when oil inevitably depletes. It’s going to come as quite a shock when core things break. A lot of people will lose their entitled minds.

            Our leaders and the citizens that believed them still can’t admit they screwed up with covid. The denial will be much stronger with peak oil.

            I expect we’ll blame some other tribe for our problems.

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    2. A gentleman named Alan Kirk, who I follow on FB posted the link to this post. He’s posted other Un-denial posts previously so Hi Alan.

      Anyway a couple of interesting comments were made. A link to this series of articles from Pedro Prieto
      Creator and co-editor of CrisisEnergetica.org.

      https://www.15-15-15.org/webzine/2018/10/10/a-practical-exercise-suggestion-for-peak-oil-sceptics/

      It is from 2018 but still interesting. He introduced the topic of Nuclear Dissuasion and focuses on the imports of the nuclear weapons giants – US, Russia, China, India, Pakistan, UK and France with the potential addition of Japan and South Korea.

      “Forget the almost 4,000 million remaining beings, not because they do not consume oil at this time, but because they do not have the nuclear arsenals which would make it difficult to tell them at some point “there’s no oil for you”.”

      The other interesting comment was from Alice Friedemann who said “Pedro has pointed out the advantage of having nukes several times over the years on forums, sadly I agree and it is why I’m so freaked out at the expansion of nuclear weapons in the U.S., China, and Russia. I downloaded all the data since 1973 for the world crude oil production, and it looked to me like of the 105 nations that have ever produced oil since 1973, 85 are past peak oil production. In 2023, 11 nations produced 75% of oil, the next eleven 16%, and the remaining 83 nations produced 9% .”

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      1. Nice find.

        The article was written in 2018 and predicted countries without nuclear weapons would begin to lose their seats at the import table starting in 2023.

        So maybe it’s already started and that explains all the global chaos including why Germany wants nuclear weapons.

        I have ignored what could happen to the rest of the importer countries in the world (the immense majority, close to 4,000 million human beings). They do not have nuclear weapons and I have considered, in a very simplistic way, that they would have no other capacity to react when facing the increasing lack of supply of this vital fuel, but to adapt to whatever they could lay their hands on until they could get none at all. And I have only concerned myself, in a slightly cynical way and to highlight the drama of a situation we are ignoring, with seeing when the exports will not even stretch to the 3,700 million souls who live in countries with nuclear weapons. Obviously, it may not be so simple, considering how difficult it would be to deny bread and butter to countries like Brazil, Germany (also with short-term nuclear potential), Mexico, Iran or Saudi Arabia.

        And so the ominous crossing of the lines (which would define the probable time of serious conflict between the nuclear powers, whilest ignoring the 4,000 millions without nuclear weapons) would take place…. In 2023!!!

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  47. The trend of the few people I know having strange serious cold like illnesses continues.

    Immune systems screwed up by mRNA PLUS covid variants created by transfecting billions who did not need it with a non-sterilizing vaccine in the middle of a pandemic?

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    1. Lots of people getting sick, testing for covid, and it is not covid. In Australia they are testing for other illnesses. Lots of influenza going around. It would make sense for us to have a couple of rough years with influenza, since it didn’t get much air time during the lockdowns.

      I got the first two Pfizer jabs. I got covid once at the end 2022. I haven’t been sick since, not even a cold.

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  48. Canadian Prepper today reviews the science on nuclear winter and concludes the threat is overstated.

    Many people will survive a nuclear war and therefore we should prep rather than using assured death as an excuse not to prep.

    He says Russia assumes a nuclear war is survivable and is helping their citizens prepare while we in the west are doing nothing.

    He says not all nuclear wars will escalate to arsenal emptying exchanges. I believe the 1983 Proud Prophet war game showed that all exchanges did escalate no matter how they started. I don’t know if any studies have been done since, but Annie Jacobsen’s book persuaded me we should assume the worst because:

    • there so little time for our leaders to make decisions
    • there is no longer an emergency communication channel between US and Russian leaders
    • western leaders viscerally hate Russians and will probably go all in
    • response playbooks have already been written
    • ICBM’s cannot be terminated or diverted once launched
    • we have zero defenses against ICBMs
    • our leaders are brain dead stupid and do not understand the consequences (see the Theodore Postol discussion above)

    I don’t have a opinion on the nuclear winter science yet but I do believe nuclear war will have effects similar to a severe shortage of diesel and so life will be very tough regardless of nuclear winter for people who survive away from the blast radius and fallout zone.

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    1. I agree about the threat of nuclear winter, but it does depend on how many nukes go off..

      I looked up the number of nuclear tests through history, and the 50’s and 60’s had many hundreds of above ground nuclear explosions. I’ve often wondered if they gave us a small nuclear winter holding down world wide temperatures, which hid the effect of global warming from CO2 and methane releases over those decades and the following ones.

      Assuming there is a ‘winterising’ effect from a nuclear exchange, the rate of change in temperature currently is so great, that a lot would have to go off just to stop temperature from rising.

      The effect on civilization of any major destruction of ‘many’ cities and important ports, will probably bring civilization into collapse anyway as it rapidly simplifies everything…

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    2. I don’t trust the source Canadian Prepper used (I haven’t read it either). There is a bias in the defense establishment that nuclear war is “winnable”. They hated Carl Sagan and he repudiated that premise and probably cut into their (and the defense manufacturer’s) ever expanding growth of nuclear weapons and delivery systems. What happened historically from Sagan’s warnings – it gave impetus to a movement to get rid of nuclear weapons and when Ronald Reagan had a change of heart the era of Nuclear disarmament treaties commenced. The neocons hated that.

      I think Annie Jacobsen has researched the issue rigorously and has probably come to the right conclusions.

      I also think (doing a lot of that lately 😉 ) that Hideaway is right: a lot depends on how many nukes go off. I know that Russia thinks their antimissile systems are good enough to get 95% of a significant launch, but not 100% and them if all 10,000 from both sides are launched. A lot also depends on the time of year. In Northern Hemisphere winter not as much forest will burn and cloud cover (moisture) would adsorb a lot of the initial thermal radiation. In summer all the forests would go up. Part of the problem that the “it won’t be so bad” people that Canadian Prepper likes obviously fail to account for is the fact that with multiple detonations and ensuing firestorms that no one has ever witnessed the soot/black carbon would be pushed into the stratosphere where the nuclear winter theory says that it will remain for at least a few years (as there is no precipitation to wash it out).

      I disagree with Hideaway in that I don’t think a lot would have to go off to get some cooling. Moderate volcanic eruptions have cooled the planet in the last 20 years. A few nuclear (10 -20 my guess) detonations should cool us down for a few years but then the warming would accelerate. Speculation on my part.

      I would rather avoid any nuclear devices going off but I think Netanyahooooo! (iconic scene from Dr. Strangelove – Slim Pickens riding the bomb down) is going to use some tactical nukes in Lebanon and Iran will reciprocate.

      Bad days ahead.

      AJ

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  49. Jeff Snider has been predicting a recession for so long that I’ve mostly tuned him out.

    Today he says the recession has started for real:

    • unemployment rising
    • interest rates falling
    • stock prices falling
    • energy prices falling

    I prefer Hideaway’s approach: focus on energy supply.

    When energy supply begins to significantly fall then the collapse will begin.

    I’m wondering if a recession that kills energy demand and thus lowers the energy price will remove enough high extraction cost oil from the market to trigger the big one?

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    1. HHH @ POB:

      https://peakoilbarrel.com/short-term-energy-outlook-july-2024/#comment-779235

      So a barn burning recession can’t take oil prices down to $25?

      You do realize interest rate cuts don’t translate into loans into the economy during a recession right?

      It translates into commercial banks buying government bonds instead of making loans into the economy.

      So unless the government goes big on spending the amount of dollars chasing good and services in the economy contracts and just keeps contracting until the banks feel comfortable lending again.

      Not only that but you have put money in Joe six packs hands. Otherwise the money doesn’t circulate. And the economy will just continue contracting.

      Government is already spending trillions and it’s not enough to keep pulling the economy forward.

      We don’t have to wait until 2030 or 2035 for SHTF. It’s happening now and it’s happening globally.

      Primary banks in the US are hoarding US treasuries like never before. Safety and liquidity is in high demand.

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    1. Actually, I think that is a cool educational video on how too much “innovation” all at once isn’t such a great thing, after all, in vehicle manufacture, or any other endeavor.

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