By Kira & Hideaway: On Relocalization

The idea of rebuilding and relying on a supply of necessities near to where you live is called relocalization and is often promoted as a wise response by people aware of the simplification/collapse that will be soon be forced on us by fossil energy depletion.

The Post Carbon Institute defines relocalization as “A strategy to build societies based on the local production of food, energy and goods, and the local development of currency, governance and culture. The main goals of relocalization are to increase community energy security, to strengthen local economies, and to improve environmental conditions and social equity.”

It is common to observe cognitive dissonance, which is caused by our genetic tendency to deny unpleasant realities, in discussions about relocalization.

Un-Denial regular Kira pointed out some cognitive dissonance in a recent essay by the excellent overshoot writer ‘B’ The Honest Sorcerer. This resulted in an insightful exchange with another un-Denial regular Hideaway that I thought deserved more visibility so I have copied their comments with minor edits here as a post.

Kira:

I wonder what to make of B’s latest article? Looks like he’s beginning to struggle with a bit of cognitive dissonance. I wonder how many of his ideas are actually feasible taking into account all the feedback loops?

While it’s true that large and heavy, individually owned vehicles (and their manufacturers) are slowly going the way of the Dodo, ultra-small, ultra-light vehicles are not. Just think about it: how efficient it is to move an 80kg (or 176 pound) person in a one and a half ton vehicle? The monsters most people drive today not only take a ton of resources and energy to make, but also burn untold gallons of fuel (or kWs of electricity) to move around. I mean, there is demand for a lot of things, like traveling deep into space, but since neither the energy, nor the resources are available to do that, it simply does not happen. As soon as the penny drops that this energy crisis is here to stay, auto-makers will come out with smaller and cheaper to maintain automobiles (in both gasoline and electric versions). Many Chinese manufacturers are already well ahead of this curve producing tiny two-person cars or even miniature utility vehicles, taking up much less resources and utilizing a range of “primitive” but time-tested and dirt-cheap technologies. It’s a different question, of course, whether renown car makers can swallow their pride and come out with tiny boxes on wheels. (Or how about being spotted in one…?)

Another, even more low-cost / low-tech mode of transport to revert to in a world of much less fossil fuel energy is the plain old bicycle. Cheap, easy to maintain (at least the older models) and requires no fuel to run. And as for carrying stuff around just take a look at cargo-bikes — which is already a big thing in Europe, especially in the Netherlands. By fitting an electric motor and a small battery pack on them, these clever inventions can be cheaply upgraded into a veritable work-mule, able to carry a hundred sixty pounds of just about anything.

Hideaway:

Most overshoot aware people like B assume the collapse will only impact the vulnerable portions of our economy and not everything.

There is a lack of understanding about how a 6 continent supply chain actually works! Minerals and parts come from all over the world to make anything in our modern world. Visit any manufacturer and you will see that whatever they are ‘making’ is constructed from parts that were manufactured elsewhere. The ‘manufacturer’ might make the box that all the separate pieces fit in, or the circuit board that chips made elsewhere are soldered to.

When the economy starts to fail due to reductions in oil supply year after year, businesses around the world will go bankrupt, and production and transportation of the materials and components needed by every manufacturer to make any product will be impossible to organise in a fashion that suits the way modern industry operates.

No company makes all of the parts needed to manufacture a ‘car’, and attempts to do so will be impossible in a world of falling energy availability and businesses going broke everywhere.

To make anything, you need industrial machines that can forge, stamp, put plastic coatings on bits of metal, or coat ‘wire’ with plastic to make electrical wire, etc., etc., and all require someone else to make the machines, and they need parts and raw materials to make the machines.

Once contraction of the oil supply really gets going, 5Mbbl/d down, then 6Mbbl/d down, year after year, and economies are collapsing, governments will do things they hope will help there own people, but that harm the global supply chain and ability to manufacture anything, such as banning some exports, placing tariffs on some imports, and restricting certain activities.

With food production falling and insufficient food getting to cities, the last thing governments will be worried about is helping new businesses and industries to get started. The collapse will happen faster than governments can cope with, with failures in sector after sector across the country and everyone pleading for help.

It takes time and capital and coordination for a business to set up new production. In a crumbling world we’ll be lucky to have any old existing manufacturers operating, let alone new manufacturers.

The expectations of many overshoot aware people like Dr. Tim Morgan and B are that an economic contraction will only impact discretionary things on the periphery of civilization. This may be true at the beginning, but when oil (and therefore all energy) is in an accelerating decline, each year there will be less of everything, because energy is needed to produce everything, including for example oil drill pipe and oil rig replacement parts, which will accelerate the collapse via many feedback loops.

This chaotic collapse means that by the time we reach ‘bottom’ it will be a world without oil, without mining, most agriculture gone, billions dead, making a Mad Max world look like a party.

Kira:

It’s the year on year decline that is difficult for people to wrap their heads around because for the last 200 years all that we have experienced is an increase in energy supply. The positive feedbacks upon feedbacks pushed us at warp speed from horse drawn carts to stepping on the moon in little more than a century, which is almost akin to sorcery. This magic happened only because we shrank the world with oil to access multi-continent resources.

The cobalt of DRC and lithium of Chile are right next to a battery factory in China thanks to massive diesel powered cargo ships and diesel mining machines. When oil starts to decline the resources will move farther away each year, eventually being permanently out of reach. Even within a continent distances will increase, for instance, China’s western provinces are rich in minerals but transporting them to the eastern manufacturing area will become increasingly difficult.

It appears as though oil has altered the concept of distances for us modern humans. When people like B talk about relocalization they are not specific about the distance. Is it a radius of 10km, 100km or a 1000km? If it is 10km or 100km you may not have any easily accessible minerals or energy to make even a bicycle. If it is 1000km then it brings us more or less back to where we are today.

A microchip requires about 60 elements from the periodic table. How many of these 60 would be available within a radius of even 1000km? Without accessing six continents of resources, dense energy deposits, and thousands of global feedback loops in manufacturing, we never would have gone from Shockley’s transistor to a microprocessor. This applies to everything from a bicycle to an airplane engine.

I also think we should move on from EROEI as it may no longer be relevant in a world where all types of energy liquids are lumped together to show an increasing ‘oil’ supply. We have surely come a long way from 10 years ago when EROEI was pretty fringe, to today when governments like China’s have special committees to review EROEI before sanctioning any large energy project like CTL.

We need a new metric DRODI (Diesel Return on Diesel Invested) as this measures what is most important to modern civilization. Diesel powers everything we need to survive including tractors, combines, mining machines, trucks, trains, and ships.

Shale oil, for instance, may be DRODI negative as it produces little diesel but consumes a lot of diesel. A negative DRODI is ok in a world with surplus diesel the US can import, but without any diesel imports can the US continue any shale extraction? Seems unlikely to me.

When the diesel supply falls our ability to shrink and reshape the world to our liking goes away.

Hideaway, I want to add that observing your debates with Dennis Coyne at Peak Oil Barrel has taught me that a good way to evaluate any proposition is to deconstruct all the components and then apply the circumstances of no diesel and very low ore concentration to it. I have been training myself to do this. With this insight we can see that the only way you can make even a bicycle is if your community is within a 50km radius of a mine with accessible coal, and an iron ore mine with float ores, with access to machines like lathes, and people with expertise to do everything required. This might be possible today or even at the beginning of the energy downslope, but impossible near the end.

Hideaway:

Thanks Kira, you seem to understand the problems caused by energy depletion that multiply on top of each other. Localization is not an alternative for 8+ billion people. We rely on massive economies of scale that result from cities and a 6 continent supply chain. Sourcing everything from the ‘local area’, as in walking distance of a day or less, means a massive simplification of everything.

No one lives within a day’s walk of a coal mine, and an iron ore source, and a smelter that can operate without a source of electricity, plus food. The old smelters didn’t use electricity to drive the huge motors moving heavy hot metal and slag around. The first smelters were close to coal and iron ore sources, but we used them up, they no longer exist close to each other.

In the year 1500 we had a world population of around 450 million and grew massively over the next 250 years to the start of the industrial revolution by increasingly using the resources of the ‘new world’. We’ve been on an upward trajectory ever since, especially since around 1800 when fossil energy came into use.

People just don’t understand our extreme (and still growing) overpopulation problem given the imminent decline of oil, and especially diesel. Assuming “we’ll downsize this” or “relocalize that” ignores the fact that once oil supply shifts to contraction, the declines will be permanent year after year, and with diesel shortages the ability to build anything new all but disappears.

It will be a sad sight with suffering everywhere and increasing year after year. Survivors will have to be hard people, protecting and providing for their own, at the exclusion of others.

Everyone should look around their home and imagine it without the oil used to produce and deliver everything in it, because that’s the world of the future, with old decaying cold buildings and no food in cities.

Kira:

To be fair to people who advocate for simplification, as I also often do, the complete picture of our predicament only becomes visible by looking at both the supply and demand side. If you only consider supply the mindset of resource substitution can creep in. Tim Watkins recently wrote an excellent article that explains the supply and demand squeeze that is causing the “Death Spiral” of industries. He chose as examples the communication and airline industries but the idea applies to all industries.

The long and the short of it (Four: Power down)

Watkins defines “critical mass” as the minimum number of people needed as customers to maintain the complexity and economy of scale of any industry.

As I understand it, money is a lien on energy. When we pay Apple for an iPhone that lien is then given to Apple. Apple then uses it for direct energy purchase or passes it further down the chain till it reaches the bottom of the chain which is a mining company in Africa, South America, Australia, or Asia. The larger the critical mass, the more collective lien there is to increase complexity, or reduce cost, or both.

This is how solar panels, which were originally affordable to only NASA, are now affordable to even rural villages in Africa, as the critical mass and therefore the total energy lien of NASA has been far exceeded by a large number of customers using their discretionary income (lien) to buy solar panels. The complexity and efficiency has remained more or less the same but the cost has gone down.

When this process reverses and critical mass decreases, the profits of companies will decrease until they are losing money and need government bailouts. But governments cannot afford to bail out every company and will prioritize sectors critical for survival like agriculture and defense.

Soon every industry will enter the dreaded Death Spiral.

Rob here on 17-Sep-2024 adding a follow-up by Hideaway and Kira.

Hideaway:

‘B’ The Honest Sorcerer has a new post up with a lot of content that we understand and discuss here.

https://thehonestsorcerer.medium.com/the-end-of-the-great-stagnation-45473b60d243

Although GDP figures suggest otherwise, people of western (OECD) economies are in fact trapped in a great stagnation lasting for fifty years now. During these decades real wages struggled to keep up with inflation as neoliberal economics and globalization ruled supreme. Meanwhile, the wealth of the top 10% — and especially that of the top 1% — has kept rising exponentially, together with debt levels and the chances of a major financial meltdown coming sooner, rather than later. But could it really happened otherwise? Are the lucky few really behind the steering wheel when it comes to economic growth, or are they just that: the lucky, greedy, clueless few who are just riding the top of the wave while it lasts?

One aspect that B and many others in the peak oil/end of growth/collapse world miss, which guarantees our situation is much worse than most assume, is scale and complexity. We require economies of scale with our huge population to build the millions of complex parts that support modernity. When we lose scale or complexity it will take more energy and materials to keep the system running.

Localization doesn’t work, and can’t work, with the complexity of the modern world, because we have exceeded the scale for making ‘widgets’. If you require 500 ‘local’ factories to make widgets, that used to be produced by 10 factories around the world, it will take a lot more buildings, machinery, energy, and workers to produce the same number of ‘widgets’ for the world.

Multiply this by a million for all the different ‘widgets’ modernity uses, and consider that we can’t discard 80-90% of the ‘widgets’ because most are required to run modernity.

A lower population creates similar problems. Our cities still require maintenance, but with a lower population the taxation to pay for it becomes too high for an individual to afford. The number of people available to work in factories falls below that required, and the number of customers falls causing businesses making widgets to go bust.

The more I research how our civilization works, the more confident I become that civilization’s collapse has been certain from the beginning. There never was a way out once our species decided to live in a ‘civilized’ world instead of the natural world.

Every conquered culture around the world, when given a taste of modernity, grab it with both hands. A few people, especially the elderly, lament what’s been lost, but they too make use of modern appliances and conveniences. We no longer have the wild animals that people could hunt like their ancestors to survive. I shake my head in disbelief when I see native peoples trying to return to their ancestral hunting lifestyles by replacing their wood canoes and spears with aluminium boats with outboard motors and rifles.

https://www.ntnews.com.au/news/northern-territory/hunter-claims-dugongs-are-not-low-in-numbers-in-northern-territory-waters/news-story/c55ca7d2de6e176508a33e05ad1d80f2

A HUNTER has hit back at calls to ban dugong hunting, saying there’s no proof the animal is an endangered species despite its global classification as ‘vulnerable’.

Using all available resources to expand its population is what every species that’s ever existed has always done until some limit is reached. Consider at a mouse plague, enabled by human agricultural practices, with its huge population until the next frost or the grain is eaten, then a massive die off in a short time.

Whenever we read someone calling for more recycling, more repairable gadgets, more solar, more wind, more batteries, more recycling plants, more localization, etc., we instantly know the person doesn’t yet understand the big picture. They are in denial, still searching for answers.

People in cities will not be able to ‘grow’ their own food. In Melbourne, my nearest large city, all the old backyards were subdivided off and townhouses built where people use to grow some vegetables. Now there is just no room. We would need more tools, more land, more seeds… Oh, there’s that little nasty expression “we need more”, which simply wont happen.

“It won’t happen” also applies to the many other things we would need more of to relocalize our world.

We should live and enjoy every day, and not feel guilty, because there never was anything any of us could have done to change what’s happening now or will happen in the future.

One of these days the power will be off and the internet will be down which will signal the end, because our leaders knew there was no future and decided to end it all quickly.

Kira:

Good points Hideaway. I want to add that people underestimate the difficulty of growing food since most of them have never had to do it and assume a few urban community food gardens in vacant parking lots or backyards will suffice when fossil fuels are gone.

There are articles on how Cuba managed to move food production away from oil dependence after the Soviet collapse that reinforce this false narrative. I believed it myself for a few years but none of it is true. Cuba’s per capita fuel consumption is on par with Eastern European countries, always has been, yet still imports a lot of food, especially grains. Here is Cuba’s yearly oil consumption:

https://www.indexmundi.com/energy/?country=cu&product=oil&graph=consumption

Cuba’s population has plateaued for decades so the decrease in consumption can probably be explained by an increase in efficiency.

Without potash, phosphate and nitrogen there is no feeding even a billion people.

Another topic commonly ignored is security. Even if you could somehow grow your own food, protecting it from raiders will be a massive challenge. A hallmark of modern states is its monopoly on violence and the umbrella of safety it provides. When states lose their ability to impose their will (which is certain once fossil fuels become scarce) and the threat of consequences disappear, the safety we take for granted will also disappear.

There is a good movie called The Survivalist released in 2015 that nicely captures this tension. Unless you join a sizable community of people you fully trust that is capable of defense there is no point in trying to grow food.

The certainty of collapse, knowing that this is how it was always going to be, knowing that the horrors we inflict everyday on the biosphere and on our siblings in it in the pursuit of being “civilized” will come to an end, and knowing that our arrogance of having conquered mother nature using the gifts she provided will also end, is very comforting.

Rob here on 24-Sep-2024 adding another interesting exchange between Kira and Hideaway from the comments below.

Kira:

I think B’s article was pretty good today cutting out all the noise of simplification and going straight for the core of the issue.

https://thehonestsorcerer.medium.com/2030-our-runaway-train-falls-off-the-seneca-cliff-cd51db4e7dfb

I had a few questions about this graph. I have seen this before and it has been mentioned on this site as well. This is the study but is it accurate?

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

If our destination in 2050 is 1/3rd the amount of energy from oil that we get today, what happens on our way there especially with the economy?

Hideaway:

Hi Kira, have a close look at the graph and notice the exponential rise from around 1950 to the early 70’s. Hubbert showed that the rise and fall of world oil production should have followed a normal distribution curve, like individual oil fields tend to do.

When OPEC raised prices and the world realised oil was a finite resource there was a huge change and we implemented many efficiency improvements and substitutions (mostly gas) for oil use. The growth in oil production changed from exponential to linear, and instead of rolling over as predicted by Hubbert, has continued to rise.

We have been dragging future use of oil into the present for the last 25 years, while still growing overall oil extraction, as reserves deplete. Think about oil producers around the world. They have older wells still producing at EROEIs of 20-30:1 or more, plus newer wells in harder to reach places with much more expensive infrastructure and processing. The older wells that paid off their capital costs decades ago are easily the most profitable. They generate the most cash to keep the system going, however it’s the newer wells like shale oil, tar sands, deep water, etc. that help keep the overall price of oil lower.

Which are depleting faster? The old profitable wells, because the trade of goods and services runs on dollars and profit, so oil producers need lots of dollars coming in. Whenever the Saudi’s turn down production, it will be the expensive oil they reduce, not the cheap easy stuff, unless they desperately need to rest fields to protect future extraction.

What this leads to in our world of capitalism economics, is all the high EROEI wells depleting around the same time, just as the cost of maintaining production rises rapidly, because the wells are so much more expensive relative to the oil produced.

Complexity also enters the picture because the extraction processes for newer oils are highly complex operations. For example, horizontal drilling relies on sensors and computing power to keep the drill in exactly the correct strata, 10,000 feet below the surface. The oil sands extraction process uses large modern machines with the latest computers and sensors to maintain optimum efficiency.

Once the easy high EROEI oil is depleted, the remainder becomes much harder to extract because supply lines of equipment and spare parts become less reliable due to reduced economic activity, making everything required to support the complex processes harder to obtain and much more expensive.

Rapid loss of oil production quickly leads to higher oil prices and shortages, with businesses closing as people reduce spending, as happens in every recession, however the declining oil supply will accelerate as other high EROEI wells also reach total depletion, exacerbating the overall problem, with newer oil sources not keeping up with the declines. Deep recession leads to businesses shutting and restricted trade as countries can no longer afford imports, which causes more businesses to go bust.

Factories that earn 10% of their revenue from making essential ‘widgets’ for the oil sector go bust because the other 90% of their business starts operating at a loss, and it is impossible to restart the manufacturing because critical machinery was sold off for scrap in a clearing sale.

Thousands of factories stop making parts critical for a complex system. Without parts, oil rigs and refineries can’t operate, which brings down the entire system.

For us here at Un-Denial, it’s pretty obvious what happens next as the problems will mount and cascade affecting many businesses unexpectedly, thus triggering a self-reinforcing decline.

Most importantly, although demand for oil will fall with recession, oil will not become cheap because supply will also quickly fall. There will not be investment capital available to extract new marginal oil, especially in the Middle East where populations will be suffering from the high price of imported grains and other food, that will become difficult to purchase on the open market. Food exporters will struggle due to high diesel and fertilizer costs and will be forced to reduce production.

Then the next year oil supplies will fall another 5 Mbbls/d, and again the year after, and soon it’s over and most people will be left wondering how those in power let it happen or couldn’t see it coming…

Kira:

Thanks for the explanation.

I hadn’t considered at all that even within countries like Saudi Arabia and Kuwait you will have different EROEI fields. It makes economic sense to keep running the high EROEI wells to get most for your barrel of oil. After reading your explanation I was curious to see the status of old oil fields, the giants and super giants which are collectively responsible for the majority of our crude oil, but most importantly as you pointed out, high EROEI oil. This is the list from wiki:

https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_oil_fields

Most supergiants were discovered more than 60 years ago. Taking the top two as example Ghawar and Burgan. They both started production nearly at the same time and apparently peaked at the same time (2005) although Saudis don’t confirm it. Ghawar seems to be declining at 2.5% annually and will be down to 2.5 million barrels from a peak of 5 million by 2030. I am sure Saudis are doing everything possible to slow the decline now which will make future decline worse.

It appears as though oil fields like Ghawar are subsidising the extraction of the low EROEI oil like shale and tar sands. The energy comes from the old ones and the volume comes from the new ones, keeping price low and maintaining the illusion of abundance. It’s quite deceptive when you think about it. The net energy keeps depleting while the volume remains same or even increases for a while.

Companies that make generators for offshore oil rigs are a great example of economy of scale tumbling. They probably make generators for hundreds of clients who are not oil companies, when these clients can no longer afford their product the critical mass is lost and they go out of business. Oil companies cannot keep them in business single handedly. This can be applied to other things like pipes as well. This is what the death spiral of the oil industry will probably look like.

Hideaway:

I was thinking when reading your post Kira, yes, yes, yes, yes, yes. I certainly couldn’t have written it better.

On the oilprice.com webpage, there is this article….

https://oilprice.com/Energy/Crude-Oil/Arab-Gulf-Producers-Are-in-Need-of-Much-Higher-Oil-Prices.html

After enjoying a rare budget surplus in 2022, most Gulf Cooperation Council (GCC) economies are seeing their budget deficits widen with current oil prices still well below what they require to balance their budgets. According to the IMF, Saudi Arabia, the GCC’s biggest economy, needs an oil price of $96.20 per barrel to balance its books, thanks in large part to MBS’ ambitious Vision 2030. The situation is not helped by the fact that over the past few years, the oil-rich nation has borne the lion’s share of OPEC+ production cuts after agreeing to cut 1 million barrels per day or nearly half of the group’s 2.2 mb/d in pledged cuts. In effect, Saudi Arabia has been selling less oil at lower prices, thus compounding the revenue shortfall.

Imagine how they cut back, will it be the most profitable oil wells or least profitable ones, when they are so desperate for revenue? Obviously the least profitable ones get reduced while the cheap easy to get oil gets depleted quickly.

What could possibly go wrong when all the cheap high EROEI oil extraction starts declining rapidly just as shale oil uses up its tier 1 and 2 locations…

Perhaps we should have been called Homo dumbass, because we are definitely not ‘wise’.

Rob here on 15-Oct-2024 adding some fresh calculations by Hideaway on the expected speed of collapse, and a response from Kira.

Hideaway:

An aspect of our situation I’ve been thinking of putting down in writing with numbers, so that people can get a better understanding of the collapse ahead…

In regard to oil, we are mining around 100Mbbl/d which will roll over at some point in the near future..

According to some paper I read recently, we currently use around 15.5% of oil to obtain oil and this will rise to 50% of the energy by 2050.. From this paper…

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

At the same time as this is meant to be happening, we will be mining a bucket load more metals and minerals for the transition.

What people find so difficult to do is to put several aspects together, to see if it can work, so I’ve decided to try below.

Assuming the increase is 1Mbbl/d/yr in the energy used to gain oil, which is easily possible as we’ve mined all the easy to get oil and only have the harder, more distant supply left, plus allowing for oil production to roll over to a decline in production we get the following…

I’ve used a fall of oil production of 1Mbbls/d for years 2,3 and 4, then 2Mbbls/d for yr 5, and 6, then 3Mbbls/d, for year 7, 4Mbbls/d for yr 8, 5Mbbls/d for yr 9, then a maximum of 6Mbbls/d for years 10, 11, and 12. At no time does the depletion rate go over 10, in these 12 years…

Year 1 …production 100Mbbls input energy 15.5Mbbls … Left for society 84.5Mbbls

Year 2 99M ………………………….. 16.5M ………………. 82.5M

Year 3 98M…………………………… 17.5M ………………..80.5M

Year 4 97M ………………………….. 18.5M ………………..78.5M

Year5 95M ………………………….. 19.5M ………………..75.5M

Year 6 93M ………………………….. 20.5M …………………72.5M

Year 7 90M ………………………….. 21.5M …………………68.5M

Year 8 86M ………………………….. 22.5M ………………….63.5M

Year 9 81M ………………………….. 23.5M …………………..57.5M

Year 10 75M ………………………….. 24.5M ……………………50.5M

Year 11 69M …………………………… 25.5M …………………….43.5M

Year 12 63M …………………………… 26.5M ……………………. 36.5M

Because of the combination of more energy cost of energy (a la Tim Morgan), plus just plain slow decline, the available oil for the rest of society has gone from 84.5Mbbls/d in Year 1 to 36.5Mbbls/d by year 12..

But wait there’s more.. Assuming mining uses 10% of all energy, while in oil’s case makes it around 10Mbbls/d, we know that mining has to increase greatly for the ‘transition’. With the massive increase required, just assuming a 10% increase per year would be conservative, as we are talking a magnitude more copper, Aluminium, Nickel etc, plus all the steel in wind towers and solar farm foundations being built in the TW scale every year etc.

Mining’s use at just 10% growth rate goes from 10Mbbls/d in year 1 to 31.4Mbbls/d in year 12..

When we add this into our calculations of oil available for everything else, we go from 75Mbbls/d in year 1 (100 – 15.5 – 10 = 75Mbbls/d) to 5.1Mbbls/d (63Mbbls – 26.5Mbbls – 31.4Mbbls= 5.1Mbbls/d) for everything else other than oil production and mining..

The above assumptions are very conservative assuming oil doesn’t decline by more than 10% in any one year, that oil used to gain access to more oil goes up by only rises by 6.5%/yr at most, then the growth rate declines (unlikely), plus the 10%/yr increase in oil going to mining wouldn’t get us close to climate/transition/renewable expected growth rates…

Even with those very conservative assumptions, we go from 75Mbbls/d for “everything else” to 5.1Mbbls/d for “everything else” in just 12 years after reaching maximum possible oil production. It clearly can’t and wont happen that way!!

We’ve been dragging future oil use into the present for the last 40-50 years, as shown by the linear increase in oil production since then, whereas we had an exponential rise in production before then.

The above is just putting together 3 aspect of our modern world, instead of concentrating on one and assuming everything else stays constant as just about every ‘model’ does that I come across from ‘experts’ in various fields..

The big question is what happens instead of the above??

Do we cut back oil spending on gaining oil, so that the depletion of existing oil happens much faster than 10%/yr?

Do we cut back on mining so that the transition dies a lot earlier?

Do we assume we will find a magic energy solution to all our problems?

Do we just assume oil production will never decline quickly… because….. just because we don’t want it to???

I didn’t realise how bad the numbers were until I just did the simple calculations and put it down in writing. To me it means we collapse well before the 12 years are up after reaching peak oil production because of many feedback loops creating chaotic disruptions on the way down. Every year we remain close to the peak of oil production, means we are dragging more future oil to the present, meaning the decline when it starts to accelerate will likely be much faster than the sequence above…

Kira:

Excellent analysis!! I just want to mention that the oil that goes into getting oil is mostly in the form of diesel yet only about 75 million barrels that we extract today is the kind of crude that can be refined into diesel. The rest of oil is either shale, NGL, Biofuels among other things which have their uses but not as diesel.

There was also a video that was posted here about a gentleman who mostly agreed with what we discuss here about the irreplaceable nature of fossil fuels and the shortcomings of so called renewables but believed that there is so much oil out there that we will never run out, that we can have shale revolution after shale revolution. There are many who subscribe to this school of thought and think we can extract shale oil and gas from formations in Argentina, Russia, China and many other such places. Art Berman (who has expertise in this area) on Nate Hagen’s podcast has stressed several times that the geology of American shale is very unique and the shale revolution cannot be repeated anywhere else.

If one needs any proof of this please look at China. Despite the CCP pushing the state oil companies hard to extract shale deposits for years gas out has reached only about 30bcm per year which is less than 3% of American output. Part of the reason is the remote location of the deposits in the northern part of the country but we are talking about a country that can create entire cities from scratch within a few years. This is a matter of National security for the Chinese but the geology is the problem and has been unyielding so most efforts have been fruitless and abandoned.

https://www.reuters.com/article/markets/currencies/chinese-majors-to-struggle-to-extend-shale-gas-boom-beyond-2025-idUSKBN29V0ZD/

As far as depletion goes even if we take super optimistic figures given by Rystad which predicts that oil production will be down to 50 million bpd by 2050 then the oil available by energy would be worth only about 25 million barrels. This is just a slightly stretched out version of numbers given by you.

It is interesting excersize to speculate on how things will play out on the downslope.

At the beginning of this downslope the airline industry will be the first casualty. Consuming about 8 million barrels of oil and mostly middle distillates at that, this shutdown will provide a much needed relief to the energy constrained world. Of course the commercial airplane manufacturers namely Boeing and Airbus will also go out of business. It is unlikely that governments will have any interest in bailing them out even if they had the ability which they won’t. The tourism industry which depends on air travel will also collapse, as will countries entirely dependent on revenues from it. Depletion will soon catch up and the gutting of industries will start again but this time it won’t be something discretionary and superfluous like air travel. This time industries that touch all our lives will start competing for the remaining share of energy.

Rob here on 7-Nov-2024 adding Hideaway’s answer to a question by ABC on whether Dr. Simon Michaux’s proposed solution of Thorium reactors and iron powder will work.

My take on why this type of future can’t happen is because Simon Michaux misses complexity and scale in the argument we can go to this type of future…

Let me explain, we can only have the complexity of nuclear power and running everything off electricity with an enormous scale of the overall human enterprise we call modern civilization. The scale of this complexity would require much larger markets than we currently have as the number of ‘widgets’ needed to be made for all the complex machinery would be greater than today.

We only have the complexity of today due to the total scale of everything we do. The highly specialised nature of building the best computer chips as an example happens in one place Taiwan with TMSC. The facilities they have built to make these computer chips can only be as sophisticated as it is because of the global scale of it’s customers. To build and operate 50 such facilities around the world would not be possible, they would all go broke. The scale of the facilities built needs the scale of the market size.

To build cheap thorium reactors or any SMR, the “modular” being the important point, would require a massive market as the factories involved, down to the smallest widget all have to be working in co-operation so everything fits together perfectly, so the market needs to be massive so everyone in the chain can make a profit. It also means all the suppliers of parts have to be operating smoothly and at large scale to supply all the inputed metals and minerals.

This all requires the existing system to be maintained while we get the growth in scale of the industry which relies upon the growing demand for the new products from the markets.

Notice how there is growth at every stage to make it all happen!! So if we had a spare planet or 2 of resources to use to accommodate all this growth, then we might get to a more advanced technological civilization, however running into limits of everything we currently use, because of growing energy cost from energy access itself to everything else mined, means we can’t get that advanced.

Also note that to get to where we are today in regards to the totality of civilization has taken growing energy use of all types for over 250 years. It’s been oil that has allowed for the increases of coal and gas use over the last 100 years. All the renewables plus nuclear and even modern hydroelectricity all rely upon oil themselves, and upon oil for the cheap coal and gas used in their production.

If we didn’t care about the environment at all and had another 2 earths worth of oil on this planet, then sure we might get to thorium reactors everywhere, but it will still all rely upon oil.

As oil production starts to rapidly decline, sometime in the near future, I have no idea exactly when, then the ability to keep our modern complexity will quickly unwind. We are getting a ‘sniff’ of this at present by all the countries that want to relocalise so much production, which isn’t possible as we lose the economies of scale of the current globalised system, unless there is an accompanying simplification as well. However no-one is planning for a simplification, the actual plan is to make aspects of the modern world at home. All these plans will quickly realise that they rely on imports of most/all the parts and the relocalisation is not very economic because of smaller market size.

Of course all the duplication everywhere is more inefficient using both more energy and materials to build and taking more people to operate and maintain. We lose some of the existing efficiency in the huge scale of many operations by trying to relocalise them.

What it means by even trying the relocalisation is that the population as a whole gets poorer because of inefficient use of energy and materials (unless we had spare planets worth of all these on this planet!!), due to lack of scale and overall the complexity has to fall to match the energy we have.

Please also note we have no shortage of any material on this planet, just a shortage of energy to access lower grades, and all the processing involved in making them useful goods. It all comes back to existing energy availability within the scale of complexity of what we have as current civilization and we can only build a lot more of any one aspect, while the entire system operates normally. Normally being in growth mode, providing the capital, goods and services required in the usual orderly manner to open new mines. Which means the population needs to be well fed and educated, with abundant services continuing to operate throughout.

We can’t take energy and materials away from one sector to go to another as the odds are they use different aspects of modernity and it’s not a simple swap, with whatever being constrained having feedback loops that are unexpected.

Anyway back to thorium reactors. The industry needs to grow and develop naturally in a world of increasing demand for this product, so it can develop naturally, which takes the rest of the system growing normally. Eventually factories that could build SMR would develop, providing the capital and operating costs were a huge advantage over the existing forms of energy. This can only happen in the background of our system operating ‘normally’, ie growing economies. It can’t be forced, as any developments of forced, as in uneconomic simply don’t last as industries when times turn tough.

When we get a real recession/depression brought on by oil getting more expensive for every other industry, all the expenditures on solar, wind, nuclear and batteries will probably start falling fairly quickly, as these expensive subsidised builds lose market share, as they are too expensive, even for a product (electricity) that is only one aspect of our energy use.

All heavy industry needs a constant cheap energy supply, often in different forms at the same time to produce the raw materials that feed our modern consumption. Without coke, coal, gas and plastics many of the items of modern civilization simply wouldn’t exist at all, so build a huge array of thorium reactors with say the last of the fossil fuel energy available, solves no problems. We wouldn’t be able to make the products we use today with just electricity.

If we were to build fancy new recycling facilities that somehow made use of all existing plastics for re-use in original forms, the whole enterprise would suffer the same entropy and dissipation as everything else and winds down fairly quickly, plus requires a rapidly growing system of modern civilization working normally in the background while it’s built to the scale and complexity required.

Every argument of how we can power a new civilization with solar, wind, batteries, nuclear, thorium or whatever form of electrical energy in the future, argues for a smaller supply of energy needed than now because fossil fuels are inefficient, we only use 25-50% of the energy (depending on the machine). It’s a terrible argument as the increase in the modern civilization growth to get to that point, would mean a much higher energy use than at present, just because of the growth in scale and complexity of everything to just build this future.

Someone should ask Simon Michaux or any other expert about the clean green future whether from renewables normal nuclear or thorium, about how much of it can be built without using fossil fuels at all, including down to the plastic insulation on all wires. The usual answer is it can’t be done yet, but improvements in technology and increased use of renewables/nuclear and how cheap they all become will allow it to produce synthetic fuel for these types of purposes.

I usually counter, with how none of it’s being done now, yet renewables and nuclear are already claimed to be cheaper, so all new factories would already be going to the cheaper ways if it was true, but no-one is doing it, so something is very wrong with the narrative. The argument usually flows to climate reasons why we have to move away from fossil fuels, which is unfortunately a different argument, because the energy required to then mine all the minerals to build this fantastic green future simply doesn’t exist without the use of fossil fuels.

We are in a total and utter catch 22 where we require cheap fossil fuels to build everything and maintain the current modern civilization, which collapses without their use leaving 8 billion cold, angry starving people looking to survive. Using another 2 planets worth of fossil fuels to build the entire renewable/nuclear/thorium future with electricity used for everything, including making plastics and synthetic fuels, will leave the climate and environment in ruins, then collapse anyway, when we turn off fossil fuel use, as that is a sudden energy loss when we continue to require more minerals and metals from the environment, due to those lost from entropy and dissipation, and the increase energy use from all the movement of materials for recycling..

I didn’t even get around to mentioning that a world of recycling everything as much as possible, uses fossil fuels for all the processes anyway, but that’s another story. It’s an incredibly complex situation we are in and any ‘easy’ sounding solution will simply not work as the proponent forgets we spend 97-98% of all our existing energy and materials on just maintenance of the existing system with only the other 2-3% going on ‘growth’ of everything.

Any one new major investment into a great sounding idea on a world wide scale, can simply not work by spending less than 1% of energy and materials use on it, unless the entire system of energy and materials grows massively. As the entire system has to grow, the number we start from in the future will be much higher energy and material use than it is today. The scale and complexity has to also grow to allow for more efficiencies in the system. the starting base of energy use in 30 years time will be double of what it is today..

If we don’t ‘grow’, then we can’t maintain existing subsystems within our civilization, as we need an increasing quantity of energy just for maintenance of material availability. The system can’t work ‘normally’ without the increase in energy, even without growth in the overall system. If we shrink the market size, then we can’t maintain the complexity of the current system either, as the affordability of the complexity goes down, so the system simplifies, which makes gaining access to lower grades of everything much more energy intensive as less complex equipment will mean lower recoveries in mining, lower food volumes from a given area of land etc.

Oops, sorry for excessively long answer. Our civilization is highly complex and so is the reason why none of the bright green ideas can work, and neither can a shrinkage of population while maintaining modernity, but hte attempt to do so, will lead to collapse of it all.

Rob here on 14-Nov-2024. Hideaway and ABC had an opportunity to ask some questions to a couple important leaders in the overshoot awareness community, John Michael Greer and Simon Michaux. Following are the questions and answers plus follow-on commentary from Hideaway.

John Michael Greer:

A.) How can we have modernity without the scale of market size that we currently have to enable the mining, processing, distribution then manufacturing of the huge range of parts that go into making every aspect of modernity?

We can’t. It really is as simple as that. Modernity, as Dr. Richard Duncan used to say, was a transient pulse waveform a one-time, self-terminating affair.

B.) How do we make the machines that make the final product machines in a scale down world? 

That asks the question the wrong way around. The right way around is “what kind of final products can we afford to have, given all the constraints on producing them in a deindustrializing world?”
The answer won’t be clear for several centuries, but it’s unlikely that any technology invented since 1900 or so will be included.

C.) How is it possible to maintain complexity, such as a thorium reactor and all the machines it powers on only a small scale?

I’m not a specialist in this technology, of course. 
I’m open to the possibility that it can be done, but I want to see an affordable example first.
As we’ve seen over and over again, every nuclear technology is cheap, clean, and safe until somebody actually builds it…

D.) Where do the materials come from after many cycles where entropy and dissipation have worked their magic over many cycles of recycling?

Oh, in the long run say, another 10,000 years we’ll have to go to entirely renewable resources, and that will involve sweeping changes in everything; for example, some future society may cultivate chemosynthetic iron-fixing bacteria (the kind that currently produce bog iron) to keep it supplied with iron. Our immediate descendants won’t have to worry about that, though. Given the scale of population contraction we can expect (around 95% worldwide) and the gargantuan supplies of metal and other materials that have been hauled up from deep within the earth and stored in what will soon be urban ruins, our descendants for the next thousand years or so will have all the metal they can dream of using.

Dr. Simon Michaux:

A.) How can we have modernity without the scale of market size that we currently have to enable the mining, processing, distribution then manufacturing of the huge range of parts that go into making every aspect of modernity?

I don’t think we can. It was all dependent on oil as a fuel. We have no replacement for this.

B.) How do we make the machines that make the final product machines in a scale down world? 

We have to change our thinking in what we need all this stuff for. Do we need it?  Can we do it in a more simplified form?  Then ask how we can get there. If we can simplify how the tools are made using more abundant resources (iron vs. lithium for example) then use those machines differently, using modern knowledge.
What have we actually learned over the last 200 year? 
The last 20 years in particular?
Can we take a backyard workshop, make a small foundry, have a blacksmith forge, run a basic lathe, drill press and welder, power it with a wind turbine on a lead acid battery?
Strip out useful products from all the places around us that no longer are in operation (cars in a carpark that have been abandoned).
Make an electric motor and a lead acid battery.
Can we shred rubber tyres and make gaskets?
Can we run a furnace to recycle ceramics and building waste into geo polymers
Then you have tech like 3D printers.
Can these be reinvented where we can make our own feedstock and make our own printer unit?
And so on.

C.) How is it possible to maintain complexity, such as a thorium reactor and all the machines it powers on only a small scale? 

A Th MSR unit is about 12 m long, about the size of a shipping container and delivers 40 MW of electricity, or 100 MW of heat at 560 deg C.
They are made mostly from steel, nickel and a small number of exotic metals and alloys.
They have a working life of 50 years.
Complexity to run it is about that of running a modern medial isotope lab. 
Their production is much simpler than most other devices.
I think it can be done in some cases.
The problem is getting permission to use them.

D.) Where do the materials come from after many cycles where entropy and dissipation have worked their magic over many cycles of recycling?

Contract our material needs per capita. 
Simplify what we need to resources that are more abundant.
Most of the purple transition needs iron, which we have lots of.
Copper will be the limiting metal. 
Industrial systems have to come into line with food production limitations.
Once we get to the point where recycling and mining can no longer deliver, then society has to work out a way of living without these things or go extinct.

Hideaway’s commentary:

Thanks ABC great work and answers by JMG. He gets the big picture of what’s going to happen, but appears to miss all the feedback loops that will accelerate everything to the downside. We have over 8 billion humans on the planet and 99.99% of them have no idea modernity is going to end abruptly, and when it does so will destroy the plans of the other 0.01% (or less!! ), that did see it coming and tried to prepare in some way.

Lots of people use Cuba as an example of what can happen with building vegetable gardens etc., except forget to mention that it’s in the tropics with fast growth and plenty of water, compared to say the UK which is 2.4 times the size and 6 times the population, plus Cuba today imports around 70%-80% of their food.

Where JMG says it’s asking the question the wrong way around, is incorrect. We are not planning anything about contraction as a species, every machine is becoming more complex allowing for more automation and hence cheaper costs. Once we go down there will not be the investment capital, energy nor materials, nor co-ordination to build any new machines to make anything.

He has once again used how we have done things on the way up, as in using more energy, materials and larger expanding markets; to think that some similar type of planning will occur during the collapse phase. It’s wishful thinking not close to reality.

Realistically, when food is not arriving in cities, who is going to be sitting around talking about what machines they are going to build and what level they can acquire, when there is no energy, nor materials in the appropriate form to do any of it??

One aspect JMG gets completely correct is about thorium reactors….. “As we’ve seen over and over again, every nuclear technology is cheap, clean, and safe until somebody actually builds it…”

There is a very good reason for the cost of all nuclear, of which thorium reactors will be no different, complexity. Every aspect of it is a highly complex specialty. It wont be made from ordinary stainless steel, it will be highly specialised stainless steel, probably with a high quantity of minor elements like molybdenum to allow for the highly corrosive environment of molten salt. “Salt” as in sodium chloride does not play well with most stainless steel, as the chloride is the one thing highly corrosive to stainless steel.

In the huge new refinery in Texas built by the Saudi’s a decade or so ago, upon commissioning someone turned on the wrong valve that sent hot seawater through the piping, causing something like $1.5B dollars in damage and delaying the opening by a long time. Interesting they now call it “caustic” released as it pitted all the stainless steel pipes. If seawater can do that, imaging what 600-800 degree molten salt will do to any weakness of the piping.

Scavenging materials, finding a smelter that can separate all the scavenged materials into the original metal forms, then recombined into the correct quality stainless steel to withstand high temperature molten salt, is a highly complex process by itself, involving a lot of coking coal for the heat. We don’t currently do this for new highest grade materials, we use newly mined purity, for the combination specialist metals, recycled metals doesn’t provide the purity required at this level of specialty. There is no way Simon’s thorium reactor can be rebuilt in a small community, as we would still need the mining of all the separate metals, including his one word reply of ‘exotics’.

What seems to happen is that we get answers about the future that all sound very plausible and comforting, until some person with a bit of knowledge of the intricacies of some part of it comes along to spoil the party.

It’s the highly technical nature of the materials that go into machines, that are then forged into specialized minor, often tiny, sometimes huge parts, with all the connections working in harmony, to make any modern kit, that will be impossible when people are desperate to find food and survive that’s the problem which is overlooked. They always assume some type of normality in the future, just with a much smaller group, forgetting that normality has been a growing human enterprise, with always more energy and materials to make stuff with for generations, and that normality is going to leave us in the near future.

Rob here on 5-Dec-2024 adding an interesting thought experiment by Kira on the energy and material savings benefits of economies of scale and our multi-continent supply chain. With follow-up comments by Hideaway and Kira.

Kira:

I have been trying to think about the benefits that economies of scale and multi continent supply chain provide in terms of energy and material savings and decided to try a simple thought experiment to try to visualize it.

Lets take a simple rudimentary motorbike as an example of the product that we intend to produce at scale. The raw materials will be the metals and alloys needed to make the parts and everything else will be done in house without depending on any external supply chain. The basic parts for a bike are as shown.

If we decide to make everything everything under a single roof (which is what localisation implies) we would have to dedicate seperate machining and fabrication units for each part along with the people with expertise in each of those departments all of which are massive upfront investments and would make the factory a mammoth operation on the scale and size of a gigafactory.

So what are the downsides of this approach?

  1. It requires massive upfront investment and upkeep.
  2. The output would be low.
  3. If we have to serve a country as large as US with localisation we are looking at at least one factory per state leading to large redundancy and waste of production capacity.

Lets approach the same problem and apply a distant supply chain solution.

Since all motorbikes are more or less the same and use same parts shown above we can do the following. Three companies A,B and C may be different bike companies making different types of bikes they will only design and make the frame(chassis) and engine in house and everything else will be outsourced to an external vendor. The suspension will be made by suspension manufacturing company, brakes by a brake manufacturer and so on. So how does this benefit everyone?

  1. Since the company is only making the frame and engine its factory size will be a fraction of what it would have been in scenario one.
  2. A dip in demand for company A’s bikes would not result in wasted capacity as company B and C can absorb the common capacity for the parts.
  3. Less labour requirements as there is lower redundancy as there is only one plant making suspension, brakes, tyres, clutch etc. instead of three.
  4. Since more resources are freed up the companies can focus resources on research and innovation thereby speeding up progress.

The obvious downside of this is the loss of redundancy and a single point of failure which can halt the production of all bike companies. But the benefits to the civilization as a whole far outweighs the risk as the more complex the product is the longer the supply chain is and the more difficult it would be to make it under a single roof.

If we take microchips as an example and try to take all the processes from raw materials to a finished chip and make everything under a single roof the factory will easily be the size of a small sized city.

When I mean everything I mean everything from the lithography machines to all the other machines, starting all the way from raw materials. That means first making this incredibly complicated machine below starting from metals and alloys mined,processed and shipped to the plant then machined, fabricated and assembled into the machine shown below.

So as complexity of the object increases multi continent supply chain is not only useful but essential to making high tech products. None of this is possible without fossil fuels and high grade minerals both of which are in irreversible decline and will soon lead to the supply chain collapsing leading to a loss of complexity creating a negative feedback loop.

The lithography machine shown above is just one of a hundreds of processes in getting from silicon ingots to a microchip (albeit the most important one). Some of the processes are shown above which require equally complex machines to perform.

Hideaway:

The caption with the photo states .. “just one of the benches the engine was laid out on”.

This was from a 1965 built motor..

Thanks Kira, a brilliant breakdown of complexity, with each of the above different main parts of a motor bike having so many components themselves. A simple motorcycle can have 2,000 – 3,000 separate parts.

Our complexity of modern life is just lost on so many people, not understanding that each and every part has to be made precisely from the exactly correct materials, to work together and function as a whole ‘machine’.

The other huge misunderstanding is that we need the total complexity to gather the food, energy, and materials that make up this complexity as we have used up all the easy to get food, energy and materials.

The motorbike example is a simple machine compared to a horizontal drill rig with tens of thousands of separate parts, including many computer chips, in many separate parts of the rig, from control systems to sensors to actuators, communication systems, power systems.

Without modern horizontal drill riggs our oil production would fall rapidly by a large percentage and these machines are dependent upon lots of spare parts arriving nearly every day.

When we start to lose overall energy availability, especially oil production because of depletion, the complexity has to rapidly unwind, as there is simply not enough energy to keep it all going. Once feedback loops kick in, of lack of parts, then machines we rely on become junk very quickly, which accelerates chaotic feedback loops.

The concept of going local, means massive simplification, because we don’t have either the energy nor materials locally to do anything differently, which means we will be unable to feed the current huge populations of local areas as all the modern machines cease to function. Fertilizer becomes a thing of the past, tractors can’t get oil and grease, let alone fuel, likewise for all transport from local rural areas, to cities.

Modern humans have just forgotten how reliant we all are upon 6 continent supply chains for our very existence…

“Kleiber’s law” of power/mass use to the 3/4 power most likely applies to human civilization. Studies have shown that in nature the law is a doubling of animal or plant mass requires a 75% increase in energy use because of efficiency gains is the easy explanation.

In human settlements research, done by Prof Geoffrey West and a host of others, they have found human population centres the power law is closer to 85%, as in we are not as efficient as nature with a 4B year head start. The problem with all the work on settlement sizes is that we live in a world of one global civilization and no city is an entity to itself, which they were 500-10,000 years ago, including their surrounds.

Kira:

Actually it was your exchange with Dennis on POB that lead me to have this train of thought. I found this line by him to be quite revealing of how people like him think.

Dennis: “Society is not based on physical laws alone, it is understood using knowledge such as sociology, psychology, and economics.”

Cornucopians like him always point out how GDP is growing with less energy use ie growth is becoming less energy intense. We know this is primarily because of massive financialization of economy but when you point that out his reply is that GDP calculation are a reflection of physical and thermodynamic reality of the society. It’s funny how he tries to have it both ways whenever it is convenient.

He is wrong as usual. Let’s take three bike companies on three continents North America, Europe and Asia – Harley, Triumph and Honda respectively. Assuming that there is no contact between the continents and each company has complete monopoly over their respective continents without any alternative then they can manufacture in whatever configuration they want. They could make everything under the same roof with redundancy and inefficiency or outsource their production of components to third party and cut costs.If they are inefficient their customers end up paying more than their counterparts on other continents.

But as soon as we apply the situation of globalization and they have to compete with each other they will have no choice but to reorganise themselves in a way to reduce material and energy costs and if they don’t they go out of business. You were right in your counter that civilization is very much like an ant hill and just like how no ant has the complete blueprint, no human has the complete design of civilization. It is not intentional, it is self organizing and self assembling. Complexity increases to solve problems and with increase in complexity comes increase in material and energy cost. When this happens the system reorganizes itself to optimize resource consumption. There is no way to intervene here.

For instance Ford could probably manufacture every component of its car under the same roof 85 years ago but with today’s complexity they probably have hundreds of suppliers that they share with many other car companies. If an American president declares that every inch of a Ford vehicle must be made on American soil the company would immediately go bankrupt as if they tried to do that a car that costs 20,000 would cost 200,000.

This pattern holds even across completely different industries.

This is a ridiculously condensed and shortened version of the supply chains of Apple and BMW. All supply chains end up either at pits of mines or oil and gas rigs as everything we produce comes from earth as raw materials. The suppliers in greens are the common ones for both companies and hundreds of others including oil and gas rigs. If we fully expand the supply chains we will see countless overlaps with one another with constant reorganization happening to optimize resource consumption. The true scale of feedbacks and overlapping is so complex that it is impossible to even comprehend. But there are some interesting things we can glean from the above diagram. The critical mass of consumers for the chip industry is coming from consumer electronics meaning that the auto industry and oil industry are just beneficiaries of this. If people stop buying smartphones and PCs then oil companies and car companies go out of business. There are several such critical dependencies that may not be so obvious at first glance and may be far down the supply chain.

Of course the connective tissue connecting the supply chain is oil since without we cannot maintain the multi continent movement or power the mining machines at the end of the supply chains.

Hideaway:

Thanks, Kira, excellent work again.

Trying to get people to understand the connection between the overall size of the growing market, relative to the complexity is extremely difficult, especially when added to the overall energy and material savings to the entire super organism of the human civilization.

Because of collapsing grades of ores of all types, we need the complexity of modern machinery, modern financing and modern supply chains, to gain access to all the requirements of all materials and energy used. It’s a self feeding monster that has to grow just to gain access to the requirements.

Unwind any aspect of modern complexity and the whole lot collapses, yet keep growing and the whole lot collapses due to environmental limits anyway.

Most likely oil will be the limiting factor, that sets in motion feedback loops in reduced consumption of all the requirements used in modern complexity, and your example of discretionary spending on computer chips is the perfect example, but we can multiply this by thousands for all the unknown links that are necessary to keep modern complexity going.

The concept of localizing industries, plus using tariffs to do so, will just hasten the collapse as it uses up more energy and material resources to build all the local manufacturing plants and tool them up, let alone gain the raw materials and energy for their operation. Just the attempt to do this will likely set off other unknown feedback loops as the extra energy and materials involved in the attempt to localize puts pressure on other aspects of the system.

Of course it’s all just a duplication of what’s already happening elsewhere, supplying the world, so the energy and materials are effectively wasted giving higher costs to consumers everywhere because of the duplication. Now imagine 5-50 countries trying to do the same for their local markets.

We can’t have 50 TMSC factories around the world as there is just not the market for that number of computer chips, with the complexity it takes to produce them. That factory/foundry whatever they want to call it has to churn out millions of wafers and chips to be viable. It wont work with 50 of them, unless the super-organism of human civilization grows by enough to accommodate the increase, which means every facet of civilization has to grow including population, energy and material use.

Once oil declines because of depletion and the impossibility of an increased production, whenever that happens, then overall energy availability turns down, meaning the growing organism can’t keep growing, nor even maintain what’s built and operating as entropy guarantees we require 97-99% of all energy and materials to just keep operating ‘normally’. (All while energy use keeps growing to supply the raw materials because of lower grades).

Once energy of all types that totally rely upon oil start suffering from increased costs, as oil’s harder for any one business to obtain, the civilization that relies upon cheap energy, suffers from reductions in internal markets from those struggling, meaning less markets for computer chips, and every type of machine that relies upon them, sending businesses broke, that manufacture essential requirements of other businesses, so creating a cascade of accelerating failures across civilization itself, in producing everything required to just maintain and operate what exists.

We’ve been in extend and pretend mode for over 50 years, making up a linear increase in oil supplies, with exponential increases in coal and gas energy supplies to make up the required energy of the growing civilization, then added some nuclear, solar, wind, geothermal etc, all just electricity providers, which are not providers of the full range of products and energy supplied by fossil fuels.

The increase in coal and gas though is totally reliant upon oil, with the rest being just derivatives of fossil fuels in total.

The complexity of the entirety of the system would take multiple books to explain just the merest of details of any one component of the overall complexity of how we live. It’s beyond the comprehension of anyone, as it’s exactly as explained by Kira above, so people without thinking of the overall complexity, assume we can just increase one part of this civilization by increasing something massively, on a world wide scale, without having implications elsewhere, nor have any understanding how everything else has to keep working normally for their one aspect to increase greatly. (EVs, batteries, solar, wind, geothermal, tidal, and nuclear).

Single cell organisms, multiple cell organisms, storms, stars and all prior civilizations have grown with increasing complexity over time, yet all eventually collapse due to some type of internal energy usage decline, that collapses the overall system.

To think our modern civilization will be ‘different’ to everything else in the universe that is large and grows complexity internally, increasing energy use until collapse, is denial in it’s finest form.

1,729 thoughts on “By Kira & Hideaway: On Relocalization”

  1. For all you snowflakes that aren’t cheering for rapid human extinction, you might enjoy Pollard’s newest essay. LOL, just kidding about the snowflake thing. I’m not that jaded… yet.😊

    It’s about an old trip Dave took to a small, isolated village in Belize. It’s very good. But it’s also very dangerous. Has that strong Daniel Quinn vibe that humans (under the right circumstances) belong in the web of life.

    Lessons From a Community of Necessity | how to save the world

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  2. Tucker Carlson interviews Sergey Lavrov in Moscow.

    Excellent fact filled interview. Compare this to the childish drivel from western diplomats.

    Lavrov has high integrity and is one of the only adults in the room.

    Liked by 2 people

    Reply

    1. An excellent interview. Tucker learned something from his last interview and he was not so obnoxiously interrupting as he was with Putin.

      Why can’t we in the West have leaders (like Putin & Lavrov) that are intelligent and honest instead of just stupid, lying or blowhards all the time?

      AJ

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    1. I observe that not only are most climate scientists incapable of understanding what actually needs to be done to reduce the threat, most are also silent on the climate implications of AI’s energy use.

      They can’t even attack the low hanging fruit, let alone population reduction.

      P.S. If you are interested in another scientist’s attempt to produce low energy electronics to emulate the brain, I recommend the book On Intelligence by Jeff Hawkins.

      Denial with Cortical Columns

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      2. Nice essay (and comments). I wish I was around back then when you were this passionate. But my clueless ass was still 8 months away from being overshoot aware.

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        1. If you’re implying I’ve lost that loving feeling there may be an element of truth in it.

          In the early days after stumbling on Varki’s MORT and connecting the dots I hoped I had found something important that would make a difference.

          Now I know I discovered something important, and I also know it won’t make a difference, even for the aware people still working to make the future less bad. Not one prominent activist in the overshoot space has embraced MORT as the first hurdle that must be overcome.

          Now I’m satisfied to observe and chronicle our collapse as a statement to the universe that a few fire apes understand what is going on.

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          1. LOL… Ya, it does kind of look like I’m implying that you’re dead inside now. Nope, I just meant pretty much what you’re reply said.

            If I’m still doing this in 5 years, I imagine my comments will be cynical one-word answers. And no essay’s whatsoever.

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        1. My bet is the coming economic “recession” and the poor business case for AI will put a brake on the build-out pretty soon.

          Of course I said that about fracking 10 years ago too.

          I’ll get it right one of these times. Even a broken clock is correct twice a day.

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    1. A few observations from the Charlie Hall discussion:

      1) A core theme was why is it so difficult to spread awareness of falling EROI and it’s implications? No mention of MORT, of course.

      2) Charlie himself seems to be in denial of the destination despite understanding the predicament as well as anyone on the planet.

      3) I caught an interesting throw away comment. In a press conference with Trump and Elon, Trump said the core problem was oil depletion and Elon corrected him saying the core problem is too much government spending.

      4) At the end Charlie provides a different and interesting way to think about the maximum power principle.

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  5. Shed some expenses today.

    Cancelled my cablevision TV channels and cancelled my home phone. Negotiated a 33% reduction in my internet bill to $75/month with an increase to 500 Mbps by getting them to price match a low cost internet service provider.

    Bought an Amazon Fire stick for $25 (Black Friday 50% off) which converts an old TV into a smart TV to which I can now stream my movie and music collection from a Jellyfin server on my computer.

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  6. Earlier this week I tightened security on my property with a couple low cost but excellent outdoor wi-fi cameras.

    I went with the TP-Link Tapo C120 camera at $70 for two. Easy to install but must be near a power outlet.

    https://www.tp-link.com/ca/home-networking/cloud-camera/tapo-c120/

    I did a lot of research on battery operated security cameras and even ordered one before cancelling it. Too many compromises for battery operation. Can’t continuously stream, not compatible with popular 3rd party apps like Blue Iris (Windows) and tinyCam Pro (Android), and a lot more expensive.

    I highly recommend the Tapo C120 and installed another pair at the farm yesterday to give visibility of gate status and vehicles entering.

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  8. Here’s a very nice example of the rules based order in action.

    Biden is considering giving a pre-emptive pardon to Fauci, just in case Trump prosecutes him for murdering 7 million people by engineering a virus, withholding safe and effective treatments, and coercing people to transfect themselves with a dangerous untested gene therapy.

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  9. Hideaway makes the key argument.

    If it works and is profitable people would already be doing it somewhere. But they are not.

    #293: Days of thunder

    Matt, you perceive how hard it is to run a lifestyle off solar and batteries, now consider how much more difficult it would be to run a heavy continuous industry off the same.

    Despite all the rhetoric of solar, wind and batteries being cheaper than coal, gas and oil, no-one anywhere in the world has chosen to power a heavy industry using just solar, wind and batteries.

    Of course if it really were cheaper, somewhere sunny and windy, heavy industries would flock to such locations, because they would have a competitive advantage, especially if they could go off grid to avoid grid fees. However no-one is doing it, which tells the truth about the real costs.

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    1. Just refer those guys over to our secretary of energy, billy bob thornton.😊

      And believe me, if Exxon thought them fucking things right there were the future, they’d be putting ’em all over the goddamn place.

      There aint nobody to blame, but the demand that we keep pumping it.

      p.s. One line from the clip stands out big time. “And unfortunately for your grandkids, we have a 120-year petroleum-based infrastructure.”

      Thats how much time we have left of industrial BAU? Or is he saying that our current oil infrastructure is 120 years old? I have a feeling its the former. If so, it strips away the urgency/desperation of the whole clip. Maybe that was the only way the studio execs would approve it. I bet the original script said 20-40 years.

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  10. Rintrah with another “killer” essay today.

    https://www.rintrah.nl/how-influenza-responds-when-we-start-vaccinating-against-it/

    So yes, in the vaccinated Egyptian chickens, we see the van den Bosschean doomsday scenario. There is a “peculiar stepwise accumulation of glycosylation sites” observed, in the main protein targeted for neutralization. There’s no clear evidence of decreased or increased virulence of these viruses: They generally just keep killing every single chicken they infect. There’s also no apparent detrimental impact on the transmission of these viruses, except for the very last glycan added.

    The purpose of these glycans, appears to be to allow the virus to persist in its host. In mice we also see that the new glycans that started emerging in human influenza a few years ago, have the effect of increasing replication of the virus, virulence and antibody evasion.

    It’s worth noting, that despite an increase in vaccination of elderly against influenza, we’re not seeing a decline in influenza deaths. In 2018, before the SARS2 pandemic starts distorting everything, the United States had the most influenza deaths since the 1967-77 season. This despite about half of elderly being vaccinated. It seems influenza evolves in response to vaccination, to become deadlier.

    Of course, with far less of the population being vaccinated against influenza and with most of the people who are vaccinated having been infected by influenza many times before they received a vaccine against it, the selective pressure on influenza is less intense than it is for SARS-COV-2. In addition, SARS-COV-2 is inherently just a nastier virus than influenza: SARS2 can infect endothelial cells, it can kill T cells and it can draw T cells into the brain. Normal season influenza can’t do any of this.

    SARS-COV-2 is evolving very rapidly for a corona virus and as I’ve mentioned before, we notice that it’s rapidly adding these glycans. JN.1 mutated to add a glycan at either S:30 by deleting S:31, or by adding it on S:22. That puts the glycan on the N1 loop.

    But now we see the next glycan emerge, on 188, by changing 190 to Serine or Threonine. The version that’s now conquering the world is called LP.8.1. It adds the glycan on 188 and changes some amino acids next to it to adjust to the new glycan. But then it takes a next step. It changes S:679 to Arginine, which further improves the polybasic Furin cleavage site, by adding another basic amino acid. That’s now the most rapidly spreading version.

    I first pointed this out a year ago that it was improving the furin cleavage site, but those lineages were unable to compete against lineages that added new glycans. But now we see a lineage that added the glycans and on top of that, now improves the furin cleavage site.

    And some of you may wonder: Why keep track of every little detail? Who cares about any of this? Well, this virus is out there, damaging brains and immune systems of everyone. There’s an entire generation of children constantly getting reinfected by it.

    We know what we see in chickens, with influenza: When you vaccinate them against it and they keep getting infected with it, the virus gradually evolves to evade the antibodies and merely grows more virulent. H5N1 now kills 90% of chickens within 48 hours.

    And quite frankly, I don’t like what we’re seeing. This is how many people in Denmark catch mycoplasma pneumonia now:

    If this is immunity debt, it comes with one hell of an interest rate. In Japan they’re seeing record breaking numbers of cases too, unseen since they began tracking numbers in 1999. Mycoplasma pneumoniae is the second most common cause of pneumonia.

    So what’s the perpetrator? The lockdowns are being thrown under the bus right now. But as I warned about long ago, nobody really knows what happens when you have an IgG4 response in the lungs to a common respiratory virus. And then there is the fact that the immune system has to devote its limited T cell capacity to one single new virus. And then on top of that, you’re dealing with a virus that kills T cells and of course irritates the lungs.

    But I want to point out again, that a natural infection by a new virus, will lead to a balanced immune response: The innate immune response is strengthened through exposure to such a virus. This innate immune response can handle very different viruses roughly equally well. As an example, you see that an infection by SARS-COV-2, improves the ability of the alveolar macrophages in the lungs to subsequently protect the body against Influenza.

    Only when the innate immune response can’t handle it on its own, is an antibody response produced to a novel agent. But after vaccination against SARS2, antibody concentrations are about 50 times higher than after natural infection. So we shifted the balance in the lungs of most of the population, towards a highly specific adaptive immune response, targeted at SARS2.

    You can go back and read my posts about all of this, back in 2021 and 2022. I warned you that we were at risk of seeing all sorts of other respiratory pathogens start to take over in the lungs, because the immune system was stuck with this abnormal adaptive response targeted at SARS2 and the innate immune response was suppressed.

    Now we’re stuck with a world where everyone is just coughing all the time. Queen Camilla, King Charles wife, can’t show up in public because she has a cough that just doesn’t go away and feels tired all the time.

    I warned you about all of this. You can’t expect the adaptive immune response to keep this virus under control for us. The innate immune system has to deal with rapidly mutating respiratory viruses of this nature. The adaptive immune response, has the job of discriminating against virulence associated epitopes.

    That’s what the antibodies are supposed to do: Imagine your neighbor catches a mild virus of SARS2 and you catch a nastier version. You’re both of similar age and overall health. You will have higher antibody concentrations as a result and they will react more strongly with your version of SARS2, than with the version your neighbor caught.

    This then gives a selective advantage to the milder version your neighbor caught, because it stands a better chance of reinfecting you, than the nastier version you caught. You see this in survivors of the 1918 pandemic influenza: They have highly evolved antibodies against it (affinity maturation), that only react with the 1918 virus, but not other influenza variants. That’s why we did not end up stuck with endless waves of very nasty influenza: The survivors gave the nasty influenza a survival disadvantage, through their adaptive immune response.

    All of this could have been avoided.

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  11. In case you’re wondering why the UK is so irrationally determined to defeat Russia, they are the fastest collapsing developed economy, and need Russia’s resources, as explained today by Dr. Tim Morgan.

    #294: The perils of extremes

    The situation now is that economic contraction is going to compel the abandonment of extreme neoliberalism. But this won’t be easy in a country so heavily committed to it.

    Elon Musk was a long way wide of the mark when he said that civil war in Britain was “inevitable”. The UK is no more politically unstable than Germany, France, Italy or a starkly-polarized United States.

    Much likelier is a more insidious process whereby Britain becomes ungovernable, in the sense that no government, irrespective of party, can meet the demands of an increasingly impatient and discontented electorate.

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  12. Dr. Malcolm Kendrick has won his libel suit against a newspaper that damaged his reputation for speaking the truth about unsafe and ineffective statins, pharma’s most profitable and useless product.

    How did the newspaper respond to the court’s decision? They promoted the reporter.

    https://drmalcolmkendrick.org/2024/12/05/finally-the-end-of-the-trial-process/

    We did fight back, and we won. We won because of the lazy assumption that all the ‘experts’ must be right. Therefore, we must be wrong. There was no need to check facts, or to find out what we were saying, or why we were saying it? Waste of time, clearly unscientific idiots.

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  13. Gail Tverberg today explains that the world must and will soon simplify in response to energy depletion.

    She seems to imply that simplification of the complex systems that provide our essentials can occur without a rapid chaotic collapse as argued by Hideaway and Kira.

    I find it odd that she does not mention scarcity of essentials like food.

    Perhaps another example of Dr. Ajit Varki’s MORT in action?

    https://ourfiniteworld.com/2024/12/04/the-world-economy-needs-to-simplify/

    These are a few ways simplification might take place:

    [a] High level government organizations might start disappearing.

    [b] Programs that we expect to be funded by the US Federal Government might be handed over completely to the states, to be funded or not, as the finances of individual states permit.

    [c] There could be major banking problems, perhaps simultaneously in many countries around the world.

    [d] There could be a great deal more sharing of homes and of apartments.

    [e] Healthcare may become much simpler and local.

    [f] Universities may be slimmed down greatly.

    [g] The huge amount of effort that goes into taking care of lawns in the US may disappear.

    [h] International travel for pleasure will likely disappear, except perhaps for the very rich.

    [i] Many types of optional activities that now take place by car may be replaced by more local versions, which will be reached by walking, or perhaps by bicycle.

    [j] Very strange political leaders may take office.

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    1. OFW seems to be getting many commentators now that think we can innovate our way out of a predicament. Hate to say it but it was better when FE was there as he chased away the cornucopians.

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      1. I do not read the OFW comments. My Feedly feed reader shows the new comments and if I don’t see something by Hideaway I clear them all. Ditto on Peak Oil Barrel except I also look for comments by HHH.

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      2. FE is such a mystery to me. Hated him for a while because of his hijacking of comment sections. He seemed to be insane. Then I started slowly checking out his substack stuff. Was 50/50 at first with good and bad articles. But now I regularly check out his site and I’m almost always in agreement with what he says.

        Either FE has toned it down, or I have toned it up.

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  14. Tim Watkins today adds some excellent color to the oil depletion driven collapse of the UK.

    https://consciousnessofsheep.co.uk/2024/12/04/it-was-always-about-the-oil/

    Most households are in a far worse position, since their only means of repaying debt – or, indeed, paying for life’s essentials – is from their income… mostly wages which have mostly failed to keep up with inflation.  Corporations’ need to service their borrowing require them to pass on their increased costs (inflation and new taxes) to consumers (householders) who were already facing a steep decline in prosperity (the income left over once the bills have been paid).  Government’s need to service its borrowing requires it to levy additional taxes on taxpayers (households) who have already seen their prosperity plummet.  In short, the whole house of cards is founded – in the face of material depletion – upon the incomes of a mass of western householders who are increasingly unable to consume at the rate required to maintain our overburdened debt-based economy…  a crisis of under-consumption indeed!

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  15. Small towns are so cool. I love the people!

    Just another wacky thing where when I was a kid, if you were from a small town, you got made fun of by us city slickers because you were considered inferior. Just a dumb hick.

    This short clip is about a mountain town’s only grocery store. Cool that they didn’t cave in and sell to corporate. But check back in two years and I guarantee it’s a Kroger or Walmart. Same thing as Dolly Parton trying to hold off on giving her entire catalogue to the advertising industry. Eventually the money is too important to say no.

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    1. Art says that technology cannot significantly help with overshoot. As per IPAT, environmental impact is the product of population, standard of living per capita and a technology factor. If you say that the latter cannot on its own solve the issue, then you are left with two dials. Population. Standard of Living. There are studies that show that population also cannot be turned down fast enough through the more socially acceptable means ( https://mahb.stanford.edu/wp-content/uploads/2014/10/2014_Bradshaw-Pop-reduction-not-quick-fix.pdf ). So that cuts down the options to eliminating billions over the course of decades, or drastically dialing down one’s standard of living.
      Now, Art recently calculated his own environmental footprint. Results? See for yourself. https://www.artberman.com/blog/naive-optimism-vs-reality-the-true-state-of-our-planet-and-energy-future/

      MORT strikes again, I would say.

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      1. I didn’t follow your comment about Berman & MORT.

        Berman seems to be an aware person to me and his denial is much lower than most. I think he knows the severity of our situation and the likely outcome. His perspective has significantly widened recently to include all aspects of overshoot and he speaks more frankly than most but does stop shy of saying most of us are going to die horrible deaths.

        What do you see?

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        1. He is aware of the situation, he has been for a while, and keeps telling we need to get serious about things. But he still has an eco-footprint that far, far exceeds the boundaries that have been identified. Why has he not scaled down voluntarily at this point?

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            1. Well, as per his blog-post, whatever changes he may or may not have made, he still consumes more planet than even the average US citizen. I’ve seen studies that found out that understanding of environmental issues is positively correlated with an individual’s eco-footprint – meaning, the more someone understands the problem, the more the person aware of it doubles down on what’s causing it. Art does not seem to be an exception to this.

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  18. Very cool video. Looks like they are 3-minute cuts from five separate documentaries. I think there are only two valid reactions to this type of stuff. Being in awe of the human ingenuity or cheering for the ingenuity to go away. 

    My favorite shot is the fade out of Bingham mine starting at the 6:25 mark. My favorite stat was the shipyard that makes one mega ship every 3 days. Honorable mention was the Tokyo subway system that handles 8 million people every single day.

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      1. Binge watching yt videos all goddamn day. I need to stop and get a life.😊. Could be worse though, if I wasn’t born an Empire Baby maybe I’d be stuck doing what these poor guys are doing.

        p.s. what are doing eating dinner this late? Thought you fasted for like 18 hours every day.

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        1. Didn’t have lunch until 3pm today and no breakfast.

          An app I have used for years to synchronize subsets of my Calibre book library to my Android devices has gone out of business and I had to find an alternate method. It’s kind of complicated and I lost track of time so the late dinner.

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          1. Take a look at Syncthing. It’s bascially selfhosted Dropbox but simple enough and has a very well working Android app. But basically works with any OS I tried it.

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            1. Thanks I’ve tried Syncthing. It’s very good except it does not write to microSD cards. I use a competitor called Resilio Sync.

              I don’t have a problem getting e-books on and off my phone. The issue is keeping the metadata synced and having a nice way to browse and filter using the metadata on the phone. I used to use a brilliant app called Calibre Companion but it is no longer supported. Someone is selling an alternate called Calibre Sync which is ok but not great. I’ve decided to go with a simple solution and use my Moon+ Reader to browse and filter using the metadata.

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        2. Those are hermetic compressors from refrigeration units, every air conditioner, refrigerator, water cooler has one. I work at a place where they were once repaired!! Cut open, re-wind the motor and welded shut again, not economical at all, even at that time.

          Those guys are pretty good at dissecting them!!

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          1. Notice that their salvage operation stops without affordable fossil energy.

            I asked chatGPT to explain where and why silver is used in compressors.

            Silver is used in specific components of refrigerator compressors to enhance their efficiency, durability, and reliability. Here’s a breakdown of where and why silver is used in refrigerator compressors:

            Where Silver is Used in Refrigerator Compressors

            1. Bearings and Sliding Surfaces:
              Silver is often applied as a thin coating on bearings, piston rings, and other sliding surfaces within the compressor.
            2. Electrical Contacts:
              In hermetic compressors with electrical components, silver is used in contacts and switchgear because of its exceptional electrical conductivity.
            3. Seals and Joining Materials:
              Silver-based alloys are frequently employed in brazing to create hermetically sealed joints between metal components, ensuring a leak-proof system.
            4. Anti-Wear Coatings:
              Components that experience high friction or wear, such as valve plates, are sometimes coated with silver or silver-based materials.

            Why Silver is Used in Refrigerator Compressors

            1. High Wear Resistance:
              Silver coatings reduce friction and wear between moving parts, extending the life of critical components like bearings and piston rings.
            2. Excellent Thermal Conductivity:
              Silver’s superior thermal conductivity helps dissipate heat more effectively, reducing the risk of overheating and improving energy efficiency.
            3. Low Friction Coefficient:
              Silver-coated surfaces offer reduced friction, which minimizes energy losses and enhances the compressor’s efficiency.
            4. Corrosion Resistance:
              Silver is resistant to many forms of chemical corrosion, particularly from refrigerants and lubricating oils, ensuring long-term reliability.
            5. Electrical Conductivity:
              For electrical components, silver’s unparalleled conductivity ensures efficient operation, reducing energy losses and wear on contacts.
            6. Brazing and Sealing:
              Silver-based brazing alloys are used to join components in a way that can withstand high pressure and temperature variations while maintaining a hermetic seal.
            7. Anti-Galling Properties:
              In applications where metals slide against each other under pressure, silver prevents galling (adhesive wear), ensuring smooth operation.

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  19. The URL I posted has my comment highlighted.

    Something to remember: AI itself is extremely energy intensive and relies on six-continent supply chains. The chips (GPUs) used to train and run AI models are manufactured using astonishingly complex processes. When the bend-not break moment comes, AI will be very difficult if not impossible to sustain.

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  20. This image has been posted by Tim Watkins on his site several times and most people on this site have probably come across it. I never understood it’s significance until recently largely thanks to Hideaways exchanges on POB posted here by Rob and learning more about supply chains and feedback loops.

    This graph explains most of political instability across the world and also the “affordability crisis” gripping the most countries. Please feel free to correct any mistakes in my interpretation.

    The oil industry gives us the lifeblood needed to connect the supply chains, power the machinery at the end of supply chains and also feedstock in form of petrochemicals. In return the industry charges us a nominal fee everytime we use its products

    When the EROI was 100:1 the industry could have sold the oil for almost nothing and still function but as it kept declining they had to keep raising prices. When the prices went above a certain threshold it would make the entire supply chain expensive to maintain increasing prices of everything from a burger to BMW. The consumers would cut spending leading to contraction, demand destruction and prices would return back to normal. But the buffer between the point of price rise and the ceiling for economy was quite large and oil companies could easily operate in this buffer to increase revenue, invest in exploration and increase production to bring prices down.

    Now that the EROI has fallen to around 10:1 this no longer works. But why? This is because when the EROI was high the the oil industry was essentially like a generous entity on the periphery of the economy “giving” us stuff but taking almost nothing in return. Now it is very much inside the economy taking back a lot of the energy it is giving us along with massive amount of minerals (which are getting more energy intensive to mine). So due to competition from oil industry the net energy available to wider economy is declining.

    So even when oil price is at historic lows the economy is already stressed by the oil industry taking back a good chunk of energy back leaving no headroom for any further increase in prices before economy contracts.

    One thing I struggle to understand is when there is more money chasing less stuff the price of that stuff goes up. This is how it worked for oil as well earlier. Now it seems a little different, the price of oil remains low despite more people chasing less energy.

    Is it because one of the primary pursuers of the stuff is the very industry producing it? If anyone understands please feel free to explain it.

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    1. Good insights. I’ll think about your question.

      Some of us call the above chart the “Triangle of Doom” and attribute it to Steve Ludlum who at one time was a prominent doomer and then shifted focus to politics and went mostly quiet.

      Another way of explaining the triangle of doom is that depletion relentlessly pushes up the cost of extraction, and thus also the lowest price at which oil can be sold. This gradually makes everything more expensive.

      Our incomes are proportional to our productivity, which is proportional to the energy we can afford to buy, so incomes trend down as oil prices rise.

      Eventually the cost of extraction exceeds what consumers can afford and the whole system stops.

      We won’t run out of oil. We’ll run out of oil that we can afford to use.

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      1. Eventually the cost of extraction exceeds what consumers can afford and the whole system stops.

        We won’t run out of oil. We’ll run out of oil that we can afford to use.

        I think so too. Since oil industry is using money (which is a claim on energy or energy products) to buy its own products the money is recirculating in the system. It’s not more outside claims chasing less oil, its money that has completed its claim on energy that is coming back for more. This will not drive the oil prices up.

        If an external industry like textile or plastics manufacturing was using an additional 10 percent of oil it would drive the prices above 150$ but since it is oil industry itself it is not pushing the price up.

        This is truly frightening as EROI keeps collapsing inflation will keep rising and destabilize nations, no one outside of small forums like ours will link it to net energy. They will look for conventional reasons like oil prices which will not rise because of aforementioned reasons. If oil industry is really consuming anywhere close to half the energy it produces (as is being predicted) then that is probably the farthest that this civilization could go even with all the financial wizardry.

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        1. I think the prediction for oil industry consuming 50 percent of its own energy is by 2050 if I am not mistaken. This is probably the most optimistic deadline but supply chain collapse and resource conflicts will probably bring down civilization much sooner.

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        2. It’s not more outside claims chasing less oil, its money that has completed its claim on energy that is coming back for more. This will not drive the oil prices up.

          I don’t understand why oil industry use of oil does not push up oil price. They are not skimming the crude as it exits the well. They are purchasing refined diesel after it has passed through multiple companies to refine and transport it. If you are correct it’s a very important insight. Can you please elaborate?

          Oil industry oil consumption does act as a tax meaning less goods and services can be produced from a given flow of oil which means lower productivity and higher inflation.

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          1. I have come to look at this in this manner only recently after thinking about supply chains and various interconnections of the economy so I could be wrong.

            Let’s go with the assumption that the money we use is claim on either energy or embedded energy(stuff made with energy). If we do that then the energy claimed with the money does two things –

            1. Provide energy for moving people or goods that people need. (Transportation and logistics).
            2. Power the machines extracting resources from earth like metals and wood among other things. These resources are then transported and made into “stuff”.

            The oil industry historically has been in the background just providing oil and collecting the money for the said oil. This was when EROEI was very high.

            Now that EROI is declining the oil industry has begun taking oil from the pool of oil produced by it. (This recent change is indicated in red arrows.)

            Now we have less energy going back into the wider economy than before which is leading to inflation across the world but the oil price is depressed and not rising because the the same money which came from the economy is coming back from the oil industry (this is not new money supply). If we replace the oil industry with any other generic industry with $ going out and energy coming in, it would lead to oil prices going up as there is more money chasing less oil.

            This also explains why production cuts to raise prices will simply not work as whatever extra dollars come in from the oil revenues would just flow out to buy energy. All it would do is to make the rest of economy suffer even more than it already is.

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            1. I’m still not following this:

              the oil price is depressed and not rising because the the same money which came from the economy is coming back from the oil industry (this is not new money supply). If we replace the oil industry with any other generic industry with $ going out and energy coming in, it would lead to oil prices going up as there is more money chasing less oil.

              Maybe you are using different words to describe how I think about it:

              A growing share of the oil that was used to make citizens (and companies) productive and therefore wealthy enough to afford oil is now consumed by the oil industry to extract oil. This reduces demand for oil which suppresses the price of oil.

              In addition, less growth (or degrowth) due to falling productivity means there are fewer citizens and companies eligible for new debt which has the effect of reducing the money supply and further depressing the system.

              In the limit of oil companies consuming 100% of the extracted oil to extract the oil, they would no longer function because everything else in the economy would stop and there would be nothing available to exchange money for, including the spare parts they need to operate.

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              1. Do you follow Tim Morgan over at SEEDS? I find his explanation on the complex interplay between the real economy of energy and materials versus the money economy to be helpful. He explains it a bit differently. Expanding debt is involved as well as denial prevents acknowledging the end results of shrinking EROEI.

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                1. Yes, I have followed Dr. Morgan from the beginning in 2010 before he had a blog and when he wrote 9 important reports on overshoot while employed by Tullett Prebon.

                  I have the reports and can share them if you can’t find them.

                  Today I only lightly skim his work because he says the same thing over and over. Much like I do on the topic of denial.

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                  1. Yes, he’s gotten repetitive, so I don’t visit as often. I’ll pass on the reports. I read too much as it is, and it’s easy to perseverate.

                    Niebuhr’s serenity prayer is hard to pull off when one is talking about the end of life as we’ve known it. Most of the time I think I strike a reasonable balance.

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              2. Kira and Rob, the oil industry uses lots of products of modernity in the search and gathering of oil. Take drill pipe as one aspect. Most of the drill pipe comes from China made with steel that came from Australia or Brazil. It was all mined and transported from lower grade iron ore than we use to mine 50 years ago, so takes more energy to carry and convert to high quality steel, including a lot of coal in the process.

                We (humanity as a whole) use drill pipe in exploration, it is not recovered as to reach the deep depths we go to, the holes are cased in pipe to various depths until the next section of thinner drill bits go deeper. An exploration hole might go to a total of 5,000 metres deep, but does so in stages. The first stage might be 17″ diameter to 1,100 metres, the drill bit removed and the hole lined (with pipe), then cemented in place, followed by drilling the next stage with 13″ hole diameter down to 2,600 metres, where it is then lined and cemented in place, followed by a smaller diameter hole deeper. All the effort is to help make sure the drill, on a long cable doesn’t get stuck in the hole.

                Considering we are trying to collect smaller and smaller pools of oil, from more remote places, or deeper in the sea, then the amount of effort in all the equipment just gets larger of everything, so has to include more of every aspect of civilization to make it happen, which has to include part of the diesel used by the geologist searching for new deposits of iron ore to make the drill pipe we keep burying. Imagine the quantity of pipe being buried in the Permian fracked fields for lower and lower quantity returns as a clear example of this. None of it is ever recovered, it stays buried underground…

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                1. Its no wonder that just 10-15% oil consumed by oil industry is wreaking havoc on the economy with rising inflation. I am not even sure if that 15 % percent takes into account the embedded oil in items like pipes,semiconductors and various other high tech sensors and equipment without which drilling to these depths is impossible. I shudder to think what happens when we reach 30 or 40 percent. Sadly no economist will ever be able to recognise it as they believe oil is just another commodity that can be substituted.

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              3. I was trying to map flow of energy through the economy using money as a proxy, but I was thinking along the same lines just as you described.

                As oil flows through the economy it generates productivity which is translated to money in the pockets of people which they use to claim more energy/stuff and on and on. This is a virtuous cycle which has been going on for a long time. But now the cycle is has reversed and turned into a viscious cycle.

                The oil industry is taking more oil and minerals to produce the same quantity of oil. This means less oil flowing through the economy which means less productivity, which means less “stuff” being produced. This is being addressed with more and more debt leading to more money chasing less productivity and rising inflation.

                The fall in productivity is putting the economy in a slump killing demand while the oil industry is producing more and more oil every year (at least volumetrically if not energetically). If the oil consumed by oil industry was consumed by textile industry or aviation sector that would increase productivity and therefore would push the economy forward and would pump up oil prices too. But that would require high EROEI which we are out of.

                Sadly the consumption of oil by oil industry will only increase. I don’t think we will even get to 50% of oil consumed by oil industry let alone a 100%. Assuming we are at about 10-15 we will probably reach a breaking point at 30 to 40 percent.

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                1. Kira, either last year or early this year, I went back through the records of wholesale prices for oil gas and metallurgical coal, all delivered to South/East Asia as that is the factory of the world, over the past decade. Thermal coal was a bit cheaper, but it was energy used for products I was most interested in. Interestingly the wholesale price of electricity mostly from using thermal coal also came to around $US40/Mwh.

                  The average wholesale price paid for ‘product’ energy was around $US40/Mwh over that decadal timeframe. I used this number to compare dollar cost of energy to dollar return of energy over time, to get my EROEI approximations..

                  For example Nuclear power costs around $US38/Mwh across the USA for operation, ongoing capital and maintenance costs of the Nuclear power plants, before including any capital costs for the building of the plants in the first place, also over the last decade or so (figures are not all consistent as the (WNA) misses the cost numbers for 2013 and 2014) ..

                  However the figures are rough enough (not exact) to show that nuclear is an obvious drain on overall energy and not a producer of the 100/1 EROEI claimed by the nuclear industry.

                  As money is a claim on energy, we can either spend it on energy now at $40/Mwh or spend it building and operating a NPP over the next 60 years and get zero return for our efforts.

                  Meanwhile the Saudi’s are continuing to produce a lot of oil at a total cost of $US2.50/bbl that gives them $US70/bbl return (a bbl being around 1.7MWh of energy) or an energy/dollar return of 28/1.

                  Please note, it’s not all Saudi oil, just the cheapest easiest stuff they produce. They also have more expensive, as in lower EROEI oil as well. Of course like every capitalist, they are selling as much of the cheapest to produce oil first as it’s the most profitable, no matter what the price, hence we are depleting the easy and cheapest to access oil at the greatest rate, and this is happening everywhere.

                  What’s actually happening in the world, hidden from most is that we are using past cheap embedded energy to build the future, while not acknowledging it had any energy cost in our modern calculations of EROEI. Every single paper I’ve ever read on EROEI, and it’s hundreds to thousands of them, excludes all embedded energy in the existing system, despite entropy happening to every part of our system and it needing to be rebuilt over time, with materials that are more energy intensive because of lower ore grades of everything.

                  Humanity as a whole has been lying to itself for decades about the true cost of energy and now we are starting to reap the downside of this self deception, except in some very isolated parts of the internet like here at un-denial. But none of us are immune to the rapidly increasing cost as it’s borne by everyone with decreasing living standards, increased property and other taxes and deliberately hidden real inflation numbers.

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                  1. I think embedded energy is something that is very commonly ignored by utopians when looking at EROEI. Nuclear vs Coal is a pretty good case study. If we just look at costs of mining uranium ore, processing it, enriching it and the using it in the reactor the cost may very well be comparable or even lesser than mining and burning coal simply because of energy density of nuclear energy. But when the cost of building nuclear plant, waste disposal is taken into account the cost will be anywhere between 10-15 times more than a comparable coal plant.

                    There is massive upfront investment in embedded energy which will take decades to recover if at all it is fully recovered. The problem is even worse for energy harvesting devices like wind and solar. Even if we accept optimistic EROI figures of 20:1 for these things the energy will be recovered over a period of 20 years, which implies 1 unit each year. Whereas coal plants will yield their return within just a few weeks. All of that energy is embedded and locked into those devices with no guarantee of recovery as a lot can happen in 20 years.

                    Diesel engines can last decades and infrastructure like railroads and highways can last half a century before needing serious repairs. These contain massive embedded energy in them that came at the heyday of our civilization and replacing them now or building anything at that scale is very difficult. A pipe made today contains more embedded energy than a pipe made decades ago due to depletion.

                    Saudi’s have been pumping oil from the fields that started operations more than half a century ago. I also saw reports saying they have paused new offshore developments and are focusing more on increasing production in existing fields using enhanced recovery techniques. They clearly want to exhaust the profitable giant fields before making upfront investments.

                    I am certain middle East and parts of central Asia will be the places where the last energetically profitable oil barrels of our civilization will come from.

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    2. Hello Rob,

      Chris and myself mailed you with a proposition for a possible future guest essay. Did you get our messages?

      I am wondering if they ended filtered as spam in your box, because we have got no reply so far.

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      1. Sorry, I don’t know why this comment ended up here. I am pretty sure, I used the “Leave a comment” box down the page. This already happened to me once a while ago.

        I am going to duplicate the comment down. The preceding one can be safely removed.

        Sorry about that.

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  21. Non collapse. I follow this dude. Here’s two awesome clips from their trip to Nueltin Lake, Canada (supposedly the most remote part of north america).

    If you’re looking for some entertainment, the full video is over 4 hours (link is in the videos).

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  22. Some more entertainment from my ongoing engagement with Rewiring Aotearoa and their ‘electrify everything’ campaign. This exchange was on a LinkedIn post by our Climate Change Commission who have just released a couple of reports updating the national emissions budget and targets. This statement caught my eye…

    “Our analysis indicates that Aotearoa New Zealand can reduce emissions further than the level of the current target while the economy continues to grow.“

    I challenged them on it based on pending resource depletion, failure look beyond carbon and consider overshoot and also the inability of ‘renewables’ to make themselves.

    Mike from Rewiring Aotearoa jumped on board with this…

    It’s getting closer (building renewables with renewables). https://www.pv-magazine.com/2019/09/24/jinko-becomes-first-solar-manufacturer-to-make-100-renewable-energy-pledge/

    Renewable energy is far far cheaper and therefore there is an incentive to adopt it to remain competitive when selling commodity products like solar panels.

    Me after checking out his link…

    …running an assembly factory off solar is not the same as manufacturing solar panels with solar. By far JinkoSolar’s largest emissions are from Scope 3 from purchased goods / raw materials like silicon and aluminum which are reliant on fossil fuels.

    Despite all the rhetoric of solar, wind and batteries being cheaper than fossil fuels, no-one anywhere has chosen to power a heavy industry using just solar, wind and batteries.

    If it really were cheaper, somewhere sunny and windy, heavy industries would flock to because they would have a competitive advantage, especially if they could go off grid to avoid fees. But no-one is doing it, which tells the truth about the real costs / limitations. (Thanks Hideaway for these lines)

    Your passionate case for electrification would be far more compelling if everything Rewiring Aotearoa promoted was in the context of ecological overshoot and the first priority being to power down, reducing overall energy use and promoting lifestyles of sufficiency. Instead the initiative appears as ‘business as usual by another means’.
    https://www.resilience.org/stories/2024-12-05/historian-jean-baptiste-fressoz-forget-the-energy-transition-there-never-was-one-and-there-never-will-be-one/

    Cherry season is ramping up. Go well.

    His reply….

    …but the mining industry is going electric too, why? Because it’s cheaper. Just like the cherry industry;)“

    Me after reading one mining industry artice from Australia….

    …One swallow does not a summer make’ The Oceana Gold electric shovel at McRaes is another example of totally unjustified funding assistance by EECA. Gold mining is unsustainable and it’s not even a NZ owned business.

    There are cost challenges even the industry acknowledges…

    https://www.mining-technology.com/news/electric-mines-to-operate-with-56-88-less-costs-than-diesel/

    “The report reveals that 84% of industry professionals believe Australia’s mining sector will not reach the government’s 82% renewable energy penetration target by 2030.

    The mining industry is accountable for around 8% of global carbon emissions. However, only 60% of the industry plans to switch its upcoming mining operations to electric. Around three-quarters of miners cite high capital costs as the primary barrier to adopting electric equipment, rated 1.5 times more significant than concerns about operational effectiveness.

    The price of new battery-electric haul equipment can be double that of diesel.

    EMC states that the business model carries operational risks and uncertainty. The associated infrastructure such as upgraded electrical systems, fast chargers and spare batteries is also a new addition that increases costs.”

    Technology use is unsustainable powered by fossil fuels or electricity. Carbon tunnel vision is problematic.

    His reply…

    EECA funding helps first movers take early risks and overcomes first mover disadvantage. I also got some eeca funding for my electric frost fighting fans and my electric tractor. Since then more of this technology has been adopted in NZ which is awesome, it’s what we need.

    I’m excited to see those massive iron ore mines in WA go electric. We are talking hundreds of trucks, dozers and excavators. They are talking complete elimination of fossil fuels by 2030 which is super impressive ambition.

    Me thinking wtf….

    …did you not read my previous comment which quotes the mining industry saying they don’t believe they’ll reach their target due to costs and operational risks?

    Mike do you think that there are hashtag#limitstogrowth on a finite planet? Do you understand the implications of hashtag#resourcedepletion for the electrification movement? Did you read the paper I linked in my original comment?

    Peak oil and the low-carbon energy transition: A net-energy perspective – https://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/abs/pii/S0306261921011673

    “We determine the energy necessary for the production of oil liquids (including direct and indirect energy costs) to represent today 15.5% of the energy production of oil liquids, and growing at an exponential rate: by 2050, a proportion equivalent to half of the gross energy output will be engulfed in its own production. Our findings thus question the feasibility of a global and fast low-carbon energy transition. We therefore suggest an urgent return of the peak oil debate..”

    Mike’s response….

    …yeah, I don’t buy it. The great thing about renewable technology is that it breaks apart the linear supply of energy. The energy it returns is far greater than the energy it costs to make it; it is, therefore, far cheaper than fossil fuels, and the resources within it are highly recyclable. Although we don’t have a circular economy yet, we can strive to build one, which is impossible to do with fossil fuels.

    The externalities of energy vary widely based on the type of energy, which is an incredibly important thing to consider when constructing a theoretical limit on economic growth. While it’s important to recognise that all energy does have externalities, letting perfect be the enemy of good only enforces the status quo, which is about as imperfect as it gets.

    I think we can get along, though; there is no need to fight over wider economic reform, societal revolution or planetary boundaries when we can, in principle, agree that the world requires a massive reduction in fossil fuel consumption this decade.

    I think I am wasting my time there.

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    2. LOL. I was waiting for Mike to give you the famous line that my mom’s friends gave me a couple weeks ago. “Well, you gotta have hope. Negative thinking is bad for you.”

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    3. Thanks Campbell, interesting back and forth, and pretty much what I’ve also experienced with people..

      This bit I find the most frustrating…..
      “The great thing about renewable technology is that it breaks apart the linear supply of energy. The energy it returns is far greater than the energy it costs to make it; it is, therefore, far cheaper than fossil fuels, and the resources within it are highly recyclable. The great thing about renewable technology is that it breaks apart the linear supply of energy. The energy it returns is far greater than the energy it costs to make it; it is, therefore, far cheaper than fossil fuels, and the resources within it are highly recyclable. Although we don’t have a circular economy yet, we can strive to build one, which is impossible to do with fossil fuels..”

      Firstly all EROEI calculations are bunk, because none of them use all the energy inputs, not one paper and I’ve read thousands. They all imagine all the infrastructure of factories, roads, workers, CEO’s, board of directors, managers, accountants, lawyers, salespeople, R&D, exists and has no energy cost, from mining right through to final construction and deployment of every type of energy. They also add a ‘cost’ to oil, gas and coal, but assume solar and wind are ‘free’, yet to humanity as a whole, all of them are ‘free’.

      The circular economy is a myth, with no evidence of it being possible because of entropy and dissipation back to the environment. The clearest example to anyone that knows anything about farming, is the old rusty fence, that once had a nice shiny coating of galvanizing on it. Where does the zinc come from to replace what’s lost to the environment when you replace the fence in your circular economy??

      The very last bit, “Although we don’t have a circular economy yet, we can strive to build one, which is impossible to do with fossil fuels.” is the one that often gets me upset with the promoter… Really you expect to do this without fossil fuels? You can’t do it without using fossil fuels as the 2 most likely processes to be used, either Pyrometallurgy or Hydrometallurgy for metal recycling of items made from multiple metals, totally and utterly rely upon fossil fuels for the heat and the chemicals used!!

      People think in terms of fossil fuels for energy, yet expect all the products that modern civilization totally relies upon will just magic out of the ether when required, totally ignoring that we require fertilizer, plastics, explosives, chemicals, high heat, petcoke in Aluminium production, etc, etc, the list is mind numbingly long…

      You’re correct, you are probably wasting your time there, just like I waste my time on POB debating the cornucopians..

      One aspect of every debate I’ve had with cornucopians, is that they always do the hand wave of “We’ll do XXXX” over a vast range of problems because they simply don’t understand the complexity of whatever they are discussing, nor any details about it, nor do they want to research it, mostly because of denial of some sort..

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      1. I always appreciate what you add Hideaway. I’m gonna smack him with some of that and watch him double down 🙂

        One of his colleagues actually said to me once “Of course we’re not making renewables with renewables because the transition to renewables hasn’t started yet.”

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        1. I’m trying to condense my overall scenario to a single paragraph…

          Civilization in the long term is not sustainable as it relies upon metals, minerals and materials that all suffer from entropy and dissipation over time. Even with the most efficient mining possible, the gathering of the metals, minerals and materials reverts to lower and lower ore grades that are more distant, deeper in the ground and have harder ore indexes, meaning we need exponential growth in energy use to mine what’s needed, even after recycling everything possible. All the new green technology can do is buy a bit of time for civilization while the natural environment is continually being destroyed in the effort to do all the mining necessary using the last available fossil fuels.

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          2. Nice summary. Wondering if green technology actually buys us any time? If it does the time will be very short, like maybe the lifetime of the shortest lived complex component in the system.

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  23. Another good person with good intentions wasting their time on an important issue by not first focusing on our genetic tendency to deny unpleasant realities. As with COP, the only thing accomplished was the additional CO2 required to fly 4000 people to the conference.

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    1. The number of people who don’t believe in climate change is increasing because of nonsense like the COPs. Anecdotally I witness people who used to believe in climate change who now don’t and think it is all scam.

      Greenwashing, hopium, Marxist, net zero, 10-min cities, hippy dippy nonsense did that. I have come to realise that university educated utopianists are the least helpful people to get us through the crisis

      I have started saying to people that climate change can be both real and a scam. Por qué no los dos? Where we are at now, we need brutal honesty and realism

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      1. When 99% of climate scientists promote “solutions” that have a 100% probability of failing, and are silent on solutions that might make the future less bad, and don’t research the most important question (will collapse due to oil depletion be enough to retain a climate compatible with human life?) it is perfectly reasonable for citizens to assume they are lying about everything and that climate change is a hoax.

        The same applies to healthcare “professionals” that blocked safe and effective covid treatments for vulnerable people, and coerced unsafe and ineffective treatments into healthy people, including children, that did not need protection.

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        2. The similarity between the 2 is a great observation. Experts in a field given opinions by ‘other’ experts that are taken by the first group to be factual experts, when the second group’s opinions were not thoroughly researched facts at all, just ‘wishes’ or ‘wants’…

          As it’s obvious in those 2 areas, then how many other aspects of human understanding of the world in general are the same? Economics and market behavior appears to one area with the growth paradigm being good, despite the damage to the environment via overshoot caused by growth. Can anyone think of others?

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  24. Hello Rob,

    Chris and myself mailed you with a proposition for a possible future guest essay. Did you get our messages?

    I am wondering if they ended filtered as spam in your box, because we have got no reply so far.

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  25. Art Berman today reviews geopolitics and American foreign policy in the light of energy resources.

    Not sure what to make of it.

    He thinks the US should abandon “green” energy to China and refocus on control of middle east oil to maintain its global power, and to force China to agree to US terms.

    This feels like a path to nuclear war.

    Also feels like it was written by a different Art Berman that discussed the slurping sound of oil a year ago.

    No mention of limits, temperance, and reality.

    https://un-denial.com/2024/09/14/by-kira-hideaway-on-relocalization/

    Now, President-elect Trump plans to pursue a “drill-baby-drill” policy to boost domestic oil production. This is in direct conflict with oil company strategies aimed at regaining investor trust lost in Trump’s first administration and it ignores the physical limits to U.S. reserves.

    The United States may be the world’s largest oil producer, but it’s a third-rate player when it comes to reserves. U.S. oil reserves are less than half those of Iran or Iraq and only about two-thirds of what Russia, Kuwait, or the UAE hold (Figure 3). The future of oil isn’t “America first”; it’s the Middle East first—just as it’s always been.

    Instead of waiting for China to address its energy vulnerabilities, the U.S. could threaten “maximum pressure” by restricting oil exports and targeting Russian and Iranian supplies. This strategy could cut China’s oil supply by up to 5 million barrels per day.

    The real risk lies in potential retaliation, such as a blockade or attack on Taiwan’s semiconductor industry. Statecraft could turn this into an opportunity—leveraging oil for chips and negotiating broader agreements to reduce tensions and foster more productive outcomes between the two nations.

    Tariffs are the wrong tool—they hurt the U.S. economy more than they help, and are an artifact from an economic system that has passed. This is not about outdated mercantilism; it’s about recognizing oil’s central role.

    Let China dominate the production of solar panels, wind turbines, and EVs. The U.S. can’t compete anyway. Those industries, while important, are no substitute for oil in the balance of power. Armies, navies and air forces run on gasoline and diesel, not electricity.

    The solution to future U.S. oil supply isn’t doubling down on domestic drilling, as Trump suggests. It’s about leveraging U.S. technological strengths and building alliances with the major reserve holders—Saudi Arabia, Iraq, Kuwait, the UAE, and even Russia. Results will vary, but the first step is acknowledging the need and recalibrating stratecraft to meet it.

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  26. If you subscribe to Dr. J.J. Couey’s thesis that RNA can’t pandemic because it lacks sufficient pattern integrity, which may explain the hot spots inconsistent with contagious spread, and that may have been seeded to create a panic, then this new paper by Dr. Denis Rancourt postulates a mechanism by which waves of illness can be explained without viral transmission.

    I don’t have an opinion yet.

    https://correlation-canada.org/respiratory-epidemics-without-viral-transmission/

    https://twitter.com/denisrancourt/status/1863719997803204997

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  28. Just a reminder of our peak insanity: Yesterday a baseball player signed the largest deal in professional sports history. 15-year contract worth over $800 million. All guaranteed with no deferred money.

    I can picture this guy around the tenth year of his contract. Just roaming the desolated Mad Max landscape looking for the owner who still owes him half a billion.😊

    In 1980, Nolan Ryan signed a 3-year deal worth $3 million. There are many old newspaper editorials of it that were complaining about someone making one million dollars a year just for playing a game… That might be the biggest, craziest trick that the Reagan/Thatcher era ever pulled off. Getting the public to not only accept the obscenely rich, but to aspire to be them as well.  

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  29. I just got done with this one from FE. About his collapse experience in Bosnia.

    Our city was blockaded by the army; and for one year I lived and survived in a city with 6,000 people without water, electricity, gasoline, medical help, civil defense, distribution service, any kind of traditional service or centralized rule.

    You never know with crazy eddy. I actually believe him, but even if he’s exaggerating or making the whole thing up… still a good read and paints a picture of what SHTF might look like.

    One year in Hell… – The World According to Fast Eddy

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    1. I’ve read a lot of FE and that is not his voice, nor is it consistent with other personal details he has shared.

      chatGPT confirms this was written by an anonymous survivor of the Bosnian war and that the essay was widely shared on prepper forums.

      That FE published it as his own work confirms he is not quite right in the head.

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  30. Alice Friedemann with another example demonstrating that our official green plans are so far off from being feasible that one needs MORT to make sense of the world.

    https://un-denial.com/2024/09/14/by-kira-hideaway-on-relocalization/

    This article from IEEE does a good job of explaining how and why it is incredibly expensive for cities to cope with with L2 chargers, EV, solar, and heat pumps by zeroing in on Palo Alto, where there are more EVs per capita than any other town in the U.S.

    Some key points:

    • To achieve the desired reduction in greenhouse gases, renewable-energy generation of electricity will need to replace fossil fuels. The improvements and replacements to the grid’s 8,000 power-generation units and 600,000 circuit miles of AC transmission lines (240,000 circuit miles being high-voltage lines) and 70,000 substations to support increased renewable energy and battery storage is estimated to be more than $2.5 trillion in capital, operations, and maintenance costs by 2035.
    • Supplies for distribution transformers are low, and costs have skyrocketed from a range of $3,000 to $4,000 to $20,000 each. Supporting EVs may require larger, heavier transformers, which means many of the 180 million power poles on which these need to sit will need to be replaced to support the additional weight.
    • Multiple L2 chargers on one distribution transformer can reduce its life from an expected 30 to 40 years to 3 years.
    • Exacerbating the transformer loading problem, Divan says, is that many utilities “have no visibility beyond the substation” into how and when power is being consumed.

    The entire fleet of cars and medium- and heavy-duty trucks are supposed to be electrified by 2050 to meet climate goals.

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  31. There are lots of conflicting opinions on the Syrian fall, including from people with integrity that I follow.

    The best and most balanced analysis that I trust above all others comes again from Simplicius the Thinker.

    I’m thinking the west made a mistake by backing terrorist groups to overthrow Assad. This probably explains why Israel is now bombing the shit out of Syria to destroy weapons before they can be used against it.

    https://simplicius76.substack.com/p/syrias-fall-in-depth-analysis

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  32. I have another quippy comment I’ve been using a bit lately.

    There are only two things that have been empirically proven to reduce CO2 emissions. Those are:

    1 Severe economic depressions in Western countries.

    2 Covid-19 pandemic lockdowns and travel restrictions (which worked better than depressions).

    Even the OPEC oil embargo only managed to flatline CO2, not reduce it.

    This is looking at global CO2 emissions as that is all that counts.

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  33. https://www.dw.com/en/why-fertile-land-is-turning-to-desert/a-70955221
    Why fertile land is turning to desert

    Four football fields of land degrade into desert every second. That equates to an area almost as large as Ethiopia each year. Could efforts to restore and reforest this arid terrain bear fruit?

    Nearly one half of the planet’s land mass is on the brink of turning into nonarable desert, according to the United Nations Convention to Combat Desertification (UNCCD).

    These already-arid lands are marked by low rainfall yet support 45% of the world’s agriculture. Now, extreme drought linked to human-made global heating is helping to transform this area into an infertile wasteland.

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  34. It’s fascinating to watch all the financial “experts” thrash around trying to explain what is going on in the economy.

    All are in denial of limits to growth so not a one understands what is going on.

    Here we have George Gammon being very proud of the fact that he has found data that proves The Fed is not responsible for causing inflation by printing money as all the gold bugs and bitcoin boys assume. He shows the cause of inflation is debt being used for non-productive purposes.

    By this I think he means that the growth rate of real wealth created by the debt is less than the interest rate, and he blames the growth in unproductive government spending. Gammon is optimistic that the Trump/Musk DOGE program will restart growth by reducing the size of government.

    We at un-Denial of course understand that whenever you see the word “productivity” (or “innovation”) you must substitute the words “non-renewable fossil energy with falling EROI due to depletion”.

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  35. https://youtu.be/JdmZhVmP2z0?si=U6AY8asTN_MP-5eb

    I think social contracts are far more fragile in democratic societies than they are in authoritarian regimes. US has probably the most unstable and fragile social contract thanks to its off the charts gun ownership, racial and ethnic diversity which is unprecedented in human history, unbridled and mindless consumerism.

    The social contract in the case of America seems to be that the government will protect the “American way of life” which is really just unlimited mindless consumption wether it is cars,fast food, shopping etc and the people will try to overlook racial and ethnic divisions and allow the heavily militarized police force to impose their will on the population.

    Once oil begins its relentless decline both the carrot and stick will disappear and society will revert to “state of nature” and no external enemy has to invade the US as the people will do the job themselves.

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    1. Kira, I suggest spending some time living and volunteering in a rural community affected by a natural disaster to broaden your understanding of the future. In my grandfather’s hometown a catastrophic flood during the election cycle resulted in a form of healing and reconciliation between people who were fighting over politics.

      As for guns.. my HS political science teacher who became Superintendent then Deputy Secretary of Education bragged about shutting down our school’s marksmanship program. By default, urban youth learn about settling disputes with violence from popular movies, music and tv “programs” while our local sportsmen’s club teaches firearm safety, self defense and hosts various scouts and conservation efforts. The state federation of sporrsmens clubs were one of the 1st conservation groups cleaning up acid mine drainage in the early 1900s.

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      1. Replenish …. ” I suggest spending some time living and volunteering in a rural community affected by a natural disaster to broaden your understanding of the future.”

        What you wrote is what happens when there is a local disaster and everything outside the disaster area remains ‘normal’. Apart from people helping people, there is also a lot of outside aide pouring in.

        The situation of the future will be one where no outside aide starts to pour in as it’s every person/family/group for themselves, which is very much different to what has been ‘normal’ for most of humanity over the last 200 years.

        You missed the part in Kira’s post about the “Once oil begins its relentless decline both the carrot and stick will disappear and society will revert to “state of nature” and no external enemy has to invade the US as the people will do the job themselves.” That’s less energy and declining materials and food for all.

        It’s appears the concept of being a totally different situation that any of the last 8 generations of humanity has had over those last 200 years, is really hard for people with no experience of it to imagine..

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        1. Good point thanks! I will clarify you may stand a better chance of survival if you form relationships and secure a spot in rural Appalachia especially in the nothern tier before the collapse because the agrarian, hunting, gathering and tinker know-how is still practiced to some degree. Trust earned through hard work, hospitality and honesty are fundamental rather than identity and oolitical affiliation. People actually use their big trucks for work, lol. For example, Draught horses and horse drawn implements, maple syrup operations, Amish saw mills and a plethora of old tools, resources and materials are available to forge and fabricate. I appreciate your input. Thanks to Kira as well.

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      2. I think Hideaway made all the points that I wanted to make but I just want to add that I agree with you when you say that building a good relationship within your community is useful than not building it. It is also useful to learn important skills that maybe useful in the post industrial future like growing food. But we must not lose sight of reality that by the end of this century and most likely a few decades sooner the population would have to come down to a billion or less. This is not happening voluntarily for sure. Learning skills and building relationships may improve your odds of surviving though.

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    2. You can see a trend around the world of democracies becoming ungovernable as oil depletion limits growth and reduces standards of living.

      For example, the French government was unable to pass a budget and has fallen because EU rules require it to reduce government spending or increase taxes. It’s unlikely a new coalition can be formed and it’s unlikely a new election will change the distribution of power.

      Germany is in a similar situation except they are also constrained by their own constitution which limits government debt.

      It looks to me like democracies will stumble along and be ineffective until a financial crisis breaks something and then despots will rise to overrule constitutions, nationalize banks and business, and implement social controls and rationing.

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      1. The despots you mentioned can even recycle the arguments used in the Weimar republic to denounce democracy. To be fair to the despots, even the Romans recognized that the democratic process tends to be slow and you need a dictator from time to time. But before that can happen the right wing populists of Europe have to show that they are just a slightly different shade of BAU. Let’s see if John Michael Greer is right and we will really see a resurgence of actual Nazis (although collectivism is not really fashionable in the west nowadays I would argue) or something more in line with idiocracy will take it’s place.

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        2. When climate change and overshoot can no longer be plausibly denied, do you think that some people might start scapegoating? I fear that once American leaders realize that growth is over, they will try to preserve BAU for a subset of the population and throw everyone else to the wolves. (I won’t use the term “ecofascism”, because it is often used as a slur against anyone who recognizes limits to growth.)

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      2. Yes, soon Democracy will become unaffordable.

        Or as Stefan Gruber wrote in “A book for no one”:

        Democracy is first created by a revolution and is later maintained by prosperity. It ceases to exist as soon as it is no longer affordable. Once the final capitalist crisis breaks out, there is a final battle between the money powers as the bearers of democracy and the Caesars as the bearers of pure power politics, from which the latter – democratically elected – emerge victorious.Nothing is permanent. Under socialism, where the state has usurped all powers, democracy becomes a farce, indeed it cannot possibly flourish there. Democracy needs the vacuum of “freedom”, the battlefield between the state and the people. But it is not only the people who are constantly demanding social reforms; democratic parties must also constantly awaken new needs in the people, to get elected to implement this needs. A party that has pushed through all its plans without arousing new needs has no chance of re-election in the democratic spectrum. It is this dynamic through which the people ultimately cede more and more freedoms to the state – in favor of security, short-term satisfaction of needs and state regulation. In the end, they trade in democracy itself in favor of a sense of security.

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      3. On the other hand the authoritarian regimes may actually do better (at least for a short while) than democracies as they can make the kind of tough decisions that leaders who need to get re-elected can never make.

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  36. There is only one economist that understands how the economy works, Steve Keen, because he understands energy.

    Imagine if there was only one engineer that knew how to build a safe bridge!

    The discipline of economics should be banned from universities.

    This new interview with Steve Keen is pretty good.

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    1. Good interview. I learned much about where economics came from. Basically the discipline of “Economics” is a bunch of pseudo intellectual social “scientists” who were envious of the prestige given real science (physical scientists & STEM educated people) and invented a non-testable bunch of theories that are so divorced from reality that they can’t be easily falsified. Envy & hubris sustain economics.

      Give me Tom Murphy any day.

      AJ

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      1. If you are interested in the history of economic theory and how they got so far off track this recent interview with Steve Keen is also excellent, although he stays away from energy here probably because the interviewer is overshoot blind.

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  37. Will there be copycats? (to Crazy Eddy; No, I’m not talking about posting these words as your own)

    To the Feds, I’ll keep this short, because I do respect what you do for our country. To save you a lengthy investigation, I state plainly that I wasn’t working with anyone. This was fairly trivial: some elementary social engineering, basic CAD, a lot of patience. The spiral notebook, if present, has some straggling notes and To Do lists that illuminate the gist of it. My tech is pretty locked down because I work in engineering so probably not much info there. I do apologize for any strife of traumas but it had to be done. Frankly, these parasites simply had it coming. A reminder: the US has the #1 most expensive healthcare system in the world, yet we rank roughly #42 in life expectancy. United is the [indecipherable] largest company in the US by market cap, behind only Apple, Google, Walmart. It has grown and grown, but as our life expectancy? No the reality is, these [indecipherable] have simply gotten too powerful, and they continue to abuse our country for immense profit because the American public has allwed them to get away with it. Obviously the problem is more complex, but I do not have space, and frankly I do not pretend to be the most qualified person to lay out the full argument. But many have illuminated the corruption and greed (e.g.: Rosenthal, Moore), decades ago and the problems simply remain. It is not an issue of awareness at this point, but clearly power games at play. Evidently I am the first to face it with such brutal honesty.

    ‘It Had to Be Done’: Luigi Mangione Manifesto Revealed

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  38. Very hard to keep with world events these days.

    Today I learned:

    1. New evidence China’s banks are in big trouble.
    2. Russia just advised its citizens to leave the US.
    3. ATACMS strikes into Russia resumed today ending calm after last Russian warning via new ballistic missile.
    4. US about to impose new energy sanctions on Russia which will harm China/India.

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      1. I don’t know.

        On the one hand, they have smart leaders and a lot authority to ignore laws and do anything that might prevent a collapse.

        On the other hand, without growth someone has to eat the losses and they have a lot of debt, maybe even too much for the government to eat.

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  39. Jeremy Grantham is a good and aware man but I don’t know what to make of this interview. Maybe he’s getting old and not thinking too clearly.

    I left the following comment on YouTube.

    There are so many threats it’s hard to know where to focus. For example:

    1) With 50% less oil by 2030 due to depletion and economic collapse, sperm count will be the least of our worries, everyone will be too poor to purchase any toxic chemicals, and people will be grateful for any food from any source.

    2) If US continues to ignore Russia’s reasonable security red lines, which are the same red lines the US has, then there will be nuclear war and the population will plumet regardless of the sperm count.

    At the end of the interview it became clear the problem is he is energy blind.

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    2. Jeremy Grantham is very much aware of resource limitations, we can clearly see this in his older videos on You-tube going back for a decade, yet also thinks that ‘renewables’ can save us, a complete denial of his previous work of limited resources as he turns away from energy and materials concerns to the price trend, only made possible by cheap fossil fuels.

      It’s really denial in it’s finest form, but should we expect anything less from a billionaire? His ideas and concepts have served him well over a lifetime of fortune gathering, in a world of increasing energy and material use that is rapidly coming to an end. He has a blind spot for ‘renewables’ because they simply are the only answer possible to avoid the collapse he doesn’t want, so instead of studying it thoroughly, like he’s done with everything else during his life, just wants to believe the ‘experts’ on the published EROEI and lifetime cost of energy rubbish..

      Also, like Nate Hagens, he fails to understand the size/complexity power laws that means we can only have a highly complex system of renewables powering everything if the overall system continues to grow in every aspect, which it physically can’t, because of damage to the environment and fossil fuel energy limits, especially oil.

      We can’t downsize our civilization without collapsing as we need the complexity to gather the food, fuel and materials of the modern world, because of lower ore and energy grades and degraded lands. We can’t maintain complexity without size and growth. The growth is needed to maintain the physical requirements from lower grades of everything, meaning more energy required to obtain the materials, including fossil fuels.

      In trying to simplify the situation for those not paying attention, both Jeremy and Nate, along with most of his other guests, tend to forget we have a complete system, not separate parts that act independently. The entire system of civilization has to be connected since we globalised everything, not realising the increased complexity gave us efficiency gains for the whole system, all without us understanding exactly what was happening.

      The part that everyone wants to deny the most is that every complex system dies. None are possible to be maintained in the long term. They all have common features of birth, growth, maturity and death. Some don’t make it all the way through the cycle and die early.

      Death is the rapid collapse of the entire system, no matter how long it’s been held together on it’s last legs. It’s true for every system from stars, to storms, to single cell organisms, multi cellular organisms, to ant and wasp colonies, to all past human civilizations.

      Why does anyone, like Nate and his guests, think this time will be different, unless it’s just the denial of the bad outcome kicking in?

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            1. I have been persistent on the importance of MORT with a few people including Nate Hagens and Tom Murphy.

              They get annoyed but never provide a better explanation for the obvious denial that is central to why their work has failed so far and will continue to fail.

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      2. Careful you two. Nate is gonna end up banning you both. LOL

        you dont get it.

        Imo you (and Rob) look at the output too literally from your own lenses without seeing the broader playing board.

        ps. And forgive me Hideaway for trolling your comment on Tim Morgans blog last night. I was bored, what can I say.

        But I think we can make some easy money. I see a road show act with the two of us. You’ll be the hated villain with all of your truth bombs, and I’ll be the popular hero with my DQ bullshit hopium. Of course, it will be fixed like professional wrestling so that I always come out on top. You seem to have your ego in check (unlike me), so I think it’ll work.😊… if you cant beat em, join em.

        Seriously though. There is money to be made right now with moral at an all-time low. And just like climate change & resource depletion, moral is guaranteed to only get worse (it’s never gonna turn around). I don’t have enough knowledge in bullshit to pull off being a traditional religious zealot. But I could definitely trick my way into taking money from the Daniel Quinn fanatics.

        Don’t be shocked if my youtube channel takes a drastic turn. I might come out dressed in a white robe with a cross preaching about catastrophes of biblical proportions & how the only way humanity will survive the upcoming bottleneck is by getting back to our old ways of living in harmony with nature and right relationship to reality.🤭

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          1. Ya, I should’ve spelled that out better. The quote was part of Nates reply to Hideaway in the thread that you started.

            I assume the broader playing board means he thinks you two focus too much on depleting energy. And not enough focus on our upcoming awakening of consciousness.😊

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            1. LOL.

              I was thinking the broader playing field is where you make shit up so you don’t have to face reality.

              Or maybe Grantham was faking energy blindness to not sow panic while he and Nate work on their super secret “break glass in case of emergency” plan to save us all when the system crashes.

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              1. That reply from Nate, makes me understand a lot better where he is coming from. He does get it, but wont say the important stuff out loud as he wants a foot in the door of conversations about the future, so can’t scare the audience too much.

                Here we all know that reality of the future is a bitch so need to enjoy our time while we can, which I’m sure Nate also fully understands, but will not communicate as he wants to build the audience to be relevant to many more people than we are here, and slowly bring about more nuanced reality over time.

                The comment to me and Rob,

                “you dont get it. Imo you (and Rob) look at the output too literally from your own lenses without seeing the broader playing board.”

                … doesn’t mean he disagrees with us, it’s just a wider audience he’s trying to drag in, trying to make more people aware, slowly but surely…

                This comment meant to me he understands “i know all the things you articulate” plus “And this is just the tip of the spear – the content here ‘gets me in the room’ on non-public discussions on these things -that I assure you are much closer to your take”.

                That screams to me someone that does get the big picture, and is annoyed that others like ourselves are pointing out the final reality that he doesn’t want disclosed until he has more kudos and following in the sphere of influence. It also tells me that we are not alone in working out the future, there are people much higher up the food chain of civilization who obviously get it…

                ———-

                BTW Chris, I just laughed when I saw your comment on Tim Morgan’s site…

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                1. I agree he probably does get it. The “Great Simplification” is a soft & cuddly synonym for overshoot collapse.

                  Thing is we’ve been trying the soft approach since 1972’s Limits to Growth and it does not work. Every attempt by every person and organization that’s tried to make the future less bad has failed. And we’re out of time.

                  The conversation now needs to be clear and frank:
                  1) Billions are going die horrible deaths over the next 10 years.
                  2) The only goal that makes any sense now is to focus on minimizing the time integral of suffering for all species.
                  3) This means we need rapid population and consumption reduction, with a diversion of remaining resources to building low-tech simple infrastructure and skills that will be useful in the future.

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                  1. Hi Rob, I’ve been pondering over your comment above, that I don’t really disagree with any aspect of, yet I know from experience that turning the conversation to be clear and frank has people just reject everything stated.

                    It’s their denial kicking in and they do the usual handwave of ‘renewables’ or ‘nuclear’ or whatever will save us.

                    I think I’ve come to the conclusion that civilization itself has to collapse from it’s maximum point and there is nothing anyone can do about it.

                    Those of us that have researched it for decades and understand the overshoot problem from many/all angles only reached where we are from great research over these decades, and it’s impossible to educate others quickly, so without this research themselves, convincing themselves, prefer to believe in the fairytale (which they also don’t research in any detail so believe the magical BS numbers of things like LCoE or high EROEI of renewables while ignoring every other predicament).

                    On your point 3 of what’s needed, and what’s actually happening are 2 entirely different things. What is the world actually spending resources on? More renewables, more nuclear, more AI and huge data centres, while worrying about population being too low and the ‘West’ importing people to make up for lower birth rates.

                    Humanity has bought the green tech (including nuclear) will save us, plus space mining or seawater mining and we need to continue growing. As a species we don’t care about the rest of the species on this planet, nor the more distant future, we take whatever we need, probably the MPP (or something similar) kicking in. We need to survive today to get to tomorrow.

                    What’s been bred into us, is to go along with the existing system, as that is the individual’s best chance for survival and reproduction. It’s been this way for the last 120,000 years. The Homo sapiens individual that wanted to go against the group was most likely cast out, forced to go alone in a wild world and probably didn’t survive long, hence why we all have a predilection to denial of bad outcomes. It’s a survivor bias outcome of many thousands of generations, evolution in action.

                    We are a small group here at un-denial from around the world, and talking hard facts is also not working, because it misses all the infill bits that most need to research themselves, to change their mind on anything, let alone the big picture.

                    Nate has had over 22K views of the interview with J. Grantham, while we get ‘dozens’, if lucky, so an argument could be made that his gently, gently, don’t scare the pigeons approach is working better than we are, though not close to a fraction of a percent of what’s needed.

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                    1. I get what your saying. Let me clarify.

                      I’m not saying the “clear and frank” approach will work. It probably won’t because of MORT.

                      But I am saying the gentle “more education” approach will not work. We know this from 50 years of trying with 100% failure.

                      So if don’t try “clear and frank”, then what’s left?

                      I can only think of two options:

                      1) Accept that the time integral of suffering cannot be reduced for all species, and try to buy a little extra personal happiness time with prepping and behavior changes.

                      2) Hope that an aware billionaire engineers and releases a sterilization virus.

                      3) Other ideas anyone?

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                    2. You can tell that in the last year or so, Nate seems to be struggling with what focus, what message, what interviews to do. To give him the benefit of the doubt, I think he may have decided that a strategy of shifting the Overton window more slowly but surely will work better than yanking the fire alarm. His academic background and connections to movers and shakers must be husbanded, or he’ll get labelled a nutter like us.

                      Just a theory.

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                    3. Yes, I sense a struggle too. I think his strategy is:

                      1) Build a group of aware citizens that might be enough to shift public policy (similar to Jack Alpert’s grandmother model).
                      2) Work behind the scenes to create “break glass in emergency” policies so we know what to do when SHTF.

                      A problem with 1) is the majority of his guests are energy blind and communicate wrong information about critical information, and he does not correct them. I don’t have a problem if someone is wrong about say % insects extinct, or over/under estimates of pollution threats, but if you’re wrong on energy then you’re wrong on everything. False energy information must be aggressively stopped for 1) to help. Otherwise his army will push for defunding/prosecuting oil companies and building more solar panels, which will make things worse.

                      An important missed opportunity is to explain why so many of his brilliant guests understand everything except what they must understand: implications of fossil energy/mineral depletion. I think MORT explains this brilliantly. Its very sad for me that he never ever mentions MORT as a possible explanation for the near universal blindness singularity of his guests.

                      A problem with 2) is once the unwind begins it will accelerate rapidly as Hideaway has explained, and then all the well crafted policies can be tossed in the rubbish because despots will take over and blame other tribes.

                      He’s clearly avoiding controversy to grow his followers. I expect this explains his silence on the 7+ million covid murders. Personally I think it is wrong to be silent on a crime of this magnitude.

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    3. Where is the estimate of 50% decline by 2030 from? I don’t doubt it, but I would like to see how that number was reached.

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      1. Nobody can forecast oil decline accurately because many unpredictable chaotic forces affect it like financial crashes, wars, pandemics, climate change, etc.

        It’s my best guess after reading and listening to thousands of opinions over the last 15 years.

        I can make a good case that it’s too pessimistic and a good case that it’s too optimistic.

        So I use 50% down by 2030 as my mental model for what’s reasonable.

        At the core it is based on my belief that once the decline begins it will accelerate very quickly for all the reasons Hideaway and Kira and others here have explained.

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  40. Again, an opinion from “das gelbe Forum”:

    “Letter from a reader: The West’s hypocrisy of democracy

    Ikonoklast , Federal Bananarepublic Of Germoney , Thursday, 12.12.2024, 08:58 @ Albrecht 525 Views

    The cynical displaces the sacred as the West reveals its true face

    Von Simplicius

    It is hard to believe. The West has abandoned any semblance of its sacred cow, democracy, which for generations has been used as an instrument of moral superiority to intimidate and delight the rest of the world.

    Romanian candidate Călin Georgescu slammed his opponents in the first round of the presidential election, after which the entire result was declared “invalid” by a Romanian court on the absurd grounds of “Russian interference on TikTok” – without having any real evidence. (See here for a deeper look into said “evidence” [1]).

    A few context-dependent reactions:

    https://substackcdn.com/image/fetch/w_1456,c_limit,f_webp,q_auto:good,fl_progressive:st…

    https://substackcdn.com/image/fetch/w_1456,c_limit,f_webp,q_auto:good,fl_progressive:st…

    https://substackcdn.com/image/fetch/w_1456,c_limit,f_webp,q_auto:good,fl_progressive:st…

    https://substackcdn.com/image/fetch/w_1456,c_limit,f_webp,q_auto:good,fl_progressive:st…

    In addition, the current Romanian President Klaus Iohannis – following Zelensky – has declared that he will illegally stay beyond the constitutional end of his term, without any outrage, calls for action or even criticism from his Western partners:

    https://substackcdn.com/image/fetch/w_1456,c_limit,f_webp,q_auto:good,fl_progressive:st…

    So, as the West finally disintegrates, we are witnessing a whole series of shocking perversions of the so-called “democratic” process. Some time ago, Imran Khan experienced the same thing and was promptly jailed and sidelined for daring to look eastward toward Russia and China. More recently, the Venezuelan election was called undemocratically “stolen” without evidence – by the same people behind the pristine “rule of law.”

    The election in Moldova itself was then actually rigged, with Sandu only saved by a questionable diaspora vote from abroad, a fact that even Georgia’s own globalist stick figure of a president admits:

    https://substackcdn.com/image/fetch/w_1456,c_limit,f_webp,q_auto:good,fl_progressive:st…

    “The fact that the EU accepts the results in Moldova but not in Georgia is the continuation of a policy that applies double standards and uses democracy as a slogan only when it suits it,” said Ivan Katchanovsky, professor at the University of Ottawa and author of the book The Maidan Massacre in Ukraine. – [2]

    The reality was the opposite of what she claims: the elections in Moldova were subject to a number of “irregularities” and other frauds – for example, the Moldovan diaspora living in Moscow was disenfranchised by being given only a small polling station, which meant that many were unable to vote for Sandu’s pro-Russian opponent.

    Abkhazia and Georgia followed suit with massive Western interference to undermine genuine democracy, with NGO-funded crowds attempting to create new Maidans to intimidate the leadership and undermine the political process.

    Even in South Korea, Western-backed President Yoon Suk Yeol carried out a sudden military coup in which armed special forces stormed the parliament building.

    In France, Macron yesterday announced his refusal to step down following the collapse of his government and the resignation of his Prime Minister Barnier, triggering a historic political crisis. As in the case of Scholz in Germany, European politicians have lost the mandate of the people.

    https://substackcdn.com/image/fetch/w_1456,c_limit,f_webp,q_auto:good,fl_progressive:st…

    https://substackcdn.com/image/fetch/w_1456,c_limit,f_webp,q_auto:good,fl_progressive:st…

    https://substackcdn.com/image/fetch/w_1456,c_limit,f_webp,q_auto:good,fl_progressive:st…

    The short-sighted West considers the various CIA-sponsored subversions of democratic processes as a “victory”: but have these people ever thought about the precedent they are setting? They are burning their foundations and setting fire to their whole house. In the hope of smoking out a few supposed “wasps”, they will now destroy their entire order within a generation.

    The perception of the West’s miserable “rules-based order” can never be repaired afterwards – the rest of the free world watches and learns exactly how “rule of law” is related to principles; the West will never regain their trust, and its institutions will forever bear the stench and taint of political interference and hidden hatred of true democracy – which has always been only an alibi to excuse the imperialist supremacy of the Western order.

    The Western order has turned into a stench, and the global South cannot squint hard enough.

    For a long time, it was hidden beneath the hypnotic glitz and glamour of the hegemon’s “magic show” that the “indivisible” idol of democracy was always divided into “good” and “bad” forms as necessity required. It used to be well hidden, with Western leaders at least still trying to pretend to keep up the fable. Now, however, things have spiralled out of control so quickly that desperate measures are required – throwing caution to the wind to reveal the ugly face of the Western political system, buried for so long under the ashes of its conquests.

    In short, they no longer have time to create elaborate myths and plans, but are forced to act instinctively to save their failing empire. But in doing so, they only accelerate the empire’s decline by revealing how illiberal and despotic it was all along.

    An illuminating example of how things got to this point is provided by the X-Thread by author Peter Herling [3], who uses his expertise on France’s idiosyncratic system to provide insight into how the globalist apparatus infiltrates the political processes in every country. The more digestible version of the thread for readers [4].

    France’s foreign policy has never been so superficial, reflexive and incoherent, detached from any national interest, slave to the news cycle.

    I have witnessed this development myself during my 25-year career. There are lessons to be learned from this for diplomacy in a broader sense

    Notice what he says next, drawing parallels to the United States and its infamous State Department takeover of policy:

    The most obvious change is presidentialisation. Previously, politics took shape in the ministry (on the Quai d’Orsay), where there were solid intellectual traditions, a solid corps of civil servants and strong leaders.

    Gradually it was moved to the presidential palace (the Elysee).

    At the Elysee, policy was initially shaped by a small team of technical advisers who came from the Quai d’Orsay and worked closely with him.

    This, too, changed when the President’s political staff and the President himself took the lead.

    This then opened the door to all sorts of late-night whisperers and the impulses, intuitions and influences that came from the President’s personal networks.

    In short, we can understand this as a kind of subtle, built-in system of internal checks and balances, whereby experts not under the direct control of the president maintained a strong hand in policymaking. But as the calls of the Davos globalist cult for even more manipulation, repression and tougher policies grew louder, a natural process took shape: a process whereby this previously effective system of checks and balances was gradually rolled back in favor of the hand-picked president and his small shadow circle of eminence grise henchmen.

    This is the same process that led to the US presidency being co-opted by a handful of powerful globalist agents working in the State Department and the Cabinet, who essentially began to run the presidency and control all direct flow of information to it, internally and externally.

    This leads to abrupt, puzzling decisions that foreign policy makers sometimes only learn about from the news.

    In this increasingly ad hoc process, precisely what constitutes foreign policy was lost: intellectual frameworks, institutional memory, long-term strategies, hard-earned technical experience.

    They are still there, but all too often they are only in catching up mode.

    The formal diplomatic circles have not only fallen by the wayside.

    …

    This means that what once structured foreign policy has been dismantled. What remains are the paraphernalia of diplomacy: declarations, envoys and conferences with little substance and even less consistency.

    For the same reasons as in France, the foreign policy of the United States, the United Kingdom, Germany and other countries is marked by the usual prejudices.

    Since politicians are free from professional structures, their personal whims and preferences as well as those of their advisors prevail.

    This is the epitome of the centralization of power through internal shadowy globalist structures.

    This may help explain the ongoing breakdown of Western-style international norms regarding the Gaza Strip.

    It also sheds light on what takes the place of these norms: baser instincts through which so much of our unresolved past resurfaces.

    Back to the topic:

    The latest example of this great decline is the West’s sudden whitewashing of ISIS MP and Al-Qaeda leader Al-Joulani. The stunning CNN softball interview is an event for the ages:

    Video

    https://substackcdn.com/image/fetch/w_1456,c_limit,f_webp,q_auto:good,fl_progressive:st…

    The pre-written questions simply served as a platform for the terrorist leader to introduce his new brand to a Western audience. It’s a classic set-up: the moderator pretends to “challenge” the terrorist leader, only to ask him exactly the question that allows him to frame his PR facelift with the prepared answer.

    One of the incredible highlights is when he suggests that he has put his ISIS past behind him because he was a young man and people “change” as they grow through the changing stages of life – we can all relate to that, can’t we?

    https://substackcdn.com/image/fetch/w_1456,c_limit,f_webp,q_auto:good,fl_progressive:st…

    Look at this man’s resume, for heaven’s sake:

    https://substackcdn.com/image/fetch/w_1456,c_limit,f_webp,q_auto:good,fl_progressive:st…

    Al-Qaeda, you know, the guys who, according to the official GWOT hagiography, supposedly killed thousands of Americans on 9/11? The guy who has a $10 million FBI bounty on his head right now?

    https://substackcdn.com/image/fetch/w_1456,c_limit,f_webp,q_auto:good,fl_progressive:st…

    Yes, this guy is courted by CNN, has softballs thrown at him, and offers no challenge to wax lyrical about his ISIS teenage angst. What can we say, the CIA has created its perfect archetype of the “redeemed terrorist folk hero.”

    Democracy for the New World – the Western way!

    https://substackcdn.com/image/fetch/w_1456,c_limit,f_webp,q_auto:good,fl_progressive:st…

    https://substackcdn.com/image/fetch/w_1456,c_limit,f_webp,q_auto:good,fl_progressive:st…

    The media complicity stems from the fact that none of these illiberal or undemocratic travesties are challenged. If it were Russia, China, North Korea or Iran, language designed for that purpose would immediately be deployed to challenge, sue and blame these countries in specially designed headlines. But when a number of countries supported by the West cancel their presidential elections, the media play dumb, lie by omission and publish “neutral” sounding headlines with passive language that neither point fingers nor insinuate wrongdoing. Where is the hysterical outcry over a NATO and EU country cancelling its presidential election literally on a mere whim? Not to mention the lack of due diligence and journalistic investigation into the rumors that a mysterious American Bombardier plane flew to Romania on the eve of the cancellation:

    https://substackcdn.com/image/fetch/w_1456,c_limit,f_webp,q_auto:good,fl_progressive:st…

    As mentioned at the outset, the West’s naked hypocrisy is visible around the world and will reverberate for generations. Western leaders see only the short-term gains and are willing to do anything in their power to prop up their failing system, thereby only increasing the catastrophic “bubble” that must inevitably burst at some point. This is no different than the use of the US dollar as an economic weapon, which is now leading to global de-dollarization and the creation of parallel financial systems in the global South.

    The EU in particular has reached a point of no return, becoming the “prison of nations,” as one previous commentator wittily put it. The harder the globalist EU technocrats crack down, the more obdurate the growing opposition and Euroskeptic class becomes. For every Georgescu they destroy and illegally suppress, they open eyes to several others who will rise in the near future. Technocrats never think anything through, always reaching for the quickest and most convenient sword. This lack of foresight has led them to hugely strengthen the bloc’s censorship complex, leading to egregious violations of citizens’ rights. Recent reports from the UK and Germany show that people are being arrested time and time again for harmless memes or political jokes aimed at members of the government:

    https://substackcdn.com/image/fetch/w_1456,c_limit,f_webp,q_auto:good,fl_progressive:st…

    In short: total information blackout or doom.

    After the “glitch” in the Romanian elections, calls for more censorship are naturally only being heard. Several prominent European figures are not only advocating “measures” against social media, but are also openly condoning the idiosyncratic cancellation of elections based on hearsay. A sitting member of the European Parliament:

    https://substackcdn.com/image/fetch/w_1456,c_limit,f_webp,q_auto:good,fl_progressive:st…

    Note the indifference with which the annulment of a presidential election is accepted, as if it had not shaken the foundations of political trust and social cohesion in society. A precedent has been set whereby any election can be completely annulled based on mere circumstantial rumors of “Russian interference.” Most have not even bothered to consider that “social media interference” is a deceptive gaffe from the start:

    https://substackcdn.com/image/fetch/w_1456,c_limit,f_webp,q_auto:good,fl_progressive:st…

    Once again, the West’s disgusting hypocrisy is on display: AIPAC openly boasts about funding its preferred congressional candidates to victory. And just a few days ago, the incumbent German Bundestag member Michael Roth of the SPD traveled to Tbilisi to openly participate in a coup attempt and even gave a speech to incite the demonstrators:

    https://substackcdn.com/image/fetch/w_1456,c_limit,f_webp,q_auto:good,fl_progressive:st…

    https://xcancel.com/AdameMedia/status/1863931473029464317

    Quote:

    It would be hard to believe if it wasn’t documented on video: A German MP goes to Georgia to stage a coup against an incumbent government.
    ‘Interfering in foreign affairs’ is only bad when other countries do it, the EU can interfere wherever it wants, right?

    https://video.twimg.com/ext_tw_video/1863718674466582528/pu/vid/avc1/1280×720/IOSGMHa56…

    In his speech, he even mocks the accusation of “interference,” thereby displaying typical Western hubris by deliberately ignoring the very hypocrisy that is leading to his downfall.

    Imagine if the late Russian Duma deputy Zhirinovsky had traveled to the Capitol on June 6 to incite the crowd against Congress with fiery speeches from a stage. How would that have been received?

    The West is devouring itself like a snake with its own tail in its mouth. The latest desperate measures are just that: they merely accelerate the backlash. Western elites are trying to buy time so that the entire order, including the EU, does not collapse. Like a wounded man slowly bleeding to death, gulping down one glass of water after another, Europe and NATO are reflexively devouring new nations at record speed, as if the sheer, voracious scale of their sick empire could compensate for the flying decay within.

    But the entire system is walking a fine line, because people are slowly starting to see through it, and the political duplicity of the globalist technocrats has already reached its limit; they simply cannot afford to steal any future election without the system collapsing under the weight of its rampant tyranny. It is already buckling, and a handful of souped-up globalist puppets are busy putting on a smiling facade of normality for the cameras while the foundations beneath them creak alarmingly.

    https://substackcdn.com/image/fetch/w_1456,c_limit,f_webp,q_auto:good,fl_progressive:st…

    This political order is not just the sick man of Europe, but the truly sick man of the world, coughing out its infectious gases on everyone nearby. This is the cynical twilight of the West, which has chosen terror, repression and political manipulation against its own citizens to cope with the slow loss of its imperial claims. It is only inevitable that the rising tide of anti-establishment parties will continue to wash this cancer away. But before this finally happens, Europe will probably experience several years of destabilising political paralysis, a kind of final death throes of globalist deniers and political hacks like Starmer, Macron, Scholz and co, whose only job will be to delay the downfall as long as possible.

    Link: https://simplicius76.substack.com/p/cynical-overtakes-sacred-as-the-west

    [1] https://xcancel.com/RnaudBertrand/status/1865246209339986002
    [2] https://www.thenation.com/article/world/russia-european-union-protests-putin/
    [3] https://xcancel.com/PeterHarling/status/1862034218814951590
    [4] https://threadreaderapp.com/thread/1862034218814951590.html“

    Saludos

    el mar

    —

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    1. Nice roundup of the west’s hypocrisy.

      The most promising explanation I’ve heard for why the South Korean president declared marshal law is that the US was pressuring him to supply Ukraine with weapons but his country’s laws do not permit it so he needed to dissolve the parliament to overrule the law. Notice that the US did not criticize his declaration of marshal law.

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      1. Democracy has always been a sham in the US, so why expect anything different in their ‘view’ of the world.

        Doesn’t the declaration of independence state all men are created equal, then the founding fathers set up a system where the votes of people in Wyoming with a population of 576,851 people have the same representation in the senate, as the 39,538,223 people of California.

        Despite the words, true democracy has never been a requirement, otherwise the US would never have allowed the House of Saud to continue ruling in Saudi Arabia. Democracy is just a word used to remove someone in power the US didn’t like.

        Expecting anything less than the world wide shenanigans happening in plain site as the complex system of civilization starts to unravel due to energy and material constraints, plus self inflicted environmental catastrophes increasing, was always a denial of bad outcomes.

        None of what’s happening really surprises me anymore, I’ve grown attune to expect the unexpected in everything, as everyone tries to keep their own lifestyle beliefs going.

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        1. I’m giving serious consideration to stopping all monitoring of world news.

          As you say, the evil behavior is not new, it will get worse, there’s nothing any of us can do to stop it, and watching it closely is a waste of time that could be used for pleasant or productive activities.

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              1. I do actually. Piano and tin whistles. My mother is a pianist and so we had music playing in the house all the time growing up. I play in a local folk group for fun with the whistles but the Piano for me is a bit of an obsession lately.

                I was in Melbourne recently with my son. He had brain surgery for epilepsy at the RCH. Amazing (and life saving) facilities you have over there. It’ll be tragic when we loose all this. I am glad though that I live nowhere near Melbourne. That city will be an absolute cluster fuck in a post oil world. There is no hope.

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                1. Are you playing much? I am mostly focused on guitar though I play piano.

                  At the moment I am enjoying writing some songs. Lyrics are the hardest.

                  Are you in Victoria? I am in Northern NSW.

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                  1. Sorry, I had it in my head you were in Victoria somewhere. Maybe I was confusing you with hideaway. I’m from Tassie. Yeah I play everyday. Sometimes for hours. Even the week that I’m working on the fish farm try and squeeze in at least an hour (I work week on week off). It also depends how much we have going on with our own farm. Certain times of the year are busier than others but if I get the chance I can “waste” the day away in front of the keys. I don’t write music

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                    3. hi Campbell. Funny. Yes I’m under no illusions on the sustainability of fish farming. I work in the industry and it is an industrial behemoth that is destined collapse. There is no way you can farm fish without oil. The second fish farm described in the Ted talk isn’t really a fish farm. It’s an ecosystem. The presenter seems to think that a natural ecosystem can support the current world population. I don’t.

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  42. Dr. Philip McMillan asks what in the world is going on with disease X in the Congo?

    First we had monkeypox, now we have malaria or ??. And how is this connected to covid?

    I just skimmed this but I think his argument is that idiot/evil government policies that required mRNA transfections in people that did require it have damaged immune systems creating an opportunity for old diseases to re-emerge.

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  43. Dr. Morgan’s essay today. Notice that he must have read Hideaway and is now including mineral depletion in his story.

    #295: Beans on tech

    Until quite recently, the idea that the global economy might reverse – my preferred term is inflect – from growth into contraction lived in the realm of radical and unwelcome theory.

    But this has been the year in which theory has been borne out by experience.

    Much as astronomers deduce the existence of invisible objects through their gravitational effects on other bodies, we can see the effects of economic inflexion in everything from social discontent and the “cost of living crisis” to deteriorating international relations and worsening financial fragility.

    The causes of the ending and reversal of growth can be summed up in the single word depletion.

    Fossil fuel energy has been depleted to a point where its material costs, measured here as the Energy Costs of Energy (ECoEs), are becoming unaffordable.

    Non-energy natural resources, too, such as minerals, agricultural land and accessible water, have been depleted, as has the finite ability of the environment to absorb the effects of human economic activity.

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  44. Rintrah today on Ozempic. The hits from pharma keep on coming.

    https://www.rintrah.nl/please-dont-take-ozempic/

    Right now 137 million Americans are eligible to receive Ozempic. That’s more than half of all American adults. One in eight Americans has already tried this drug. You’re basically moving towards a society, where a large segment of the population has artificially induced immunosuppression, as a side-effect to lose weight.

    Ozempic is to 2024, what mRNA is to 2020. Cooperate with your body. Don’t try to trick or force it into doing something that it doesn’t want to do.

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    1. I loved his take on how ozempic does things to both the brain, metabolism, and the immune system in ways that we don’t really understand. Especially in upregulating some responses and down regulating others without knowing the long-term effect.

      I only disagreed with him when he said that the obesity epidemic in the West is caused by eating fatty animal products, my perception is it’s too many cheap, simple carbs and no exercise.

      AJ

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  45. Here’s something you don’t see every day.

    The caustic realpolitik Dmitry Orlov I used to know is back with a vengeance.

    For a fresh perspective on what’s really going on in Syria and surrounds this is worth a watch.

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      1. It does make Orlov look rather idiotic, doesn’t it:

        “The Syrians were taken by surprise and to some extent the Russians were too, but now they’re moving troops in and it may take a bit of time, but I don’t think those forces will take over Aleppo. I would be surprised if that happens.”

        Note that in his more recent vids on Dialogue Works, he’s made no mention of his huge error, either. He reminds me a bit of JMG, an obviously huge ego who is completely convinced at all times of his inability to be wrong, even when events concretely display his errors within just a few days of confidently stated and entirely erroneous predictions.

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        1. I find Dmitry can be really funny. But he is also mega racist and sexist a lot of the time. A lighthearted racist/sexist joke is fine to me, but yea he often takes it too far for my sensibilities and as a millennial I’m offended

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          1. 15 years ago Orlov was one of the top peak oil intellectuals.

            For several years now he has been silent on overshoot, even when discussing geopolitical and economic events that are clearly caused by energy depletion/scarcity. His silence may have coincided with his return to Russia.

            Perhaps it’s more dangerous to discuss things that threaten BAU in Russia. Or maybe he has a job that he needs to protect.

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  46. https://tsakraklides.com/2023/02/21/the-need-for-human-free-zones/
    The Need For Human-Free Zones

    In the words of David Attenborough, “humans have overrun the planet”. We are the most invasive species this planet has ever known. The study of ecology and ecosystem balance is an embarrassing oxymoron, coming from a species that has broken every possible rule in the ecosystem book. A species which has redefined, expanded and exceeded the definition of what constitutes an invasive species.

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  47. Sarah Connor has a fun article predicting collapse. Two years ago I would have considered her vision scary. Now it looks like a hopium filled pipedream to me.

    Collapse: A Timeline

    ps. Saw this comment on Tim Morgans blog from an article by ZeroHedge and it made me laugh: 

    “A new era of clean electricity for our country offers a positive vision of Britain’s future with energy security, lower bills, good jobs and climate action. This can only happen with big, bold change and that is why the government is embarking on the most ambitious reforms to our energy system in generations,” energy minister Ed Miliband said in the document.

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      1. That is exactly what I was thinking when I read that article of Sarah’s, how can she turn to just climate change after knowing/discussing fossil fuel depletion and rapidly falling EROEI in previous pieces of work. It seems like a lack of systems thinking as everything interacts with everything everything else, you can’t look at one aspect alone.

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      2. LOL. Ya, I held my tongue too. (just gave her a very light ribbing in my comment)

        Such snobs we are over here at un-Denial. LOL. This site reminds me of a dive bar I used to hang out at in my 20’s called Hidden House. It attracted musicians and music lovers. Us regulars would laugh you out of the bar if you tried bringing up anything mainstream. It had to be obscure and good. We looked down on people because of their taste in music. Embarrassing when I look back on it.

        But I’m not embarrassed for being a snob in the collapse community. I got my denial under control so that I could understand the bigger picture. Some of my hopium was incredibly painful to let go. So yes, I feel I’m entitled to look down on you if your denial is cranked up too high.

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  48. Mike Roberts is at it again with trying to discredit MORT. He’s persistent, you gotta give him that. 

    All I got out of this paper was “See, even Sapolsky wouldn’t believe in MORT, so that means it’s not real.”

    This pessimism/nihilism stuff I’ve been reading lately is making me more focused on our jump into the nightmare of full consciousness. eToM & MORT (or something similar) had to be part of this jump. And of course, I think fire was the main ingredient. But just chalking it all up to “humans are a species” is baloney. 

    Rob, it’s been long enough, you should unban Mike so that he can ridicule me and defend his position.

    Another Nail in the Coffin of MORT? | A Glimpse of Reality

    ps. Good thread above about Nate Hagens. I agree with Hideaway and Scarrow, but I side with Rob. The gentle approach has already been proven to not work and if anything does more harm than good. 

    Plus, most good people will become corrupted when they get the big audience. (like Leonardo DiCaprio’s character in Dont Look Up)

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    1. Mike argued against MORT here for years before I discovered he did not understand MORT. Then he claimed to have studied it and came up with different weak reasons he thinks MORT is wrong, always ignoring the key arguments that support MORT.

      The gist of his argument is that we are an animal and animals behave as they evolved to do. That’s as insightful and useful as saying water flows because it’s a liquid.

      As Dr. Ajit Varki has said many times, most people really don’t like MORT, but that’s not a valid reason it is wrong.

      My hunch is that Mike has some god in him.

      The reason Mike he is no longer welcome here is that he passive aggressively supports the covid policies that murdered 7+ million people and pretends he doesn’t.

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    2. In denial about denial.

      “MORT hypothesis would also have to suggest ways in which both of these mutations got switched on by environment and why those environmental markers were the tiny fraction of the epigenome which is inherited.”

      Umm the hypothesis literally does explain both of these…

      “Or, if not inherited, how the environmental markers emerged in enough people at the same time to make those MORT behaviours factors in the success of modern humans (success in the basis sense of subduing all other species and altering the ecosphere) as well as continuing to switch on those mutations down the generations.”

      This is easily explained. The evolution happened so far back in time that every human alive today will be descended from just one person with this gene. I can prove this mathematically if anyone is interested, but I will need to jog my memory how to do it 😉

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      1. I’m interested. If you have free time and are bored enough, please do it. It’ll probably go over my head and I won’t understand anything, but I am curious.

        ps. Hey Rob, I got this reply from someone named Charles Raymond on youtube from a comment I made about MPP and denial. I didn’t mention MORT and my yt handle is not paqnation. Not sure how this guy knew to bring up Varki. Do you know what v-denial is?

        An example of a person who is in denial is Varki the guy who wrote Denial. He is known to say we have v-denial. He was recently diagnosed with Parkinson’s disease.

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        1. Notice the telltale attack on the messenger rather than the message. He does not offer a better explanation for why, among many other things, there is only one species on this planet that believes in gods and flies to the moon. He simply does not like the MORT theory.

          I’ve never heard of v-denial and Google hasn’t either.

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        2. This video is a good starting point. You only have to go back just over 1000 years to find an ancestor that all humans alive today are descended from. As Extended Theory of Mind is much older, several hundred thousands years, it only needs one human to have to the gene mutation for all modern humans to have it.

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          1. Really? I hadn’t noticed much in the way of argument, though you did make an attempt above without Mike being able to respond.

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            1. Well you need to go back over the last couple of years, not in this blog post. Mike has even made a post on this website and you can read the comments under that

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              1. Thanks, monk. That was an interesting essay, and some others thought so, too. Although there were nearly 400 comments, most weren’t related to the post. Not a lot of argument over MORT versus the alternatives. Any proposal about how humans got to deny reality (if it didn’t always exist) has explanatory power since we are clearly in denial. Mike put a good case for species and has mentioned others on his blog. But it seems that minds are made up.

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                1. I think what happens is people confuse fear of and awareness of death, with Death Anxiety in MORT. Death anxiety refers to a deeper, more existential form of anxiety that arises from the awareness of mortality and the inevitability of death. One needs to have extended theory of mind and a deep awareness of time to feel this. MORT proposes this feeling is so bad that we have to deny the death reality. The denial probably functions as both a genetic propensity, reinforced by the culture/religion around us.

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                  1. There is no “awareness of mortality”. There is “belief in mortality”.

                    It’s not because we can witness the decomposition of the body of other people we, at some point, interacted with, that it tells us anything about the becoming of the sense of being.

                    I am not saying, there is life after death. I am saying if we are really honest about it, there is nothing that can be said. Well, at least, that is true for me. Of course, I can’t really know for you. Maybe you know, you experience, something that I don’t. That’s possible too. But if you are like me, then you can’t jump to conclusions.

                    To try an analogy. It’s like we are in a room with a door. Some people at some point are compelled to open the door and get out to never return. That we can witness. And that’s all.
                    Is the fact they nevery return a proof they disappeared? Not really. We don’t know.
                    Some end up fearing the door and do not want to open it. Some end up imagining that’s some kind of a behavioral test, the answer of which lies behind the door. There are stories about what some people saw while having the opportunity to glimpse through the door. Some will say they just mistook the paperwall of the corridor behind the door with what awaits us. Then some other come up with smart schemes to leverage these various beliefs and organize life in the room at their whim.
                    What can I know? Why should I fear? Why should I conclude?

                    Well, again, at least that’s how it is for me. And of course, this is just an analogy. Incomplete, probably as misleading as it is telling.

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                    1. We know that when you are dead you can’t breathe, see, hear, or feel, as we know that all of these things need a body to occur. Heck that’s enough for me to have a strong awareness of mortality.

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                2. Also you are right there could be other good reasons to explain denial. Even just simple explanations like optimistic people live longer even though pessimistic people have been proven to be more realistic and factually correct. Evolution is favouring optimism, maybe even optimisitic people have more children? “Oh I’m pregnant again, we’ll make it work somehow” versus “I can’t afford another child so I’ll be careful to avoid pregnancy”.

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  49. Hello Rob,

    Is everything all right? I wrote a comment a few days ago (https://un-denial.com/2024/09/14/by-kira-hideaway-on-relocalization/comment-page-5/#comment-107921) and you didn’t answer it yet. However you are still active publishing comments here. I am wondering what’s going on.
    It has now been 13 days since Chris initially sent you our joined proposition for a future guest essay. If you don’t like it, just tell us. That’s not a problem. If you need some time to read it, just tell us how much.
    But being left in the dark, is not feeling pleasant.

    So I hope you will let us know the reason of your silence, whatever it may be. Thank you.

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      2. Hello Rob. Thank you very much for your reply.

        Take care of yourself. I am not sure about what I am going to say, as it originates from a mix of intuition, observation, and extrapolation. (I am working with very little information: you are quite a reclusive man 🙂 For good reasons, you only know) I may be totally beside the point. I will risk sharing anyway.

        If you are going through a similar episode than what I am witenessing around me, then I think it’s ultimately positive. The darkness you are experiencing has been in you, part of you, for a long time. Only, it was blocked and you were made unaware. As a protection mechanism. The darkness is coming up, because the time is right to face it (it’s as much an individual process as it is collective right now).

        Do not fight it. Do not provoke it. Do not flee. Your main role is to take it easy, rest and witness the information that is going to be made available. While the system reconfigures. Do not try to hasten it: it may just block the process (but only to postpone it). Don’t go too fast: the things you will discover might be pretty (extremely) dark. But it is only a phase which ultimately may transform your outlook (quite radically) and bring you back to a better balance, your center, clarity of sight, insight. You might recover lost memories and be surprised of what you discover. What you experience may go against your beliefs. That’s OK. There may be external physical manifestions of the inner cleansing (skin rashes, body posture reconfiguration, extreme quantities of snort pouring out, …). From what I have heard and seen, it may take 6 months to 2 years (but that’s really a maximum, I think).
        I would limit outside influences (screen time, any kind of drug intake…). For you, I would say, presence in the forests may help. They are your element, the entity you are more easily and closely connected with.
        You may, if you like, see a professional. Unfortunately, not all of them know about this. If they are open, they will learn with you and be useful as an external observer. By listening to yourself, you will know if and what works for you.

        If my intuition is right about what you are experiencing, it may mean you won’t have enough energy to do much else than support the ongoing process. It is normal. I would say necessary. So it may be difficult for you to maintain the site. And once you are on the other side, you may totally lose interest for the topic. That’s OK. Just let us know at some point.

        From tomorrow evening, I will be away from keyboard and without internet connection for at least a week. Talk to you then.

        Hang in there!

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    1. There’s that 2030 date again. Could be sooner if something “unforeseen” happens like an economic collapse or world war. Maybe later if we need to lock down for another plandemic or the drones turn out to be aliens.

      The world does not realize how close we are to an abrupt decline in oil production. Trump’s claim to boost shale oil-gas, at a time when companies have designed plans to distribute inventory over a longer period (a matter of survival), can manage to maintain US production (and even increase slightly) in the next years, but only at the cost of a very rapid depletion of the remaining inventory. And the consequence is always the same, a flattening of world oil production, with an inevitable faster decline, when the inventory of good wells becomes scarce.

      The rest of the world, with conventional oil at the helm, follows the same path. For decades (especially from 2005), attempts have been made to maintain production, through intensive landfill drilling, to avoid a decline in production. The lack of new discoveries is the drop that fills the glass, when this process of lengthening the maintenance of world oil production to the end, comes to an end. Without new reserves and with the deposits in an advanced state of exhaustion, production will begin to fall in a synchronized way and this time, there will be no new rabbits in the top hat to stop the expected decline. The bulk of pending developments and most of the production expansions in the supergiant fields. They will be completed in 2028-2029 and therefore there will be no reserves to bring to the market. Therefore, nothing and nobody will be able to prevent the collapse of production in 2030 (it does not matter if we advance or delay the date for a couple of years).  

      We cannot be surprised by the interest of world authorities in accelerating the energy transition, putting the focus on 2030. If by then we have not achieved oil substitution, in reasonable amounts, the collapse will be brutal. 

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