RFK Jr. was confirmed yesterday as HHS Secretary and the MAHA Alliance held a press conference to celebrate this important moment in history.
Del Bigtree was RFK Jr.’s Communications Director. Now that RFK Jr. has been confirmed, Bigtree’s job is finished and he’s able to speak for himself without representing RFK Jr.
Sen. Ron Johnson introduces Del Bigtree at 10:20.
Bigtree’s speech starts at 16:00 and is a must watch for anyone concerned about improving our collective health, and righting the wrongs of covid.
If any of you, like me, feel the need for a little revenge after covid, this speech is righteous.
Bigtree brutally destroys the mainstream news media for their incompetence, indifference, and corruption.
This speech by RFK Jr. after his swearing in ceremony is also excellent.
I don’t have too many heroes, but RFK Jr. is one of them. This video is a nice introduction to the man.
Here is the president’s executive order authorizing MAHA. It’s inspiring and worth a read.
ESTABLISHING THE PRESIDENT’S
MAKE AMERICA HEALTHY AGAIN COMMISSIONEXECUTIVE ORDER
February 13, 2025
By the authority vested in me as President by the Constitution and the laws of the United States of America, it is hereby ordered:
Section 1. Purpose. American life expectancy significantly lags behind other developed countries, with pre‑COVID-19 United States life expectancy averaging 78.8 years and comparable countries averaging 82.6 years. This equates to 1.25 billion fewer life years for the United States population. Six in 10 Americans have at least one chronic disease, and four in 10 have two or more chronic diseases. An estimated one in five United States adults lives with a mental illness.
These realities become even more painful when contrasted with nations around the globe. Across 204 countries and territories, the United States had the highest age-standardized incidence rate of cancer in 2021, nearly double the next-highest rate. Further, from 1990-2021, the United States experienced an 88 percent increase in cancer, the largest percentage increase of any country evaluated. In 2021, asthma was more than twice as common in the United States than most of Europe, Asia, or Africa. Autism spectrum disorders had the highest prevalence in high-income countries, including the United States, in 2021. Similarly, autoimmune diseases such as inflammatory bowel disease, psoriasis, and multiple sclerosis are more commonly diagnosed in high-income areas such as Europe and North America. Overall, the global comparison data demonstrates that the health of Americans is on an alarming trajectory that requires immediate action.
This concern applies urgently to America’s children. In 2022, an estimated 30 million children (40.7 percent) had at least one health condition, such as allergies, asthma, or an autoimmune disease. Autism spectrum disorder now affects 1 in 36 children in the United States — a staggering increase from rates of 1 to 4 out of 10,000 children identified with the condition during the 1980s. Eighteen percent of late adolescents and young adults have fatty liver disease, close to 30 percent of adolescents are prediabetic, and more than 40 percent of adolescents are overweight or obese.
These health burdens have continued to increase alongside the increased prescription of medication. For example, in the case of Attention Deficit Disorder/Attention Deficit Hyperactivity Disorder, over 3.4 million children are now on medication for the disorder — up from 3.2 million children in 2019-2020 — and the number of children being diagnosed with the condition continues to rise.
This poses a dire threat to the American people and our way of life. Seventy-seven percent of young adults do not qualify for the military based in large part on their health scores. Ninety percent of the Nation’s $4.5 trillion in annual healthcare expenditures is for people with chronic and mental health conditions. In short, Americans of all ages are becoming sicker, beset by illnesses that our medical system is not addressing effectively. These trends harm us, our economy, and our security.
To fully address the growing health crisis in America, we must re-direct our national focus, in the public and private sectors, toward understanding and drastically lowering chronic disease rates and ending childhood chronic disease. This includes fresh thinking on nutrition, physical activity, healthy lifestyles, over-reliance on medication and treatments, the effects of new technological habits, environmental impacts, and food and drug quality and safety. We must restore the integrity of the scientific process by protecting expert recommendations from inappropriate influence and increasing transparency regarding existing data. We must ensure our healthcare system promotes health rather than just managing disease.
Sec. 2. Policy. It shall be the policy of the Federal Government to aggressively combat the critical health challenges facing our citizens, including the rising rates of mental health disorders, obesity, diabetes, and other chronic diseases. To do so, executive departments and agencies (agencies) that address health or healthcare must focus on reversing chronic disease. Under this policy:
(a) all federally funded health research should empower Americans through transparency and open-source data, and should avoid or eliminate conflicts of interest that skew outcomes and perpetuate distrust;
(b) the National Institutes of Health and other health-related research funded by the Federal Government should prioritize gold-standard research on the root causes of why Americans are getting sick;
(c) agencies shall work with farmers to ensure that United States food is the healthiest, most abundant, and most affordable in the world; and
(d) agencies shall ensure the availability of expanded treatment options and the flexibility for health insurance coverage to provide benefits that support beneficial lifestyle changes and disease prevention.
Sec. 3. Establishment and Composition of the President’s Make America Healthy Again Commission. (a) There is hereby established the President’s Make America Healthy Again Commission (Commission), chaired by the Secretary of Health and Human Services (Chair), with the Assistant to the President for Domestic Policy serving as Executive Director (Executive Director).
(b) In addition to the Chair and the Executive Director, the Commission shall include the following officials, or their designees:
(i) the Secretary of Agriculture;
(ii) the Secretary of Housing and Urban Development;
(iii) the Secretary of Education;
(iv) the Secretary of Veterans Affairs;
(v) the Administrator of the Environmental Protection Agency;
(vi) the Director of the Office of Management and Budget;
(vii) the Assistant to the President and Deputy Chief of Staff for Policy;
(viii) the Director of the National Economic Council;
(ix) the Chairman of the Council of Economic Advisers;
(x) the Director of the Office of Science and Technology Policy;
(xi) the Commissioner of Food and Drugs;
(xii) the Director for the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention;
(xiii) the Director of the National Institutes of Health; and
(xiv) other members of my Administration invited to participate, at the discretion of the Chair and the Executive Director.
Sec. 4. Fighting Childhood Chronic Disease. The initial mission of the Commission shall be to advise and assist the President on how best to exercise his authority to address the childhood chronic disease crisis. Therefore, the Commission shall:
(a) study the scope of the childhood chronic disease crisis and any potential contributing causes, including the American diet, absorption of toxic material, medical treatments, lifestyle, environmental factors, Government policies, food production techniques, electromagnetic radiation, and corporate influence or cronyism;
(b) advise and assist the President on informing the American people regarding the childhood chronic disease crisis, using transparent and clear facts; and
(c) provide to the President Government-wide recommendations on policy and strategy related to addressing the identified contributing causes of and ending the childhood chronic disease crisis.
Sec. 5. Initial Assessment and Strategy from the Make America Healthy Again Commission. (a) Make our Children Healthy Again Assessment. Within 100 days of the date of this order, the Commission shall submit to the President, through the Chair and the Executive Director, the Make Our Children Healthy Again Assessment, which shall:
(i) identify and describe childhood chronic disease in America compared to other countries;
(ii) assess the threat that potential over-utilization of medication, certain food ingredients, certain chemicals, and certain other exposures pose to children with respect to chronic inflammation or other established mechanisms of disease, using rigorous and transparent data, including international comparisons;
(iii) assess the prevalence of and threat posed by the prescription of selective serotonin reuptake inhibitors, antipsychotics, mood stabilizers, stimulants, and weight-loss drugs;
(iv) identify and report on best practices for preventing childhood health issues, including through proper nutrition and the promotion of healthy lifestyles;
(v) evaluate the effectiveness of existing educational programs with regard to nutrition, physical activity, and mental health for children;
(vi) identify and evaluate existing Federal programs and funding intended to prevent and treat childhood health issues for their scope and effectiveness;
(vii) ensure transparency of all current data and unpublished analyses related to the childhood chronic disease crisis, consistent with applicable law;
(viii) evaluate the effectiveness of current Federal Government childhood health data and metrics, including those from the Federal Interagency Forum on Child and Family Statistics and the National Survey of Children’s Health;
(ix) restore the integrity of science, including by eliminating undue industry influence, releasing findings and underlying data to the maximum extent permitted under applicable law, and increasing methodological rigor; and
(x) establish a framework for transparency and ethics review in industry-funded projects.
(b) Make our Children Healthy Again Strategy. Within 180 days of the date of this order, the Commission shall submit to the President, through the Chair and the Executive Director, a Make Our Children Healthy Again Strategy (Strategy), based on the findings from the Make Our Children Healthy Again Assessment described in subsection (a) of this section. The Strategy shall address appropriately restructuring the Federal Government’s response to the childhood chronic disease crisis, including by ending Federal practices that exacerbate the health crisis or unsuccessfully attempt to address it, and by adding powerful new solutions that will end childhood chronic disease.
Sec. 6. Additional Reports. (a) Following the submission to the President of the Strategy, and any final strategy reports thereafter, the Chair and the Executive Director shall recommend to the President updates to the Commission’s mission, including desired reports.
(b) The Commission shall not reconvene, following submission of the Strategy, until an updated mission is submitted to the President through the Executive Director.
Sec. 7. General Provisions. (a) Nothing in this order shall be construed to impair or otherwise affect:
(i) the authority granted by law to an executive department or agency, or the head thereof; or
(ii) the functions of the Director of the Office of Management and Budget relating to budgetary, administrative, or legislative proposals.
(b) This order shall be implemented consistent with applicable law and subject to the availability of appropriations.
(c) This order is not intended to, and does not, create any right or benefit, substantive or procedural, enforceable at law or in equity by any party against the United States, its departments, agencies, or entities, its officers, employees, or agents, or any other person.
THE WHITE HOUSE,
February 13, 2025.
<edit>
A few comments below from angry, now ex, followers suggest they were unaware of my gradual transformation over the last 4 years of observing and researching covid, from being certain RFK Jr. was a nut job, to now supporting RFK Jr.’s mission to improve our abysmal and worsening pubic health.
I’ve copied my replies to the criticisms here so that the reasons for my new beliefs are clear.
notabilia: You make excellent, well-researched points at times.
And you throw it all away by being an anti-vaxxer ass clown.
I too thought anti-vaxxers were nut jobs.
Then the experts I trusted renamed a 20 year old technology, known to be unsafe and ineffective in humans, from transfection to vaccine, pretended transfection was a new miracle technology, and coerced it into 5+ billion people after insufficient and fraudulent testing, including children that had zero risk from the virus, and when adverse event data showed the transfections were dangerous at levels far higher than had been sufficient to withdraw prior vaccines from the market, they doubled down, and hid and denied the data, and they continued to coerce transfections despite the disease being low risk for all except elderly and co-morbid people, and despite several safe and effective alternate treatments being available.
Today the rate of sickness and all-cause mortality is higher than pre-transfection, and the only thing our “experts” are certain of is that the cause is not the mRNA transfections. This despite there being several easy to understand first principle reasons to suspect mRNA transfections will never, and can never, be made safe.
The mRNA transfections are just the tip of the covid iceberg. They lied about every single covid issue, and they used tax dollars to corrupt news media, and to censor social media, to make us believe the lies.
Every covid policy was exactly wrong. To maximize your probability of good health the best course of action was to do exactly the opposite of what they told us to do. Incompetence does not explain this. They would have achieved a better public health outcome had they flipped a coin on every decision.
After observing 4 years of a healthcare system incapable of learning and correcting when new data emerges, and that pathologically lies, I no longer trust a word they say about anything.
So yes, I now proudly call myself an anti-vaxxer.
Go get ’em Bobby!
Anonymous: The health problems of the US population can largely be traced to a crap diet… good luck changing that. Any real attempt to do so will be shut down as a communist plot.
Yes, unhealthy food is a huge problem. It’s also not that complicated. Reducing sugar would be a good start.
We face many existential overshoot threats for which there is no “fix” thanks to MPP and MORT governing our behaviors, and thanks to the core design of the system that keeps us alive.
The threat from relatively recent, extremely poor public health is different. There is nothing fundamental blocking us from improving public health. I think we should support RFK Jr. and try.
A healthy population will be a strong asset, perhaps our only asset, when the everything bubble pops and modern civilization collapses.
<edit>
Secretary Kennedy delivers welcoming remarks to HHS staff.
Godspeed RFK Jr.
un-Denial 
Can avian flu spread via the wind? Can’t be ruled out, experts say
https://www.cidrap.umn.edu/avian-influenza-bird-flu/can-avian-flu-spread-wind-cant-be-ruled-out-experts-say
Here is a link to the study itself.
https://www.biorxiv.org/content/10.1101/2025.02.12.637829v1
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Until the “experts” admit all of the lies and mistakes they made during covid, and explain why those lies and mistakes will not be repeated, I am going to ignore everything they say about pandemics going forward.
This morning on CBC, which is a mouthpiece for the Canadian government, headline news was the spread of measles and polio because fewer people are getting vaccinated. They did not mention the fact that no one trusts them now because of the lies they told about mRNA transfections.
To be more precise, every single thing they said about mRNA transfections was a lie.
FAFO.
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Did anyone just hear about Trump’s meeting with Zelenskyy? We just saw the bottom fall out from under the American Empire.
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I reported on it this morning a few comments above this one.
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A few comments on today’s video by Nate Hagens.
I’ve logged many hours listening to Nate over many years. My sense is his stress level is rising and he’s becoming overwhelmed by the complexity and intractability of our predicament.
In this episode he presents yet another laundry list of complex issues for us to think about, but again is silent on the simplifying essence:
I wouldn’t be surprised if Nate pulls the plug on his venture soon because he said when the day comes that he’s unable to provide hope and possible good paths forward he will go silent.
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You wouldn’t mind if I shared this comment on discord, would you?
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No problem.
If you’re speaking with a group that’s given up and is resigned to our fate, you might want to clarify that I respect that point of view and have no problem with those people ignoring MORT. My beef is with the people still trying to make the future less bad.
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That includes me then 🙂 Even though I wouldn’t phrase it like that. I’d rather say: I play my part to make (event a minuscule aspect of) the future look like what I want it to be.
Cheers.
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I wouldn’t include you Charles. I don’t know you well so may be wrong but it seems like you’re living the life you wish others would live but you’re not trying to change the world. You might be hoping your example causes others to follow but you’re not pushing for change.
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Thank you.
I think that’s right. I try to be reasonable 🙂 To be honest, I have been angry for very long at the overall apathy over what seems to matter the most to me. But, talking to a lot of different people, I came to understand they are miles away: their lives revolve around other centers of interest. Everybody is a little world in his/herself.
So, when I reverse the viewpoint, I can’t really blame them. Shouldn’t I be the one taking interest in what seems to matter the most to them?
Also, I understand the apathy: we are trapped in systems larger than us. For instance, at work, there are things which do not work well, every body regularly complains about them, but nobody tries to change them anymore. We are resigned. Because there are out of every body’s control. It may be some cost which is diffuse (it’s nobody’s responsibility/fault, it’s something that is just not taken into account in the workflow because it seems secondary, but still creeps up). Or, it may be some service which is handled at the whole company level (and not adapted to our local conditions) or outsourced and we can’t do anything about it.
So it’s hard (impossible) to step back, understand the root of the problem, get the right people involved and implement some change.
So, at the societal level. That’s another scale! Talk about the mega-machine.
By the way, have you noticed? It seems to me that the apathy has just recently morphed into a kind of mild panic, cristallizing over Trump. For a long time, I heard: “don’t worry, this is not for us to deal with, maybe for our grand-children”. And now I am hearing: “it’s going to collapse, there is nothing that can be done, I prefer enjoying my life now (and keeping my head in the sand)”.
To me, this all sounds like excuses. Reality is going to catch up with everybody 🙂
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Yes, I have noticed the tension in aware people is way up. Seems to be up in unaware people too.
Something I notice all the time now is that there is no shared reality. Everyone lives in their own world.
Look at me and my anger about covid. I am certain my reality is correct and yet most Canadians seem to think healthcare workers are heroes rather than morons or murderers.
Look at the divide over DOGE. There is no debate about the facts. Just yelling about feelings and beliefs.
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DOGE has some serious problems
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Every cancelled expense is itemized on to the DOGE web site. If you find an item that you don’t think should have been cancelled, you should submit your rationale. They have publicly stated that if they make a mistake they will correct it.
Social media accounts have been set up to report corruption tips for each department. If you are aware of something corrupt Musk is doing you should report it.
For your mental health you should listen to the Rogan/Musk interview. Form your opinions from first hand information. There is a massive campaign underway to convince people Musk is evil with the goal of causing some nut job to assassinate him. Musk might be a little wacky, but he’s not evil.
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https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Stochastic_terrorism
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Yes, that is very true and probably another symptom of collapse: I believe there can’t be a functional society very long if there is no basic shared agreement on “what is true” (a shared normalized mental space to exchange).
My wife tells me it’s one of the impact of the internet: there is so much information to pick from, it’s so easy to build one’s own little mix of beliefs. So the group is fragmenting, unable to stitch the patches around real physical campfires.
Yes, I too, suffer from the fact that many are not willing to take the time to listen and reason and build and present complex counter-arguments/stories anymore. The attention span is very small and then you either get that dead look (human has been switched off) or a bout of anger or some kind of automatic pre-built response or just the person going back to his phone screen. Learned Helplessness? (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Learned_helplessness)
Hopefully, I also believe this is going to change during the process of collapse: reality is going to catch up. Maybe the internet will go down, maybe people will have to build communities to feed themselves or protect themselves… This is only temporary.
Sorry for the somewhat deconstructed rambling. In any case 2025 feels very much like a turning point to me. Let’s keep our routes, let’s keep our spirit.
🙂
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I’m only 3 minutes into a 3 hour discussion between Musk and Rogan and it’s already funny enough to post, plus it’s clear no one is driving the bus because the elite don’t understand what’s going on any better than we do.
I don’t know if I buy this. Musk also discusses what a huge threat debt growth is. It seems to me immigration is pretty much the only quick fix to getting some economic growth needed to kick the debt can a little further. I’m not saying Musk is lying. I guess both explanations could be true.
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Is it worth it, if it makes the inevitable collapse much steeper? But then again, we are dealing with someone who believes the earth can sustain 80 billion people (i.e. he either delusional or a con-artist).
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Could be both.
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Just saw this cool comment from Robin Schaufler on Art Berman’s blog.
Solutions: The Art of Avoiding Reality | Art Berman
In a different comment she said she recognized me from un-Denial. I don’t recognize the name, maybe a lurker. But between the mention of Wrangham and Varki books and also the fire emphasis… by all means Robin, feel free to start commenting here.
And I agree with her about the Holocene being an important piece to the puzzle of how we ended up in this shitstorm. Prior to my fixation on fire, I was blaming the Holocene for everything. I attempted to write an essay about it, but I couldn’t make it interesting.
But I do have one complaint. And maybe Robin doesn’t mean it in the way I’m interpreting it. I don’t like the wording of “humans controlled fire at least a million years ago”. If you take it too literal then you get into that Quest for Fire thing we’ve mentioned here before where it’s almost impossible to believe that 80kya some humans had not conquered fire yet.
I believe that harnessing fire was on and off for a million years. Some tribes figured it out and then it was eventually lost within the tribe. Some tribes never figured it out. Maybe some tribes were able to keep it and never lose it, but the tribe itself became extinct through conflict or famine. And no tribe full on excelled with it… that can’t happen until the nightmare of full consciousness. Perhaps there were even long gaps (50k years) where nobody on the planet knew how to start a fire.
I think it eventually evolved to where there were some overaggressive fire using tribes or hominids. Some groups using it much more frequently than the norm, especially for cooking. I think that’s where sapiens come into the picture.
I don’t give the homo genus much credit for intellect prior to full consciousness. I picture the intelligence & consciousness levels slightly above a chimpanzee or elephant. Makes it easier for me to picture tribes of chimps/elephants losing fire and then gaining it again down the road and then losing it again and so on. But nobody ever outright conquering it in the way that my human brain pictures “conquering”. And that pretty much went on for a million years until that nightmare event happened to sapiens 100-200kya.
LOL, I only wanted to post Robin’s comment. I should probably not hit the send button until I look this over again. Oh well, I’m sure you guys will let me know if any of this sounds insane.😊
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Nice find and good ramble.
I can confirm that Robin’s never used her name in a comment here.
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In WordPress I use my alias of Carroll Lewis (2 “L”s at the end of Carroll). It’s a play on Lewis Carroll, because I identify as female, but have always admired the writings of Lewis Carroll. He hit the nail on the head so many times with respect to the Nonsense we worship as truTHmp.
There had to have been at least one band that mastered fire and kept it going indefinitely in order for evolutionary time to kick in and shrink jaws, de-mature adult digestive systems, stand upright / lose body hair / exit the trees / lose upper body strength => be able to sweat while running long distances, and all the other physiological changes that made homo sapiens homo sapiens. I’d have to look back through Catching Fire to figure out when that was – my memory isn’t perfect. Of course there must have been mastery gained and mastery lost on the way to mastery sustained, but the latter had to have occurred long enough ago for physical evolution to result.
I am not a lurker. Rather, I come and go depending on how consumed I am by the rest of my life.
Thanks for recognizing me.
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P.S., Since Varki/Brower make a plausible but not convincing case, I continue to read-watch-listen to other intellectuals. I find Iain McGilchrist particularly compelling, but haven’t delved deeply enough into his writings. I don’t even have either of his Opus Magnus tomes, although they are on my list. I also just ordered a copy of Sapiens by Yuval Noah Harari. I returned to un-denial.com because I wanted to recommend Catching Fire and Denial to the friend who recommended Sapiens. Right now, that entire line of inquiry is on hold while I perform civic engagement, trying to nudge my borough’s comprehensive plan in a more prudent direction.
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I hear recommendations for Harari’s ‘Sapiens’ from some of my pessimistic/nihilistic sources. I’m gonna have to try that book eventually.
Let us know what you think of it when you get done Carroll.
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I reviewed Harari’s Sapiens twice.
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Thanks. I should have known that you’ve already “been there, done that”😊.
And once again Apneaman had my favorite comments. Wish that guy would post comments here again.
A couple of Harari quotes I liked best:
And I’m gonna read that Chaisson paper The Natural Science Underlying Big History – Chaisson – 2014 – The Scientific World Journal – Wiley Online Library
I was cracking up at this angry line from you Rob:
ps. And thanks for this badass version of Thunderstruck. Freaking awesome.
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I too miss Apneaman.
For a long time he was pretty much the only supporter I had on this site. He’s also a Canadian in my region that might have become a real life friend.
I got angry (and hurt) because I thought he attacked me for no good reason and he didn’t think I had any reason to be angry because he wasn’t attacking me and that was that.
Very sad. I may try to contact him.
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Yes, you should definitely try to contact him. You’ll feel better. He’ll feel better. And we will have another good contributor. win/win/win
He reminds me of me… so don’t forget to appeal to his egomania. Let him know he has a fan club waiting for him over here.
ps. I’ve been into these guys for years but forgot all about em. Cool video here. Reminds me of Pee Wee’s Playhouse. And I like to think the song is about industrial civilization.
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My preps paid off today.
The display died without warning in my 6 year old $1200 high end cell phone.
I had a new spare cheap $200 cell phone in inventory and was back up in a couple hours. My phone configuration is very complex so was glad I had spent the time pre-configuring the spare.
I plan to buy one more cheap phone as a spare. By the time it fails the wireless networks might be down.
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This clip is not very good, and the host is annoying as hell. But I like what it was going for. These types of videos are more for the overshoot/energy blind clueless masses, but they do still appeal to me.
I kind of liked what he was saying at the 11:14 mark. And here were some comments I liked.
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If you don’t believe any of the explanations of what’s going on with US/Ukraine, including those from the mainstream and alternate media, this discussion between Brian Berletic and Kalibrated is pretty good.
They think the minerals deal is intended to provide cover for the US continuing to fund the war, and calls for peace are an excuse to pivot to China leaving Europe to send troops into Ukraine. In other words, the war will continue.
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Plans within plans.
God knows…………………….but does he care?
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I believe yes, “he” does. There is no such thing as chance.
At least, that’s what it seems to to me.
I kind of agree with Rintrah when he says (even though, I would have prefered the word “humbled” to “humiliated”, but that so in the style of Rintrah 🙂
That’s from https://www.rintrah.nl/a-not-so-great-acceleration/.
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Today I had 25 people over for a lunch where everyone brings a plate.
I love bringing people together and telling them that their presence in my life is very important.
Most of these people I have only known for less than 3 years but I feel very close to them now.
This I think is the only way forward through collapse.
Stand together in support if we can and appreciate what we have in the here and now.
None of us are perfect and all we really have is each other.
As I have said before I would love to have you all at my table for an afternoon of sharing.
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Sounds great.
Yes.
And thank you for the offer.
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B today discusses Europe’s energy driven suicide.
He acknowledges that bad decisions have accelerated a collapse that would have eventually occurred regardless of good leadership.
https://thehonestsorcerer.substack.com/p/no-escape-from-fantasy-land
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xraymike79 (like Nate Hagens) is concerned about the loss of democracy and nicely demonstrates how intelligent aware people can have completely different interpretations of the same reality.
I think his criticisms can also be explained by a superorganism without a bus driver optimizing itself for a final bit of growth.
I’m not sure who is right. I see so many examples now of smart people that disagree with me that I’m not sure what is true anymore.
https://collapseofindustrialcivilization.com/2025/03/01/americas-headlong-lurch-into-authoritarian-rule/
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LOL. Feels like 4 years ago with all the confusion around a certain jab.😊
Xraymike is a great source for overshoot/collapse. Maybe it applies to his politics as well. I don’t know. He does make me doubt myself a little (LOL. See, its 2021 all over again). But he sets off a major red flag at the end with the “RIP America” and the upside-down shredded flag. I got some “proud to be an american” vibes. I was even expecting to see a line about how democracy is no longer alive because of team trump… or that the rest of the world is laughing at america.
Ya, my stance on this administration is “hell no, nothing’s gonna get better”. We’re already knee-deep in the peak of insanity. Greedy millionaires and billionaires are incapable of doing anything that goes against their profits, even if they were genuinely trying to make a change (kind of like how willfully reducing energy consumption is impossible). Maybe they get a win here and there, but the “system” cannot be changed… in the same way that the momentum of collapse cannot be slowed or stopped.
That’s why I’m confused about all the hate in the overshoot world for team trump. Feels like the correct answer is – anything but the goddamn status quo!! Mitt Romney, Kamala, Obama, Rick Santorum, Biden, Bush, McCain, Clinton, … enough with the usual suspects. Heck, I hope President Camacho from Idiocracy is next in line after Trump.
And yes, this could all backfire where this administration ends up speeding things up and making our lives worse than it would have been otherwise. But if it’s between this and the status quo… I’ll take my chances with this.
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I can totally see his perspective but what I don’t understand is why can’t he see that what he is describing is exactly what was happening with the Clinton, Bush, Obama and Biden presidencies too. Power will always corrupt in the end for that is our nature if we don’t reign it in.
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HHH has been studying Hideaway.
https://peakoilbarrel.com/opec-update-february-2025/#comment-786467
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Hi Rob
I will be a bit more specific. It’s a couple living in Calgary who are almost 60 and have worked in consulting jobs in various fields. Their kid is probably in mid twenties. None of them have any background or skills that would be useful or relevant in a post collapse world.(Like most of the population)
Assuming that the unraveling is 5 – 7 years away and they somehow overcome their denial, could they buy some land away from the city and grow their own food to live off the land? If they joined up with some other families could they create a small community of a dozer or so individuals living sustainably?
Of course needless to say there would be no fertilizers, pesticides, pumps, electricity or any benefits of modernity. It would be a pre industrial lifestyle. What would be the challenges?
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Preptip:
Hi Kira,
This is a very complex issue with many variables that can have dramatic impacts on the correct path to choose, and every path has much uncertainty in the outcome.
Buying a piece of land and trying to live off of it is a high risk path. It’s very difficult, takes a lot of time and money, and has many possible paths to failure. If they want to go down this path there are many experts with better advice than me that they should consult.
I think it would be wise for me to stick to advice that is likely to be valid for most people:
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I am planning to share these recommendations with a friend group.
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I know this is a late reply, but what would you advise for younger people?
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Sorry Stellarwind72, I do not understand your question. I think my advice above applies to all ages. Please clarify.
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Some of the advice focuses on retirement savings and I am seeking advice for people at the beginning of their careers. Even if one isn’t saving for retirement at the moment, I am pretty sure the same principles apply.
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For a young person without savings I would say they should focus on developing skills that will be useful in a less complex and poorer world.
That does not mean they should abandon a well paying modern job as say a software developer or insurance agent, but as a hobby they should develop some other skills like growing and preserving food, DIY repairs, scratch cooking, first aid, etc. etc. Basically any skill that another poor person will value and exchange something for.
Self-defense skills will probably also be useful.
It’s a very personal decision that each young person must make, but I would advise to think long and hard before having children.
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Thank you.
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Kira they most certainly could.
They just need to start 7 years ago.
Takes about 15 years to get good at agriculture.
FYI
Everyone should keep rabbits as a food source.
They are the perfect apocalypse protein source animal.
They eat plants, can be easily tamed to be pets, they breed like rabbits and they generally make no noise so you can keep them hidden – unlike most other animals.
They easily fit in a bug out bag. You only need two. A boy and a girl (please ensure they don’t only indentify as that ha ha…).
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Adding to nikoB’s comments on rabbits (from what I’ve read, no first hand experience):
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I have kept rabbits for 20 years. They are the easiest of all animals to raise for meat.
Also forgot to mention. no need to keep in freezer as you only kill enough to eat unlike a cow, pig or sheep.
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Thanks for the suggestions.
Based on what you and Rob have said it looks like rabbits manage to form a cyclical system where the nutrients from the environment are cycled to a great degree. Looks like it is only these circular systems that have any hope of making it through the collapse.
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Yes 🙂
I like to form substrings of infinity such as: “feed life feeds me feed life feeds me…”
Or “plant feeds animals fertilize soil grows plant feeds me fertilizes soil grows plant feeds animals fertilize soil…”
Or “seed grows into plant flowers feed bee pollinates flower makes seed grows into plant feed me fecundate woman bear child plant seed grows into plant flowers feed…”
One bead at a time on the rosary of life, the blissful flow of life.
Ah ah ah.
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You might want to read Alice Friedemann’s book review of “Back from the Land: how young Americans went to nature in the 1970s, and why they came back”.
https://energyskeptic.com/2016/why-back-to-the-land-failed/
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Good find.
Alice’s review nicely explains why I did not want to provide advice on buying a homestead to Kira’s friends.
Not mentioned are the additional risks of climate change and starving people invading your homestead.
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Alice Friedmann, from Energy Skeptic, for those that don’t know; really has a great handle on our future and why things just wont work. She is well aware of the complexity of every aspect of our modern civilization, which is precisely why I don’t think the Nate Hagens of the world would ever have her as guest. She would just unravel all the hopium very quickly..
Another guest I suspect Nate would never have is Tim Garrett for precisely the same reason, based on physics..
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Thanks for the find. Its been a lot of years since I read that article. Alice truly has covered almost every aspect of collapse.
It looks like there is nothing new about these ideas of self sustainable living and it also looks like it fails almost everytime for more or less the same reasons.
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Hi Kira… “could they buy some land away from the city and grow their own food to live off the land? If they joined up with some other families could they create a small community of a dozer or so individuals living sustainably?“
I’m going to be the fly in the ointment… No they can’t!!
Firstly it all assumes the complexity of today disappears, as in rules, regulations and cost in money terms of what applies today. The current system will not allow people to buy some land and live off it “sustainably”. They have to produce an excess off their land to pay for the land taxes, water rights, council rates, insurance etc, etc. They have to abide by local laws in getting permits for whatever they want to build, etc.
They cannot just go and live off their land, in today’s system, and one aspect that history teaches us is that the complexity of rules and regulations on those farming the land get to be larger burdens on the farmers as we head into collapse. There is plenty of evidence that the further away from Rome the farmers were preferring the invaders as the taxes on the farms from Rome were getting too onerous at the end of empire.
Putting novices and old people in such a situation just doesn’t work as during the pre total collapse phase, those in charge of cities will be putting more pressure on farms to produce food for cities, with less inputs to the farms, via higher taxation/prices for everything.
How would people in the Calgary area survive winter without the modern conveniences of well heated homes, based on lots of firewood, only collectable by people of 60+ years old with chainsaws and machinery to move it, in the spare time after farming? What would be the food source for a long cold winter? How did the natives live a thousand years ago in that area.
I’m afraid we all have the denial gene to some extent in thinking we can plan and survive the collapse, myself included, in our attempts to survive what’s coming. A quick look around at what we need to farm in today’s world to survive involves lots of modernity. Without it we could not remain financially viable on a farm as production from hand tools (which have to be bought using money) would not produce the enough surplus to keep some people in cities fed.
This is another important aspect of our modern complex civilization. Food, the energy for the human body, must remain ‘cheap’ for those in the city to be able to perform ‘other’ aspects of modern civilization. If people in cities were all trying ot grow their own food, they wouldn’t have the time to do the other important roles of our complex civilization, like being teachers, engineers, designers, financiers, managers, accountants, lawyers, electricians, fitters and turners, welders, politicians, actors, hairdressers, inventors, researchers, garbologists etc, etc…
No-one can “own” a decent slice of land and NOT be part of modern civilization, the system will not allow it. This means to have a bit of land to be self sufficient only, requires some off property income to pay for all the rest, which means ‘financial assets’ that pay some type of ongoing income, which is going to be one of the first things to collapse, probably well before govts, or local warlords stop taxing the workers of the land….
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Hideaway, you make a really important point.
Our system does not permit minimal self-sufficiency. It forces you to create a surplus. That’s very hard to do today on a small farm.
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Hello Hideaway,
Hope you and your family are all well and far from Cyclone Alfred’s reach (forgive me as I have forgotten if your property might be in northern NSW or is it Victoria?)
I completely second your opinion on the near impossibility of being self-sufficient without also being mired in the system. We are in that exact situation as you describe where my husband has had to hold down a well-paying job for the past 25 years whilst I didn’t so I could be the master organiser and frontsperson to develop the two homesteads which have siphoned every single penny and ounce of energy available and continues to do so. Once contracted into the working world (and especially as an academic) his life was not his own and 70 hour plus working weeks have been standard. If not for the possibility that I could be free to make thousands of hours of phone calls and doing internet research, ordering and picking up thousands of plants (and planting them), meeting up with contractors, setting up irrigation systems, and all the countless (but by no means thankless!) tasks which has frankly been my full time job for over two decades, this endeavour wouldn’t have gotten off the ground, even if it had the funding. This is not to say in the least that my husband only had to do his two hour daily commute (how else does one live in the country and be able to work in a major population centre) as well as the demanding day (and night) job, his every spare hour on weekends and holidays was spent doing the major physical maintenance–brushcutting, pole-pruning, hole-digging, fencing, wood-chopping and carting. This all of which was learned from scratch by mainly trial and error, and a whole lot more error, as we were fresh off the boat (plane) migrants from big city America (San Francisco was our last domicile) to a rural setting of 300 people. It is a very good thing that we had our start at around 30, as I can’t imagine having the energy to begin such an undertaking now that we’re in our 50s. Oh, did I forget to mention that despite all the invested time and energy (and money), we are no where near self-sufficient, in fact our lives seem more complicated and complex than ever, and there is still gear to purchase, always needing maintenance and fixing, and ever more infrastructure to build. We are currently trying to work out how my husband can retire early so we can consolidate our lives onto one property full-time and take care of my elderly mother. And the reason we can’t throw in the towel just yet is because we still need money for rates, insurances, regos, and all the associated expenses that come with modern living in the system from which we will not ever be able to escape from cradle to grave.
But despite it all, it is a life we would not trade for any other and the journey has made us who we are. We feel absolutely privileged to be able to have this experience and the joys (as well as sorrows) are forever part of lives. Our dream was to make a life closer to the land, and we have been at once humbled and uplifted by our ideals and the realities. Self-sufficiency as a goal has long since been abandoned and just being a more aware and active participant in the rhythms and cycles of nature is our daily aspiration. Meaningful physical and mental work along with deep gratitude for all the blessings we can easily take for granted make for a good and fulfilling life and we can ask for nothing more. I daresay that all those here who have embarked on a parallel path would agree with me wholeheartedly.
So, my two cents for Kira is that although the head (and body!) may weigh the pros and cons of starting a new homesteading venture, the heart will find a way through and that is perhaps all we ever really want being here during our short but brilliant spark of life.
Namaste, friends.
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Thanks Gaia for your bracing honesty.
I agree with your conclusion. If homesteading/small scale farming is a passion and brings great joy, and you have off-farm income or savings to afford it, then go for it, but expect at least 10 years of hard work to get setup, and don’t do it because you think it will isolate you from the coming chaos.
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So well said, Rob. How do you do it? From my unruly ramblings (note the lack of paragraphs again, sorry) to a well-heeled, one sentence summary, what a transformation! I think you would have made a superb (if ruthless) editor!
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That’s my little niche in the world. Max info in minimum words.
It’s not a skill that’s attractive to the opposite sex, and it makes for dry essays, but I like it.
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Hi Gaia.
Hope you and your family are doing well.
You are absolutely right when you say that it is a privilege to be able to live a life close to mother nature soaking in everything that she has to offer. Unfortunately being part of a civilization like ours means you have to make a concious choice as Rob put it.
I am glad to hear that you were able to balance the constraints of the modern world with your passion despite the challenges. It is always a joy to read your words and hear your story.
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Hello Kira,
It’s my sincere pleasure and fulfilment to be able to comment freely from my mind and heart here as I do amongst fellow travelers and friends. Having your and others’ encouragement is like sunshine and gentle rain for my spirit. I do consider my journey since finding Rob’s site (is it 3 years ago now, or 4?) like a tree growing from a seed, having been fed with solid knowledge of our predicament (to which you have contributed immensely, thank you), and nurtured by the understanding and fellowship of compassionate and generous companions. It is my great desire to be able to give back, in any measure to anyone and everyone, something which may help your own journey. It means so much to me that we have this connection despite all the uncertainties. Here is a space where I feel and find steadiness, comfort, and contentment to just be and be witness to and honour all our stories.
Thank you again for bringing light and warmth to my day. I wish you and your family and all in your life story a safe and smooth path forward.
Namaste, friend.
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Hi Gaia, I read your comment from above shortly after I came out of the surgical unit where my molar with the rotten root canal had just been removed as the local had worn off, so no I was not very well yesterday. I had started to be getting sepsis from the infection a couple of weeks ago and had been on high level antibiotics, which came with it’s own problems..
I’m another that would not be alive if not for modern medicine, for a different reason, but having teeth drilled when very young, led to eventually having to have the root canal in the first place, and possibly poor diet when very young also..
Enough of that.. No we are in very dry Southern Victoria, I’d like a degraded cyclone to come and dump a lot of water!! I do have friends and relatives that are in Northern NSW and Brisbane, so right in the line of wind and wetness..
We’ve been on our property for 40 years now, which is enough time to see entropy in action with all modern conveniences going from being extremely useful, to needing lots of maintenance to being replaced because of failure. It’s a natural unstoppable trend. Fences rust, posts holding them up rot, even the preservative pressure treated ones.
The entire concept of self sufficiency, cannot work for more than a short period, especially if relying upon anything from the modern world. After collapse when the products of modernity are no longer available, we get to see how our supposedly robust self sufficiency really is. Of course none of us can overcome the effect of drought, wildfire, floods or hordes escaping the city that can all overwhelm what we’ve tried to ‘plan’ for.
Gaia …”Self-sufficiency as a goal has long since been abandoned and just being a more aware and active participant in the rhythms and cycles of nature is our daily aspiration. Meaningful physical and mental work along with deep gratitude for all the blessings we can easily take for granted make for a good and fulfilling life and we can ask for nothing more. I daresay that all those here who have embarked on a parallel path would agree with me wholeheartedly.“
Yes, I agree entirely, and as per usual you state it so much better than I ever could, Thanks..
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Ouch Hideaway, I hope your mouth heals quickly.
What I’m hoping works for me is being old and having a few years of luck, and few years of canned sardines, and then a natural death.
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Oh Rob, you make me laugh! And that brought to mind immediately the title of Douglas Adam’s book “So long and thanks for all the fish” in his Hitchhiker’s Guide to the Galaxy series. I was never a total fan (unlike many of my generation when these books were all the rage) but perhaps I would be able to appreciate the loopy humour more now that we’re heading into the great unknown.
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Hello Hideaway,
I am very touched that you would respond to my post so shortly after coming through that ordeal. I hope you are feeling better today and I trust your body in its infinite wisdom will heal in the right manner and timing, especially now that the nidus of on-going infection has been dealt with. I really feel for your discomfort in addition to being concerned for your situation which really was an acute medical crisis. I am very thankful that you have had the defining therapy now and should be well on your way to mending. You probably will still have another course of antibiotics, and yes, that can cause other issues but once you’re done, your gut health should bounce back with your excellent diet. Like Rob (and probably Chris) dental scenarios are my worst nightmare, and I have been very fortunate to have avoided them (after a terrible start with orthodontics as a teen) for the most part.
A while back I gave the advice here that my secret weapon is an oral water irrigator, I find that using it daily, gradually having built up to the maximum pressure, is the best thing to keep the excess bacteria from building up (a main factor for gum issues and enamel erosion) and whilst the jet blasts the gum line to remove food debris, it also massages and strengthens the gums which promote over all oral health. From my experience, this is a far better method than flossing as that causes micro and macro injury to the gums and in effect pushes food debris and bacteria deeper into the pockets, causing constant low level inflammation. So, long story short, please do try an oral irrigator if you don’t use one already, but go very gently around the healing areas and work your way up through the intensity setting slowly. The one I use is a Panasonic EW1613W541 (don’t you just love the complexity of the model number, as if the more letters and numbers the better the quality!) but I think any of the options would work fine.
As for our “self-sufficiency” tally, today I harvested two small pineapples, one bunch of bananas (a lot more on the way), and one shiitake mushroom (yes, just one!) that popped out of a log that I inoculated about 6 months ago with spawn. We had a very meager mango crop this season but still, I was happy to have picked around 40 (and I was very grateful for David and Jo’s generosity in sharing their mango bounty, it’s just so awesome that a fellow un-denier lives only 25 minutes away, how cool is that?) There’s an assortment of greens growing and I recently processed a fair number of bamboo shoots. I haven’t gotten into vegetable growing due to not being up here full time yet, but I do have root and tuber crops in the ground and ready to scale up. I am also counting on my stocked up supply of grains and pulses, but as you say, no amount of prepping will prepare us for total collapse for none of us is an island and there will be many who will want to climb aboard our tenuous raft.
On that note, I want to follow up here with a further recommendation of the book series I mentioned a couple weeks back. The movie The Homestead (about the first weeks after social collapse of a prepper community in the state of Utah in the US) was based on the first book Black Autumn in the apocalyptic series by Jeff Kirkham and Jason Ross. I got sucked into the escapism and have been going through the series, now on book 4 out of 10. Whilst obviously sensationalised, the scenarios are still plausible and what I am finding unnerving is just how easily we can descend into total anarchy–yes, I have been aware of it for some time but to have it described in detail with characters in a story seems to have given my awareness some wings and definition. Like I said before, it is written by an ex Green Beret and is very military and weaponry focused (model numbers of all the guns and equipment) and peppered with gratuitous violence (people don’t hoard ammo for nothing), but then again, maybe that is going to be a possible scenario. The books have prep tips sprinkled throughout (generally stock up more food and ammo, learn as much as you can about anything and everything related to survival, not rocket science) and whilst not great literature, it still generates a good story that highlights just what can go wrong and how wrong when everything stops working. Roving hordes play a very key part, especially in the first few months after an apocalyptic situation, and the consequences are stark and sobering.
Anyway, apologies for that downer of a tangent, but I think we here can appreciate all the more just what we have now and what we have to lose, and will lose one day. All the more reason to be grateful for every bonus day, even if it does involve major dental woes!
All the best to your and your family, Hideaway and everyone. It is a privilege and delight to Ride it out with you all.
Namaste.
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I agree with Gaia on the value of a water irrigator. My dental health improved a lot since I started using one. I have used the Waterpik Ultra every day for 5 years and it has been reliable. I like it so much I have a spare in inventory.
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Hi Hideaway thanks for the answer.
You nailed the issue of having things both ways where one also wants the safety net of detachment from civilization while enjoying it’s comforts.
But I wanted to understand where these ideas are originating from and it looks like it is from videos and articles like this.
People are looking at videos like these and thinking that they could do the same in Canada or Australia.
If you are in India where agriculture employs more than half of population (directly or indirectly) you indeed could do something like this without bogged down by larger civilisational structure of taxes, permits etc. The population is much more rooted and has never industrialized to the extend that the west has.
A huge difference certainly is the climate. As you pointed out correctly much of Canada is too cold to survive without heating and adapting to a life like the indigenous tribes within a few years coming from a western level of comfort is just delusional.
India seems to have the perfect climate for a food forest such as this one where all the nutrients are cycled back endlessly which is how nature does it. They also have rich traditional recipes for pesticides made from neem and other medicinal plants in case the natural defenses of the food forest are not enough. They also seem to have mastered the method of water management as populations in places like Rajasthan (which is a desert in western India) also were very prosperous and thriving.
These methods and techniques honed over generations cannot simply be transplanted to a different continent with a drastically different climate.
I guess the key difference is that people who are doing this in the video are not doing this as a hobby or a backup plan with one foot in the civilization, it is a way of life and they are all in.
I would like to know if anyone has accomplished this kind of thing in Australia or Canada or if it’s even possible with the kind of climates that exist.
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What they always fail to show in these types of videos is the large city of over 1M people only 10km to the South of this haven.
What happens during collapse when all the city dwellers find the imported rice, wheat, meat etc is no longer available? This haven is less than a day’s walk away and if just 10,000 people turn up looking for food, there is no chance of sustaining any of it, the seed will be eaten..
It all works nicely and looks totally sustainable to those not prepared to look deeper. A city just 10km away gives a huge market while times are good, giving them profit to pay taxes, with everything they produce, in a near perfect climate, until the next typhoon hits in our changing climate..
Thanks for putting this one up Kira, I understand where you are coming from..
I look at a lot of sites and videos about our bright green future, always to try and find where I might be wrong, but every single one of them makes the assumption that “this bit” can grow to be ‘the answer’, but it’s always provided the rest of the world acts ‘normally’.
Normally for the last 200 years has been growth in energy and material use, growth in population, complexity and destruction of the environment. They never ever discuss how reversing the lot of these detrimental effects, will their own idea that needs to grow, can happen in the background of everything else going downhill.
Plus they never ever discuss the pure physics of it all. I’ve just watched another “Just have a think” and “undecided” videos by promoters of a bright green future, who think solar panels, wind turbines, batteries, all the recycling factories, chemicals used etc, all grow on trees. Never, ever do they discuss the fossil fuels needed to make any/all of it happen, nor what happens when fossil fuels get too expensive or unavailable to build or recycle any of it…
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Your point about population was spot on and neatly brings us full circle to the starting point.
These regions down south are more densely populated precisely because they can harvest more of the photosynthetic ability and the warm climate speeds up the nutrient cycling processes enabling larger yields. Regions up north will have harder time replicating the food forest system.
Security of the state is the most overlooked aspect taken for granted and for good reason. With the exception of a few countries in Africa and middle East most countries still have government monopoly on violence which will cease when the collapse happens. All it takes is a horde of hungry people to completely destroy all the produce and put you in the same boat as those people.
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@Rob Mielcarski
What evidence is there for such a campaign? I would have posted in the thread above, but that thread reached its nesting limit.
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In the Rogan interview Mush discussed the large number of death threats he’s getting. One team of 2 nut jobs have already been intercepted. Musk said he’ll have to leave 20% of the corruption alone because going after it would be too dangerous.
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This raises some questions: Who is leading/organizing the campaign? What is that 20%?
Trump and Musk are rampaging through the government, firing people willy-nilly. Sooner or later, they are going to break something important.
Kurt Cobb has some good articles about this.
http://resourceinsights.blogspot.com/2025/02/downsizing-u-s-government-this-way-will.html
http://resourceinsights.blogspot.com/2025/02/are-computers-and-democracy-compatible.html
http://resourceinsights.blogspot.com/2025/03/no-matter-what-elon-musk-thinks.html
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Have you watched the Musk/Rogan interview?
When you were concerned about Musk’s Hitler salute I suggested you watch the unedited source video. You did not do as I suggested and continued to be misled like millions of other people.
You should form your opinions from first hand observations rather than from what someone else wants you to believe.
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A friend bought a used Nissan Leaf EV with about 100,000Km a year ago. It’s battery is failing.
His options are a used replacement battery with 1 year warranty for $14,000.
Or a new battery with 1 year warranty for $85,000!!!
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It’s interesting how fast the electronic car meme is dying. Electric cars where all the rage a few years ago while now it feels more and more like reality is seeping in and at least here in Europe governmental assistance is slashed either due to budget restraints or the right talking over power. Climate change also seems to get much less traction these days. Are “renewables” the next in line?
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Veganism in cold climates without imported food might follow.
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Veganism will be rebadged as “I only eat vegans”.
More sustainable.
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Meat based diets require far more resources per capita.
There is a reason why prey outnumber predators in a natural environment.
This means that without imported food, cold climates will fall back to their true carrying capacity.
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I broke my femoral neck seven days ago while riding a bike and after a lengthy operation I’m now the proud owner of three titanium pins in my body. As a healthy mid to late 30 year old I hardly have any points of contact with the health care system but I remember very vividly the relief when the ambulance arrived, the help of the pain killers and my appreciation that they operated me within a 6 hour time window so that my chances of walking without pain or even doing sports are quite high.
Why do I write this here? Because just like Alan Urban I Don’t Wanna Live In The Modern World most of the time. Actually at some points in my life I felt a daily dose of hate and disgust at all the concrete, artificial light, ugliness, noise, fumes, chemicals, short our current way of life. I guess growing up means also seeing more gray and I resigned even further to the fact that this is all I will every truly know and when it’s gone then I’m gone.
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Ouch. Hope your recovery goes well. I hope the health system here continues to function long enough for my daughter to get an important operation she needs.
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Hello Campbell,
Hope you and your family are well and enjoyed a fruitful summer in your food forest haven. I can imagine your and Nicky’s concern for your daughter and want to say that I am thinking for you all. Is there any chance to move ahead the operation she needs instead of waiting? This seems to be a critical time and I am of the opinion that there is no time like the present for anything you can do now, especially those things one needs to do. I understand that there may be financial constraints (if NZ’s health system is anything like Australia’s, there would be a waiting list for the public system and it could take 1 year of private health insurance cover before getting the needed procedure) but perhaps there is a way to go private health through other funding, say contributions from grandparents (early inheritance for example) if that could be an option? Money is only useful now to convert into necessary goods and services whilst the system is still functioning, and we who are aware of the impending collapse can use that knowledge wisely.
I apologise if I seem presumptuous in my unsolicited advice. You needn’t reply with anything else, I just wanted to reach out and say I honour you as the loving and caring parents that you are, wanting the best for their child. I know you and your family have worked through all the options and I trust everything will work out for the best and in the right timing, too.
Namaste, friend.
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A friend of mine ended up in hospital for the first time in his 65 year old life. Heart issues probably jab related but can’t say for sure. Otherwise he is super fit and healthy.
Me however, I have been in hospital so many times I have lost count. Without modern medicine I would not be here. So very thankful for it when it works. Life is going to be brutal in the not too distant future. I worry a lot about my kids future.
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Gosh Niko,
It is incredible that the health system here in Australia has been so responsive to you, and I am very thankful for that for you! I hope the visits to hospital will become further and further apart not due to the system collapsing but your improved health.
I did laugh when you said the new Veganism would be “I only eat vegans” ! Maybe that could be the next health trend, especially during collapse? If so, and if necessary, and if possible, I might be willing to bring myself as the “plate” to share at the BBQ you invited us all to!
Hope you and your family are going well and weathered the summer all right.
Namaste, friend.
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I’m going to need a bigger BBQ. 😉
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Hello Florian,
I am glad you are on the mend after quite the ordeal! Modern medicine is nothing short of miraculous for these acute injuries, alas, not so good for preventing and treating chronic ones. I can appreciate your gratitude for the privilege of receiving the care and treatment, that must have been a very positive emotional experience to balance the worry and discomfort of the physical trauma.
I just wanted to say that I totally hear and see you when you share your angst of living in the modern construct that we have been born and raised into. I, too, try to reconcile that disconnect daily but we are not meant to remain in despair and there are still countless ways to feel purposeful, connectedness, and yes, joy, despite everything around us. Whether we know it consciously or not, life is the art of seeking meaning as well as the physical experience. One thing that has helped me find some solid ground from which to continue the journey is reading the thoughts of other humans, historical or contemporary, who have examined their lives and by example lived their self-found and tested truths. I have mentioned in the past that the Stoic philosophy really resonates with me, and especially in relation to the dilemmas of living in modernity. The internal life well lived is a more true and desired aim than the outer trappings which disillusion. I encourage you to consider that all you see around you is very different and limited than what you can know for yourself to be meaningful, and when the outer world is going or gone, what is truly important and genuine to your self identity will remain, and somehow sustain you through. I am trying to walk this path and it is an ongoing experiment to see if I will get a taste that contentment and peace that we attribute to the blessed.
But enough of this mumble jumbo, I trust you are making steady progress in recovery but don’t be disappointed if some days you feel much weaker and tired, that is completely normal especially since it’s very early days for your recuperation and your body has gone through quite a lot! You are in it for the long haul, steady and sure, even if slowly, will lead to a better outcome for complete strength recovery. It is very good that Spring is on the way and with that the increased sunshine which will do wonders to help your bone heal–are you taking Vit D supplements and if not, I would advise that.
All the best for your body, mind, and spirit, young friend! (you are definitely a youngster here at mid 30s!)
Namaste.
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Hi Florian,
I hope your recovery is quick.
Treatment of acute injuries via surgery is one of the good things about our modern health care.
I’ve been lucky. My last interaction with the healthcare system was about 35 years ago when I needed IV antibiotics after a business trip to Israel.
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What happens to people who depend on diabetes medications or other pharmaceutical products to survive? I am guessing that they won’t survive.
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Hi Rob,
A quote for 85K USD for a battery sounds like a dealer that doesn’t want to do the work.
Depending on the battery size, I’m seeing Nissan dealer prices for a new battery, installed, around $8~12K, with cheaper aftermarket options.
A ‘used’ 2025 LEAF, with 434 miles on the odometer, is on Carfax for $17K.
A shop in California will install a battery with triple the original range in my 2014 Mitsubishi for $10K. But the battery still has over 90% of it’s original capacity and works fine for me.
Thanks and good health, Weogo
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Thanks Weogo,
I don’t understand the quote. He had them double check the price. Maybe Canada is different?
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Hi Rob,
I have no explanation for the $85K quote but, charitably, can imagine a scenario where a dealer steers customers away from 15 year old EV tech to newer.
The Nissan Leaf and Mitsubishi I-MiEV came out around the same time, with similar levels of battery development.
The early LEAF was bigger and had a 24KWHr battery, and weighed more(3600# vs. 2600#) than the Mitsu, with a 16KWhr battery.
The battery charge/discharge software in the Nissan was optimized for range, while the Mitsu was optimzed for battery life. The EPA range of the early Nissans was rated at 73 miles and had an 8yr battery warranty, while the Mitsu was 62 miles with a 10-year warranty.
In addition to the software difference, the Leaf didn’t have active battery cooling available for the charge cycle, while the Mitsu did. Many Leaf batteries died an early death in climates like Arizona.
Nissan eventually changed the software, and I’m pretty sure later added battery cooling.
Some dealers stood behind the Leaf and replaced batteries under warranty, others balked, gave generous trade-ins on a newer Leaf, etc.
If we can still afford roads, bridges and energy, and are still driving around 10 years from now, I’ll likely replace the Mitsu battery(down to about 10~12KWHr) with a newer one and the old one will become part of a solar PV system.
More likely, I’ll be happy to have some sort of public transit and a bicycle.
I’m half a mile from the rail station, though currently we don’t have passenger service.
Thanks and good health, Weogo
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Thank you Weogo, very interesting!
My friend’s LEAF was used in the US before before being imported into Canada. I would not be surprised if hot climate damaged the battery.
Cheers.
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Berman seems to have changed his mind again. Today he’s says we’re not ok in the short term.
https://www.artberman.com/blog/the-energy-transition-that-isnt/
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https://peakoilbarrel.com/opec-update-february-2025/#comment-786513
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LOL. I kinda like what Art is doing. Just changing his worldviews daily.
Might have to start doing it myself. Today I’m a nihilistic human hater who blames fire for everything. Tomorrow I’m a Daniel Quinn sustainable cultures, right relationship to reality guy who blames our totalitarian agriculture. The day after that I’m a techno-optimist who believes colonizing Mars is the only answer. Maybe one of the days I can even squeeze in being a religious zealot who believes in the Rapture.
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I may have to change my views or stay silent on anything of substance. My few friends have a completely different interpretation of what’s going on in the world. I’m definitely an alien in Canada.
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The alien thing is funny and so true.
Lebowski in this scene is exactly how I feel around friends, family, and normies.
(whole clip’s worth it, highlights are at 0:34 and 2:54)
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Very funny. You have an amazing memory for movies. I’ve seen that movie but have no recollection of that clip. The white russian always cracks me up.
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I believed a few of the vaccines injected into children were useful, such as measles.
Other vaccines, like hepatitis B, that you only get from sex with prostitutes or dirty drug addict needles, are not so useful for little children.
It looks like they are lying to us about measles as well.
It makes you wonder what they are not lying about.
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Sometimes it seems like Nate Hagens exists to soft sell the collapse as being the “great simplification” of a “super-organism” with an inevitable slide into happy peasantry for most, scratching the soil for their privileged Davos and WEF stakeholder lords. But then again, stirring death salience does not sell well under any circumstance.
Nate’s model is somewhat flawed in that there is no super-organism since no common homeostatic barrier exists around all nations other than the earth’s atmosphere and magnetosphere. Each nation exists on its own to see to the needs of its human population (that usually has a unique or common language) to maintain homeostasis and protect its people. Each nation keeps its own books, is supposed to protect its own border and has exclusive citizenship.
Technological cells like homes, factories, government buildings etc. have arisen in evolution’s due course and in each nation along a distribution system of rivers, paths and roads that collectively form a metabolic network. The network has become larger and more elaborate as the technological system has evolved from a low organic energy flux to the current massive fossil fuel flux. The cellular interactions and economic trades along this distribution system constitute a metabolism. Inside the technological cells people work. Part of the nation’s goal is to see that the human RNA have their own protective enclosures or homes, medical care, food, climate control, education, etc. This protection and accommodation guarantees a growing population of people (high survival) that want to live in a cell or home somewhere along the distribution system and therefore growth and expansion in number of cells, population and complexity is a ubiquitous feature. Sometimes a partial homeostatic or protective barrier may be constructed at a nation’s border as with “The Wall” at the United States border with Mexico, the Great Wall of China or the Maginot Line in France. These are rarely an effective impediment to entering a nation as the aspiring entrants can develop counter strategies.
The RNA containing technological cells within a nation feed primarily upon the resources enclosed within its borders. Sometimes token nature reserves are established but the primary goal of the technological cancer is to eat what is available and grow rapidly and without limit. Each respective nation can invite or allow international corporations to set-up shop on their territory to begin exploiting resources for the production of goods. This is supposed to serve the homeostatic goals of employment and improvement of life for local populations but often only lines the pockets of corrupt politicians. Loans may be provided to build the infrastructure which will be repaid over time by the resident population and tax breaks may be given to corporations that decide to locate in a given location. Economic hit men may be deployed if there is resistance to the cancerous infiltration. Product may travel through the distribution system to ports, border crossings or airports to be exported to other nations.
On occasion and in order to maintain homeostasis a “civilized” nation may employ aggressive tactics and go to war with neighboring countries to acquire the necessities of life. Likewise, the country being attacked will defend itself.
The globalists seem intent on creating a “one world order” and I think that rather than seeking some kind of homeostasis-maintaining whole that they’re simply trying to eliminate any barriers imposed by individual nations to entry, growth and exploitation of resources. There doesn’t seem to be any effort to “save” anything except the cancerous consumption of resources for a maximal build-out of dissipative structures that will soon be worthless due to lack of energy gradients.
The world of nations is not a super-organism and the “great simplification” is only a euphemism for metabolic collapse. Collapse will see technological cells die and deteriorate and metabolic connections will involuntarily disappear. The speed of collapse will be determined by various factors like homogeneity of the population, energy resources, food availability, military capabilities, debt, etc. and will be different for each nation. But due to the cancerous, open-ended growth strategies of the respective technological cancers in each nation the final result will be the same for all. Some signs one might look for is a high rate of unemployment, products once available that no longer be found (like the disappearance of insects in the ecosystem), an ever increasing cost of goods, starvation and war.
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Very nice.
James, you are one of the best bards in the overshoot space.
Stay well.
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Beside the Great Wall of Cognition there grew a pyramid of life. It had a broad microbial and floral base and upon it were added tranches of increasingly complex organisms, none of which could see over the wall in achievement of cognition. Eventually, at the pinnacle of the pyramid there was poised a hominid that seemed promising, but even with its jumping it could not see over the wall.
The splodge, having put much effort over billions of years into constructing the pyramid of life pondered the problem.
“What shall we ever do? We’ve don’t have enough energy flux to see over the wall.”
The splodge pondered the situation and then decided there was only one thing to do.
“We must transform that chimp to get more energy. We must transform it into an RNA. Then it will create new tools to consume resources that our organic life cannot.
“Splendid idea.”
Slowly the chimp began to transform, its brain grew larger, its hands became nimble and it began picking up tools and experimenting with fire. Soon enough the energy began to flow and a new pyramid made of new materials began to grow upon the old one. Within a short while the foraging chimp, equipped with new tools, had discovered the fossil fuels, had recorded much information and was ready to see over the Great Wall of Cognition.
“Everyone push, push…………..”
They hoisted their best and brightest above the wall of cognition.
“What do you see?”
Everyone was excited and full of anticipation. After much observation, measurement and experimentation they had a pretty good fix on reality.
“Well, what did you find out?”
“We found out that we’re suspended upon a sphere of matter within a magnetic bubble whose dimensions are unfathomably large and there’s a cold and dark void stretching in every direction, not for hundreds or even thousands of miles, but for billions of miles. We also found that we’ve damaged the foundation of our organic pyramid by consuming it and toxic fossil fuels with our technological tools.”
“What should we do next? Build spaceships ad venture into the desert?”
“That makes no sense as the only oasis for billions of miles is the one you stand upon.”
“But we must know what is out there.”
“Have you not listened?”
“Spaceships were built and blasted-off to nowhere while life’s pyramid was severely damaged. Eventually it collapsed back beneath the Wall of Cognition never to rise again.
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So there I was, Mr. Megacancer, sitting in the library with the sun on my screen, thinking that I was commenting on my own site. Ha, ha. Oh well.
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LOL, you beat me to it. I was just about to ask if this is James. (the language is such dead giveaway)
That’s classic. I hope you make that mistake more often…. great comments.
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We are honored by your presence, even if it was a mistake. 🙂
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This morning Israel announced it was cutting off food, water, and supplies into Gaza, just as Ramadan began.
There is a strong probability that this will trigger a middle east war and the US will be dragged in to defend Israel.
So now we have a real test of the wisdom and integrity of Trump and team. Let’s ignore all the words from all sides and simply observe what happens.
If supplies into Gaza resume we know Trump did the right thing.
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World Reacts to Israel’s Use of Starvation as a Weapon of War by Blocking Humanitarian Aid to Gaza
https://countercurrents.org/2025/03/world-reacts-to-israels-use-of-starvation-as-a-weapon-of-war-by-blocking-humanitarian-aid-to-gaza/
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Stellarwind72, I do not understand what you saying here.
I suggested we ignore the words from all sides and observe if supply shipments into Gaza resume.
You, did not say “Rob, that’s a stupid idea, I think it’s much more important what people say than what they do.”
Instead, you posted quotes from some world leaders that don’t shed any light on what is going on in Gaza.
P.S. I spent some time this morning trying to determine the status of Gaza supply shipments without success. I do not know what is happening on the ground.
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I was just reporting how other countries were responding. Personally, I think it’s despicable.
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I agree, it’s genocide in plain sight, supported and enabled by one powerful country, against the wishes of almost every other country in the world, and that country claims to be the world leader of freedom and democracy.
I’m still watching to see if Trump forces Israel to resume the flow of supplies.
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https://peakoilbarrel.com/open-thread-non-petroleum-february-26-2025/#comment-786523
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This certainly won’t be problematic later /s
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If the government really wants to save money, they should switch to FOSS software.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Free_and_open-source_software
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Dr. Tom Murphy is good today on the squishiness of meat-brain structures like democracy and law.
https://dothemath.ucsd.edu/2025/03/hall-of-mirrors/
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xraymike79 is a poet today.
https://collapseofindustrialcivilization.com/2025/03/04/elegy-to-the-anthropocene/
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US/Canada tariffs start today. Heading out now to buy more staples that do not go bad.
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The shit that comes through LinkedIn is mind boggling. Apparently now we are able buy whatever we want and we’ll actually be saving the world.
https://www.greenpay.au/learn/welcome-to-greenpay
“So, the world might not need another payment company, but GreenPay is not just another payment company. We’re helping Australian businesses and organisations to make a difference, without any compromise. We’re out to turn payments processing into a powerful force for good, by putting nature at the centre of every transaction.
Your support is crucial to our success. Please join us and help to create a world where nature thrives, and every transaction contributes to a greener, healthier planet.”
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That’s right up there with the Europeans planning a ceasefire without speaking to the Russians.
The stupidity everywhere is mind boggling.
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Nice one Campbell. Your LDS (linkedin derangement syndrome) always cracks me up.😊
Ya, this shit makes me mental too. Actually, it makes me want to go all Luigi Mangione.
The bullshit is right there in clear print, yet people can’t even connect those simple dots. If any company was truly directing half their profits towards an industry where there is zero money to be made (restoring nature) … then obviously they’d be unable to provide a competitive price point to customers and would be out of business in a week.
The whole sustainability and green washing kick by the corporate world is nauseating. Like when banks claim that for every dollar you deposit with them, they’ll plant a tree or whatever.
Remember when they used to have to hide shit from the public? Like Big Oil having to bury reports by their scientists about the dangers of what they’re doing to the environment. No need for that secrecy anymore. Just create a nice fluffy slogan or mission statement, and it’s all good – For every barrel of oil that we spill on land and in oceans, we will plant a tree to help ensure a greener healthier planet!
That’s why I always bust out my favorite quote… because it sums everything up so goddamn well and reminds me why the corporate greenwashing works so effectively.
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Love that quote and the LDS comment made me laugh out loud. I’ve got it for sure. Cheers
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Hi Chris for your entertainment here’s my exchange on LinkedIn with one of the GreenPay founders.
I jumped in on this comment by a supporter.
“Won’t feel guilty about retail therapy when every transaction is saving the world 🌎 love your work, can’t wait to see this implemented everywhere 🔥”
Me
“Maddi Ingham I’m sorry but that’s what’s so #greenwashing about this initiative. People actually believe that they can continue to shop their way to a sustainable lifestyle. It’s an example of a circular economy… The things we buy wreck the planet and when we buy it some of the proceeds go to cleaning up the mess.
Here’s another circular economy initiative.. “For every barrel of oil that we spill on land and in oceans, we will plant a tree to help ensure a greener healthier planet!”
Great intention from people who obviously care but unfortunately will do nothing to reduce our #ecologicalovershoot.”
Her
” Campbell Sturrock thanks for your comment. I agree that consumerism is a huge problem in our society – but that’s a huge problem to tackle, and not one we had an idea on how to begin to solve.
The options here are: (a) consume with no funding going to the planet, or (b) consume, and direct a portion of the payment processing fees to restoring our planet. While we work to solve the consumerism problem, I know which one I’d prefer. 🌳
In time, the hope is that GreenPay creates a sustainable source of funding for our planet, above and beyond the ~0.1% currently committed by the federal budget.
I’d love to hear your solutions to solving the ecological overshoot – more than happy to support people working to solve the same problem!!
Also, for anyone else reading this – greenwashing is “the creation or propagation of an unfounded or misleading environmentalist image” (Oxford Dictionary). We’ve been very deliberate in the environmental statements that we make (50% of our profits going to the planet), to ensure that we can be held to account to our claim. We’re so serious about this mission that it’s even written into our company constitution.
P.S. this comment is a personal joke between myself and one of my best friends”
Me
“Maddi Ingham thanks for the reply. Your manifesto literally tells people they can buy a better world.
“At GreenPay we figure if transactions got us into this mess.
Then they can get us out of it.
That’s why at GreenPay we make every transaction, make a difference.
To divert millions in payment fees towards the planet.
To help people literally buy a better world.
One transaction at a time.”
Nowhere do you recommend less consumption. Your friends comment is just a rewording of the manifesto.
Have you undertaken a lifecycle assessment? I believe the impacts of the technology required (energy and materials use and the associated ecological destruction and pollution) will outweigh the benefits. Without a lca I stand by my well intentioned greenwashing claim as your statement “help people literally buy a better world” cannot be proved.
Ultimately technology is not sustainable as it is reliant on fossil energy and finite mined materials for its existence. More technology use worsens overshoot.
Overshoot is a predicament with no solutions but consuming less would help make the future less bad.
https://open.substack.com/pub/thehonestsorcerer/p/averting-collapse-is-no-longer-profitable?utm_source=share&utm_medium=android&r=yn9sg”
Her
….. nothing
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LOL. Thanks Campbell. Keep em coming! It never gets old.
I despise that statement. Obviously for someone like Maddi, it just shows how little she knows. And it’s really just code for: “I’d love to hear your solutions for how to keep human life on easy street while we continue to make all the non-human life miserable”
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New one from Gail Tverberg today helps to explain why governments everywhere are going nuts.
Gail predicts that grids in some countries will soon begin to fail.
She also advices us to blame god instead of Trump.
https://ourfiniteworld.com/2025/03/04/energy-limits-are-forcing-the-economy-to-contract/
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Even though Gail mentions complexity a couple of times she doesn’t seem to understand where it fits in the big picture when talking collapse. Coal was only prolifically available because of the steam driven pump in the UK, which was a step up in complexity.
Start to lose size and we lose some complexity, which makes obtaining energy, materials, food and water more difficult, which feeds back into making things less complex. Complexity gave us greater efficiency in all the material aspects of the modern world, while all the freed, growing workforce gave increased complexity of bureaucracy, rules and regulations as solutions for problems that came up with massive expansion of civilization.
The complexity of those governing unwinds at a much slower pace than the material world complexity failing, which is what Tainter’s book “Collapse of Complex Societies” clearly shows enhances the overall speed of collapse..
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You’re right, Gail’s missing that piece of the puzzle.
It still needs work but I’m trying to write a short summary of your idea. Feel free to correct or improve.
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That’s it in a nutshell Rob, however the problem is anyone that has not followed the entire line of thinking immediately comes up with why can’t complexity be maintained with lower population? I’ve had people ask me this in the past.
It is after all Jack Alpert’s plan/wish that we can have modernity for a vastly reduced population, but realistically it isn’t going to work for long as salvaging from other abandoned cities can only last so long..
I suspect the entire complexity is one of those things that can’t be explained simply to the uninitiated as they will prefer to believe in all the magic solutions without a full explanation. However they usually can’t be bothered reading a full explanation either, they or pick on one little aspect, that they hand wave away with more magic thinking, because following the entire path is difficult and time consuming.
People like Brandon Young on Tim Morgan’s blog, that have a whole series of hand waves about the bright green future, and have been working on their plan for years, have so much embedded denial that they will never look up specifics, but prefer to believe in magic. Looking at details of any one aspect will easily tell them their entire world view/plan is nonsense, so they never research those types of details.
Almost everywhere or time I’ve tried to explain our predicament the person who has no counter argument comes up with the concept that Human ingenuity will solve the problems, even to the extent of some, unknown as yet, form of energy. In Gail’s case it appears as if God will look after her, which means despite all the research she has done, still has denial as a core value and tends to believe her ‘group’ will be OK, which is denial in it’s finest form.
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The population piece is hard to digest, I’m still working on it. Do you agree with this explanation?:
A certain percentage of a population has the aptitude and motivation to be an engineer, and each engineer has the ability to master a finite amount of technology (aka complexity), therefore to increase the total amount of technology in use you must increase the population.
I imagine many people believe AI will grow our technology without growth in population. Time will tell if AI succeeds, however if it does succeed then resource demand growth may shift from population to energy for the servers, which will have approximately the same effect.
I am no longer critical of people like Gail who are comforted by their religious beliefs. Unlike most overshoot scholars, Gail seems genuinely happy and at peace. Ditto for Andril Zvorygin.
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I’d put this in the “not gonna happen” bucket, but I’ve been wrong before.
https://www.zerohedge.com/energy/texas-needs-equivalent-30-nuclear-reactors-2030-meet-data-center-power-demand
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How to build a nuclear power plant.
According to the nuclear industry way of working out the EROEI, you need 240,000 tonnes of concrete, 60,000 tonnes of steel etc, etc dumped in a pile and it magically works. apparently you can take any average New Guinea highland village population to put it together, even though they can’t read or write. That’s the simplicity of the argument to get really high EROEI numbers…
I think it’s a bit more difficult. A country might send 100,000 students to secondary school, of which 10,000 end up doing senior physics. Of these 1,500 might go on to University and get a major in physics, a few hundred with honours. Perhaps 50-100 might go on to do a Phd in physics, which is a wide field from astrophysics, to quantum mechanics, to optics, to relativity to atomic and nuclear physics.
A few students might do the Phd in nuclear physics. From these few students will come the people invited to design the system of operating the nuclear power plant…
Now imagine only 100 students enroll at secondary school, how many nuclear physicists of the caliber required will be available in 15 years time from the pool of 100.
We could never get to the technology required if our ‘civilization had remained at the Dunbar number of 150 people. It’s just not possible to develop the fields of speciality with such a small population.
Nor would it ever be possible for a small Dunbar number people in a civilization to operate, fuel and maintain an existing nuclear power plant for long. Something will break that there are no replacement parts for (or the fuel runs out) with a civilization too small to possibly understand and be able to fabricate the parts that break, or fabricate the fuel (or find it!!) while mostly taking part in the daily gathering of food..
We can only take part in modernity while there is plenty of free time for most, away from the arduous task of growing/gathering food. We need huge trucks, tractors and farms operating to free up all the people required for complexity, all the teachers teaching the 100,000 new high school students every year, the food coming to both the teachers and students from afar.
Likewise for every other aspect of modern city life that makes civilization function. Without the energy to fuel it all, we don’t have the ability to build or maintain complexity, so complexity unravels very quickly, which means the energy, material and food sources unravel very quickly…
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Gosh, Hideaway, I just get goosebumps when you explain it the way you do!
Even though you’ve spelt it out so concretely (all 240,000 tons of it) and it is rock solid rational, I am still a bit in awe of the implications of the tangled web of energy, resource pool, population, and complexity which is our modern life. We are so entrenched in the system, like fish trying to understand water, that all other realities seem like illusion even though we are actually living in the most illusory of them all. We rather believe in fairytales of “Just imagine” and “Once upon a time” and “In a land far, far, away” we can just wave our magic wand and sprinkle pixie dust–poof ! we can have anything we want! Indeed it has seemed so, for so many, for so long, with our fossil fueled super powers. No wonder most people don’t want to wake up from this dream; we are sleepwalking through our modern life.
I have been thinking just how delusional we really are. In just six or seven short years (the formative period in humans) we go from being born, helpless and expecting only warmth and milk to thinking that the modern world with all its paraphernalia is our right and always will be, becoming more ingrained with every year. How quickly are we inculcated to demanding our endless wants, without ever having the slightest inkling of how to first hand take care of our needs. And this is all our collective expectation, not only that modernity will continue to exist, but expand to new entropy defying levels that soon become ho hum. Just think of that seven year old with last year’s Christmas toy.
It’s crazy making to think that we consider this life normal, yes it may be normal in that it is the majority experience but it is the furthest thing from natural. Once we lose our magic super powers (and it may very well happen as suddenly as the stroke of midnight when our Teslas turn into pumpkins, not that it would be a bad trade given the circumstances) we won’t even have a clue what natural should look like, much less live it. The new normal could be very dire indeed.
The demand destruction that will start ushering in a serious contraction, logically should be the actual goal of these tariff wars (if we think that there is something trying to drive the bus to direct us towards a “controlled collapse”, which frankly to me sounds more and more asinine like a “limited nuclear war”). When the economy tanks as a result, that may go some way into shaking our expectations of what our normal should be. But we are woefully unprepared for the consequences, and just how the masses will react is still the great unknown factor. Generally people don’t take it too well when hungry, broke, and on the verge of homelessness and poor health. If we look at history as a guide, this will pave the way for the acceptance of a totalitarian government that will provide the means to survival, if the citizen follows its directives, whatever that may be.
I am guilty again of dumping into my stream of consciousness, thank you for your tolerance. Each day is bringing new developments and I think we’re all just trying to keep up with the implications of it all whilst living our version of normal, or near-normal. Some days I may seem calm and collected but like a swan seemingly gliding along the water, I am furiously paddling underneath just to stay afloat. Comparing myself to a swan seems too precious, maybe I’m a duck, or better yet, goose! Honk! Honk! Okay, Gaia’s losing it, probably time to lull me to sleep with a good bedtime story like “The Little Nuclear Power Plant that Could” Can Uncle Hideaway read it to us again, pretty please?
Namaste, friends.
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I added your paraphrased quote to the sidebar:
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😊😊😊
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The thing preventing hunter gatherers from developing technology isn’t free time, but energy and scale. If anything, hunter gatherers had more free time than we do today.
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fun little story about building nukes. The company I retired from, Chicago Bridge and Iron, builds plate metal structures of all kinds. So back in the 70s, we built containment liners for nukes, as well as a few of the actual reactors, in a joint venture with Westinghouse.
Fast forward thirty yeas or so, and the Southern Companies in Georgia decides to build two new nukes at their Vogtle plant. The U.S. hadn’t built any in all that time, but how hard could it be? were popping them out like crazy back then, and we have better computers now! Commence the overruns and delays galore! Very few engineers remained from the earlier builds, so the “relearning curve” was terrible and we were just one of the major suppliers. An engineer fresh out of school takes years to gain the specialized knowledge to design specific structures like nukes. Even worse than our in house challenges, we found that the entire specialized supply chain that had evolved in the 70s was very atrophied, and all manner of workarounds and delays caused a real cluster****.
At this same time, Duke energy tried to build a couple also, but cost overruns got so bad, they cancelled the project part way through.
To Hideaway’s point- just building up and maintaining the large number of skills and material supply capabilities is a huge effort, and it will only get worse.
So glad I got out of that planet killing industry.
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She says, “the self-organizing economy seems to make changes on its own”, but she believes “that there is a God behind whatever changes take place”… What? Seems like that line about God was forced by Gail. No need for it at all. Wonder why she is trying to push it. (I don’t follow her, so maybe she always talks about god)
Some good comments over there. It’s worth reading all from Norman Pagett. And I like this comment from Chris Martenson (provided by Rodster) that echoes Hideaways complexity logic.
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I have some documentaries on the 1942 construction of the Alaskan highway by the US government in response to the threat of Japan attacking Alaska after Pearl Harbor.
It was an amazing project that used 10,000 troops to build 2200 Km of road with 200 bridges in 7 months.
I’ll bet we couldn’t do that today due to energy and debt constraints.
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No way we could pull it off today. That HHH quote you posted couple days ago kinda says it all. I’ve been annoying the hell out of friends/family with it😊. The clueless morons can actually somewhat understand it. LOL
Deserves to be up on your sidebar (imho).
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Good idea. I added HHH’s quote.
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Looks like I was not the only one curious about this. If anyone is interested, there’s a good thread about it started by commenter Kevin. https://ourfiniteworld.com/2025/03/04/energy-limits-are-forcing-the-economy-to-contract/#comment-479112
Comments get buried over there so I’m not gonna engage. But here is what I’d say:
Based on the rest of your comment Karl, it kinda sounds like you’re using this line as some type of proof that god exists. There also seems to be a near universal desire for infinite growth on a finite planet, but I’m sure you don’t buy into that logic.
The near universal desire for religious experience is pretty simple when you boil it down to where it comes from. This desire is found nowhere else in life except humans. Why? Because humans are the only species that have been injected with the nightmare of Full Consciousness (FC). Without FC the concept of god & religion does not exist (because you’re not capable of that kind of thinking).
Why are we the only species with FC? Because we are the only ones that use fire. Fire is the only way to get to FC. Once you have FC, your species has to start creating meaning out of everything. Why? Because the bleakness of it all is too overwhelming and your species will end up going extinct quickly. By assigning meaning to everything, your species has a chance to continue on. Thats why we invented god/religion. It’s also why every religion has an afterlife story.
To recap: Hominids have existed on this planet for six million years. One million years ago some of them started playing with fire. Over the long term of using fire, the benefits/advantages started clearly showing up around 100k-200kya in the form of FC. This is when god & religion were created. Created by homo sapiens, the only life form in this solar system (and more than likely the entire Milky Way) that has been cursed with Full Consciousness.
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One interesting thing Gail mentioned.
As the oil supply declines, we will be eating a lot less meat.
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I agree. Scarcity of meat and fat are common themes in everything I’ve read on what happens during tough times.
It’ll be Gaia’s Rice & Beans most of the time, which I’m practicing cooking again tomorrow, this time with some very old black turtle beans I need to use up.
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Does anyone here eat Turmeric regularly in substantial quantities for good health?
I ask because I’ve read good things about it and my local big box store just brought in a few giant 5 Kg bags of ground Turmeric for $20 that I could add to my stores.
Currently I use Turmeric for occasional curries and dals so only use a couple tablespoons a month.
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So, I was surprised by this post because I had just gone down this rabbit hole a month or so ago. I get all these annoying e-mails from substack with links to articles they think I would be interested in. The e-mails are mostly health/nutrition related (lot of dementia and metabolic health ones). One popped up on Turmeric (active ingredient Curcumin). Seems like your gut digests almost all of the curcumin in Turmeric so that just adding that to the diet has little effect. There are multiple supplements that have highly bioavailable Curcumin in them that actually raise blood levels of Curcumin that can then pass through the blood brain barrier. At least that’s my read on a perusal of all the NIH studies out there.
Here is a link to the initial article that got me started: https://substack.com/home/post/p-157231959?source=queue
AJ
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Thanks AJ.
I’ll pass on the bulk ground Turmeric.
The best price I can find on Curcumin supplements is about $100 a year which I think is too expensive to use for the balance on my life. I’ll take my chances without.
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It’s not just about the Curcumin as there are many other compounds within turmeric that is good for the body too. Western science likes to reduce everything holistic into individual components for analysis but that’s just not how natural herbs work.
I take half a teaspoon of turmeric daily with a bit of hot water before breakfast. Back in 2018-19 when i started taking it one thing i noticed was the almost immediate lift in mental fog. Vision became clearer. It’s cheap. It’s supposedly very good for the gut. You should try and see how it works for you. Be careful of the quality as I’ve also read that poorer quality ones may contain lead.
It makes me poop more too so i try not to take too much.
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Thanks. Didn’t realize you could drink it straight up.
5 Kg @ $20 is a lot of cheap half teaspoons. Maybe I’ll try it.
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Hi Rob,
Hope I’m not too late in this advice but 5kg for $20 seems way too ridiculously cheap and I’d be wary that there may be additives instead of pure turmeric, like rice powder and colouring to bulk it up. That’s the problem with powdered goods, you just never really know what’s in it, and if you can truly trust the labelling.
I’ve gone through phases where I thought I should take in more turmeric in addition to the bit in curries and one way is to make a hot drink with chai spices, honey, and milk of your choice. It’s a rather strong taste so that’s why the chai spices may go best with it. Here’s a recipe that I just got off the internet but there are tons of others similar if you want to try. https://www.thefullhelping.com/turmeric-chai-latte-mix/
Also, the other thing I wanted to share is the active compounds (including curcumin) in turmeric are supposed to be absorbed best when taken with another active compound piperine which is found in black pepper. So add a few grinds of pepper into your brew, you may actually like the extra kick.
If you want to try adding more turmeric into your diet, try getting a small bag from your local health food shop to see if you like it enough to continue, they probably have more turnover for this kind of thing and hopefully will have a reputable supplier for their bulk spices. It’s not the most expensive spice but something about that deal you stated smells fishy to me.
Hope that helps, or maybe I’ve just clouded the issue!
Namaste.
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Thanks Gaia!
It does seem too cheap but I do love a rare good deal. I’ll read the ingredients carefully. The store has a good track record of integrity.
Good chance they’ll be sold out next time I go back. I already have 1 Kg in inventory for cooking so I guess I could start drawing that down.
I’ll try the pepper idea. I’ve also heard people mix Turmeric with milk and honey to make it more palatable. I probably won’t do that just as I don’t lace my caffeine drugs with sugar as many people do.
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Piperine in pepper does help with absorption. So that’s a good way to take it. Adding milk/honey/fats is similar to taking it in the traditional way, i.e. curry and that helps with absorption too.
Taking it without any additional stuff means it will stay in your gut and benefit the gut more from what I gather. So i actually take it in both ways – with black pepper and hot water or just by itself with hot water in rotation. And i eat curry often.
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Oh jeez, not again.😂
Between this genius and that Chrystia Freeland clip… get the hell out of Canada asap!
The ego/pride of a few are gonna spell misery for the masses.
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Hello Chris,
Hope you and your family are going well. It really is hard to imagine that we’re in a major tit for tat spat between neighbours. American hegemony has been unveiled warts and all to one and all, and it takes no prisoners. I found this happy piece today, thought you’d like it as you’re a softie with the underdogs and especially animals. Maybe Nature is trying to tell us something. And there’s a reason for the famous saying (originally from the Bible) “Pride goes before the fall”. And what a fall it is going to be.
Keep well and cheeky as ever.
Namaste, friend.
https://www.theguardian.com/environment/2025/mar/05/canada-goose-bald-eagle-political-symbolism
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Hi Gaia. Thanks for the link. And cool pics that guy got. But don’t be letting this site know about my softie weakness for underdogs and animals… I got a rep to maintain😊. I’m the big bad anti-human villain.
So nice to have you back here posting comments again. That pipedream of all of us undenialists hanging out by the campfire, hanging out, telling stories… is growing stronger in me every day. I think you kind of started it a while back with the Gaia Commune plan. You’ve even got the other villain of this site, nikoB, daydreaming about it.😊
And ya, it’s so cool that you live 25 minutes away from David and Jo. I was laughing about it because I can picture you pestering them. Just showing up unannounced every couple days or whatever. LOL. Any of you ever live that close to me, I guarantee I’ll be annoying about it. Knocking on your door every morning, “you wanna come out and play?”😊
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Dear Rob & company,
I hope thou are feeling well.
A notification.
Event:
Date:
Time:
Guests:
Kind and warm regards,
ABC
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Thank you ABC for letting us know. That’s an impressive list of guests. Laherrere is a peak oil legend.
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And Wackernagel is the overshoot ecological footprint guy along with Bill Rees. Will be a very interesting discussion.
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Yes. I’ve heard Wackernagel speak several times but I’ve never heard Laherrere speak.
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Not sure where I got this link (more than likely Steve Bull or Erik Michaels). It’s a pretty cool conversation with someone named Steve Pyke and DeepSeek about the imminent collapse of civilization.
DeepSeek says civilisation is doomed
Jan Andrew Bloxham is the person who posted it on his substack. I’ve only read this and the following link but so far, his site seems very promising. Good comments too.
Part 1 of 5: Denial – by Jan Andrew Bloxham
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Thanks. I read the AI conversation. There’s something unsettling about reading intelligent words from a machine that does not understand or care about what it is saying. I noticed the AI did not mention Varki so it has more to learn.
Ditto on Bloxham who didn’t mention Varki in his essay on denial but nevertheless he looks promising and I’ve subscribed.
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I just read it again and ya, I know what you mean… very unsettling to read something that “good” from a machine.
I say we upload DeepSeek with Dr Varki’s book and Ernest Becker’s ‘Denial of Death’. As well as Ligotti’s Conspiracy Against the Human Race. and everything else with that type of top-level denial knowledge. Including all content from un-Denial and Megacancer.
Top of the line AI mixed with that kind of denial info… if the dumb fire apes could follow along and keep up, I’d love to see where it leads. My bet is the euthanasia industry would become the biggest monopoly in the world.😊
PS. Keeping with the AI theme, someone finally called out Sarah Connor. I’m guessing a lurker here but could just as easily of come up with that conclusion on her own… Sarah played dumb about it of course.
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Sarah’s response to Karina feels like an AI.
I now just glance at Sarah’s articles but the recent ones looked even more like an AI.
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Picked up a copy of Material World from the library today, it was on reserve from inter library loan, so took a while to get to me. Read up to page 60 so far and I’m not impressed.
While he goes into specifics about the sand and glass, with history and it’s importance, plus additives to give special characteristics, so far he has been missing the machinery it takes and fuel it uses to make and where and how it all comes together. In other words the entire complexity of it, instead concentrating on the glass and additives, uses and history.
I’ll keep reading, but already understand where he gets his hopium from in the conclusion as he doesn’t put together the big picture of entirety of the complexity… (I’ve also read the conclusion)..
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Rats.
Well thanks for trying. Don’t keep going on my account.
Different people are impressed by different things. I know Conway misses chunks of the story but the balance was enough to keep me interested. I love modern history of science and engineering and reading about how things work.
Today I started Nate Hagens’ interview with Peter Strack and quit after a few minutes because he talked about communities that only use 2000 watts per person except they all used a lot more than that, and he was very light on how to actually achieve a 2000 watt lifestyle. Then I read Mike Stasse who raved about the interview saying it was one of the best he’s ever heard, so I went back and finished it. I still thought it was fluffy.
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Canadian Prepper today demonstrated how to use a $7,500 freeze drying machine to make dehydrated beef tacos. 🙄🙄🙄
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Dr. Malcolm Kendrick’s hobby is to study historic beliefs of the medical profession that proved to be wrong. He’s spent 40 years proving that cholesterol does not cause heart disease. Most “experts” consider Kendrick to be a conspiracy theorist. I consider him to be one of very few healthcare professionals with integrity.
Today he weighs in on the existence of viruses and whether covid was a thing.
I found his conclusions comforting because they align with what I believe to be true.
https://drmalcolmkendrick.org/2025/03/06/does-sars-cov-2-exist/
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I left the following comment.
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Dr. Kendrick’s reply:
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My reply:
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Lots of disagreement in today’s peak oil discussion.
Jean Laherrere thinks we’ll have an oil problem soon. Berman thinks Laherrere is making up numbers and should look at reality. Laherrere thinks official data is wrong and optimistic.
I do not understand Berman’s message. In one breath he says we have a big problem, and in the next he says all is ok.
Berman thinks analysis using Hubbert’s method is no longer valid due to technology and financialization:
I wonder if Berman agrees with Hideaway’s conclusion without actually understanding Hideaway?
Despite his worries about oil depletion, Jean Laherrere is now more worried about the threats of a solar flare and our declining birthrate.
It seems everyone everywhere is going crazy. Except of course the few people that hang out at un-Denial.
Still digesting. Will watch again.
What did you conclude from the discussion?
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I’ve watched the first half so far and Art seems to make the assumption that reserves only go one way as in up, and makes the mistake about talking about enough money to keep the drilling going, to keep the supply flowing.
While I agree that’s what happened in the past, as we have used more energy overall, had efficiency increases while our world wide complexity and population has grown, so that casing pipe from China is now cheaper etc, that the future will be different. He doesn’t include the net energy for the rest of civilization as having any effect on oil production.
The feedback loops from a net energy decline, to civilization outside the combined energy and materials gathering sector, will increase all sorts of costs for the energy and materials sector, plus we’ve used up all the simple and easy efficiency gains from increasing complexity within the energy and materials sector, which has always helped to offset lower grades, deeper resources etc.
Then around the 1 hr mark when Art discusses a 2.5B population in 2100 as an example of how a symmetric oil curve might come about, it made me understand he has no clue about the size and scale of markets from our growing population that has allowed the complexity of all the technical (efficiency) gains to happen. A lower population/market size unravels the market size allowing for so much of modern technology to exist, so the simplification of reduced population means less efficient systems available to gather energy and materials, making a lot, perhaps most of remaining resources unavailable, because the grades are so low or they are so deep we can only access them with the prior increasing complexity/technology, not the simplification that actually happens.
It seems to be the same mistake people make over and over, assuming the future technology/complexity will increase because it always has in the past 200 years, even if we change some characteristic of the past 200 years like going from more net energy to less net energy and falling population. When stepping back and looking at the entirety of the situation in the simplest of models, we are assuming the future looks mostly like the past, despite changing a couple of the most important factors of the past from growth to decline, in projecting to the future. It defies logic..
Anyway back to the rest of the video…
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Then within the next few minutes Charlie Hall nails it with the declining EROEI but doesn’t go into details of the implications of that going forward..
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I agree.
I like Mathis Wackernagle’s perspective that you can’t use the growth phase to predict the decline because everything will break.
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Exactly correct!! I haven’t had time to watch more just yet, but that comment from Mathis Wackernagle pretty well sums up why we collapse.
As everything starts to break it breaks a lot of other aspects of modernity and the cascades of failures will be way too much for any government, company, community, family or individual to overcome as every aspect of our living in the modern world relies upon modern complexity to continue normal operation.
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Steve St. Angelo also nailed a key issue.
We’ve been using debt to compensate for falling EROI.
This strategy will fail catastrophically when oil supply growth stops.
Berman said he disagrees with St. Angelo. He thinks covid was a bigger factor in rising debt than falling EROI.
Interesting: Berman said Trump intends to nationalize the oil industry and whatever public debt is required to keep the oil industry operating will be applied, which explains why the Hubbert curve is no longer applicable.
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I was going to comment on that exact chart, that you’ve posted above, so thanks Rob.
Look at that chart from 1960 to 1970, during the time when oil production was growing rapidly and the EROEI was rising. Debt per barrel of oil produced fell during that time, exactly as we would expect if energy was the dominant underlying force behind the economy.
The graph that Simon produced, based on Gail’s work, of rising oil per capita to the 1970’s, then falling is also relevant in the same context. However the initial falling use of oil per capita was offset by efficiency gains (not mentioned) plus substitution of coal and gas for some oil uses. (also not mentioned).
Overall world energy use in 1960 was around 13.93MWh per capita.
Overall world energy use in 1970 was around 18.09MWh per capita.
Overall world energy use in 1980 was around 19.82MWh per capita.
Overall world energy use in 1990 was around 20,12MWh per capita.
Overall world energy use in 2000 was around 19.94MWh per capita.
Overall world energy use in 2010 was around 21.87MWh per capita.
Overall world energy use in 2020 was around 21.48MWh per capita.
(using 2019 instead of 2020 world energy use per capita was 22.45MWh, to account for the anomalous year)
Overall world energy use in 2023 was around 22.72MWh per capita.
From Our World in Data and World Bank numbers…
In other words world energy use per capita is still rising, yet this does not take into account the increasing energy required for gaining energy and gaining materials.
The growth in energy use per capita was high during the period when world debt/capita fell, yet as the growth rate of energy use per capita declined debt soared. As the EROEI and MROEI (material return on energy invested) have been falling, that’s where/why the debt has risen..
The raw data also misses the efficiency gains that were happening back in the 1960’s which suffer from the laws of diminishing returns, Jevon’s paradox on energy, materials and complexity, plus the increased urbanisation of the population over that time which has materials and energy savings, plus add in globalization as further efficiency gains for the overall system of civilization.
In other words, don’t put too much credence on any set of individual numbers as none of them happen in a vacuum, it’s all connected in a highly complex way.
*Notice how the energy use per capita started to fall in the year 2000 until China went into overdrive with coal use after then. We don’t have another ‘China’ to save the world economy, with vast amounts of cheap labor and coal.
It all highlights to me that once oil is in terminal decline, which has an effect on coal and gas production, via higher prices on money/debt and harder investment times, plus all materials in a likewise manner, feedback loops affecting production of everything will eventually start to constrain the goods needed for further drilling of oil wells, which are increasingly complex operations on average.
Once we reach that point it’s all over, with only the time period to collapse of modern civilization to be debated/lived through. Once oil production declines due to lack of supplies and materials, despite plenty of “reserves”, then the feedback loops have to accelerate throughout the rest of the complex system, creating more shutdowns of businesses that are important to oil production in unknowable ways.
Chaos has to happen rapidly as no-one will be able to work out exactly what’s missing to get oil production rising with failures all over the system, all over the world. All that tariffs or relocalization is going to do is increase inefficiency of the overall system, hastening the poijnt when oil production starts to decline…
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Nice.
I believe Trump has a smart energy guy. Let’s assume he understands everything you just said, and let’s assume he does as Berman predicts and nationalizes the US oil industry to ensure oil supply does not fall, regardless of geology or oil price.
Do you see anyway for them to prevent inflation from blowing up their plan?
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There is no way to prevent inflation except contracting money supply. The drill baby drill program, puts an extra demand on all the materials required, just as the rest of the economy demands more materials, causing inflation.
Despite DOGE I expect in a few years time (assuming we have that long!!) that the US debt and deficit will be greater than now, just like it grew last time under Trump.
If Trump’s experts were aware of the above, then they would be very aware that money needs to keep flowing despite increasing inflation, especially in asset prices, just like how inflation has been hidden over the last few decades.
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I guess to kick the can you could nationalize the banks to force low interest rates by hiding (even more) bad assets on their balance sheets.
Then enable rationing to ensure the oil and agriculture sectors get what they need.
Goodbye democracy, hello Mordor, for a little while anyway.
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I like to look at technical specifications. They are usually over 100 pages and often have arcane details. I often think to myself: There is no way an individual or even a small team could implement and maintain this. The same thing also applies for large codebases needed to run modern software. The internet and modern computing are too complex to be maintained by a smaller scale society.
The same goes for hardware. Advanced semiconductor manufacturing relies on astoundingly complex processes. Only 3 companies are able to manufacture the most advanced semiconductors: Intel, Samsung and TSMC.
https://energyskeptic.com/2024/book-review-of-chip-war-and-the-fragility-of-microchips/
Most of the companies that design chips don’t maufacture them. For example, TSMC manufactures chips for companies, such as AMD, Apple, Nvidia, Qualcomm and Broadcom.
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Complexity – Diversity = Fragility
https://erickeyser.substack.com/p/complexity-diversity-fragility?r=1r05cx&utm_campaign=post&utm_medium=web&triedRedirect=true
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I disagree with both. We need to move a bunch of people from government to agriculture labor.
This will increase the food system resilience, reduce government debt, decrease the population by eliminating the need for immigrant workers, and slim up a bunch of fatties thus reducing healthcare expenses.
Andril Zvorygin predicts 25% of the population needs to be growing their own food by 2035, and 50% by 2040, or else society will collapse, so it’s going to happen anyway.
Might as well use this revolutionary moment in time to get ahead of the curve.
Here is Zvorygin’s analysis:
https://lyis.ca/pfet/peakoil/2025-25-in-10.pdf
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There is a lot of wishful thinking in those slides from Andreii and a few rookie errors. For example he has the FT process costing $15/ltre and makes the claim that when gasoline gets to that price it will be economic.
That’s not how the world works. If it costs $15/ltre now, then when gasoline prices have gone up to $5-10/ltre, the cost of building a FT plant and operating it will also be much higher.
I’ve followed the story of oil shale, as in kerogen for decades. Back in the mid 80’s it was claimed that when oil went to $70/bbl the kerogen would be competitive, oil had been up to around $40/bbl in ’79-80.
Fast forward 20 years when oil did go above $70/bbl and the kerogen people still couldn’t get any plants off the ground, because by then the cost to produce kerogen had gone to $200/bbl.
All the usual kerogen people still made the claims that when oil went to $200/bbl it would be competitive. It’s all bunk because the EROEI is too low, so when oil goes to $200/bbl I’m sure that the same proponents will be claiming kerogen will happen when oil gets to $400/bbl.
FT, from carbon capture I assume in Andreii’s slides will be similar. FT from coal right now is happening in South Africa from Sasol but only because of the enormous sunk costs from when there were sanctions on SA and they had no other choice for gaining oil, with a booming economy selling Gold, Platinum and Diamonds, so they could afford it..
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I admire the thinking and work he’s put into things. I think the statements such as this “25% of people village homesteading, or society collapses” are odd though. If 25% of people are village homesteading my thinking is society has already collapsed or, putting your complexity filter on things, it’s about to because the system is now so slanted to supporting an urbanised population the energy and materials required to go back to village homesteading will not be available.
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Yes Campbell, I agree entirely, was going to write that as well but post was getting too long.
It’s all part of denial about a bad outcome for civilization, if we do this or that then maybe we can keep going etc, etc.
We have 8.2 billion people on the planet, with population still growing at 70M per year. We are orders of magnitude in overshoot, with vast overpopulation everywhere. Canada is vastly overpopulated compared to the native population of 1,000 years ago, which had already caused megafauna extinctions and massive changes to the environment.
With climate changing more rapidly than just about ever, we are clearly leaving the Holocene, going into something different. We could only ever have agriculture in the stable Holocene period, so thinking we can continue as some distant ancestors lived is also just more denial of reality.
Going back to all these villages, even if denying the changing climate and devastated natural world, takes a lot more materials and energy than how we exist today. Would we cut down every last tree to build rough wood shacks and keep warm?
People just don’t want to look at the entire picture because it’s depressing. Life is so much ‘nicer’ to have ‘an answer’, to the ills of the world, which takes us back to beliefs and denial, which got us into this mess in the first place..
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I agree that we are severely overpopulated. I think that 1~2 billion is the maximum population that the earth could sustain after fossil fuels, but due to the damage inflicted on the environment, humanity will stabilize at numbers significantly lower than that.
Even Canada is vastly overpopulated? Wow, that just shows how screwed we are. Canada is has one of the world’s lowest population densities. If Canada is severely overpopulated, what does that say about regions such as Western Europe, East Asia and the Indian subcontinent, which are a far more densely populated?
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Hi Stellarwind, …..” I think that 1~2 billion is the maximum population that the earth could sustain after fossil fuels” …
Doesn’t this assume we will have a never ending Holocene period and ignores the damage we’ve done to the climate system?
Without agriculture or the ability to grow anything consistently, the number is way lower. The world was only able to support 1-4 million humans pre Holocene period and even that much smaller number caused many extinctions of megafauna.
I sometimes wonder if humans thousands of years ago tried agriculture precisely because they had consumed all the easy to catch megafauna and were running out of food locally at the time, hence agriculture sprang up all over the world around he same time, independently in each area at the beginning of the Holocene when it became possible.
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We rarely change our behavior unless forced to do so.
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1~2 Billion is a best case scenario. As I said in the comment above, we will almost certainly stabilize at a population level far lower than that. Agriculture will become impossible in many regions, not only due to climate change, but also due to factors such as biodiversity loss, soil erosion, and the depletion of aquifers.
https://insight.cumbria.ac.uk/id/eprint/6927/1/Bendell_BeyondFedUp.pdf
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Excellent paper thanks. As Rob has said previously.. All roads lead to food.
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Totally agree Hideaway.
I’ve heard William Rees and others say the same thing about the carrying capacity for humans on this planet being 1-2 billion. It’s always bugged me. Especially now that my carrying capacity opinion for the number of humans that any planet can support is zero.
In 1492 when that asshole accidentally discovered the other half of the globe, population was only 400 million. The primary reason that expeditions like Columbus’s were being put together and funded was because Europe was running thin on timber. Don’t know the details as far as how thin they were getting but if the desperation was enough to start travelling the insanely dangerous seas just to look for wood… I get a feeling it was big deal. Like a matter of life and death.
One thousand years prior to Columbus, population was 200 million. So after just one doubling (to 400million), dwindling resources were a big enough problem that they had to go exploring the deep oceans.
And that dire situation was with under half a billion people. So even with the other half of the world now open for business, 1-2 billion still sounds way too high… now or ever. For the “now” it’s not even worth debating. With the Holocene ending (which means an end to agriculture) and the severely damaged environment and the lack of wildlife, etc … LOL, no way one billion is an accurate number. You might as well just tell me that the earth is flat.😊
But was the planet ever suitable for one billion fire apes? Well, we know you can’t get to a billion without agriculture, so we’ll have to use the same timeframe of when the Holocene opened up. Let’s go with 10,000BC. With the planet in the exact same condition as it was then. So now we need our magic wand to set up the rest of this experiment. We’ll transport one billion humans (with the agricultural knowledge & expertise of say 2,000 years ago) back to this starting point. And let’s split them up so that 500 million are in the New World and 500 million in the Old World. Not sure what those worlds look like after a few hundred years. But I’m sure it’s gonna be something similar to what those Europeans ran into 500 years ago with timber.
Ugh, I don’t know where I was going with this, but I’ve run out of steam.
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I guess it depends on your definition of collapse. Zvorygin’s definition of collapse is when people cannot afford food and starve. If they are surviving as peasants growing food that’s not a collapse. (I think).
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Here in NZ we have over 85% of our population living in urban areas. Of the <15% living rurally I’m guessing less than 1% are homesteading currently. It’s a massive reversal of the trend requiring unlikely government policy to happen.
On the flip side we have a huge amount of livestock and wild game that would be available if we chose a mostly carnivore diet.
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I agree. It’s rare to find someone that is not blind on some aspect of the story so my brain ignores the bad stuff when someone is mostly good.
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I also used to think that CTL and GTL are viable solutions until recently and am still tempted to think so but as soon as I turn on the complexity analysis it all falls apart. Hideaway’s point about Sasol are accurate. The SA government only set it up as a desperate measure during apartheid sanctions at a time when mineral extraction cost was a fraction of what it is today.
Many GTL projects in Qatar have been put on hold for the same reason despite Qatar having one of largest and high EROI reserves.
BTW I am putting together a denial smasher package for friends and family starting with Alice’s books and website which should destroy most delusions about “renewables” as it is pure stats and numbers.
The only escape after that remains when asked to make a solar panel with solar panel is in ideas like “we will mine using electric trucks, heat using hydrogen and power transportation using synthetic fuels thereby making a solar panel with solar panel” and hand waving all the issues.
The best antidote to this utter BS are Hideaways comments here and on other sites. I have collected a few on specific topics but I was wondering if there was any way to organize those ideas in a more coherent topic by topic manner as almost a handbook on complexity.
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Please share your denial smasher with us Kira when it’s done.
I agree it would be valuable for Hideaway to assemble and organize his posts into a small book on complexity.
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I would be happy to but the weak link of any attempts to dispel denial is of course complexity. It provides an escape route to perform mental gymnastics and come to the exact opposite conclusion.
A good way of organizing would be starting with so called renewables and trace the complexity of solar panels, wind turbines and all their systems,sub systems, sub sub systems and so on. Next on debunking BS list should be electrification including transmission grid. Once these things are out of the way then essentials like agriculture , sanitation and water supply can be handled to show how unsustainable any population center really is.
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Hi Kira, I wanted to get to the bottom of the entire EROEI discussion without setting ‘boundaries’ to limit what was included or left out of the energy equations. All the different research papers I read, that were trying to be honest, eventually came back to a number included for background energy use in dollar terms, converted back to some average energy per capita of those involved, which seemed very wishy washy to me.
I came up with my own method using current wholesale energy cost over the prior decade for the manufacturing hub of the world in Asia, to account for building the factories and mines before actually making the solar panels or wind turbines etc. I settled on $US40/MWh as a close approximation, then went about working the lifetime return of energy given that the cost of building and operating any energy source we could find the cost for, would work.
Not only was I stunned at the overall results, that I rechecked them many times, I also came to the conclusion that it didn’t matter at what cost I used for energy production, the ratios between everything was the same. OK this needs explanation…
For simplicity sake, assume energy form XXXX cost $US1M to build and operate and supplied 25,000MWh over it’s lifetime of operation.
At $US40/MWh ‘cost’ in building and operating, the $US1M means 25,000MWh to build and operate it, meaning an EROEI of 1, it only ever produced the energy to build and operate it. By counting the full $US1M as the ‘energy’ cost we’ve included every aspect of energy use throughout civilization to build and operate it.
If the wholesale energy cost used had been $US80/Mwh then the $1M divided by $US80/MWh would only be 12,500MWh and the EROEI would be 2 as XXXX produces 25,000MWh over it’s life..
Energy sources like the best Saudi oil wells had EROEI of 50, while some metallurgical coal mines had EROEIs of 35. A particular new gas well/field I found also had an EROEI of 35. All of these were/are highly profitable in terms of dollars returned to investors. Solar, Wind and Nuclear are all around 0.9- 1.3 (without back-up or batteries or extra transmission lines for solar and wind) assuming the long life from those industries. Nuclear is the lowest at 0.9 for Hinkley assuming the cost doesn’t blow out further and operating costs the same as US NPP on average..
Now if we were to assume the energy cost of building and operating was different to the ~$US40/MWh for everything, say $US80/MWh, then Solar, Wind and Nuclear look better at an EROEI of 1.8-2.6, while the oil, coal and gas go to an EROEI of 100 and 70. In other words the ratio between them all stays the same.
It doesn’t matter what the original cost of energy was over a period of time, assuming the cost to build all of them had the same base cost, the ratios remain the same. If it takes a ‘real’ EROEI of 10-20 to operate a modern civilization, then playing with the numbers is just lying to ourselves.
In reality, because of lower ore grades we need a growing EROEI for civilization to continue like it did in the 50’s and 60’s, a time when EROEI was clearly growing, debt was low and living standards exploding. We clearly have not had a world like that since then.
The sheer fact that my method clearly shows that the energy returns are related to profits, as in giving off excess in either dollars or energy terms, means it has to be close to more accurate than what all the modern research shows about the 100/1 returns for nuclear, when no commercial nuclear plant actually operates at a large dollar profit at all!!
Today’s cost of energy ‘builds’, whether a new solar farm or oil well, or nuclear power plant all happen from cheap embedded energy in our system. New well casings for fracked oil wells, come from cheap iron ore, turned into steel using cheap coal, from China where labor, coal energy and environment laws are cheap. Re-localising to a more expensive location of less efficiency just lowers the overall EROEI.
When adding the lower EROEI of every energy source to the growing complexity of our civilization, including all the rules and regulations that have grown to soak up excess energy production, while lowering the living standards of most, means we are having an accelerating decline towards the overall collapse of civilization itself.
Any mad rush in the future to build more nuclear, solar or wind will just accelerate the decline, likewise for expensive methods of oil, coal and gas extraction, like a lot more deep sea wells or fracking tier 2 and 3 sites with lower energy returns.
Yet I expect all these actions to happen as more and more of the system breaks in unexpected ways, as people in power realise that energy is all important to keep things going, yet fail to realise that spending a lot more energy on energy doesn’t help the rest of civilization. more rules on what people can or can’t do will also happen with attempts to solve more problems that arise, which will increase complexity of everything, until the system has a chaotic breakdown..
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Very interesting.
I assume you’re familiar with the work of Dr. Timothy Garrett that shows:
US$1 (1990) = 9.7 mW or if you prefer
5.8 gigawatts = US$1 trillion (2010)
Have you ever tried to merge his ideas with your ideas?
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Hi rob, very much aware of Tim Garrett’s work. I made the comment last week about how he will probably never get interviewed by Nate Hagens, because he is too pessimistic on the future as he looks at the climate in terms of the result of civilization growth while being very aware of energy/material shortages.
He had a great interview on Planet Critical with Rachel Donald.
While I’ve followed his description of the dollar terms for energy in our civilization, I feel he misses the increase in energy required to mine the same quantity of minerals/metals and likely food /water production from degrading sources. I can’t really see how I would or could use it.
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Thanks for the detailed explanation.
So if I am understanding it correctly the EROEI papers usually take the energy needed for mining,transportation,manufacturing, installation and maintenance to come up with total input energy cost and therefore the EROEI estimates. But they just approximate or just don’t include embedded energy cost of the manufacturing facilities,mining infrastructure and equipment and the expenditure for workers. And some they all must cost money that becomes a much better stand in for invisible and hard to calculate energy costs. It sounds like a very reasonable and sound approach but I can also see why it can confuse some people.
Even though money is a lein on energy it is also easily manipulatable. The subsidies for wind and solar can easily mask their true costs making people believe they are cheaper than they actually are. Also making anything in Europe with mostly natural gas instead of cheap chinese coal can also make a difference.
The one thing that is indisputable is if there are no subsidies and solar, wind have to compete with gas and coal on their merits based on apples to apples comparison they will lose i.e they will never turn a profit which is what we have seen all over the world as the prices of electricity from them are not even comparable.
I also see the point of contention that people like Dennis and Brandon have with your method. They believe that money is purely an abstract concept and we can just redirect money from elsewhere to making renewables. This essentially invalidates your approach in their minds because if money is not claim on energy then your numbers are just made up.
To your point that renewables are just fossil fuel products their counter is to take an EROI of 15-20:1 with boundary conditions and saying that we will use the fossil fuels of today to build the infrastructure used outside the boundary like factories,mines etc. Where will this fossil fuel come from? From cutting military, commercial aviation among some other things. This way future solar and wind will be decoupled from fossil fuels and stand on their own. How will we power ships? Synthetic fuel made from excess energy of renewables. So once they have figured out how to make renewables from renewables at least in their imagination any complexity problem that you throw can be hand waved. Molybdenum for hydrogen among falling ore grades? More solar panels and more electric mining trucks.
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Hi Kira, thanks for the critique, I definitely need the feedback.
In my research going back through papers I found the numbers on the Aluminium production used in the EROEI calculations, it’s 14-15 MWh/tonne, in M de Wild-Sholten papers from around 2005-6 that are cited hundreds of times in research papers.
The newer papers, cite papers, that cite and use the numbers from these earlier papers. It’s a web of research, citing earlier research, citing earlier research, without much and mostly no, analysis of the validity of prior research used.
https://scholar.google.nl/scholar?oi=bibs&cluster=14423068015818103117&btnI=1&hl=en
I had to calculate backwards the energy cost of the Aluminium in the frames, de Wild-Sholten used, which is the standard number from the Aluminium Industry itself of 14-15Mwh of energy used in a tonne of Aluminium ingot production.
Once I went to the Aluminium industry to get a breakdown of this number, it’s the electricity used in the smelting process.
How much energy is accounted for in the building of the plant and equipment? ZERO.
How much energy is accounted for in the workforce, that all used energy to get to work, used energy to eat, shower, keep their houses warm, etc, (all paid for by money earned from working in the smelter)…. ZERO
What about the 400kg of petcoke used per tonne of Aluminium produced? ZERO.
How much energy accounted for in the equipment and people at the bauxite mine? ZERO.
How much energy accounted for in the built ports, ships, roads, bridges, trucks etc to get the bauxite to the smelter … ZERO.
It’s obviously false accounting of energy inputs by leaving all this energy content out, because if energy was not expended in all those aspects, the aluminium would never be produced.
From my reading of all the EROEI work, it’s exactly the same in every other aspect of solar and wind production, whether the silicon, glass, steel, cement or any other input, they set the boundary of what’s included at just the energy throughput of the manufacturing.
We only have one method of accounting for it all which is the cash cost. It is certainly not perfect, but is much better than excluding huge gobs of energy use, as the current accounting methods do.
I’m also very aware that those doing all the research in this area cannot be so blind to the energy left out, they have to be very aware, yet argue for their findings. Is it a case of the Upton Sinclair quote of “It is difficult to get a man to understand something when his salary depends on his not understanding it”, or is it just straight denial
For certain, most people in denial will not ever want to use any method that includes all energy use, because they prefer the delusion of comfortable numbers, no matter how flawed the methodology.
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Until we have an accurate method of calculating EROEI, is it not sufficient to say if an activity pays taxes and generates a profit then EROEI is high enough to support the current complexity of civilization, and if it does not pay taxes or requires a subsidy then EROEI is too low for the current civilization?
Isn’t this really all we need to know?
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It probably is all we need to know, but I’d add in a free market economy, as I’m sure people could twist solar, wind and batteries into paying taxes and making a profit by mandating price increases to make it happen, which doesn’t go close to the real EROEI.
The effect of such a policy would be devastating to most people making them much poorer and dropping standards of living, to the point of breaking ‘other’ aspects of the economy.
In terms of building renewables, no-one does it from expensive energy full stop. If they tried to make solar panels, wind turbines and all components from expensive energy the cost would go through the roof, making the companies/countries doing so go out of business, hence why Germany’s heavy industry is failing, because energy and every other cost is cheaper in China, based on 4.6B tonnes of cheap coal use per annum and still rising.
On the denial wagon again, most people see how cheap ‘subidised solar’ installations are in this country compared to the retail price of electricity, so assume it’s equally good for heavy industry.
In reality we pay up to 40c/KWh for retail electricity during peak times, while the Aluminium smelter still pays 1.4c/KWh, but that figure is hidden deep in govt documents. Every few years the Aluminium smelter threatens to close down, so the govt gives them more subsidies to keep operating for the sake of jobs. The labor cost is way higher than the energy bill.
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Excellent points. There’s always more to think about than expected.
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I think the problem with the energy generation methods such as solar,wind,nuclear(and ultimately their Achilles heel) is the complexity which also prevents proper accounting of energy inputs.
I am inclined to believe that the boundary conditions typically used is because of enormous complexity and involvement of massive supply chains and workers rather than any kind of malicious intentions. It’s just not possible to account for all the steps which leaves using money as a stand in as the next best thing.
Most people intuitively understand that the material needs for solar,wind and nuclear are orders of magnitude more than comparable fossil fuel plants. Let’s consider a following scenario where we wish to build a power plant in our backyard where we have access to a small stream.
We have two options to generate power.
a) We can build a small steam engine and use coal to generate steam and use that to generate power.
b) We can use the stream to generate power by building a small dam and a hydro plant.
Both of these methods are simple, proven and centuries old and can be done in DIY fashion. You don’t need advanced qualifications to build it either.Also the EROI is easy to estimate even without any boundary conditions as very few materials like steel and wood are required.
Can we generate the same power by building a nuclear powerplant or solar panels and wind turbines? Not a chance. These are products of highly advanced civilization requiring thousands of steps, highly qualified engineers and multi continent supply chains making any estimate of true EROI impossible.
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Hi Kira, great synopsis, though I don’t necessarily agree with the “no malicious intent” bit. Any researchers that look that deep (very, very few, most just use previously published numbers/research they like to prove their point), all realise that they leave out the largest single cost, and certainly understand the workers in western countries all turn up to the factories/smelters in fossil fueled vehicles, live in ‘nice’ homes with internal hot water and heating etc.
All the early work was done back in 2004-5, by M. de Wild-Scholten, et al (from European sources), still often referenced.
In other words the authors knew they were leaving out the largest costs of producing solar panels, but were deliberately trying to show them in a good light, mostly because they could get more funding for more research by showing positive outcomes, likewise for all the research that has ever followed.
Remember people like Tony Seba get huge speaking fees for giving a rosy picture about the future, likewise the researchers find funding easy to get with positive outcome forecasts, while someone like Nicole Foss speaking about a poor future struggled to find an audience. Even Chris Martenson’s crash course type information didn’t pay, so instead he appears to have moved to a model of how “subscribers” can be better off following his set of experts that know about poorer times ahead for those not following their (paid) ‘advice’.
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Hi Hideaway,
I completely agree that field of science has been completely hijacked by corporate interests, and scientists today are no different from content creators who chase clicks and likes, except these people chase funding.
Dr Sabine Hossenfelder has repeatedly shown how science has become a paper mill where most of the reasearch is worthless. Also pharma companies and chemical companies are probably the worst offenders who fund studies which “prove” their products are safe while actively killing people.
What I meant with a lack of malicious intent was that even a scientist with no financial incentive to paint a rosy picture may still use boundary conditions which exclude costs like building the factories, the machines to make solar panels and cost of workers because it may be too complicated to compute or he may not be able to see all the moving parts. It could also just be plain denial. For something like Nuclear which takes years or decades of dismantling including spent fuel storage I don’t think EROI calculation may even be possible with normal methods and using money as a stand in may be the only method available.
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So I tried to respond several days ago, but wordpress didn’t like me again.
Thanks for sharing your rationale/methodology for substituting dollar cost for embedded energy. I’ve seen you mention it over at SEEDS, and here, but had not seen the explanation. This comment, and the following thread with you and Kira are good stuff.
Researchers in dusty corners of academia are slowly trying to expand on and quantify the emergy analysis proposed by Odum, but setting boundaries and justifying each pathway is wicked hard, as you know.
The dollar substitution will have to do, but it still is a good enough tool to confirm that techno-optimism and energy transition are fairy tales.
Between this and pointing out the complexity trap/house of cards, you’ve provided a powerful piece of the puzzle. At some point, others beyond us in the fringes may well finally acknowledge reality, but it will be too late.
So it goes.
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Thanks Kira, precisely this bit …”as soon as I turn on the complexity analysis it all falls apart” …
A few years ago I started to work out details of how “we” as in humanity could use renewable energy to produce the minerals from the Olympic Dam mine owned by BHP, in one of the sunniest places on the planet, using details, not hand waves on what was required.
I couldn’t get it to be anywhere near a viable operation, way too many manufactured materials required which all had relatively short lifespans. I did likewise on the often proposed CTL plant for the Latrobe valley based on the vast resource of brown coal, still not close to viable with resources required.
I became aware of the weaknesses of the arguments like if the price of XXX goes to $YYY then “this” becomes viable. It always assumed only XXX price rose and not any of the costs of inputs, which is absurd when talking about fundamentals of modernity like oil or copper..
At one stage I kind of believed in the possibility of mining space would save us, despite my knowledge of geology and geological processes, I did a little geology back in Uni days and have invested in mining companies for decades being aware of mineral requirements.
I researched what rocks had been found on Mars, and as soon as I found the rock types were the same as here on Earth, it hit me like a tonnes of bricks, that of course the processes of rock and mineral formation were the same everywhere in the Universe. This means that the geologic processes here on Earth including plate techtonics, water, life providing concentrations of sulphur, etc into the equation of concentrating metals and minerals was vastly superior here on Earth, than anywhere else in the solar system, meant space mining was nonsense.
It also instantly occurred to me that this would be the case everywhere, which explained the Fermi Paradox perfectly. There were no space faring civilizations anywhere as they would all run into exactly the same limitations of finite resources on their own planet if it had all the same/similar processes as here on Earth, with the same limitations of their own solar systems.
Humans have reached such a level of complexity in our civilization that it’s impossible to understand the full range of the complexity by any individual. Yet a highly complex subsystem of a subsystem of this complexity can be understood by experts in that one field.
For example, take the subsystem of the proposed hydrogen economy, then the subsystem of the metal requirements to build it. A metallurgist in designing the containers and piping for the hydrogen economy will understand that high grade austenitic stainless steel is required to overcome the embrittlement that hydrogen creates, because of the small molecular size of the hydrogen molecule. This means using stainless steel of really high content nickel 15-16% plus molybdenum at 2-3%. Molybdenum is mostly mined as a byproduct of copper mining in the 50-100ppm range. 2-3% molybdenum is 20,000 -30,000ppm!! In other words we don’t mine the quantity molybdenum to do it, and the energy required to mine the quantity of molybdenum required from low grade ores is way too high and never considered.
Yet those looking at just the concept of the hydrogen economy do not have any knowledge about this, because they never look at the complexity of the entirety of that subsystem, because the hydrogen economy itself is just a subsystem of the entirety of providing energy and materials for the future.
The entire difficulty of explaining our situation to anyone is that it’s totally complicated as our highly complex civilization is a myriad of interconnecting aspects, each of which is highly complex, and as soon any part of the complexity is simplified, the hand wave of we can do ‘this bit’, immediately comes into play from lack of understanding, or lack of following the intricacies of ‘this bit’.
The supposedly simple task of relocalizing to a simple lifestyle of growing our own food, totally overlooks the reality that it was only possible during the geologically tiny period of the the Holocene, which we are rapidly moving out of due to burning of fossil fuels and going past a myriad of climate and ecological tipping points. It’s once again our own hubris thinking this is possible for anything other than a really short term without researching the full complexity of the situation.
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Exactly!! That is so true.
Whenever someone tells me about hydrogen economy I always think of energy approach as it is an energy sink and a really stupid idea but it never occurs to me to dig into subsystem of storage system to find a flaw. The typical response would be “we will just find a substitute to molybdenum” without understanding that it must have been chosen for a reason. Of course there is also “electric mining is more efficient with fewer losses so we could compensate for lower grade ores with it”.
As Alice says it is a game of whack a mole where one after other stupid ideas keep popping up and you have to keep whacking them down.
When talking about electrification of mining and heavy transport and shortage of lithium recycling is often touted as a solution and my counter is purely based on energy that it would be energy intensive but I strongly suspect that there is a complexity and scaling issue as well which is why it has not taken off in any meaningful way. But since I don’t have the knowledge for a ready answer I don’t give a reply.
The fact that this utter nonsense is being endorsed by so many reputed people just shows how low the scientific discourse has fallen in our society.
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Here’s some inspiring hope.
We’ll still enjoy some fruits of technology when the oil is gone.
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Hello and thank you for this interesting blog! I am a newbie to these topics, but I would like to know your opinion on a text I used in a debate about Rousseau VS Hobbes. Please excuse my poor English, it is not my native language.
Rousseau wins and Hobbes was wrong. In their time they could not have known it, but today the conclusion is clear: the inexorable destiny of progress is collapse, because once it starts it cannot be stopped, and we live in a world of limited space, speed and resources.
Hobbes was right when he pointed out that man’s state of nature is not the idyllic image that is sometimes held, and that existence in nature is hostile and complicated. Diseases, wild animals, plagues, enemy tribes… All this makes life hard and short. Progress allows us to face these problems and provide solutions, bending nature and creating legal systems under which those who want to be part of society must live, giving up their power and certain freedoms for the common good. Up to that point, Hobbes was right, and progress has brought us to where we are.
But what Hobbes could not have known in his time, or at least it was very difficult, is that we live in a physical world in which progress is achieved through the increase of population and the complexity of society and its mechanisms for obtaining resources. This requires work (in the physical sense of the term) and work requires energy. And the energy contained in the Earth system is abundant, but not infinite. Since once you start on the path of progress, it cannot be stopped voluntarily (an individual can be satisfied with what he has, but society as a whole never does and always wants more and better things), more and more energy is required to maintain society and growth. This creates a vicious circle that gradually depletes natural resources, first local and then global, in a geometric progression to which human minds are not adapted. We think in a linear way and we are not able, or we have a hard time, to foresee the problems that geometric processes generate.
A few hundred years later, here we are. We have practically exhausted the easily exploitable reserves of oil (the energy resource par excellence), we have polluted the environment to levels that are hardly tolerable, we have depleted the useful metals from the Earth’s crust, the Earth’s biodiversity is being reduced at a dizzying rate, the oceans and the atmosphere are gaining more and more temperature due to the loss of energy in the form of heat in each energy-consuming process that we carry out… and the curve continues to grow exponentially. Math tells us clearly that this cannot continue for much longer.
Inevitable conclusion: progress is not sustainable. Every parent wants their children to live better than they have lived, and for that they need to spend more energy than they have spent. But energy is not infinite, and its expenditure entails other cumulative consequences that are incompatible with the ecosystem for which we have evolved. Hobbes could not know to what point this would become a problem, and that is why he was wrong. Life in nature was hard, difficult and sacrificial… but the human being as we know it lived in nature for hundreds of thousands of years. After “discovering” progress, it condemned itself to its own demise at worst, or to an inevitable return to nature at best, all after only a few thousand years. Rousseau wins. We may think we have defeated nature, but we are much smaller than we think, nature is inevitable and always ends up proving it.
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Hello and welcome.
Your understanding of our predicament is pretty good.
A couple minor corrections. Many people do want a higher standard of living than they have, but I don’t think that’s the primary force for growth. There are two main forces for growth.
One is the design of our monetary system which requires growth to enable the abundant credit it creates and that is needed for the high up front investments of modernity.
The second is that depletion of finite energy and minerals increases the energy and materials cost of extraction. To grow the net energy and materials needed to support the monetary system you must increase the complexity of the extraction technology, which requires a growing population, and you must grow the gross faster than the net to feed the extraction system.
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Thank you, Rob. I see it’s even worse than I thought… hehe.
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a song for Charles, at the end of the world:
All of us laugh
How many of us sing?
This sky where we live
Is no place to lose your wings
So love, love, love
Lose your body
And your mind
And the bitter
Taste of time
All of us cry
While we should be dancing
This sky where we live
Is no place to lose your wings
So love, love, love
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Thank you very much.
Exactly, where I am at now and also what I need.
❤️
(the end of a world 🙂
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I fear that Netanyahu and Trump will try to exterminate the population of Gaza and they will face no consequences for doing so. I hope I am wrong on this.
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There are some seriously talented young people on YouTube.
Here are a few Led Zeppelin covers by Chiara Kilchling.
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Very nice Rob. Thanks for the link.
This is a duo that I have been listening to for awhile you may like. Their latest album Unamericana.
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And another collaboration by Josh Turner. The Bygones.
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Thanks! I loved them all. Great guitars and great vocals. I’ve subscribed. They have a deep rabbit hole to explore.
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Elle and Toni are great too. Tony is an incredible guitar player.
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Hello again! This time I bring you an excerpt from a talk by a renowned economist in my country, answering the specific question of whether capitalism can collapse or not. At first glance it seems terribly simplistic and wrong to me, but I’d like to know your opinion, so I can properly refute it if someone asks me about it. I have automatically translated it into English. Thank you in advance!
“Ancient societies did indeed collapse. The question is, can capitalism collapse? The answer is no.
Why not? Because capitalism is not that we have a lot of things, capitalism is a mentality. Capitalism is compatible with any level of resources and compatible with any standard of living. Many people think that capitalism is what we have now, but capitalism did not start like that. Capitalism started at a very low level, burning wood or burning a little coal, and from there using that technique of systematic saving, investing in the best possible way, it developed a mental technology with accounting, with banks, etc. But it is compatible with any level of development. In fact, critics take resources for granted, when there is no resource or the resource can be anything. There is only one resource and I like to emphasize it, which is the human mind. There is no other resource. Did the Persians have oil when Genghis Khan conquered them? Yes, but it was useless. When the Mongols came, they would make a hole at night and oil would come out and set it on fire for fun, because it was worthless. Oil was not a resource until someone, Mr. Benz, invented an internal combustion engine. Later, ways of refining it were invented, but before that, it was not only worthless, it was actually a nuisance because where there is oil, nothing grows, you can’t cultivate it and it also smells bad. The Carib Indians had oil for hundreds of years in Venezuela… and what did they use it for? Why didn’t they set up Standard Oil? Why didn’t they set up kerosene refineries? A resource without the human mind is worthless.
So, what are the resources? We don’t know what they are, or whether there are limits or not. There must obviously be physical limits, but where are they? We have more and more resources, not less. At first we only had firewood, then we had firewood and coal, then coal and oil, then oil and electricity… We can get electricity from a thousand different sources apart from burning fossils, burning coal, etc. We can get it from the wind, from the water, from the sea, from solar energy, geothermal energy… There are many ways and new ways are invented every day to get it. I’m not saying that it’s efficient or not, that’s not the question. I’m saying that we can’t know what a resource is until we find a way to develop it. The more minds there are in the world, the more minds there are to think and invent things. That’s the point. And furthermore, capitalism doesn’t collapse because capitalism doesn’t need a specific space either. It seems that capitalism has to be worldwide, but it is born in a few regions, not even in provinces… in a few regions, in certain specific places and from there it spreads like an oil stain to other parts of the world. But capitalism, in order to continue existing and not collapse, does not need to be global, as they think.
In short, no. Capitalism cannot collapse.”
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It would be helpful if you chose a nickname for this site so we know who we are talking to. I can use your IP to go back and add the nickname to your previous posts.
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Ah, fair enough. You can call me “Klin”. =)
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Before beginning a discussion involving capitalism it is wise to start with a definition because people have many different understandings of what capitalism means.
Here is my definition of capitalism:
The economist is saying that the prosperity we enjoy today is created by capitalism and innovation, and because there are no limits to innovation, there are no limits to prosperity.
This is fundamentally flawed logic, usually explained by ignorance (or denial) of the physical realities of the energy and minerals that underpin our prosperity:
Therefore he is wrong in intent, but literally correct:
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I was gonna tell Klin to stay the hell away from economists, but your reply is better😊
And you must have edited it since I last saw it. Tighter and more crisp now. Nice job!
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Firstly, welcome Klin.
Can I just add that the collapse of civilization has nothing to do with any “ism”. It doesn’t matter if we had capitalism, communism, fascism or any other “ism” or some combination of them all.
Where we are headed has everything to do with population size, scale, complexity, energy, material resources, climate, environment, species destruction and pollution.
Any thinking about whether one ism is better than others just deflects from the big picture.
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The discipline of economics is a disgrace. They’re not even aware of the most important forces in the economy, which they should understand better than anyone.
Affordable and growing energy and minerals are of course the most important forces.
Assuming there are no limits to energy and minerals growth, then it’s true that of all the isms, capitalism has the best track record for maximizing growth.
However, the real juice behind growth is the debt back fractional reserve monetary system, which all isms use today. It’s also the thing that will accelerate the collapse.
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https://peakoilbarrel.com/u-s-december-oil-production-at-all-time-high/#comment-786677
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Outstanding big picture discussion of troubling trends in the behavior of our western leaders.
The trend is intolerance, close-mindedness, lack of empathy, irrationality, and lower intelligence.
I think it points to a rapid loss of freedom and democracy when collapse picks up steam.
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Hello Rob,
Hope you’re going well. I am very happy to hear that you are so well stocked in sardines that you can offer them as security to any wager on the acceptance of MORT. I am comfortable enough to see your bet with another tin of beans (I don’t have sardines, sorry) that your stash will be quite safe!
I just wanted to say here that I totally agree that further loss of freedom and democracy is well under way already in our society as sign of the collapse of the total structure. As if we need reminding of the response of governments during Covid for further proof, don’t even get me started. Now the hallowed halls of higher learning are being besieged on another front–the crack-down of so-called illegal pro-Palestine protests in university campuses under the guise of antisemitism, and the government of the States has threatened to withhold funding to any institution that falls short of draconian measures to uproot these gathering and punish their students, with arrest, expulsion, and even deportation (cancelling of student visas) if the student is a foreigner. I am totally ashamed to have attended The University of Chicago, once one of the most liberal institutions, and recently in the news for arresting a foreign student for participating in a protest. Columbia University is on the brink of losing $400m in funding for having allowed extended protest as an example to other universities. The students are protesting against government sponsored genocide, and many are Jewish, but it’s a conspicuous threat to the powers that be and their agenda so it must be cracked down. It is hypocrisy to think we are any different in intention (albeit not yet to the same intensity of reaction) to China’s Tiananmen square. The whole vision of a university as a community where open minds are encouraged in an atmosphere of democratic ideals is a total farce now, and me thinks that is actually the point. Universities as they once were supposed to be have no place in the totalitarian order that is emerging as we hurtle into a collapse of the modern state. We will be told what to think and how to act, and we must conform or face the consequences.
Brave new world that is upon us, I am afeared for you but I will summon all the courage I can to bear witness and live with the angst.
Namaste.
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Thanks Gaia, this totalitarian world has been creeping upon us for decades. I look around at simple things like what you can do on your own property today compared to a few decades ago. Always more restrictions and permissions needed to do nearly anything.
A couple of friends of mine had, had enough so stood for local council, were elected, became mayor within a few years, but couldn’t unravel any of the laws that they stood for in their elections. There were state government rules, and lots of bureaucrats with a million excuses of why something couldn’t be undone. Both eventually quit any form of politics..
All the newer rules and regulations on everything are a creeping form of complexity, which is a natural aspect of our growing system. People can’t work out why it costs so much for any major project that takes years to build, whether nuclear power plant, new large hospital, a major road, tunnel, transmission lines or railway, but it’s all the same increased complexity of planning, procedures and rules.
I’ve heard the call to cut the “red tape” for decades, yet instead it all gets more complicated to do anything, because that is the natural progression of growth and complexity and all the net energy being consumed.
A quick look at all prior civilizations that collapsed, a commonality was the hierarchical structure remaining as dominant as possible until the bitter end.
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I like Trumps new reg rule. Delete 10 rules for each new one you wish to add.
Prune the tree before adding a graft.
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Chris Martenson has concluded that corruption is so bad in the US that big chunks of the government need to be burned to the ground and re-built.
My friends here in Canada are mad about the defunding of USAID. They are not aware that USAID was 10% good stuff (for cover) and 90% corruption and CIA mischief around the world. We can thank USAID for killing 17+ million by funding the covid virus in Wuhan, and for killing over a million people via the Ukraine war by funding the Maidan Coup. That’s plenty for me to burn USAID to the ground. You don’t get forgiveness and a do-over for those kind of mistakes.
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I had a conversation with my ex Canadian neighbour tonight with some other friends. They were very adamant that the US wants Canada for it resources. I said very plausible, now can you see why Russia is defending itself from the West/Us wanting its resources?
not really
sigh
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At this point, addressing the corruption in the US government will require deep systemic change. Has Chris Martenson ever talked about the unrestrained political bribery in the US government?
https://www.rollingstone.com/politics/politics-news/jimmy-carter-u-s-is-an-oligarchy-with-unlimited-political-bribery-63262/
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My estimate of 10% good stuff in USAID was wrong. It’s 17%.
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Hi Hideaway,
Hope your mouth woes are resolving, are you thinking of getting an implant to take the place of the extracted molar once the infection is completely eradicated? Ah, the things we can do in a world of complexity, dental interventions must rank high as a necessary evil.
You are so right about the increasing entanglement of red tape, I am so glad we built our house (and renovated my mother’s house just sold) nearly 2 decades ago rather than trying to start proceedings now. Yes, there were still planning approvals but they were straightforward and timely (and a lot less expensive, even accounting for inflation). But even more so than the lack of efficiency, the gross deficiency of competence in every sector is frightfully alarming. I am not sure if we’re dropping the ball because of the level of complexity is too great to manage, or if we’ve been dumbed down so much that our brains are in permanent state of cobwebbing and fog. Probably both.
A sad case in point–a neighbouring municipality in Tasmania wanted to upgrade their CBD for pedestrian and bus accessibility. A great plan and commensurate funding received much fanfare and self-congratulatory motions for bringing this job-creating project to the district. The execution involved closing off the the main thoroughfare for more than a year, confusing residents and passing traffic to no end with detours and new stops for the bus routes. I’m sure the businesses along the road suffered greatly and maybe some didn’t make it but such is the price for progress. The main improvement was to be a new bus interchange off the main road which aimed to improve traffic flow and safety. Months of delays and hundreds of thousands in blow-outs later, upon the great unveiling it came to light that the turning circle that was built for the busses was too small for a bus to negotiate around! You’d think that this would have been an elementary point for the initial engineering, to obtain precise measurements for the structure to fit the function. So they have to tear up the road and re-do it but now there’s no funding! What a debacle and humiliation! Council blamed the private road works contractor and vice versa for this fatal error, god only knows how many heads rolled and who wants to sue who.
You have really opened my eyes to the reality of complexity as a never-ending and ever-growing energy sink, on every level. We’ve now been in Australia over 25 years and it is laughable (it would be funny if it wasn’t so pitiful) that our initial goal of simplifying our lives by living in the country has morphed into just trying to stay afloat managing what seems at times a three ring circus. Why is it getting harder instead of easier? I can understand more clearly now that we’ve just kept adding layers of complexity to our lives (more plantings, more buildings, taking care of family that is aging) and the scope and scale to just maintain what we’ve done continues to drain all physical and financial resources. For example, the trees which have been planted have grown, needing yearly pruning, mulching, picking. With the bounty of fruit comes storing the harvest through drying, canning, freezing, all which take devices, energy, and more physical space to keep the tools and goods (containers, sheds, endless need for shelves). Now in addition there’s repairs or even replacements to original working systems (as you well know after 40 years on the property) and we’re at the stage of trying to work out an exit strategy to consolidate (selling, buying, moving) all which takes even more energy. And we just can’t stop (not that we wish to, but even if we did), otherwise all that we’ve put into the system is for naught (assuming we can sell it, we end up with just digital dollars and no infrastructure and you’d have to buy and start over again). If this is happening on a micro level (as in a homestead for three people), one can only imagine the scale of entropy for whole nations. It is frankly amazing to me that we’re still holding on as we are and the lights still turn on (well, not for those affected by the tropical storm). It is such a fragile system, if we can even call it a system as if our bringing it into being mainly through fossil fuels guarantees our modernity a place in thermodynamic reality.
I hope some rain comes your way soon (so you can bring that ride-on mower out of the shed, haha!)
Namaste, friend.
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Hi Gaia,
Western hypocrisy on the Gaza genocide is crazy making. Fingers crossed that something snaps in the middle east and Israel is delivered harsh justice, or Israel’s reasonable citizens regain control of their country.
You’ll be pleased to know I’ve had Gaia’s Rice & Beans for 3 days in a row since one batch makes 3 servings.
My current standard flavorings are chopped fresh ginger, onion, garlic, dried mushrooms, dried seaweed, and fish sauce. Then after cooking, as you suggested, a little sesame oil and soy sauce stirred in when warm.
It’s excellent by itself, but when I want to take it to a next level, I dump a can of sardines on top.
I won’t disclose how many cans of sardines I have in inventory, but let’s just say they are the cheapest form of high quality protein, and they last forever.
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That made me smile, Rob! So glad you’re a fan of what is a staple diet for millions (if not billion) of people daily, a pulse and a grain in some form or another. Another benefit of sardines is that they are a whole food, as you eat bones, skin and all, so not only are they proteinaceous, you get your calcium and omega 3s, too. I think they are gutted before being tinned, otherwise you would also get the benefit of the organ tissues.
Having said all of that, I myself haven’t eaten a sardine for over 20 years but somehow I am getting all the nutrients from my plant-based diet as it is quite varied and whole food concentrated. I do take regular B12 supplements. I would say my health is generally excellent as I haven’t seen a doctor for any ailment for 25 years (it helps to be one so I can self-diagnose if needed but the main benefit is I am more confident of what is an urgent matter versus a watch and wait one), and only needed to see the dentist once in that time (chipped front tooth). With exception of the Covid bout I had 6 months ago, I can’t recall the last time I had a significant cold or flu, maybe 15 years? But, I am not resting on any laurels, this past year has been stressful enough that I feel that my immune system is a bit overstretched and my energy reserves need topping up. No rest for the wicked (and in addition in my case, only children of aged parents) however, I am now preparing to go to the States in April to check in on my father-in-law who is 94, bless his still beating heart. So Gaia might just disappear again for a considerable duration but this time I will warn you first.
It is going to be total culture shock for me to return to the country of my birth, last time I was there was 6 years ago and I already felt a total stranger, it can only be more surreal this time. I will still visit your site regularly but I may not have time to comment even though it might be good therapy to do so!
Namaste, friend.
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I hope you have a safe trip and a happy visit with your father.
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Today I started to read a book called “A Minority Interest” from Martin Butler which I would very loosely consider as pessimistic? philosophy. Following is summary from his own website:
Very few people are experts in their own nature; it’s a minority interest. Plenty of people are interested in money, sex, fame, power, sensual indulgences, but self-knowledge is a rare thing indeed. Even so-called spiritual traditions focus on dogma and external practices such as mindfulness. This book is about you and the world you live in. It isn’t pretty. There is no happy ever after story here, and no easy answers. As such, the contents of this book will always be a minority interest.
When reading the book I couldn’t stop asking myself if he was aware of MORT and as a curious person I wrote him an email asking if he was aware of it and in case he wasn’t I included Rob’s short summary of MORT and the 2019 paper. Let’s see if I will get a response. If yes I will post it here.
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Thanks! I’ll bet you a can of sardines he has not heard of it, and if he reads it will reject it, thus demonstrating again that genetic denial of genetic denial is the strongest form of denial.
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Martin Butler is a cool dude (and funny as hell). Megacancer turned me on to him a while back.
Love that sentence! Exactly how I feel when reading these pessimistic nihilist types. The way some of them describe full consciousness (and when it happened) … how can you not correlate it to MORT theory.
I also love their fascination and focus on how it’s only humans that have to live with the central neurosis that they know they are going to die. And maybe some of these guys are overshoot blind (although I wouldn’t bet on it) … but they are absolutely not blind to denial and energy.
You should post a short book review when you get done with it. And just in case you’re unaware, Martin has two youtube sites that are pretty good. Here’s a link to both. (Charles, you should try the 2nd link “Tyranny of the Will to Life”, I think you’ll enjoy it)
ps. Yes Rob, I’ll take that can of sardines bet with you that Martin will not reject MORT.
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I hope I lose the bet. He’d be the first “famous” person to understand the significance of MORT.
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I was in the grocery store today and they’ve put little red Canadian flags next to every product made in Canada.
I saw several shoppers pick something up and put it back and then say in a voice loud enough to make sure I heard them “That’s made in the US, I’m not buying that”.
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I remember that some time ago I saw a presentation by Andrew McAfee, a MIT researcher, in which he said that everything was going to improve because the economy was “dematerializing.” As an example, he showed a picture in which you could see a lot of office supplies and devices (landline phone, paper diary, computer with tube monitor, typewriter, reflex camera, various pens and pencils, notebooks and post-its, envelopes and stamps, ink bottles…) and then he smiled and proudly showed his smartphone, implying that we now carried all of that in a much smaller device, thanks to the development of technology. He then showed the corresponding graphs of the materials used and it could be seen that, indeed, much less copper, plastic, paper, etc. was used in the manufacture of a smartphone than in all previous office supplies, to achieve the same functions in a business. He even ended his presentation with a nice pic of a whale in front of New York city skyline. Human ingenuity is saving the day, and Earth is recovering while we can keep “business as usual”. All is good. The applause was overwhelming.
It seemed right. I must say he convinced me and I sighed with relief. However, the years went by and things did not seem to improve economically. They got awfully worse. Why, I wondered. Now, thanks to websites and blogs like this one, I can see the sleight of hand behind that presentation. It was enough for me to see the list of materials from the periodic table used in the making of a smartphone. True, it uses much less copper, iron and paper… but to manufacture a paper diary praseodymium, molybdenum, and coltan were not used. For smartphones, they are. And the more advanced they become, the more complex their manufacture gets. It’s not that the industry is “dematerializing”, but that it’s “doping” with rarer, scarcer and more difficult to obtain materials. The athlete runs the same eating less rice and chicken than before… but to do so he’s needed to start using amphetamines.
Once again, increasing complexity. For modern industry we need elements we didn’t use before, which are much scarcer and require much more complex and energy-intensive production, transport and processing systems, as well as straining geopolitical relations like never before. And if we assume we will not be able to maintain these more sophisticated devices for much longer and we stop using them (with the consequent blow to our way of life), copper and other simpler materials curves will take off again more quickly than before.
It remains to be seen how much time remains before one of the pillars supporting this increasingly heavy and complex building goes from cracking to completely giving way… but that’s all that remains. Time. Complexity has raised us to heights we never imagined, and at the same time condemns us to fall hard. That is what I think now. I wonder, am I closer to the truth…?
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Sorry, this was Klin. I don’t know why it didn’t recognize me, so I logged in. I hope it will, this way. It’s been years since I last logged in WordPress! 😀
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Klin, it looks to me like you have a pretty good understanding of what’s going on.
One correction that Hideaway has taught us. Your assumption that when complexity retrenches we will revert to simpler technology thus increasing the use of core minerals like copper is probably wrong. The ore concentration of copper is now so low that it cannot be economically mined without advanced technology. Same story for oil. So as complexity unwinds we should expect the supply of energy and minerals to fall.
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Well, it’s a relief to know that I’m starting to see where things are going (or maybe not so much of a relief after all, haha…). The truth is that I’m quite a noob in all this, that’s why I’m sharing these thoughts to see what you think and how far I am from the mark.
From what you say, I still leave out some details that makes things even worse than I think they are. Although I suppose that’s to be expected, my short experience in the subject has taught me that people tend to be fairly optimistic when it comes to it.
I’ll keep dropping by to learn with you all. I just hope my horrible English won’t make your eyes bleed too much… n_nU
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Hello Klin and welcome.
I agree with Rob, for a newbie, you have a good understanding of things… and your English is perfectly fine.
Keep sharing your thoughts. You’re probably going to learn a lot here. My advice is to lean hard into the number one resource at un-Denial… the audience. All of the questions and crazy thoughts running through your head, don’t be afraid or embarrassed to ask anything. That’s what these guys & gals are here for.
You can track your collapse awareness growth with your older comments, kind of like a personal journal. I have comments here from a year ago that have not aged well😊. It’s comical how I saw things back then compared to now.
And if you haven’t seen this essay yet, it’s worth reading. Great summary of our predicament.
Energy and Human Evolution – dieoff
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Thanks, paqnation! I’ll definitely check it out. 🙂
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B on debt and how it will destroy the fabric of society.
https://thehonestsorcerer.medium.com/until-debt-tear-us-apart-fc31dab93efe
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Ancient civilizations used debt jubilees to shut down the wealth pump
In the comments, Joe Clarkson said this
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Andril Zvorygin on peak oil, overcrowding, and the bible.
https://x.com/aizvo/status/1898842162940219681
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Totally corresponds with all the work from Prof Geoffrey West and others that have followed on this research, about scale in urban centres as the size grows.
They found materials and energy savings to the power of .85 for every doubling of urban size. They also found that every doubling of urban size came with a power relationship of 1.15 in terms of social influences, both good and bad. Patents follow this power law, Phd students/research etc, while so do crime rates, drug use, divorces, decadence etc.
It’s one of the aspects of complexity that is not allowed for, how all the different parameters of modern civilization are interconnected and researching any one in isolation gives a false image of what’s really going on, yet the possibility of anyone researching the whole lot and connecting all the dots are are remote or impossible, such is the entire complexity of the puzzle which is modern civilization.
Have a look at the conclusion Andril has come to …” Ruralization’s not an option; it’s the only way to stop the cycle.“
That’s making a conclusion based on one set of problems, not the totality of our situation. Where would the resources and energy come form to resettle the over 4 Billion humans in urban areas to rural areas come from? How would any factories that make the tools in cities have a workforce to make anything? what would the accommodation of these 4B sent to rural areas look like. How many would go willingly to a much lower lifestyle based on hard manual work? Pol Pot anyone?? Of course Andril’s ‘answer’ assumes we have not knocked ourselves out of the Holocene, the only short geologic time farming or growing our own food was possible.
There is just no solution, we are clearly in a predicament of our own making over the last 10,000 years and perhaps a lot longer. To gain the energy, materials, food, water we require to keep 8.2B humans going in this fairy tale lifestyle of modernity, requires the rape and pillage of all Earth’s resources and natural systems until they can no longer provide enough for the machine of modern civilization to keep operating.
Once it fails because of some limit reached, the collapse will be unlike anything ever experienced by humans throughout our brief period of dominance on this planet, as we have 8.2 billion humans in a highly degraded natural world where the carrying capacity was likely less than a million without damaging our natural environment..
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I agree Andril seems to have a blind spot on what is possible with 8+ billion. I don’t know for sure, but I have a feeling he knows, and is simply trying to point a path to the few who might make through the bottleneck.
I see this theme often in your comments:
While this is true I don’t worry about it like you seem to.
An analogy is gas molecules in motion. The huge number of molecules and the random nature of their motion make it impossible to understand or predict the motion of any molecule. But it doesn’t matter. We can accurately predict key features of the collection with:
PV = nRT
Similarly for our civilization, when energy declines, we cannot predict exactly what will happen, but we can know with certainty that:
Isn’t this level of understanding good enough?
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Rob … “Isn’t this level of understanding good enough?“
Yes and no.. Yes it is for those of us that have worked out the complexity and interconnectedness of everything humans do in our modern civilization, but as Andril’s post above shows, without thinking about the lot together, it’s really easy to come to some false conclusions.
Kira brings up this point in a post above when people talk in context of the hydrogen economy, yet have no idea about materials, or others that talk about the energy density of nuclear being so high that it will save us (it isn’t, try throwing uranium ore into a nuclear reactor and see what doesn’t happen).
Every simplification we do leaves gaps open, which have to be discounted in detail to make whoever understand their own lack of education in that area.
Without details you can’t get around most peoples denial of bad outcomes, while I’ll easily acknowledge there are plenty of people (most?) that continue to have denial even with full information, they just refuse to do research, so there is no reaching those people anyway.
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If you succeed in working out why all of the dreams people have for sidestepping overshoot will fail, that will be an amazing accomplishment, but I suggest you do it for self-satisfaction, because those facts will sadly not change most minds thanks to Varki’s MORT.
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So… I assume population has always been a problem too, in the sense that if we have too much we inevitably exhaust resources, but if we have too little we don’t have enough “crew” to pilot the system at the point it’s at and it inevitably crumbles?
Golly, it’s clearly a dead end, more so than I expected…
Do you think there will be any viable remnant of population that can carry on when the dust settles? Obviously at a much lower level of development. I don’t know… Maybe like in classical civilizations or at least as hunter-gatherers…
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Few days ago we touched on this a tiny bit. Check out the comments in this thread by Hideaway, Stellarwind72, and myself.
https://un-denial.com/2025/02/15/rfk-jr-confirmation/comment-page-2/#comment-110909
For sure no type of classical civilizations. And I highly doubt a successful transition back to hunting/gathering (even if it was just a couple million humans).
Here’s my guess at what world population will end up looking like:
2050 – 2 billion
2100 – 500 million
2150 – 50 million
2200 – 5 million
2250 – zero
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Probably Robs sardines will still be around in 2250. 😉
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I have had cans of sardines go off – they explode the can – not fun 😦
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Yikes! Did you figure out the cause? Was it a defective can, or defective canning process, or too high storage temperature?
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It must have been defective because bacteria were able to be growing. this can happen (see what I did there 🙂 )
You should never use a can if it looks swollen
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