Thank you to Gaia for contributing this essay on her experience with growing coffee in Australia, and my apologies for the delay in posting. I have been procrastinating everything in my life of late, I’m sorry.
When I think about end of growth implications, and the coming scarcity of things we now take for granted, coffee is at the top of my list of things I will miss. My favorite moment of every day is the first sip of the triple espresso Americano I make every morning.
Preptip:
We cannot grow coffee here in Canada and someday I will probably have to make do without. As a hedge against inflation, and as a buffer for the early days when supply will likely be intermittent or unaffordable, I stock a fair amount of coffee.
I have learned that unopened roasted beans taste fine well past their best-by date. I have not yet done enough tests to know how much past the best-by date is ok, but I currently assume at least 2 years.
I consume 50 g per day which is 1 Kg every 20 days. When scarcity arrives, I will reduce my consumption in half to double the duration, and then halve it again if necessary. I stock about 20 Kg of roasted beans, plus 10 Kg of canned ground coffee which has a longer shelf-life, plus 6 Kg of instant coffee which has an infinite shelf-life.
When my preferred source of caffeine is no longer available, I will switch to black tea, which I also stock in large quantities because it has an excellent shelf-life, and is still very inexpensive.
One of my projects this year at the farm I assist is to construct a shipping container size dehydrator which we plan to use initially for making tea from black current leaves. Apparently it’s a tasty healthy tea, but alas has no caffeine.
As the end of growth approaches we know there will be price inflation for necessities. The price of all food has increased a lot in Canada over the last few years, but coffee stands out as one of the worst. I buy the cheapest espresso beans available in my community and the price has almost doubled over the last 4 years from $14/Kg in 2021 to $22/Kg today.
Why are coffee prices increasing?
Grok: Coffee prices are increasing due to a combination of environmental, economic, and geopolitical factors affecting global supply and demand. Severe weather events, particularly in major coffee-producing countries like Brazil and Vietnam, have significantly reduced crop yields. Brazil, the world’s largest coffee producer, has faced droughts, frosts, and excessive rains, leading to lower arabica bean production. Similarly, Vietnam, a key supplier of robusta beans, has experienced droughts followed by flooding, cutting output. These disruptions have tightened global coffee supplies, with some estimates suggesting deficits for multiple consecutive years.
Rising global demand is also a factor, as coffee consumption grows in markets like China and India, alongside steady demand in traditional markets like the U.S. and Europe. This imbalance between shrinking supply and growing demand has driven wholesale prices up, with arabica beans surpassing $4 per pound in early 2025, a level not seen in decades.
I’m sure printing trillions of dollars to force a little more growth from lethargic energy supplies, while using an engineered virus as an excuse, probably also has something to do with the price increases.
Also, after reading Gaia’s essay, it’s clear there is a lot of human and fossil energy required to produce coffee, which no doubt has also contributed to the price increase.
Now over to Gaia…
Some days I am just so disheartened by what is happening on our planet on all fronts, but yet we must bear it and bear witness to the fullness of what we as a species have wrought. That is taking more courage than I ever believed I could have, but yet I must try and it certainly is a comfort to have friends on your site who are sharing similarly. I am finding great joy in communing with nature, especially through tending food plants and feeling so much gratitude for their sustenance for body and spirit. I have been wanting to share snapshots in picture and words of my experience on the land to add to the collective wonder and appreciation of so many others’ homesteading stories and images, including your fulfilling season at the farm. I think I can manage in bite-sized snippets, and if a picture can tell a thousand words, then I should be out of business sooner or later!
I think you Rob are the number one coffee addict that I know and definitely the most prepared for when the SHTF. I think you could open SHTF Cafe at the End of the World, it only needs one table and chair just for you! In honour of your habit, these are the very first photos I will share relating to our property and lifestyle. You may refer back to the post where I described in some detail (and you thought it was TMI until I clarified a very critical point!) how I successfully processed coffee from bush to bean–for possibly the first and last time as it took quite a bit of effort for not very many cups of the finished drink, which I don’t even imbibe! I do drink decaf but there is no feasible home method for that, unfortunately. I cannot say how my single estate grown coffee tastes, but it did smell as heavenly as anything when I was roasting the beans, so at least that is something.
The photo does not depict the intoxicatingly sweet fragrance from these flowers, just divine! This particular plant is a prostrate form and the flowers are layered on long branches, very attractive.
Here is the same plant about nine months later, with the berries finally ripe. Our property is located in highland tropics and the cooler climate which slows ripening of the fruit is supposed to produce a more complex flavour profile. I enjoy eating some of the red berries, the scant pulp has an appreciable sweetness, somewhat caramel-like, and the red skins which are loaded with antioxidants taste a bit like raw green beans, not unpleasant at all.
It took about 15 minutes to pick this bowl of berries, not too onerous as one just strips the branch from top to bottom. Squeezing the berries to pop out the beans, usually 2 per berry, sometimes 3, takes a bit more time and I found it best to do it underwater otherwise the beans have a tendency to fly everywhere. Then you have to soak the beans for 24-48 hours to ferment off the slimy pulp surrounding them (this is what makes them slippery suckers that shoot in every direction).
I didn’t take a photo of the drying and hulling process, which is the next step. I placed the beans in a mesh bag and sundried them for about a day. You know when it’s dried when the outer parchment-like husk starts to crack a bit along the middle of the bean. Removing this rather hard covering is the most time-consuming and tricky part of the operation. I looked online for advice and it seems like putting the beans in a food processor that has plastic blades (some models have plastic blades for stirring function, I happen to have this) which won’t pulverise the beans is the best solution if you don’t want to try to remove the parchment layer by hand. There will always be some beans to be hand hulled, usually they rub off in 2 halves. The plastic blades agitate the beans enough to slough off the dried parchment hull on most of the beans, but you have to do this in small batches. Then you still have to somehow separate the beans from the removed hulls and the best method is winnowing, tossing the beans and hulls up and down on a tray in a current of air (on a windy day) and the air blows the hulls away whilst the heavier beans drop back down into the tray.
Finally, you will have achieved getting green coffee beans that are ready for roasting. You can do this on the stovetop, constantly shaking and stirring the pot, or in an oven, also turning the beans, but I found the easiest way is to use my hand-crank popcorn maker which is basically a pot with a metal wire stirrer on the bottom that you can keep turning whilst on the burner (this is an essential device if popcorn is your thing, and a very useful one in any case because you can toast all manner of nuts and seeds–and now coffee beans!) This took about 8 minutes of cranking (and heating) but so worth it as the smell of roasting coffee is as heavenly as the smell of the flowers from whence they originated. I was really quite chuffed when I got to this stage just for that irresistible aroma which was actually emanating from my own beans!
Viola! As you can see, I think I roasted them to an espresso strength. At long last, you have in your hand the pitifully meager result of all the work I have tried to describe in painstaking detail. In total, I think I processed in my first batch enough coffee for one person drinking one cup for about a week or less. But that’s not the point, which was really to experience all the labour involved if one had to do this by hand so we can appreciate all the more how mechanisation (and exploited labour) are the reason why we have so much for not much effort on our part other than probably the final grinding and boiling water. It highlighted for me the impossibility of being able to self produce (even if one lived in the right climate) even a fraction of the foodstuffs we take for granted daily if we were to use our own labour. In this example, I still had to use some modern devices, and certainly fossil fuels made possible the final brewing, which is the whole point of the whole endeavour. Very sobering indeed, rather than stimulating as from caffeine.
Well, it looks like it still takes Gaia 1000s of words to describe anything even when accompanied by pictures! I hope you all enjoyed this first pictorial installment of Gaia’s garden and kitchen. For all you coffee lovers out there, enjoy what you have whilst you can! This documentary has probably prompted Rob to invest in even more quantity of coffee, not a bad idea really. No doubt it will be a trading commodity in our near future.
Namaste everyone.
un-Denial 
New Bill Rees presentation. He’s still pushing that our modern brains are obsolete for this new environment we’ve created. I sensed that he’s trying to add a couple new things to his story, but I’m not sure what.
He was good as usual, but a little bit rusty.
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I always agree with the first 95% of what Bill Rees states in relation to our collective overshoot predicament, but inevitably he gets to the end where people ask about ‘solutions’ and even included it in this podcast without being asked.
It’s all nebulous we have to slowdown, lower population, live more simply etc, without any path ever delivered about how any of this could happen. At the 53m and 05 second mark is a slide he passed over without comment, that has his ‘lifestyle solution’ for a smaller world population, yet it still has modern world trappings, that will just not be possible.
I suspect he always has this because of pressure to offer solutions, and falls into the trap of delusional belief that he accuses (correctly) of modernist thinking of having.
Why is it so hard for even those that are fully aware of the predicament, to have some type of useless, soft answer, instead of the reality that we are going over the cliff into full on collapse and there is nothing we can do about it.
In all likelyhood there never was anything humanity as a whole could have done to avoid the path we’ve been on for the last 10,000 plus years where we thought we were ‘better’ and ‘different’ from natural processes.
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Nice catch Hideaway. I must have been fading out towards the end. You also made me pick up on Bill skirting by the smaller human populations slide with his “I won’t get into that”. LOL, still taboo to even address it for two seconds.
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https://thehonestsorcerer.substack.com/p/living-with-collapse
Living with Collapse
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B’s correct with his JMG slogan advice of collapse now and avoid the rush. Now what that means to each of us is gonna be different. For me it just means that while my family is in shock and being hysterical… I will be calmly getting my exit strategy ready and then execute it. Can’t reason with shock trauma so I doubt I’ll even give them a heads up or offer to do them in.
Some good names in the comments over there. I liked Crazy Eddy’s best for calling out B with another slip up. Eddy did not like this line: “or come up with plans how to power down this civilization safely and peacefully”… I’ve called out B in the past for using some type of “future historians will be laughing at us” line. B’s denial control is still lagging behind ours here at un-Denial.
Another good comment was from Mike in a reply to Jack Alpert.
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Thanks for making me aware of the Jack Alpert comment. He rarely comments so when he says something I pay attention.
https://thehonestsorcerer.substack.com/p/living-with-collapse/comment/118254231
Jack used that comment to make public a new video on his plan to avoid 13 billion horrible deaths while retaining a few of our best accomplishments by reducing our population to 50 million by 2100.
This new video is a big jump forward in his thinking, and is longer and more detailed than previous videos (that I recall).
The big new idea is that he’s abandoned the plan to educate enough people on our predicament to make it politically possible for aggressive population reduction policies. I thought this would never work due to MORT and MPP.
His new plan is to educate one scientist with the skills to create a sterilization virus. Not stated is that this scientist must have defective denial genes however I imagine it might be possible to find such a scientist.
There are 3 issues that make me pessimistic about his new plan:
Regardless, it’s worth watching and discussing. Jack’s the only person on the planet who understands our predicament and is trying to come up with a plan to retain some of our science and technology.
If there’s enough interest maybe I should create a new post for this.
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Of course I’m anti any plan to retain some of our science and technology. I think everything in our modern brains needs to die off. So I figured I’d hate the video, but no. Really good. If I was in favor of sapiens continuing on in the history books… no doubt I’d be Jacks #1 fan. As I was watching it, I even said to myself “I hope the ruling elite don’t see this”.
I agree with your three pessimistic issues. Especially #2. Hard enough to get the one scientist on board. LOL, good luck with 8 billion. I’m trying to play it out in my head… They’d have to JFK it for as long as they could. A few breadcrumbs here and there… pretend babies are still being born… maybe this will end up being AI’s true purpose.
So ya, I’m interested in discussing more. I vote new post.
ps. I really liked his simplified mass energy flow model starting at the 13 min mark. Good ten-minute short story of how we got here and where we’re headed.
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To elaborate on my point 1, an army of scientists funded by trillion dollar pharma was unable to make an mRNA transfection for covid that worked, despite having the blueprints for the virus that they engineered, and they missed the fact that the transfection harmed more people than it helped, and they missed the fact it promoted variants creating a long term problem, and they were unable to manufacture it cleanly and consistently.
How is one rogue scientist going to engineer a safe and effective highly contagious virus designed to override the primary objective of DNA honed by 4 billion years of evolution?
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Here is another video, mostly about ‘tariffs’ yet it shows the complexity of a ‘simple’ F150 truck, with all the parts laid out..
Now think how all the machines being used to make the parts and the number of people involved throughout the system, from mining the raw materials, to the processing of minerals into the right quality metals, all before shaping them into the car parts, that need to happen, just for the 50m people society to have a simple modern car…
Any type of understanding of modern complexity clearly shows that modernity can’t be maintained without the huge diversity of markets, factories, and labor. Without the population, we lose modernity, so Jack’s plan will not work with an implied modernity.
I also have great difficulty accepting the 100m figure for hunter gatherers, all anthropological work I’ve read had only around 1-4 million humans killing off the megafauna over the last 100,000 years. Also the 600m for the agricultural period was only reached with exploitation of the New World by Europeans. There is no evidence this number could be sustained after the trees had been cut down and the soils degraded with 1,000 years of agriculture..
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I exchanged emails with Jack last night. He pointing me to his new video, and me pointing him at this thread. Hopefully he will drop by to explain what pieces of modernity he hopes to retain.
From past discussions I’m pretty sure he understands that much complexity and energy consumption must be jettisoned including cars and air travel.
I wonder what specific complexity he thinks 50 million can sustain?
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Looking historically, the downward process which leads to the final collapse most likely started back in around 1970-73 period when the exponential rise in energy use, especially oil faltered to a linear growth from then on.
There was no longer a huge surplus of cheap nearly free energy to build our world with, so all types of efficiency and replacement narratives took over. Back then a ‘family’ consisting of a married couple with several children could live a great and improving life on a single income, including owning their own house on a separate block of land, have a car, caravan and regular holidays, while raising the kids, in modern developed countries. Life and possibilities seemed limitless as every aspect of modernity was growing at maximum possible rate.
Since then the future possibilities for a young couple have become worse at the median level, even though all the official statistics show everyone is better off, a median earner cannot have the median type lifestyle of that time.
We have reached a point where the net energy for the rest of civilization outside the energy production industry is starting to fall at a faster rate than any efficiency gains can keep up, so there is less per capita across the world, despite attempts to make ‘others’ have greater falls in their per capita use of energy and materials.
We continue to get closer to the precipice of collapse with energy and material declines on a per capita basis declining. The exact tipping point into where feedback loops are far greater in reducing production of energy, materials, food and water, than have happened up until now is rapidly approaching. However exactly what tips us over into full collapse will remain unknowable until it happens.
My take is still that it all becomes inevitable very rapidly once we are on an accelerating decline of oil production as the system will just not be able to maintain the net energy to keep all supply chains going that are required for the gathering of energy, materials, food and water in our highly complex modern world.
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I think peak cheap oil is very important, but is part of a much larger context of peak cheap raw materials. So far I think that improvements in technology have “papered over” the fact that just basic goods such as steel, petroleum products, and even things like wood (of a decent quality) are much more expensive now than they were in the 1970s. Substitution and technological replacement of raw materials that get too expensive has been going on rapidly since the 1970s, just look around your home for evidence. It’s normal to think of particle board and other lower grade products as substitutes for products that were made with higher grade materials not that long ago, but it’s just evidence of the fact that the products that were considered “normal” not too long ago are increasingly out of reach for normal people.
People like to use manipulated inflation figures to explain that the price of raw materials has gone up “faster than inflation”, but what they don’t realize is that the availability of raw materials is not necessarily tied to the societal cost of extracting them. In other words the “true” cost of material extraction is not necessarily reflected in the price. An excellent example that I’m sure most people here are familiar with is oil. When oil became very expensive, the economy contracted in 2008 (there were other factors, but the oil price was a key contributor). This made governments around the world, and particularly in the US lower interest rates. This created a lot of financing to expand the fracking industry, which in turn lead to lower oil prices than would otherwise be possible the last 10+ years. Couple that with demand destruction (read civilization getting poorer) and you end up in a situation where oil in inflation adjusted terms hasn’t gone up in price the last 10 or so years, but at the same time the civilization around that oil production has gotten much poorer in material terms. The cost of basic goods like food and shelter have gone up tremendously, which would make sense if civilization is prioritizing oil extraction over, say, cattle ranching or housing construction. Civilization generated the capacity to extract oil at the expense of other parts of the system, which means that for example a skilled laborer who could have developed into a great construction worker or cabinet maker instead went to work for a fracking company.
Examining the keystone materials civilizational costs in terms of currency is not an accurate measure, since the economy can be distorted to make a few goods cheaper at the expense of many other parts of the system that are harder to measure. What you end up with is a world where oil is the same price as it was in 2016, the government claims that wages are keeping pace with inflation, but people who are making the median salary are putting their big-macs on payment plans.
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Love your breakdown of the single income days of the limitless past vs today where two or three incomes aren’t even enough. I don’t know how at this stage of my awareness that that wouldn’t have already been obvious to me. Of course it’s about energy… it’s always about energy. But if you had asked me prior to your post, I probably would have said something about the Reagan-Thatcher era and/or the womens liberation movement.😊
You also helped me narrow down my peak date of birth game… If your gonna live for eighty years… as a White Empire Baby… and the only chance of you dying early, is on the battlefield… what is the best year to be born so that most of your life takes place during the good energy slave times?
I think the answer is around 1940, a few years prior to the start of the great acceleration… There’s a big downside though. Your gonna spend your last 20 years in the peak of idiocracy. Would be nice to avoid the digital age and post 9/11 life. But being born in 1920 is not an option. Too risky of being affected by the great depression, spending your teen years in the dust bowl era, and ending up dying in WW2.
So ya,1940 it is. Safe from the draft (too young for Korea, too old for Vietnam). And being thirty years old in 1970 sounds like the peak of it all to me.
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Rob I was talking to my husband about how a few of the smart collapse aware men aware to be going a bit off the rails. He wondered if it could be Hormone Replacement Therapy (HRT) – ie testosterone. He said a lot of older American men are on HRT, but it impairs cognition. Something to ponder
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Interesting. I know nothing about HRT so have no opinion.
Other strong candidates include brain damage from mRNA transfection micro-clots which I do understand, and brain damage from the covid virus itself, the mechanism of which I do not understand and cannot defend, however some smart people I follow are pretty sure is a thing.
There does seem to be an across the board dumbing down since covid.
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Hmmm this guy made me wonder if fetal alcohol syndrome is getting more prevalent. It appears so
https://www.cdc.gov/mmwr/preview/mmwrhtml/00036699.htm
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I know someone with FAS. It’s pretty high on my list of worst ever crimes.
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There are different levels of severity – so it makes me wonder if this partly explains the general “dumbing down”. Especially if coupled with ongoing alcohol consumption as an adult. Fetal alcohol spectrum disorders (FASD) are considered the most common preventable cause of developmental disabilities. Contrary to what many women believe, alcohol in early pregnancy is worse.
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I’ll bet you a can of sardines that requiring children to have 72+ vaccinations compared to the 5 I received will prove to be the most common preventable cause of developmental disabilities.
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Imagine if the medical “professionals” admit that!
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Even if they were just injecting saline, shots are a pretty traumatic thing for small childen. It’s likely the worst pain your average western child suffers throughout their childhood. Now imagine your parents are subjecting you to it before your old enough to understand the broader rationale for it. Same with circumcision, which is itself barbaric (why not chop off other “non-essentials like ear-lobes and men’s nipples? disgusting). If it’s a few shots, then it’s probably not as big of a deal, but these kids are getting what, 72 shots? in 5 years I think? That’s like 14+ shots a year. There must be some sort of traumatic response to that. Of course I’m sure that will never get studied, but it must have some impact.
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Just found a jar of Cranberry Jelly in the cupboard that is 10 years past expiry date. Looks fine. Will let you know how it is if/when I open it. Pork Roast perhaps.
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LOL, I had one of those a few years ago and it was perfect. I used it to sweeten a cabbage and pork dish.
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https://philipmcmillan.substack.com/p/the-immune-escape-tipping-point
Fast Eddy brought this interview with GVB to my attention:
IS COVID Creating an IMMUNE ESCAPE MONSTER?
Saludos
el mar
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A comment as a summary:
@misterdubity3073
My summary of what I think Geert is saying: So in the highly vaxxed countries, the subset of population who is highly vaccinated has weakened immunity. In those with chronic Covid infection, there will be mutation towards a final endpoint variant (I’m calling it the Most Valuable Player or MVP, my terminology just to give it a name). This MVP variant will be well adapted to the immune-refocused multiply-boosted part of the population. It seems to me that this MVP variant would NOT be particularly more infectious or more virulent towards the never-vaccinated subgroup. This would lead to an epidemic of the vaccinated of chronic Covid infection, other infections, and autoimmune disease. In the immune weakened, the MVP Covid variant would tend to cause Covid of mild severity but chronic duration. But the more weakened an individual’s immunity, the more severe would be Covid infection, other infections, and autoimmune disease. Such individuals might collapse into an AIDS-like final common pathway. As for the never vaccinated, they are still at some increased risk due to a larger than usual amount of circulating viruses, high viral loads, not only of the Covid “MVP” variant but also many other viruses. The never-vaccinated, if in otherwise good health, will have increased numbers of cases, but a tendency at least with Covid for mild to moderate disease.
Saludos
el mar
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I listened to this interview with Geert Vanden Bossche while clearing the fence line at the farm today.
There’s an interesting parallel with what Dr. William Rees said in the interview posted by paqnation above.
Both say we have disrupted complex systems (Rees on climate, Bossche on immune system/virus ecosystem) and the systems are now responding in ways we do not understand and our models no longer predict what we observe. The experts are panicking.
Bossche as usual is inscrutable but this is my interpretation of what he said:
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Not trying to get hideaway and the gang stirred up, just ran across this, and chuckled. Desperation disguised as innovation? Maybe a bit of last minute profit seeking as well.
Now to catch up (it’s raining today) on all the links that have been shared. So much doom to scroll, so little time 🙂
https://electrifynews.com/news/work-evs/caterpillars-battery-electric-trucks-the-future-of-mining-efficiency-and-sustainability/
Further to hideaway’s comment upthread on when the decline started- this chart shows the GOM (not GOA) rig count, and how it skyrocketed right after the oil crisis. I was right out of college, and worked on building offshore drilling rigs that got bigger and bigger to go deeper and deeper. More recent charts show how the offshore rig count is declining. hmm, must not be a good investment……..
https://drillingcontractor.org/2022-nov-rig-census-figure-1-63977
The second law is a bitch. So it goes.
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Damn, a battery operated truck. What an obvious solution to overshoot. No need for diesel so it sidesteps peak oil and solves climate change. It’s so comforting to see Hideaway debunked. 🙂
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LOL, “sustainable mining” might be my new favorite buzzword. (I’m still waiting for the day that I see the term “sustainable genocideing”)
Checked out a few other articles on electrifynews and it seems they are the most obedient useful idiots on the planet. Probably funded by big oil or something.
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I’m glad you had a chuckle scarr0w, as these types of articles really are a joke…
Take the main truck shown in several photos and mentioned in the text the 798 AC. It’s a monster, that when you look up the specs for has a power output of 2,312KW and a diesel tank size of 7,571 litres that gives around 40 hours of continuous operation. It operates at around 50% efficiency.. According to the Cat performance handbook pg 15 a 798-01 AC will run at between 43 gal/hr and 72.5 gal/hr from low to high power use..
In another photo, there is the “PGS 1260 HD Energy Storage System (ESS) module” in a shipping container, pretending to power a 793 truck not a 798 AC truck. This unit can supply 1,260KWh, or 1.26MWh of power.
Their 1.26MWh power pack would supply a 798 AC truck with about 30 minutes of full power,(actually only 1MWh at continuous operation) if you could put enough batteries into a truck that large, or perhaps with a trailer..
To put things into perspective the 7571 litres of diesel the 798 AC can hold is around 80MWh of ‘energy’, with about 40MWh of actual power at the wheels produced.
https://www.empire-cat.com/sites/default/files/products/documents/CM20220207-d665b-60362.pdf
With 40 of these trailers you could match the fuel tank of the 798 AC…
Caterpillar clearly knows that batteries are not viable, but they are playing along with the green narrative for popular green denial thinking….
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In case you have any doubts on the importance of Jack Alpert’s goal to retain some of the more valuable features of modernity after we collapse, this new video on what life was actually like in Rome will set you straight.
We have it so good today!
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The bathroom stuff was surprisingly very interesting. I never think about that important aspect of overshoot and overpopulation. Like Paul Kingsnorth says, I flush it and let someone else deal with my shit.
Every single day Rome produced 350k gallons of urine and 100k pounds of feces, with most of it ending up in the streets. Oh, the horror. The stories of people just throwing their shit buckets out the window is hilarious. And it was so rampant that getting killed by a falling bucket cracking your head open was an actual thing they had to worry about.
LOL, some things never change. Perhaps even back in hunter/gatherer times they would stealthily hike down to the next tribe over to do their morning business.😊
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The description of the Roman public baths filled with unchlorinated water and people trying to heal infectious sores stuck with me.
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Maybe the problem with ancient life were due to humans living at densities far above what is sustainable and natural, Particularly the disease. I would rather live as a hunter-gatherer than live in any large city before ~1900 CE.
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I wonder about human diseases being just a natural part of civilization. In hunter gatherer small groups that only had intermittent contact with other groups, my suspicion is that disease would be very uncommon.
If any group did get a debilitating disease from say something like a deadly bird flu, then that small group could have been wiped out without the rest of the humans even knowing the disease existed..
It’s probably close to a miracle that we haven’t had a deadly disease spread throughout humanity over the last couple of hundred years, as we are now exposed quickly to any new disease that develops anywhere on the planet..
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Another superb conversation on covid. Nice to know there are some intelligent people with integrity that are as angry as I am.
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I enjoyed this conversation about Covid & Pharma/Medicine, it was intelligent and enlightening. It’s too bad that Brett and Michael are collapse unaware as all of the discussion about anarchy/government and how to fix society misses the point in that civilization is going to disappear shortly.
AJ
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I agree. More famous polymaths in denial.
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Was going through my youtube comment history. The above was from a 2023 interview with Bret Weinstein and Dave Rubin. I Can’t Overstate How Dire This Is | Bret Weinstein (don’t watch… its garbage). This was just prior to me finding un-Denial. I was obviously stuck big time in full noble savage mode. As well as Nate’s great simplification. LOL.
After watching this new interview with Bret and Michael… I’d still say the same thing to both of em (maybe not the 2nd paragraph). Michael was good though. Rob, you highlighted the best part. My other favorite moment is around the 34 min mark when he’s talking about how doctors were prescribing cigarettes 60 years ago and how nowadays we laugh at that… but it wasn’t martians from another galaxy… this was us and we are still that.
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You’re right. We don’t change.
Today we’re supporting the genocide of Palestinians, because… reasons.
60 years ago we dumped agent orange on Vietnam, because… reasons.
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I have just finished my essay on denial here. I hope someone finds it helpful. Thank you to monk for the Berman reference! Here’s an excerpt:
Evidently, we are not very good at making sense of the world. Predictions fail, and contradictions abound. Economists project infinite growth; physicists conceive of infinite parallel universes that indicate we can never really die; and so-called “rationalists” concoct fantasies of consciousness uploading
into an immortal superintelligence. It can only be reasonably concluded
that we did not at all evolve to prioritise truth-seeking. In Denial, Ajit Varki elaborates that with greater reasoning capacity, we evolved self-awareness, and then theory of mind—the awareness of others’
minds. Theory of mind is absolutely crucial for evolutionary social
cohesion and competition, but with it inevitably comes the awareness of
our own deaths. Naturally, within a decision-making architecture that
seeks to mitigate immediate suffering, an awareness of death leads to
the possibility of suicide as a permanent solution. To mitigate this, we
need the combination of a crippling fear of death and an optimism bias
such that we can believe in a reason to continue living. This is the
crux of what Varki encapsulates in his Mind Over Reality Transition:
reliable map-territory correspondence is only incidentally favoured when
it optimises evolutionary persistence.
In Breakdown of Will,
George Ainslie elucidates that we have evolved to prioritise short-term
reward-seeking and pain avoidance, except in the case of extreme
long-term potential stimuli. Immediate survival, as ever, is most
important; however, we need some future planning capacity to survive,
and thus within this architecture, we need some hope of significant
future reward. Those who do not develop such a capacity—or those who
have become total outcasts with zero hope of social integration, as
described by Durkheim in Suicide—typically
select themselves out of the gene pool, either through self-sabotage or
suicide. Incidentally, this doubles as a population control mechanism;
one must not deny the brutality of evolution. Understandably, one of the
primary motivating factors behind long-term planning is permanence:
it makes little evolutionary sense to pour a significant investment
into a potential reward that might not last for very long. This is the
basis behind our sunk-cost fallacy.
This operates on multiple spatiotemporal scales: we deny our own death
to maintain motivation to persist, and then we deny the death of our
tribe through our obsession with legacy. It is
often said that a society grows great when old men plant trees in whose
shade they know they shall never sit: this contribution to the
permanence of the tribe thus acts as a group-level fitness augmentation.
These evolutionary teloi—denial of death, optimism bias—cannot be
conceived of as so-called “accidents”, but rather adaptive constraints
on our epistemic filters.
Our evolutionary denial is not limited to an optimism bias. In The Elephant in the Brain,
Kevin Simler and Robin Hanson elucidate the many ways in which we
deceive ourselves about our own motivations and impulses in order to
deceive others. Backhanded compliments are genuine attempts at kindness;
charity donations are never about prestige; education is entirely about
teaching critical thought; and I am writing this essay solely to be
helpful, and not also at least partially for your
validation. Indeed, social norms are necessary for cohesion and trust,
but it can be individually advantageous to skirt these norms wherever
possible. In fact, small lies are often mutually beneficial: there is no
reason to expose small problems to others that are better dealt with
alone, and it is often unhelpful to expose deeper motivations that may
be hurtful to others. However, it is impossible to fully replicate the
way we might act if we truly believed in a lie unless we first believe in the lie. This is the nature of computational irreducibility: second-order simulations of complex processes are always expensive and inaccurate. And thus actors must immerse themselves fully in the world of the characters they play, and mirror neurons have us literally feel the pain of others to construct our empathy.
Evidently,
social cohesion would immediately break apart if norms were never
upheld and everyone cheated. Thus, we develop feelings of guilt,
rejection, shame and unlovability. Through the use of what Robert
Axelrod describes as meta-norms,
we reward the upholding of norms, and punish bystanders who look aside.
Furthermore, we are compelled to generally give others the benefit of
the doubt, at least within our in-group, to prevent the spread of a
wildfire of paranoia. In A Happy Death, Camus writes: “we always deceive ourselves twice about the people we love—first to their advantage, then to their disadvantage.” Our egoic project, then—our epistemic telos—becomes
one of crafting sufficiently coherent narratives to placate the id such
that it does not fear rejection and punishment. In short, it is what
Harry Frankfurt describes as bullshit:
a story intended to persuade without regard for truth, with truth only
contributing as an incidental advantage. We lie to ourselves. We repress
feelings, thoughts and memories we feel may lead to our exile. Random
thoughts of violence or desire that may otherwise be considered just as
whimsical and absurd as thoughts of sprouting wings or winning the
lottery may be elevated in salience—in extreme cases leading to
egodystonic conditions such as harm OCD.
Indeed, we have a certain amount of control over our narratives, but
our id must feel they are at least somewhat believable; a battered and
bruised id will lash out in paranoia, demanding more and more from the
ego until it falls into the depths of despair.
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I can’t wait to read it 🙂
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MORT is amazing!
The guy who runs the only site dedicated to discussing peak oil doesn’t understand the significance of oil.
https://peakoilbarrel.com/opec-update-may-2025/#comment-789171
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https://peakoilbarrel.com/opec-update-may-2025/#comment-789247
Hideaway’s lessons are not being absorbed.
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Yes!
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I’m half way through a book on the history of refrigeration recommended by Alice Friedemann and really enjoying it.
https://www.goodreads.com/book/show/199514774-frostbite
This new video on how the global fresh fruit supply chain works is discussed in the book.
After watching this you may develop a deeper appreciation for apples and bananas in your grocery store (and the magic of diesel).
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I remember a day not many years ago when I bought bananas in the deep winter here in Central Europe and it just felt so surreal walking the in the cold dark with my fresh produce. It’s hard to describe. Akin to being an inhabitant of a giant hospice but with floors of gold and diamonds.
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Not collapse related at all but there is a great YouTube channel called “Life & The Earth” and they make great, educational content so obviously they have a low view count. Anyway, I enjoy the paleontology ones a lot and you might too.
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Thanks for the tip! The channel looks interesting. They advertise that no AI was used in production.
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Crazy Eddy is always railing against preppers. I sometimes wonder why he’s so harsh towards that crowd… Well, this movie (The Survivalist 2015) reminded me exactly why I’m 100% in agreement with Eddy.😊
I saw it a while back but forgot how great it is. You know you’re in good hands with the director right off the bat during the opening credits when we see one of those graphics showing the human population growth explosion in parallel with oil production.
Without a doubt the most realistic film portrayal of life after civilization collapses, that I know of. Fans of ‘The Road’ might disagree. I finally was able to make it all the way through that movie. The Road is boring, dreadful and depressing the whole way through. I don’t ever end up caring about the father or son for even one second… Complete opposite of The Survivalist.
Both movies are free on Tubi streaming. (in the US)
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Thanks for the tip. The trailer for the Survivalist is super intense. Don’t know if my denial genes can take it. I hate sad endings. Does it have a happy ending?
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spoiler – A mix of sad and happy… but more on the happy side because it gives you a sliver of hope. If you know the movie Children of Men, its similar to that ending.
You should give it a try. I think you’ll enjoy it. A lot of these type of movies leave me exhausted with a feeling of darkness… and I’m mainly relieved to be done with it, so that I never have to watch it again. This movie is not like that. I could’ve easily watched it for another 2 hours.
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Excellent, thanks, I’ll give it a try.
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if you don’t like sad endings don’t watch Gallipoli then
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I liked this movie too, definitely worth a watch. Excellent portrayal of the fact that the overwhelming majority of anyone’s time post-collapse will be dedicated to securing food.
My only critique is that the guy seems to be “doing just fine on his own” at the beginning of the movie. It’s the post-apocalypse version of the “I don’t want no trouble” protagonist trope at the beginning of an action movie before he, well, finds trouble. People are much more likely to survive in groups than as individuals. There’s tons of reasons for that, from mental health to share of labor if a member of the group falls ill, to compensating for disabilities or lack of skill in a given essential area (infections, accidents, fighting, a lot of people would be missing fingers for example). More importantly there’s tons of essential things that are easy to do as a team but nearly impossible to do on your own, like lifting heavy/awkwardly shaped objects for example.
If you want proof of this, go backpacking on your own, then go backpacking with a friend. You’ll immediately understand.
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It didn’t take long for Florian’s channel recommendation to release a good one.
If you know the Laws of Thermodynamics are the most important laws of science, but don’t understand them, or are curious how our species discovered them, then this video is an interesting and easily digestible place to start.
Not discussed is why only one species figured them out, or why that species denies the laws apply to it, but for that you have to turn to Varki. 🙂
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You just summed me up perfectly.
Thanks, I’ll check it out.
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More entertainment. This is another Canadian dude I follow. His schtick is stealth camping. He’s funny as hell, but the main reason to watch him is because of what a genuinely good person he is.
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Cool channel. I subscribed. He has a lot to learn about low energy, healthy, low cost meals when camping. Hint, you don’t plug a slow cooker into an inverter connected to a battery, nor do you buy a battery operated oven from Canadian Tire.
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LOL, ya he’s definitely not a bushcrafter.
I’m ignorant with electricity so not sure what you mean. Does it suck too much power by plugging the crockpot into inverter connected to battery? And are you saying you shouldn’t use a battery operated oven?… or you shouldn’t buy one at Canadian Tire?
If you enjoy his channel, I recommend older videos when he was at the peak of his game. Stealth Camping In Roundabout is the title of one of his best and most popular vids.
Life has been tough on Steve in the last couple years. His mom, wife, and best friend all died within about a year of each other. Understandably, he’s lost some of the passion.
This clip was when he informed the audience about his wife passing. I can’t watch it without shedding a few tears. (and I hate myself for being curious if it was vaccine related)
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I use my summer camping trips to practice post-collapse eating. It’s possible to eat well without any cooking at all. Think sardines and chili straight out of the cans, or pumpernickel bread with hard cured salami that does not require refrigeration, and dried fruit for desert.
If you do want something hot using a battery for energy is a bad idea because a charge won’t last long. I like isobutane (or propane) stoves for convenience, and when that fuel becomes scarce I’ll switch to a naphtha stove, and when that fuel becomes scarce I’ll switch to gasoline which my dual fuel Coleman stove can burn, or diesel which my wick stove can burn.
He seems like a nice guy. That’s a lot of hardship for a young person.
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Ahh, I gotcha. Yes, much stealthier your way.
My goodness! These outdoor channels have me so used to seeing the cooking of good meals… that I didn’t even pick up on what you were talking about.😊
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A new president with good intentions to reduce the deficit made it 120 days before giving up and growing the deficit faster than ever.
This despite having a strong mandate, and having warned voters some pain would be required, and having caused very little real pain so far.
So, either we have become so soft that no pain is acceptable, or some big problems are brewing behind the curtain.
My guess is limits to growth driven by peaking energy override all other priorities because our system blows up without growth.
Expect more price inflation of necessities.
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That assumption is questionable. If he really wanted to reduce the deficit, he wouldn’t be giving tax breaks to oligarchs.
https://www.reuters.com/world/us/us-house-republicans-set-pre-dawn-votes-get-trump-tax-bill-over-finish-line-2025-05-22/
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Steve St. Angelo’s take on this is behind a paywall but you can get the gist from the headline…
https://srsroccoreport.com/u-s-shale-oil-peak-has-arrived-as-drilling-rig-count-plunges-oil-prices-likely-to-remain-weak-due-to-trump-tariff-economic-policies/
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The US is running wartime-level deficits just to provide historically lackluster growth. 36.2% of all GDP is government spending. GDP is a very suspect calculation, more propaganda than a real measurement, but if you accept that framework then think of it this way… if the government cuts spending by 3%, then approximately 1% gets knocked off of GDP (0.36*0.03). This doesn’t even include the multiplier of new spending through the system. For example, the government pays me to sell them a hammer, I pay my employee who made the hammer money in wages, they take that money to get a new car tire, the mechanic buys a sandwich etc etc. There’s no way of really accounting for that multiplier effect, but poor people/workers spend marginal income more quickly on more real goods and services by percent than their richer equivalents, and most government spending goes to the poor, the retired, and working people. So basically a 3% decline in government spending would probably have a 2-5% impact on gdp (totally making this up, but it’d be higher than 1%).
This is all theoretical and back of the envelope stuff, but I’ll return to my original point, which is that the US has wartime deficits and is only growing at 2-3% per year (as of 2024).
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Hate to reply to my own comment, but I didn’t include the “so what does this mean” part…
Basically if trump actually cut government spending, then you’d have a recession in very short order, and no president/political party wants to be in power when a recession hits. Inflation is preferable to depression, which is why countries who are able to print their own currencies never go bankrupt, but over a long enough timeline will eventually have high levels of inflation. Trump’s policies aren’t that radical at the end of the day. For all of his posturing, his legislative record is pretty vanilla republican stuff. Tax cuts for the rich, protectionism for american businesses, enforcement of immigration laws. I remember Bush jr. talking about the same stuff (look into his auto tariffs!).
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We’re Experts in Fascism. We’re Leaving the U.S. | NYT Opinion
Do you think there is a serious risk of the U.S. becoming fascist? If you think these historians are wrong, what specifically are they wrong about?
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Does it matter?
The US supports genocide, disregards international law, breaks its agreements, and its “democracy” has no influence on key policies due to corporate money.
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Maybe the US is dropping the pretense of liberal democracy and is just revealing its true colors…
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I think democracy and civility is enabled by sufficient necessities and some growth to offer hope for a better future.
Democracy and civility may disappear with scarcity of necessities and no hope for a better future due to energy depletion.
A good example is Germany which was a well educated democracy with deep scientific and cultural accomplishments that switched very quickly to a genocidal war machine.
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The way I see it (for what it’s worth 😉
Yes, this is fascism. But, it is fascism at the end, which is very different than fascism at the start (she made the comparison with 1933 here https://youtu.be/IXR9PByA9SY?t=40).
It will be much more limited in its power. A lot weaker than it wants you to think. Entropy is kicking in. It is going to fade away.
Yes, people dependent on mega-structures (state, large organizations, corporations) can, will be layed off. But, these mega-structures are short-lived anyway, at this stage, and highly toxic. Learn to be independent of these structures as soon as possible.
Yes, unfortunately, more horrors might be tried to be implemented. In an effort to “save” a cherished past which can not exist anymore. Stay calm. Don’t cooperate. Follow your heart. It’s going to be alright.
To me, this fascism represents what Nate calls the Mordor future. Like a patient who is having a final skin rash, I think that we are seeing what was underneath the US system for a long time, and disguised, come out. It’s a last attempt to maintain the status-quo, before unravelling.
I noticed the video was highly edited (at some point some expert starts a sentence which is ended by another: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=IXR9PByA9SY&t=63s). Also, it mainly appeals to fear (which blocks subtle thought mechanisms, creates automatisms).
I don’t like that. Control. Propaganda. It exists on both sides, in all flavors.
I would like to know what these experts said during covid. This was already a period of fascism.
And in a way, these kinds of videos are making the current power seem more powerful than it really is.
Left and right are both delusional. Two behemoths fighting each other on a land which cannot support the weight of even one of them anymore. It’s the end of the empire. Be ready for change. A lot of positive change, but not at the level you are looking at (that is central control far away from you). You have a lot of power. Look around you, and inside your heart. Think about what you would like to see around you, instead of harbouring fear. If you first need to clean up darkness in your soul, start there. Go towards love. It will be fine.
Best.
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Is Superintelligence inherently (self)destructive?
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Some people I respect like Chris Martenson think rising Japanese long bond yields point to an imminent 2008 like crisis.
Others like HHH think it’s a nothing burger.
I’m thinking HHH’s and Hideaway’s perspective that everything can be safely ignored except the rate of energy consumption is a great way to simplify world events.
When energy stops growing, or worse, falls, we can be confident collapse is imminent.
Until then, relax, enjoy life, and if you’re so inclined, prep if you’d like to survive the coming storms a little longer than your neighbors.
https://peakoilbarrel.com/opec-update-may-2025/#comment-789321
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Here is the article HHH mentioned above. (The roughness is due to it being an English translation.)
Notice the 2027 prediction aligns with Lars Larsen.
https://futurocienciaficcionymatrix.blogspot.com/2025/05/iea-agencia-internacional-de-la-energia.html
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Still digesting Hideaway’s insight that non-essential wasteful consumption is required to enable essential consumption.
It’s a tough pill to swallow, kind of like the 2nd law of thermodynamics.
https://peakoilbarrel.com/opec-update-may-2025/#comment-789319
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Rob, the full understanding of our complex civilization is probably impossible for anyone to fully understand. Just look at “The Honest Sorcerer’s” latest piece on the modern electricity grids that almost no-one can fully understand, as just one aspect of the entirety.
What “B” fails to grasp in his long term slow degrowth/collapse scenario is that all the ‘other’ complex subsystems must continue on near normally for only the grid to fail in the longer term. There is never any thought about multiple systems failing at the same time, all slowly at first, but feedback loops eventually accelerating decline to full collapse.
It wont be a shortage of electricity, or oil or coal or copper or lithium or any other material that “causes” the collapse. They will all be contributors to declining feedback loops that are outside any and every government control. Every system we have for energy gathering, metal, mineral, food and water gathering is highly complex, relying upon a huge supply chain of expertise, energy and parts.
Imagine a business that makes some simple looking tiny nuts and bolts out of a range of materials depending upon the market they supply. some are used to hold alternators together in cars, some are used on computer boards to hold the computer together, some are used on drill bits holding the sensors together in hte harsh environment of the bottom of the hole.
What happens to this business when the electricity supply becomes intermittent, the cost of copper, nickel, stainless steel goes up, because of depleting mines, lower oil supplies leading to inflation? Their costs skyrocket. But what happens to that business if the market for most of their tiny nuts and bolts falls rapidly for all the computer bits at the same time as input costs are going through the roof?? They eventually go bust, with the business not being in the category of ‘too big to fail’ so receiving government support.
Now multiply this tiny business by tens if not hundreds of thousands around the world. Supply lines of important bits and pieces, all essential for our modern complex society in a variety of ways, not fully understood by anyone, all start going bust, creating huge supply problems for the producers of oil, gas, cars, trucks, food, solar panels and everything else.
As unemployment skyrockets from all the ‘discretionary’ uses of energy and materials, going out of business, the feedback to all those essential components of complex civilization, is less demand and those businesses going bust as well, creating greater unemployment, and higher prices for every commodity that becomes much scarcer.
It’s not just lower supply of oil that gets us, it’s the feedback loops from the consequences of less energy in the entire system, leading to less demand (in economic terms due to high prices), that stifles businesses everywhere, then extra problems of grid instability, shortages of metals, feeding back into other areas like food production that all occur in a world that totally relies upon full complexity to exist.
We don’t have parts of a system that interact, we have a full system that includes all the ‘waste’, as that ‘waste’ contributes to the growing market size of every ‘widget’ produced by a myriad of different businesses across the world.
As EROEI has declined over decades, it has been compensated for by more efficient use (increased complexity) and still growing overall energy use, with many material items using less materials (a modern fridge compared to one 60 years ago, a this screen TV, computer monitor, LED lights instead of incandescent, etc, etc.) All these ‘efficiency’ gains only exist because of increased complexity and suffer from the laws of diminishing returns to added layers of complexity.
Once in energy decline, the existing relatively small feedback loops from a system near balance, that has led to greater debt and wealth inequality, greatly accelerates in the ‘have nots’ not being able to purchase what they could in the prior economic, energy and material environment of our civilization. The rate of demand for goods and services starts to collapse, which feeds back into lack of demand as costs of businesses are going up, sending them bust adding to unemployment, decreasing demand further, which makes so many essential parts unavailable to so many other businesses, farming, mining energy collection, which of course feeds back into higher prices and less supply of the lot, which in turn accelerates the downward decline.
We’ve been extending and pretending everything is alright for decades instead of deliberately reducing population as much as possible and never reaching the level of complexity we now have. We now totally rely upon the full version of modern complexity to gather food, energy, water metals and minerals to keep our civilization going so when one aspect starts to fail because of actual physical limits, the whole house of cards comes tumbling down very very quickly.
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Thanks Hideaway, I understand and agree with all you said.
Despite knowing we’ll never do what a wise society should do because of MORT and MPP, I still like to know what the optimal path is.
If someone asks for my opinion I want to be able to offer something that would actually help rather than a bullshit prescription as offered by most “experts” that actually make things worse.
In the past the correct path was population reduction and constraining complexity growth, however you say it’s too late today for these prescriptions because we need the population and complexity to compensate for falling resource quality.
Assuming the goal is to minimize total suffering for all life, what is the optimal path today?
P.S. This would be an excellent essay topic in case you’re interested.
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Rob, …. “Assuming the goal is to minimize total suffering for all life, what is the optimal path today?”
I have no idea, as all paths lead to collapse.
If we made a near zero births compulsory across the world, tomorrow, then we’d collapse anyway in the near future due to markets all crashing and taking most essential businesses (in other words most!!) with them, which leads to all the feedback loops mentioned above..
If we went on a last fossil fuel binge digging up all accessible coal to turn into liquid fuel to offset oil declines, it would only lead us to a higher level from where we collapse anyway possibly due to environmental/climate feedback loops, or eventually oil, coal and gas production falls.
I’m increasingly thinking we are on a set path that was never possible to stop or change, from the moment humans decided agriculture was a good idea, and it will cause the sixth mass extinction taking a huge percentage of all life with us. As this has happened 5 times before, it’s not a biggie for planet Earth as life in different forms to present will evolve over time for the next few hundred million years while life on planet Earth is still possible. Then as the sun expands and Earth gets too hot, eventually all life will cease.
Even if we had a one world government enacted tomorrow, so that all military spending could cease, with all the nuclear subs/ships devoted quickly to production of desalinated water for regreening desert margins, while providing food for millions of poor, while enacting some type of population controls etc, it would still lead fairly rapidly to falling/failing markets, which would crush businesses and all the feed back loops kick in..
We are in massive, massive overshoot and the huge population that exists as our civilization unwinds rapidly, will guarantee a bad outcome for the remainder of existing life, due to the mad scramble for food and fuel to keep warm. I’m all ears to any exit plan of less damage, but I can’t see one..
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It’s not hard to imagine some things we might do that would increase suffering like starting a nuclear war, or blocking trade, or growing debt even faster, or encouraging a higher birth rate.
You’d therefore think there must be some things we could do to reduce future suffering.
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Rob, before you were talking “all life”, but if you mean just human lives then that is a slightly different proposition. Obviously, the less humans that are born and the more that can die peacefully is better for reducing human suffering, but perhaps a nuclear war (limited) and fast collapse of civilization, with people in cities starving quickly is the best outcome for “all, other life”.
Anything that prolongs the collapse of civilization, will be worse for most other life forms, especially higher lifeforms as the human survivors eat everything they can catch, while burning as many trees as they can to stay warm and cook with.
Perhaps the best outcome would be a new, very contagious, deadly disease that only effects humans, that kills a large percentage of them at night in their sleep without suffering, so that the rest of life has a chance of surviving while civilization itself quickly collapses with a whimper, not effecting the rest of life much at all. Even then there will be a cost as fences get in the way of animal movements as the climate continues to change….
Maybe I’m just in a darker mood today, but realistically there are negative feedback loops to whatever we do, while realistically the path we are on is that one that counts, not great theories of degrowth which seems against the human collective belief systems., except for us oddballs…
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Your comment makes me wonder if covid was a failed attempt by someone powerful and aware.
Reality sucks.
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The biggest conspiracies are right there in the open…
Name one major corporation, western government, or incredibly rich person who is against women’s education. Ok, what about family planning (condoms in particular)? Women’s rights? Women joining the workforce? Increased economic complexity (urbanization)? I usually hate rhetorical questions, so I’ll answer them myself, not many or none. Some of them even say they support these things to limit population growth (Bill Gates comes to mind).
All of these things have a larger impact on human population in the last 100 or so years times than any plagues, wars, or famines. Look at developed countries where women are allowed education and economic independence. The birth rate plummets. Giving women the choice to not have children has led to there being far fewer people than there would otherwise be in western countries, and we’re starting to see that same pattern globally as these trends continue.
I think that the combination of women having more autonomy coupled with changes in the economy leading to less people living on farms (which makes children economic assets/more labor) is already reducing the rate of population increase dramatically.
The trends currently point to urbanization, women’s rights, and economic contraction causing a very rapid decrease in the population in the next few generations independent of whatever plagues or natural disasters may come. Even if we get the star-trek future, I bet there will be less people in it than we have today.
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I also want to clarify that I’m all for women’s rights, both ethically and more abstractly as an indirect way of curtailing environmental destruction. I don’t have the time or inclination to read UN or major NGO papers on it, but I bet at least buried in the footnotes they list that family planning and women’s rights are a way to reduce population in economically/environmentally stressed regions.
That said I don’t want it to sound like all women’s rights movements are some grand conspiracy to reduce births, but empirically we can say it definitely has that impact, and that impact has had a greater impact on population trends in at least developed countries than any other factor.
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If that was the case, would the response to Covid be a form of mass euthanasia?
(I’m not saying it is justified, I am just saying it would be understandable).
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I’m not sure, but I’m leaning toward no. So far it seems like there are a lot of adverse side effects from the covid vaccines, way more than people were led to believe/are being reported on, but we’re not seeing the number of deaths that would be needed to make a major difference in the grand scheme of things.
You could say that there’s the possibility most of the deaths from the vaccine will occur in the future from some long term complication like cancer or immune system disfunction arising from the vaccine, and that it’s only been 3-4 years since most people got vaccinated. I guess that could be true, but for now we can only speculate.
Let’s say it was a population control experiment for argument’s sake though, I just find it hard to believe that scientists could engineer a poison that kills most people after several years of not demonstrating any major symptoms. As widespread as Covid vaccine injuries are, it’s pretty clear to me that most people who got the vaccine have not had drastic side effects. I think for most people they probably lost a few IQ points and their hearts got a little weaker. That’s bad and may knock a few years off their life expectancy, but it doesn’t necessarily mean people are going to die at rates that would greatly impact population levels.
There’s also the issue of who took the vaccines. If you were some mastermind attempting population control, why would you want to kill off the people who are demonstrating obedience, and leave the conspiracy theorists and others who are skeptical of authority alive?
My leading theory is that it was a money-grab untested vaccine that will likely end up killing millions of people, but on a planet of 8 billion+, it would need to have a much greater impact to make a difference on global population levels. I don’t research this stuff as much as other commenters here though, so I’d imagine others will have more informed opinions.
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I guess most cities will end up like Nazino Island.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Nazino_tragedy
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Good conversation you two are having. And based on your comment here, my Great Reset take doesn’t sound so far-fetched. It’s an unstoppable process. I might start preaching it again.😊
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Rob, I went back and reread that post from 2016 and all the comments. I would have mostly agreed with what you wrote back then as I was also looking for answers. The last post in the comments from yourself, is what I’ve eventually come to realise from working out the real numbers of our situation…..
“Thank you for reminding us why we are screwed. Even people that understand overshoot don’t want to do what needs to be done. Enjoy the party while it lasts.”
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I spend a LOT more time than the average citizen trying to understand the trajectory of geopolitics and I currently have no idea what will happen next.
Every outcome seems possible including nuclear war and a tense peace.
Possible and probable outcomes change almost every day.
I don’t recall another time in my life being so uncertain and unsure of everything.
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I too try to keep track of what’s happening in the greater world of politics/war/peace, AND I have no clue. Trump appears to be rapidly going into full-blown crazy/looney tunes. I sometimes wonder if this is how narcissistic personality disorder and dementia play out. One minute he sounds like nuclear war and the next minute it’s peace. Maybe it’s like some of the pundits have been saying he goes by whoever was the last person to talk to him before he tweets out his nonsense. And just think Harris would have been worse. The USA and the West have incompetent leadership that precludes a slow collapse.
AJ
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Some synchronizing force seems to be in play.
Our western leaders are shockingly incompetent and citizens and journalists don’t think there is a problem.
I wonder if it is scarcity intuition? I was thinking about covid brain damage but our leaders were incompetent at the start of covid before there was time to damage any brains.
Anyone have any other ideas?
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Ya, they’re all older than dirt.
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Most journalists are too scared to say anything that doesn’t paraphrase a government press release
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Journalism had some intelligence and integrity when I was young. Mainstream journalism today is a disgrace.
Do you think the cause is simply that the internet killed advertising and impoverished newspapers so they all now depend on government money?
It feels like some something else is going on because citizens seem to want nonsense news.
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I have no idea about the cause. Probably just a combination of govt and big business funding creating a conflict of interest
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“Anyone have any other ideas?”
I know you’re talking about incompetence here rather than evil… but I still think it all falls into the same bucket we were talking about the other day;
Back when I was newbie here, I was pushing a Daniel Schmachtenberger quote about technology & animism. You correctly shot me down with –
Seems like that same concept applies to the present… A lot of people want to believe that we are different and better now than in the past.
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https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Kurt_Tucholsky
What can we do? We can enlarge Tucholskys stair (talking – writing – remain silent) enlarge with to levels:
laughing and living,
as Emil Cioran and Rob told us! Enjoy the party while it lasts.
Saludos
el mar
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HHH hits the bullseye today…
https://peakoilbarrel.com/opec-update-may-2025/#comment-789366
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A little over a week ago, there was a dust storm in Chicago. The last dust storm before that was in 1934 during the Dust Bowl.
https://www.the-independent.com/news/world/americas/chicago-dust-storm-chemicals-illinois-b2756323.html
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Ah, good to know those things are still popping up. Living in the AZ desert for over 40 years, I’ve seen hundreds of dust storms and dust devils. But I’ve only seen three of these mega ones. All around 2010-11. We thought it was gonna be the new normal. I actually miss em. It’s fun when weather starts getting scary like that. The local weathermen even made up a new word for it… Haboob. These things are insane. One mile high and 50 miles wide. And they really are just like the CGI dust storms in Interstellar and Mission Impossible part 4.
For two of them, I was hiding in my house waiting for the world to end… But for our biggest one (7/5/2011) I was at the park playing tennis. For how massive the wall is, you’d think there’s no way you’re not gonna notice it coming at you. But the entire park was caught off guard. Everyone frantically scrambling to get in their cars to wait it out for 20-30 minutes. Me and my buddy were the only ones to brave it out. Just sat there and watched the big wall coming at us until we were engulfed in it. We could only take it for a few minutes before jumping in the car.
You know how when you spend all day at the beach… and the next day you’re still finding sand in crevices of your body. Same thing with this except it lasted a week.😊
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Cool story. That must have been a scary experience. We have nothing like that here.
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A watched a good little video of most of our problems, but of course it ended with the soft ending of ‘we need to do things differently’ instead of the natural conclusion of the process of civilization they identify.
It seems denial kicks in everywhere when the obvious conclusion to their findings get ignored at the end…
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Gold’s up. Potatoes in.
Chris Martenson today continued on his theme that it feels like it did just prior to the 2008 GFC.
He offered a couple new data points:
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That’s some very nice looking soil you’ve planted the spuds into. How deep is it and what’s below?
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It is beautiful soil. I think it’s about 18″ deep.
Sorry, I forget what you call the next layer but if you go down about 15′ you hit clay because the pond we dug holds water without a membrane.
We had a wireworm problem 10 years ago but it seems to have mostly gone away. Expecting nice potatoes without irrigation.
We planted Sieglinde which is a German butter variety. They are my favorite and I highly recommend them. We were the first to grow them in this area. Now several farms grow them.
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Art Berman is pretty good today.
https://www.artberman.com/blog/the-reductionist-delusion-how-we-got-climate-change-wrong/
Trigger warning, his essay has the obligatory happy ending.
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Similar truth up to the ending of Gail’s new piece today, where denial kicks in ….
This is Gail’s last paragraph….
“We don’t know how soon new economies will begin to evolve. Eric Chaisson, a physicist who has researched this issue, says that there is a tendency for ever more complex, energy-dense systems to evolve over time. This would suggest that an even more advanced economy may be possible in the future.”
What it ignores by comparing to large physical complex systems like the largest stars, is how the largest stars collapse in a supernova, with the remnants being dispersed across huge expanses of space and all ‘complex processes’ ending. Plus in the very long term there will be heat death of the universe.
It seems to me that denial is more than just doing well, it’s taking over the psyche of many/most in the doomsphere who are seeing all their predictons/theories from the last 20 years coming to fruition, yet they are changing the ending to achieve wider audience, or just in plain denial to excise themselves from depression.
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Indrajit Samarajiva today on China…
https://indi.ca/where-is-chinas-national-security/
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I’ve never had a problem with Gail Tverberg’s belief that a higher power is in control. I’m sure it provides some comfort and as long as the higher power abides by the laws of physics who cares?
Now Gail’s implying that complexity may continue to grow despite fossil energy depletion.
That seems to be grasping for hope at best, and wacky at worst.
https://ourfiniteworld.com/2025/05/27/economic-contraction-coming-right-up/
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Oops, you wrote this as I was typing the above post, they clearly belong together…
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LOL! We had a spooky quantum entangled mind-meld from opposite sides of the planet. It’s clear evidence that god exists. 🙂
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Nah…. It’s clear evidence that advanced aliens with long distance telepathic communication melded our minds in a brief instance from a vast distance away, to just show us humans what’s possible….
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I think Gail will be closing her long running blog soon and doesn’t want to say goodbye without leaving hope. She has said it all!
Saludos el mar
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Gail’s done a lot of very good original research and thinking for many years on the most important aspect of our overshoot predicament and can retire with pride.
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100 % agreed!
Saludos
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Best geopolitical discussion I’ve heard in a while by the best interviewer with the best interviewee.
Col. Larry Wilkerson speaks out loud the quiet bits that you rarely hear discussed.
Scary thing is he’s a top expert and understands how dangerous the situation is but has no clearer opinion of what happens next than I do.
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I listened to this yesterday also. I think that this is the first pundit online that I have heard say that maybe Trump is suffering early signs of dementia. Trump is indeed clueless as evidenced by your above quotes and he can’t retain any information in his brain long-term (minutes to hours). It’s literally stream of consciousness for him. Unless he has some strong handlers around him, I think he will probably get us into a war.
AJ
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I also thought his discussion of oil forces behind the conflicts was interesting.
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Whew, that’s a relief. FBI Directory Kash Patel says Epstein committed suicide. I was worried the US government was evil.
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I am pretty sure that comment is sarcastic.
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I’m pretty sure you’re right. 🙂
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BBC Israel Bias DESTROYED By Gaza Doctor
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Publish or Perish is now on overdrive with AI slop.
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Dr. Tim Morgan’s claim, if true, probably explains the geopolitical insanity we are witnessing.
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Agreed.
And it nicely aligns with the feeling of calmness I got starting December 2022.
The war against life has ended.
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This article was pretty good. A year or two ago, I’m sure it would’ve stirred something up inside me. But this stuff does nothing for me anymore. I do like his passion and how he thinks he’s stumbled onto something big with the ambush analogy. I remember that feeling. Like you’re the chosen one to bring 8 billion people to awareness. LOL… The doomasphere is so much more fun with a little hopium. I’m bone-dry now.
The Only Way Out of Collapse – by Justin McAffee
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Me too, I’m kind of numb to all forms of great new ideas about our predicament.
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That’s weird because I just stumbled on that article a few hours ago too. I didn’t think much of the ambush analogy but the rest of it was a pretty good summary of our predicament.
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Agreed.
He seems to be somewhat still stuck in this “everything is a war against something” conditioning.
But the second part of the article was kind of good.
I think he misses the point that so much is out of our hands and in the hands of system dynamics greater than us (if you are atheist), God/providence (if you prefer that way of spelling it out, like me, because the word “system” still hints for the possibility of understanding by the human intellect, control).
To me, now is also (mostly) time to stop struggling and float on water, or glide down from the Mount Civilization, if you will.
(still I agree with him, in that each of us, has to, can do his part to see the world he would love)
I have faith, in the sense, I am trusting and relieved (by the end of human supremacy, the end of growth, the end of arrogance, the end of control…) Room to breath, at last.
🙂
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LOL! Hideaway’s finally run out of patience with morons. 🙂
https://peakoilbarrel.com/short-term-energy-outlook-may-2025/#comment-789516
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Note to self: Don’t ever waste your time watching takedown videos. They’re always fueled by jealousy or some hidden agenda.
Anyone out there a fan of Professor Dave on youtube? If yes, please slap yourself in the face.
Never heard of him until this video popped up in my playlist – Sean Carroll Humiliates Eric Weinstein (Piers Morgan is Also Dumb). I don’t like Eric so it was pretty easy to watch this and be entertained. But I also noticed how Dave was just doing the lowest hanging fruit thing of hurling insults and putting up idiocracy graphics & sound effects… he might as well be the wacky morning DJ for your local radio station.
After the video ended another one popped up that included both Weinstein brothers. Unlike Eric, I can deal with Bret… but I still wanted to see a good takedown video of him so that I could share it here and piss off any fans of Bret. LOL. But after watching it, the only thing I’m sure about is that Professor Dave has figured out a niche for himself by taking advantage of a population that can no longer think for itself. Having nearly 4 million subscribers is almost a dead giveaway that the only charlatan in the room, is you.
His analysis of Bret’s “pandemic lies” might as well have been written by the ruling elite (17:21 – 30:00). Wouldn’t surprise me at all if Dave is being funded by big pharma… but more than likely he’s just drowning in his own denial for getting jabbed up.
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Did not watch.
I forgive those who allowed themselves to be misled by the covid lies and who contributed to the crimes through their ignorant obedience however today there is no excuse for not admitting their serious errors and I have zero tolerance for people who still support the covid crimes.
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Oh c’mon. At least watch the covid part just to see how big a jack ass this professor dave guy is.😊
Video is queued up.
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My click might give him some ad revenue. He should be in prison.
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Dave is a complete moron. He believes in the twin gods of scientism and progress. He ALWAYS supports the next thing. Here’s an example: he literally believes transgender people are the opposite sex to what they are – a clear sign of low intellect. I have read articles that Dave “references” in his videos; and he has gotten every single one wrong that I have bothered to fact check him on. And when people point out his mistakes, he closes comments on his YouTube. His career is making click bait garbage for people who like to pretend they have a high IQ because they got vaccinated or some shit.
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As someone with ADHD, I often will watch Nate’s podcasts over a few days.
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What is it about Nate’s videos that are a challenge for you?
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It is not the content itself, it is more that I struggle with ADHD.
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Just finished Nate’s latest.
Did you notice he does cartwheels to avoid saying the word overshoot?
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He has talked about overshoot on some of his other podcasts though, so he isn’t completely in-denial.
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Every time I think I’ve got a decent handle on the dozens of serious covid mistakes made by our health “professionals” I discover another deep dive into a different dimension of errors.
It’s so bad and no one gives a shit. I’m scarred for life.
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Sigh.
China’s not an enemy, China’s a competitor that’s kicking your ass.
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This is where none of the leaders and most commentators, just have no clue as to how the modern world actually works.
China is an important cog in the machinery of 6 continent supply chain modern civilization. It’s not an enemy nor a competitor, it’s just another part of the system. If ‘people’ decide to stop China’s economy somehow, then watch out for all the repercussions that are totally unanticipated.
The way politicians and economists talk, you’d think that sticking a steel bar into the cogs of a highly specialised machine would have no effect, so they can do it again and again.
They may have got away with this type of action in a growing global system of more people (markets), more materials and more energy use, but to expect the same mild effects when there is less, less and less is delusional thinking.
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I’m not following your view that China is not a competitor.
Chinese companies, like companies everywhere, are trying to be more successful than their competitors.
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On the level of materials and raw products and very basic mass produced components that are often used in all the companies ‘competing’ with each other. Something like 90% of REE’s come from China, 80% of all raw copper, 90% of processed lithium chemicals…. then there is basic pipes, tubes, wires, rubber hoses, insulation, steel pipes.
Sure others also make these products, but a sudden reduction in what China supplies the world would lead to total economic crash, with many unknowable important “bits” suddenly being unavailable, which would lead to failures in production of all sorts of ‘widgets’ in the rest of the world…For example certain types of capacitors, diodes, or resistors for electronics, etc.
There are many factories that also make these types of things in Japan, South Korea, Thailand, Vietnam etc, yet you’ll find some of the inputs all these other factories rely on often come from materials processed in China.
It’s the supply chains of supply chains that will cause a great disruption, with the complexity of how our entire modern civilization actually works, being too complicated for people to consider at all. There seems to be an attitude that we can break ‘China” by stopping their production of A, B and C, then we’ll just have to make them ‘here’, without considering that the machines necessary to make A, B and C are made in China, while the materials required to make A, B and C also get processed and come mostly from China…
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What happens if extreme heat makes it unsafe to work outdoors in the summer in some regions?
https://archive.ph/DETUz
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Excellent essay on peak oil by B today.
He mentions the requirement for growing complexity to extract oil and minerals but still seems to think we have another 25ish years of gradually declining living standards. We’ll see. I’m thinking that complexity will unravel much quicker than that.
https://thehonestsorcerer.substack.com/p/so-this-is-how-the-oil-age-ends
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Net Zero will happen, just not voluntarily…
I thought it was roughly 20%.
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Me too. Maybe if you include process heat in the total, electricity drops to 10-15%?
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Hmmm… big Ukraine war escalation today.
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“In the last few hours alone, four strategic air bases of the Russian Aerospace Forces have been attacked by Ukrainian drones. From that distance, the drones can only be controlled via state-of-the-art, shielded satellite communications. But Ukraine has no satellites. Of course, they had help. British? French? Americans? Whoever? That would be direct complicity in the attacks on the Russian Federation’s strategic nuclear air force. According to Russian nuclear military doctrine, this should trigger a nuclear Russian response. Essentially, today they declared nuclear war on the nuclear power Russia. I hope Putin will react prudently!
From “lexa” on X. https://x.com/rebew_lexa/status/1929236994493747202
Saludos
el mar
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I’ll say goodbye now to everyone in case we don’t wake up, if Russia responds as they have said they would in the past and we go up the escalation ladder as all previous Pentagon war game scenarios as shown. It’s been nice knowing you all.
AJ
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You’re a good person and it’s been a pleasure spending time with you.
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So far, no nuclear response. It seems that the West is playing a game of Chicken with Russia. If neither side yields, we all lose.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Chicken_(game)
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Hmmm…. All the mainstream news feeds are silent this morning about the attack deep into Russia on it’s nuclear forces.
Instead they focused on UK’s decision to invest in war readiness.
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Listened to much of the punditry, that we post here on occasion, this morning. Seems most think this was a dangerous escalation by Ukraine that Putin would be well within his rights to retaliate against most of the West, but especially the U.S. If Trump didn’t know about this he is an idiot that is kept in the dark and if he did know about it he is a complete fool. Either way Trump is ultimately responsible for this escalatory step. We all have to thank Putin that we are still alive and that he is focused on destroying Ukraine and Russia surviving for some time into the future.
There are truly evil people (some of the U.S. political establishment and their enablers in the military/industrial/deep state complex) that think a nuclear war is winnable by the U.S. and are pushing for it (according to Col. Wilkerson). Hopefully they will not get their wish.
AJ
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Pretty good Chris Martenson podcast yesterday. He reviews official oil supply forecasts and observes they went from forecasting growth in 2023 to forecasting decline today.
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I didn’t realise he was still doing the podcast, I will have to tune in when I go for a walk
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Thousands evacuate from fast-moving fires in Canada
https://www.bbc.com/news/articles/cz9yv2g07p0o
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Denial by Hypernormalization
https://www.15-15-15.org/webzine/2025/06/01/la-hipernormalizacion-ante-el-colapso/
Hypernormalization is a paradox: by imposing the fiction that the system is stable, the dominant powers that thrive on it don’t save it, but rather exacerbate its collapse. Ignoring the signs of crisis—economic, ecological, psychological, social—doesn’t halt the deterioration: it accelerates it in a corrosive and uncontrolled manner. Thus, by trying to preserve normalcy , what is actually achieved is to intensify civilizational collapse. The greater the hypernormalization, the more disruptions in the system’s structures are reproduced. In other words, hypernormalization intensifies the collapse and increases the likelihood that it will be chaotic and catastrophic. This is the paradox that urgently needs to be explored if we are to recover some form of collective lucidity.
Quark recommended this article!
https://futurocienciaficcionymatrix.blogspot.com/2025/05/la-produccion-de-petroleo-usa-bate-el.html
Saludos
el mar
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Exchange between Hideaway and HHH.
https://peakoilbarrel.com/open-thread-non-petroleum-may-27-2025/#comment-789633
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I think they are both right. Plus never underestimate a government’s ability to meddle and f things up!
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I agree there are elements of truth in both points of view.
If we had allowed the system to naturally deflate and simplify as it did so I’d lean to HHH’s view, however because we have forced growth with unrepayable debt, and removed all of the safety valves, like for example ignoring bank fraud and preventing the market from correcting, I think we have created a bomb that will validate Hideaway’s view.
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Survivalist wrote above this thread:
Where is the figure 2 years coming from? Is it from the Diesel exports stopping in 2027? (I can’t find the original report).
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LOADOFSOIL replied:
I wonder how groundwater depletion will dovetail with the other symptoms of overshoot such as climate change, arable land loss, biodiversity loss, etc..
https://insight.cumbria.ac.uk/id/eprint/6927/1/Bendell_BeyondFedUp.pdf
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Going back over 3 decades, my wife and I bought a 50% interest into a niche footwear manufacturer. We became very quickly aware of supply chains and the importance of constant, consistent supply lines. There were and are always hiccups in every aspect that need constant attention and monitoring for troubles.
One of our machines was a Fipi clicking press. In early July one year a very specific part unexpectedly broke, and needed replacement. Only one very specialised part would fit, made by one part supplier in Italy. After contacting people around to world for this replacement part, no-one had any spares that I could find.
I couldn’t contact the supplier directly, as the factory that made this part was closed for summer, until early September. Basically Italy manufacturing was closed for summer..
If that factory was closed permanently, then the entire press was a useless statue, as it was a specialised tiny electronic part, made to fit that particular model Fipi press only..
It’s exactly the same with farm equipment, it all runs on just in time supply chains of probably millions of very specialist parts, with huge machines becoming useless very quickly if the exact part is not available. This is especially so for modern equipment.
If we had the equipment made 60-70 years ago, then it was possible to ‘bodge’ up a repair for something that broke, a lot of the time anyway, (not all the time), to keep the machine running. I’ve done this on my 70 year old Ford Dexta tractor, that was over 30 years old when I bought it. Even then some parts are very specialised, like the front wheel bearings shape and size, that only come from one supplier. (they were still being made 10 years ago when I needed a new set!!).
To me it’s people with academic, financial and every other non practical background, that have no clue how any machine operates that think a wave of the hand ‘prioritization’ will cover a continued positive outcome for whatever, in a world that will be completely different to anything anyone has ever known, when we get to energy and material declining availability.
It’s one of the main reasons I think collapse will be much faster than anyone anticipates, as the complex supply chains for every machine in the world will break down, possibly due to financial reasons, costs rising rapidly, sales falling rapidly, which will make production of millions of essential ‘parts’ and ‘consumables’ of both essential and discretionary machines come to an abrupt stop.
Governments can try and prioritize many businesses, but can they control the overseas supplies of raw materials, can they conjure the machines required for the manufacturing of parts from thin air, or can they choose the correct businesses to keep going?? No none of it, all while every other government priority is falling to pieces? Not a chance..
Then, with over 4 billion people living in urban areas, all requiring food, water, heat, shelter, perhaps cooling, refrigeration for their meager food supplies, and electricity to cook with, all failing around the same time, mostly a long way from food producers. What could possibly go wrong with governments deciding at this point, to prioritize anything?
I’m sure unemployed, hungry, cold, thirsty, angry people will just meekly stay put and die peacefully, without causing any trouble for authorities…
Sorry for the sarcasm, but every discussion I have with supposedly educated people like HHH, it increases my understanding that it’s the entire complexity of our system, where it comes from, how it operates and it’s importance in our system of civilization, that people completely miss in their understanding of the big picture…
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Our leaders are behaving VERY strange. They probably don’t understand the issues you discussed, but my guess is they intuit big problems coming soon.
Col. Larry Wilkerson in the interview I linked below said the quiet bit out loud. The UN says we’ll hit 10 billion but will be unable to feed 10 billion, and that’s without the collapse you and I expect.
He said he knows powerful people who believe the only solution will be to kill billions with nuclear weapons.
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Do you have the timestamp? If the UN knows we won’t be able to feed 10 billion, why aren’t they urgently pushing countries with high fertility to reduce their birthrate?
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42:35 but I’d start earlier around 33:30 for important context.
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Read this comment and your exchange with HHH. A few points:
1) when does the government “prioritize” and how do they do that? How do they justify it? If they come out and say that growth is over then what do you think the reaction would be? The stock market and debt-based monetary system would collapse. What politician wants to be responsible for that? It’s one thing to implement rationing for a war where there’s a clear inciting incident and a feeling that it’ll be temporary, but try being a politician and pitching permanent and declining rationing to the public forever. Look at what happened to Jimmy Carter- you’d be voted out immediately.
2) How do you justify what’s “essential” and what’s “non-essential”? HHH picked out sports and movies. Well just looking at history, movies were made and pro sports were played during the Great Depression and WWII. I just don’t buy that it’s possible to distinguish very neatly between essential and non-essential, or that people are going to prioritize their spending in a “rational” way. Even with food. Is pork essential? What about strawberries? Chocolate? Are those things more essential than, say, toothpaste? Who decides that? Is it even legal?
3) Assuming you get the public to buy into rationing for the rest of their lives, and you’ve sorted out what’s essential and non-essential, and the supreme court has upheld your decisions (and you’ve presumably won the dictator of the year award!), next you need to think about the bigger picture. With global supply chains, you’d need to coordinate with other countries and get all of their leaders and populations to agree with your assessment of what’s essential so they can agree to work with you on keeping these “essentials” going. Tough to do in your own country, can’t even imagine how hard it is to do in someone else’s. Now imagine how hard it would be to do in everyone else’s country.
4) So let’s assume you’ve gotten other countries onboard, and everyone on earth is only working in an essential industry. How do you decide on distribution? How do you reward/incentivize companies and citizens? Do poor countries that are producing essential goods stay poor? Why would they agree to that? What about workers who are doing essential tasks in different sectors of the economy? Do some make more than others? You think this through for a little bit and you realize that it’s practically not possible to do this without a global government that would need to micromanage everyone’s lives down to the minute detail, and every country on earth would need to agree. We can’t even get a binding resolution through the UN to slow down carbon emissions! Moreover cutting resource allocations and dictating distribution sounds like a recipe for civil unrest, if it’s even possible to implement, especially given that people will be going through having their standard of living dropping this whole time.
I guess I just don’t buy that you can do this in an organized way. Look at the global leaders we have now. You think they’re going to pull this off? If not them, then who’s in the bullpen? I think what’s far more likely to happen is what’s always happened during civilization decline and collapse- resource wars, unrest, impoverishment, etc etc.
I don’t know how long it’ll take, but there isn’t going to be some global dictatorship that’s going to hold a declining industrial civilization together.
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All good points.
Gotta say I hate being told there is nothing that can be done to make the future less bad. As I said earlier, I can think of many thing we could do (and are doing) to make the future worse, so you’d think there must be some things we could do to make the future less bad.
I suppose if you are super charitable and believe our leaders are smart aware people trying to do the best for their citizens you might think they tried using a ginned up pandemic to form a world government via the WHO, and a digital currency (which would provide the tools for rationing and forced consumption changes) via vaccine passports, but their plan failed.
This would also explain why they hate Russia and China and populist leaders everywhere that resist their rules based order globalized dream.
P.S. I’m not charitable and don’t believe this.
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I think if there were a plan it would have already started before Covid. There’s been discussions about resource depletion at high levels of government since the 1970s at least. I just have trouble believing if there were a plan they’d have waited until this late in the game to get things going.
That said I’m pretty sure that Covid had to have been some sort of conspiracy. I just don’t know what else to make of the fact that global governments coordinated so closely and so rapidly. Another thing that doesn’t get talked about is how all these different countries supposedly developed a vaccine independently of one another so quickly and ramped production so fast. I just don’t know how you set up the manufacturing & supply chains for billions of doses of a type of pharmaceutical product (MRNA) that had never been manufactured at scale so quickly without some level of pre-planning involved. I still think that it was more of a financial shell game than some sort of grand plan about resource constraints or population reduction, but I have no evidence of either. If it were about population reduction though I’d imagine the virus would have been deadlier. Maybe the vaccine causes infertility after a generation or two? Who knows? But again, I’m not sure what to make of it, but it’s clear there was much more than meets the eye going on there.
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I agree with you. Here’s a fuller account, a two hr documentary called The Agenda. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ZFHHOBiUrkg
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Hello Hideaway, this is from Lars Larson:
https://skogslars.blogg.se/2024/april/additional-material-to-my-book-on-global-oil-exports-more-corroborating-information-epilogue.html
“Something of the most important to understand regarding oil, is that the EROEI of oil is closely linked to the whole economy and its health. If the economy collapses, the EROEI also collapses. If natural disasters and global heating and the Green Transition take more and more of our money and our energy, this is subtracted from our EROEI. Because all these things are rising exponentially, this is in some way a fourth exponential factor to add to our three that I have mentioned in this book. This was a point made by economist Umair Haque in an article several years ago, that I cannot find now.
The alternative economist Gregory Mannarino often repeats that the American economy is “in free fall”. Mannarino’s “free fall” harmonizes with what I know about the “free fall” of global net oil exports. These two “falls” are like a self-reinforcing positive feedback loop, and are unthinkable without each other.
This fact, that oil exports, and with it the whole of civilization, will collapse with an exponential speed (accelerating), is the least understood and hardest truth in all of collapsology, and is so incredible that it requires us contemplating it every day, and that we especially contemplate how fast the collapse already goes, especially in the US. It is a heavenly truth, indeed. And it is mathematically certain, whoever can calculate on it and see that it is so.”
Saludos
el mar
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I remain impressed by Lars Larsen. For new readers I summarized his work here:
https://un-denial.com/2024/07/29/book-review-the-end-of-global-net-oil-exports-by-lars-larsen-2024/
Larsen retired to prepare for collapse, if anyone finds any new work by him please post it.
From the same essay linked by el mar above:
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One thing to also consider: The loss of jobs in discretionary sectors may be balanced by de-automation in essential sectors. Automation is a side-effect of having huge amounts of cheap energy.
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Good rant today by Col. Larry Wilkerson.
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Found this essay from a Sam Mitchell video. I guess his name is Itsovershoot. Pretty good WASF summary. I think he’s part of the new wave of doomers that are slowly trickling in. I like this crowd because they’re angry.
Understanding Our Collapsing World – Itsovershoot
I was impressed. And he even has some fire awareness. But he’s still confused (takes one to know one😊). I sense a big Michael Dowd and Nate Hagens influence. He’s hung up on Daniel Schmack’s famous animism story. And he’s pretty far away from understanding that full consciousness is always guaranteed to fail.
LOL, that’s a warm and fuzzy outlook. Funny thing is that it has nothing to do with being a newbie. Majority of overshoot lifers are in this camp. Denial is a beast.
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Denial is a beast. It’s the most important overshoot relevant force in play (except MPP) and no one discusses MORT. Not event to argue why MORT is wrong and something else is more important. Not even by aware people who have spent their lives trying to understand what is going on. Amazing!
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We don’t really know anything about what people believed 12000 years ago. It’s a bit like how archaeologists assume every built structure was for sacrifice. People project fantasies on the past rather than being honest and saying we just don’t know. We can infer things sure, but we don’t KNOW
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Sacrifices are uncertain but I’ll bet you a can of sardines the structures had something to do with life after death.
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