Today’s guest post is by Hideaway, the originator of Complexity Theory, the only new idea in the study of human overshoot since Varki’s MORT 10 years ago.
For those who have not followed Hideaway at Peak Oil Barrel or here at un-Denial, Complexity Theory argues that any species that is dependent on any non-renewable resource must grow or it will collapse, because as a resource depletes the quality of its reserves declines, which requires increasing complexity and energy for extraction to maintain the flow of supply, and increasing complexity requires a growing population, because each brain can manage a finite level of complexity, which requires a growing supply of resources to support the growing population, and because recycling non-renewable minerals without losses is impossible, and since the energy that supply chains depend on is mostly non-renewable, a point is eventually reached where the complexity of supply chains must break down, and the species returns to a state that is not dependent on non-renewable resources, which for humans is a hunter-gatherer lifestyle.
Complexity Theory, if true, is important because it implies any plan to mitigate the effects of human overshoot like climate change, species extinction, pollution, or resource scarcity, with population reduction policies, or a steady-state economy using a full-reserve asset-backed monetary system, or voluntary degrowth, or balanced budgets, will cause a reduction of complexity, and therefore the population and its lifestyle that depends on growing complexity for resources will collapse, possibly quite quickly due to the many self-reinforcing feedback loops in supply chains, and the extreme level of current human complexity and overshoot.
In today’s post Hideaway focusses on a quality of energy that is required to support complexity, Energy Returned on Energy Invested (EROEI).
“EROEI is the ratio of the amount of usable energy (the exergy) delivered from a particular energy resource to the amount of exergy used to obtain that energy resource.” – Wikipedia
For anyone new to the concept of EROEI, here is a simple way to visualize it. Imagine we discovered an oil field with a gigantic quantity oil but it was so deep that the machines used to drill and pump the oil burned all of the oil obtained. This energy source has an EROEI of 1.0, because energy obtained equals energy used, which means it contributes nothing to civilization (except pollution), and will not be exploited for long because oil companies cannot make a profit.
Any useful energy source must have an EROEI higher than 1.
Most advocates of non-fossil energy believe it has a plenty high EROEI and therefore we can and should transition from burning fossil energy. Hideaway here calculates that their EROEI assumptions are far too optimistic.
Hideaway has spent several years patiently trying to educate and persuade dozens of alternate energy advocates, with, as far as I can tell, zero success. I believe this is yet more evidence that Dr. Ajit Varki’s MORT theory is correct because energy experts are plenty smart enough to understand Hideaway’s calculations, yet are incapable of doing so.
Given that Hideaway’s Complexity Theory predicts we will soon collapse no matter what we do, why is the truth about EROEI important? Because if Hideaway is correct and non-fossil energy is not making enough net contribution to our civilization, then subsidizing and prioritizing non-fossil energy will increase the rate of depletion of non-renewable resources, which will reduce the time to collapse, and probably worsen the pollution and ecosystem destruction our descendent hunter-gatherers must cope with. In other words, using non-fossil energy will worsen the problems their advocates are trying to solve.
Truth here therefore is a big deal.
Hideaway should be commended for the significant original research he did here.
His conclusion sheds light on why everything seems to be breaking all at once now, and why our leaders are obsessively fixated on regime changing Russia and Iran, two of the very few remaining big sources of exportable oil.
A few years ago, when I couldn’t get a mining project to work economically by using just renewables for the power source, despite the claims of “renewables” being the cheapest form of electricity, I knew I had to go and find out what I was missing. Using diesel to generate electricity at remote mine sites is extremely expensive, so if there was any truth in renewables being “cheaper”, it should be validated at remote mine sites.
I searched for every document I could find about how EROEI was worked out and found many documents discussing great EROEI for renewables, but precious little on how much energy went into building solar panels, wind turbines, or batteries. If I traced far enough back to references of references, I eventually found some numbers, but mostly just plucked out of the air with some basic calculations on Aluminium production and glass production, with a few about silicon wafer production and the energy used in the processes alone.
Even the nuclear industry had a way they worked out their often touted 100 to 1 energy return on investment. The following is from the World Nuclear Association, quoted!!
“Peterson et al (2005) have presented materials figures for four reactor types:
- Generation II PWR of 1000 MWe: 75 m3 concrete and 36 t steel per MWe.
- ABWR of 1380 MWe: 191,000 m3 concrete, 63,440 t metal – 138 m3 concrete and 46 t metal/MWe.
- EPR of 1600 MWe: 204,500 m3 concrete, 70,900 t metal – 128 m3 concrete and 44.3 t metal/MWe.
- ESBWR of 1500 MWe: 104,000 m3 conc, 50,100 t metal – 69 m3 concrete and 33 t metal/MWe.
The AP1000 is similar to the ESBWR per MWe but no actual data is given.
Using gross energy requirement figures of 50 GJ/t for steel or 60 GJ/t for metal overall, 1.5 GJ/t or 3 GJ/m3 for pure concrete, this data converts to:
- Generation II PWR needs: 225 GJ concrete + 2160 GJ metal/MWe = 2.3 PJ/GWe.
- ABWR needs: 414 GJ concrete + 2760 GJ metal/MWe = 3.2 PJ/GWe.
- EPR needs: 384 GJ concrete + 2658 GJ metal/MWe = 3.0 PJ/GWe.
- ESBWR needs: 207 GJ concrete + 1980 GJ metal/MWe = 2.2 PJ/GWe.
In common with other studies the inputs are all in primary energy terms, joules, and any electrical inputs are presumed to be generated at 33% thermal efficiency.
The figures now in Table 1 for plant construction and operation, and also for decommissioning, are from Weissbach et al (2013) adjusted for 1 GWe. They are slightly higher than the above estimates, but much lower than earlier published US figures (ERDA 76-1). Our fuel input figures are 60% higher than Weissbach. Hence our EROI is 70, compared with 105 in that study.”
My way of thinking is that if you dump 191,000 tonnes of concrete and 63,440 tonnes of metals, mostly steel with ‘some’ copper, aluminium, etc. all together in a pile somewhere, it does not materialize into a ABWR nuclear power plant all by itself. All the bits and pieces need to be carefully constructed into very certain shapes and combinations, plus built in the correct order to become a nuclear power plant, therefore their calculations had to be horribly wrong!
If we dumped that quantity of those materials, in there correct shapes, onto the North Sentinal Island where some of the most isolated primitive humans exist, would they turn it into a nuclear power plant? The answer is obviously also NO!!
What if we left a very specific set of written instructions for those people? Again NO as they do not know how to read, nor do any calculations.
How about leaving the cement, reinforcing steel, gravel, sand, and all the instructions of how to put it all together to make concrete in some sign language form, to just make the foundations? Once again NO. How do you give instructions for just the right consistency, or to get all air bubbles out, or to work the surface correctly when in the setting process? You can’t, it only comes from experience of working with concrete.
Even if we had a group of knowledgeable teenagers, who could read and follow instructions, would we get them to be totally responsible for the foundations of a nuclear power plant? Again NO, as we need engineers and experienced concreters to build something that will last decades and is highly dangerous with failure of something like the foundations of the reactor chamber.
From this line of thinking, extended to solar panels, wind turbines, batteries, geothermal, plus even oil , gas and coal, there has to be an inclusion of all the energy inputs, which includes the education of the people involved in construction and operation, as well as all the energy inputs to the trucks, bridges, ports, mines, roads to mines, etc., etc., that all have to exist for building of anything to be possible. We only have one possible way to include all the inputs, money, or the cost of building and operating any form of energy source.
Money, or cost is certainly not going to be a perfect way to work out the Energy cost of building anything, plus it needs to be compared to something to come to a conclusion about the EROEI.
Firstly, we know that fossil fuels certainly can or could provide the net energy for everything else in a modern civilization, from the simple fact that modern civilization exists at all, at least for ‘most’ in the developed countries.
As the price for every energy supply appears to be different all over the world and different for each type of energy, I decided to look at the wholesale price or cost of energy at the world’s manufacturing hub of South/East Asia as a starting point. The question is over what period? Going back to 2012 the average price of crude oil was often over $100/bbl, while in March 2020 it was $16/bbl.
Should the price be from a single year when a solar panel factory starts production, or should it be over the years when the factory was built?
Should it be when the adults who are working in the factory were at school, or perhaps when the engineers, accountants, lawyers and managers were at university?
Maybe it should be when the mine providing the silicon was established, or the ships and ports where they load and unload were built? OK no easy answer at all.
Anyway, I decided to look at the average wholesale price of energy in different forms over the last decade (from 2013- 2023) as it encompassed times of higher and lower wholesale energy prices. What surprised me most was that oil, gas and metallurgical coal all had around the same average wholesale price over that period of around $US43/MWh, with thermal coal cheaper. It was cheap enough that the wholesale price of electricity in Asia during this period was also around the $US40/MWh.*
*Of course there are variations from year to year and from one location to another, but interestingly when I worked out the average price for oil over the prior decade 2003-2012 is was also around the same number, roughly $70/bbl that corresponds with around $41/MWh for the energy content using 1.7MWh/bbl.
Once I had a base number it was fairly easy to just compare the total lifetime cost, both capital and operating and maintenance cost of any energy producer back to how much energy was produced.
I decided to use $US40/MWh as the average wholesale cost of energy for every type of energy producer, as the base for the capital, operating and maintenance costs over the lifetime of operation. This cost to build and operate the plant can then be compared to the total lifetime output for that plant. The actual base number doesn’t really matter as I’ll explain towards the end of this article.
For our purposes here is a simplistic example. If an oil well returned $400 worth of energy over it’s lifetime, while only costing $40 worth of energy in total, to build and operate, then the EROEI was 10/1. As in it cost 1MWh of energy and returned 10mWh of energy, in this case oil.
I had no idea at all about what type of results this form of calculation would give me, or if it would be close to the often touted 10 or 20 to 1 returns that are needed for modern civilization to exist, until I worked out as much as possible.
I was not interested in theoretical cost, I wanted actual existing examples so I could compare different energy delivery types. Finding the actual numbers proved a lot more difficult than I expected. All over the place are headlines of a new development with an expected cost of $XYZ. Often though, the completed cost was vastly different to ‘expected’ capital cost. Then there was also operating and maintenance costs which many projects are very coy about, again giving some expected costs, with nothing about actual operating costs released, this depended upon the energy source.
For some like the nuclear industry, it’s fairly easy to find average O&M costs from public companies or industry announcements. The nuclear industry reports this for US reactors, with the average being around the $30/MWh as per World Nuclear Association (includes fuel costs).*
*Anyone paying attention can immediately see that in a world of $40/MWh energy cost an O&M cost of $30/MWh means that this form of energy cannot deliver a 10/1 ratio of EROEI. It’s 1.33/1 before including any capital costs.
OK, here are some examples of what I came up with…
A relatively new coal fired power plant in Queensland Australia, that was a highly efficient design, based on super critical operating temperatures, situated right next to the coal mine, where they dig the coal themselves, so no “price” paid for coal, had an EROEI of only 5.09/1.
This coal power station cost $US750M to build, including all the costs associated with the coal mine and conveyor system (4km), with an operating cost of around $US4.68/MWh for staff and sustaining capital.
Assuming the lifespan to be 40 years then over the plant and coal mine life of 40 years at a 90% capacity factor, it will produce 750Mw X 24hrs X 365 days X 40 years X 0.9 capacity factor. = 236,520,000MWh of electricity into the grid.
Total cost of capital plus O&M over this lifetime = $US750,000,000 + 236,520,000 X $US4.68 = $1,856,913,600 or $7.85/Mwh, giving an EROEI of $40/7.85 = 5.09/1.
The overall formula is adding all costs in $US to keep everything consistent, then divide by the $40/MWh average cost of wholesale energy over the last decade or so. Then compare the cost to build and operate in MWh with the total MWh the plant will produce over it’s lifetime of operation.
Using exactly the same method, I came up with an EROEI of a new gas well, connected to the system and paying their share of O&M to the pipeline authority in Western Australia of 23/1. The capital cost of drilling 2 wells and building a simple processing plant, plus joining up to the main gas pipeline, plus the fees to pipeline operator comes to a total cost of $US25,750,000, while the return is 15,000,000 MWh of gas delivered to customers.
In Saudi Arabia there are still old wells that have a total capital plus operating and maintenance cost of $2.5/bbl. That comes out to an EROEI of 27/1. These are the old legacy wells drilled decades ago and still flowing well. The Saudi’s also have newer wells at a much lower EROEI, yet I can’t get data on this of actual costs.
The New England Solar Farm in northern NSW, is still being built at a capital cost of around $US858M for a 720 MW plant, an expected life of 25 years with an expected capacity of 5.5 hours/d on average. It also has 400MWh of battery storage, or about 35 minutes at the rated capacity. In terms of O&M costs in solar circles I’ve seen 1% of capital costs as the base used for the first decade, with costs expected to be 2-3% of capital costs thereafter. I’ve used a constant 1.5% of capital cost as the basis for my calculations.
1% of Capital cost of $858M = $8.58M X1.5 O&M X 25 yrs = $321,750,000. Add capital cost of $858M = $1,179,750,000. Divide by cost of energy $40/MWh = 29,493,750 MWh.
How much electricity will the plant produce over it’s life 720MW X 5.5Hrs/d X 365d/y X 25 Yrs = 36,135,000MWh ..or an EROEI of 1.22/1.
A wind farm near me of 132MW capacity, at a capital cost of $US193,000,000 and an expected O&M cost of $7.53/MWh, with expected production of 7,227,000 MWH over it’s life expectancy of 25 years. It was meant to have a capacity factor of 37% but has been running well below that at only 25% capacity, which is the number I’ve used. I’ve also noticed that fairly often during the day when I pass it, even with a good breeze, it’s often mostly stopped, and when I check the wholesale price at the time, it’s negative, meaning they deliberately shutdown the plant to avoid a cost to send electricity into the grid.
Anyway cost of $193,000,000 + 7,227,000MWh X $7.53/MW = $US247,419,310 lifetime cost. Divide by $40/MWh = 6,185,482MWh to build. The EROEI is 7,227,000MWH divided by 6,185,482MWh = 1.17/1.
Hinkley Point C nuclear plant with a latest estimation of $62,000,000,000 capital cost, an output of 1,564,185,600 MWh over a 60 year lifespan plus the same O&M costs of $30/MWh as in the US NPP fleet, works out with the following… 62B + 1,564,185,600hrs X 30/MWh = $108,925,568,000 lifetime cost, divided by $40/MWh = 2,723,139,200MWh to build while producing only 1,564,185,600MWh of electricity over 60 years or an EROEI of 0.57/1. In other words less energy produced than went into building and operating it!! (assuming there is any accuracy in the methodologies ‘cost to build’)
For curiosity I worked out a fracked well based on some industry numbers from D Coyne and others on the Peak Oil Barrel web page. Assuming the capital cost of the older wells was around the $US10,000,000 plus O&M costs averaging $US12/bbl, and a return over first 120 months (10 years) of 375,000bbls oil equivalent, then the cost is $10,000,000 + 375,000 X $12 = $US14,500,000. Divide by $40/Mwh = 362,500MWh for a return of 375,000 bbls which equals 375,000 X 1.7MWh.bbl = 637,500MWh. The EROEI is therefore 637,500MWH divided by 362,500MWh cost or 1.76/1.
Assuming the wholesale price of energy was a too low a number to use in the first place, because only the largest businesses pay this cheap price, while all the people involved in every aspect of their daily lives have to pay a much higher retail price, what does it do to all the EROEIs shown?
Lets take a quick example using a cost of energy as $80/MWh instead of the $40/MWh of the approximate wholesale price of energy to reflect the ‘retail’ costs people actually pay.
In the first very simple example we had an oil well that cost 1MWh of oil energy to build and returned 10Mwh of oil energy. In that case the energy cost was $40/MWH.
Let’s double the energy cost to the more realistic $80/MWh cost. However it still only cost $40 to build and operate, all we changed was the base price of energy we use to $80/MWh. It’s now only costing 0.5MWh of energy to build and still returning 10MWh of oil energy so the EROEI has gone up to 20/1.
Exactly the same happens to all the EROEI numbers we worked out, they all doubled. The ratio between any of the energy producers stayed the same. In fact we could use whatever number we liked for the overall energy cost, it’s just the EROEI numbers that change, but are always related back to each other.
In summary, assuming the original $40/MWh wholesale cost of energy, and $80/MWh for comparison, we get the following EROEIs:
| $40/MWh | $80/MWH | |
| Kogan Creek coal power station | 5.09 | 10.18 |
| Old Saudi oil wells | 27 | 54 |
| Permian fracked oil wells ~2015 | 1.76 | 3.52 |
| NESF Solar Farm | 1.22 | 2.44 |
| MTG Wind Farm | 1.17 | 2.34 |
| WA gas wells | 23 | 46 |
| Hinkley Point C nuclear | 0.57 | 1.14 |
None of the new energy types, including nuclear give us anything like the 10-20 EROEI that’s needed for modern civilisation to operate, yet the older fossil fuel plants have given us a much higher numbers on average well in excess of what’s often cited as the required EROEI.
Taking another new coal mine, the Leer South one in W Virginia USA, has a resource of 200,000,000 tonnes of metallurgical coal at an energy content of 8.33MWh/tonne. So the return for this new mine is around 1,666,000,000MWh in total over decades. The capital cost was around $380,000,000 and operating cost of $72.49/tonne. This works out at an EROEI of around 4.48 at the $40/MWh rate or 8.96 at the $80/Mwh rate for energy cost of building and operating the mine.
This mine and the Kogan Creek coal fired power station I mentioned earlier are both late coal developments, not considered viable in earlier times when easier to obtain coal resources were available. It’s the same with the fracked oil from the Permian, only left until recently as the energy prices were too low for them to be considered. The Leer South mine has seams of coal 2-3.5 metres in thickness with waste between the seams and between layers in the seams. Likewise for Kogan Creek.
These are not the thick, easy to mine types of coal deposits we built civilization with 50-100 years ago, so have a much lower EROEI than the easy to get and now depleted coal from around the world. Yet both are decent EROEIs at the $40/MWh cost and much higher EROEIs than any of the newer energy producers.
In conclusion, it should be obvious to everyone that any energy producing facility that costs a total of under $US26M over it’s lifetime (the small gas field in WA) and delivers 15,000,000MWh has a far better return under any metric than one that delivers only 7,227,000MWh (and intermittently at that), the Mt Gellibrand Wind Farm for a total lifetime cost of over $US247M.
All the ‘costs’ associated with any of energy producers are spent by the providers of the goods and services to build and operate the plants. People spend the money they earn working on these things, on food, heating their houses, cooling their houses, getting to work, their kid’s education and food, holidays, etc., the list is endless. Yet every single cent spent by anyone in the chain anywhere has an energy cost associated with it somewhere. Spending over $US247M must have a much higher background energy cost than something only costing under $US26M.
Understanding this cost difference, then comparing just these raw numbers to countless research papers that try to make out that wind farms have a better EROEI than the gas wells/plant costing only 10% overall, yet producing more than double the energy, has to make you think we are just deluding ourselves.
I know my numbers and methodology are far from perfect, yet they seem a lot more honest in comparing differences between the various energy providers and clearly show we have trouble ahead as the older much higher EROEI type energy producers are rapidly declining. These older types, even in the fossil fuel domain, are clearly the most profitable ones, so humans being humans are likely to use these much faster than the newer more marginal energy sources.
un-Denial 
Excellent Hideaway!! And great intro Rob.
The techno-utopians are gonna hate it. Hideaway is gonna be public enemy #1 soon, LOL… I can already hear the smart-ass retorts, something like “so let me get this straight, you want me to include the EROEI from every person that worked on that power plant from when they were first born and all the energy it took to get them to the present day?”… to which I would reply, “yes, that’s exactly what I want you to do”.😊
In other news, I found this story on Sam Mitchell’s site. I always like to see what it looks like when a well-versed collapse aware brain, greatly underestimates denial:
Of course we at un-Denial know that we’ve been perfecting that peculiar “American amnesia” for at least 100k years now. It was bequeathed to us from our ancestors and was bequeathed to them by their ancestors. It will never not be passed down to the next generation. I guarantee the author thinks there was a “good old days” (in the last 10k years or so) where humanity didn’t deny unpleasant realities.
You can get away with not assigning fire the proper respect it deserves… but you can’t get away with it when you do it with denial.
I liked the article though. It’s members only, but the Freedium trick still works. Just paste the first link into that 2nd link where it says “enter Medium post link”
https://medium.com/the-springboard/the-arithmetic-of-emergency-3331e990425f
Breaking Medium paywall! – Freedium
ps. While reading Hideaways essay, this song got stuck in my head. No idea what the correlation is, but it pairs up well with the essay. Good background noise.
LikeLiked by 1 person
Good song and good essay by Gael MacLean. Thanks for the Medium crack.
LikeLiked by 1 person
Complexity theory is a field of science, not Hideaway’s idea or creation as he says. Duh.
LikeLike
That’s wonderful news.
It means many smart people are discussing in peer reviewed journals the implications of human overshoot and how any attempt to mitigate our predicament will accelerate the collapse of modernity.
Can you please provide a link to a paper that you think best captures this discussion?
I’ve been looking for evidence that Dr. Ajit Varki’s MORT theory is wrong for a very long time and it’s wonderful to meet someone with this evidence.
LikeLike
😂😂😂
I’m actually rooting for him to provide an old, obscure or forgotten link that ends up blowing our minds.
LikeLiked by 1 person
It will make a lot of people happy if we can find some evidence that Varki is wrong.
Then we can continue to ignore 50 years of 100% failure and try even harder to shift our collective consciousness with more education about energy, non-renewable resources, limits to growth, and overshoot.
It will even make me happy because I’d love to find a group of smart aware influential main stream intellectuals discussing something that actually matters, and trying to find the optimal path through our overshoot predicament.
LikeLiked by 1 person
Nony, you are correct, complexity theory is a field of science. from AI to shorten it all…
“Complexity Theory is a relatively new and interdisciplinary field that studies complex systems. Unlike traditional science which often breaks down systems into their smallest components to understand them (reductionism), complexity theory focuses on how the interactions between many individual components give rise to emergent behaviors and patterns that cannot be predicted by studying the components in isolation.”
What areas of science is complexity theory applied in, again from AI…
“Biology and Ecology: Understanding ecosystems, evolution, cellular networks, and the brain.
Physics: Chaos theory, statistical mechanics, complex networks.
Economics and Finance: Analyzing market behavior, financial crises, and economic systems as complex adaptive systems.
Social Sciences: Studying social networks, urban development, collective behavior, and organizational dynamics.
Computer Science: Artificial intelligence, neural networks, distributed computing, and algorithm design.
Management and Organizational Studies: Developing new approaches to leadership, organizational change, and strategic management in dynamic environments.
Health and Healthcare: Understanding disease spread, healthcare system resilience, and patient complexity.”
A lot of complexity theory work relies upon the work of Prof J Tainter, that I also refer to, yet most work in the field misses important aspects of EROEI, lower ore grades and the feedback loops from the complexity of this aspect alone. Even Tainter’s, Turchin’s and others work, from an anthropological perspective, missed the effect of depletion on complexity. Resources were often labelled as just one aspect, instead on a major influence.
I’ve never stated I invented complexity theory, I just apply it to the totality of modern civilization a bit differently than has been done or understood before.
LikeLike
I may be wrong but I think I coined the name “Complexity Theory” for Hideaway’s idea that increasing complexity is required to maintain extraction flows of depleting non-renewable resource reserves.
I wanted a short name for a complex idea so we didn’t have to explain it with a long sentence every time we referred to it.
“complexity theory” is a field of science.
“Complexity Theory” is a specific idea.
Maybe we should come up with a different name for the idea?
How about “Complexity Trap”, or maybe “MORT Trigger” 🙂
I kind of like “Complexity Theory”. It’s just arrogant enough to irritate scientists in the field so they think a little bit. Also quite catchy for the TikTok crowd.
But it’s Hideaway’s call because it’s his idea.
LikeLiked by 2 people
I searched the comments. The first time “Complexity Theory” appears is on June 7, 2025 several times by me.
LikeLike
I kinda like the word paradox. “The Complexity Paradox” ehh, I don’t know.
Too bad I didn’t I come up with this stuff. “Paqnation’s Paradox” sounds perfect.😊
LikeLike
“Complexity Ratchet” – You can go up but you can’t safely come down.
“Prosperity Secret” – The most important fact about human prosperity that experts never discuss because our species evolved to deny unpleasant realities.
LikeLiked by 1 person
RE: “our species evolved to deny unpleasant realities”
Yes. And what’s at the bottom of that negative trait, what’s the cause of it?
The reality-based theory of The 2 Married Pink Elephants In The Historical Room (https://www.rolf-hefti.com/covid-19-coronavirus.html) provides a fitting answer… our species, particularly ‘advanced’ people, have a malignant disease — a “Soullessness Spectrum Disorder” (see link above).
“Despite the extensive documentation, most mainstream doctors and media dangerously continue to ignore my findings and refuse to speak about the self assembly nanotechnology that is in every human being now. The blood contamination is greatly accelerating in the amount of nanotechnology seen due to C19 bioweapon shedding, geoengineering and food contamination, to name a few sources.” —Ana Maria Mihalcea, M.D., Ph.D., Oct 2023 (https://archive.ph/GbMtm)
“There are large numbers of scientists, doctors, and presstitutes who will sell out truth for money, such as those who describe people dropping dead on a daily basis as “rare” when it it happening all over the vaccinated world.” — Paul Craig Roberts, Ph.D., American economist & former US regime official, in 2024
LikeLike
The covid crimes:
killed 20+ million people and are plenty to put our leaders in prison.
There is no need to make up unscientific conspiracies without evidence to condemn what our leaders did.
The problem with these conspiracy theories is that they cause many citizens to assume that all arguments against government covid policies are crazy.
Which partially explains why the criminals are getting away with the crime.
LikeLike
The 20 million deaths caused by COVID-19 would be higher if none of the medical advances of the last two centuries were in place.
LikeLike
Not sure how blocking the use of antibiotics to treat side effects of covid like pneumonia, or blocking the use of proven safe antivirals like ivermectin, or prescribing remdesivir “aka run death is near”, or staying silent on vitamin D, or telling people to avoid sunshine and public parks, or not telling the obese to avoid sugar, saved lives. A stronger argument can be made that we discarded our medical advances.
LikeLiked by 1 person
Thanks for publishing this essay Rob, and thanks for the great introduction.
The reason I wrote this essay and not one on scale/complexity is that EROEI was the starting point for complexity for me. Just about every research paper on EROEI has boundaries where they limit what is included in their calculations, then a whole lot of other research takes the findings of the first set of papers as being the total answer.
As I looked into what to count for EROEI, it didn’t take long to recognize that everything had to be included or the result was just false.
Working out the EROEI of a coal fired power station as an example, means all the energy going into building the power plant, plus all the energy getting coal to the plant, but also had to include the designer of the plant and how they learned to design the plant. It also included all the workers at the plant and how they obtained their knowledge to do their particular job. On and on goes the chain.
In the real world the only way to account for all the energy inputs is how much it costs in monetary terms. All the workers, from the initial designers and engineers, to the lawyers, accountants and managers get paid for their particular expertise, which becomes part of the overall cost of building the plant.
All these people spend the money they earn on their housing, transport, food, heating and/or cooling their house, having showers, on clothes, on appliances in their houses etc. In fact every aspect of their expenditure has an energy component, which in traditional EROEI studies with boundaries is never counted.
In other words the entire way of working out EROEI is extremely complex and we humans like to simplify everything, especially if it’s a model, so go about excluding the complexity instead of looking for a way to include it. Hence we get all the rubbish EROEI research that has been going on for decades and is often taken as being real..
The essay itself was already long enough, yet I missed out on a lot of important information, like explaining how the energy created by solar and wind are intermittent, therefore providing energy 24/7 that is required by industry to be efficient, would require a much greater spending on batteries or pumped hydro and therefore lower the number obtained much further as an example.
Another important aspect I missed out explaining is that just about every EROEI research paper has a dollar cost for fossil fuels while taking sunshine and wind to be free. They all ignore how coal, oil and gas are also free to humanity as a whole, just like, air, water, sunshine, trees and the ocean are ‘free’ to humanity. All the early coal fired power stations were built where the coal existed, as transmitting electricity along wires was cheaper than moving coal to cities and industries. The coal just existed in the ground, the only energy cost was in mining it, which governments quickly learned was a highly profitable enterprise for whoever did it, so imposed ‘royalties’ to tax some of the energy content of the mined coal.
Realistically the entire situation of our predicament is summed up by 2 of the examples I gave in the essay, the Mt Gellibrand wind farm and the small gas deposit..
The wind farm, over it’s lifetime of operation, assuming the initial expected capacity factor will cost a total of $US273,540,578, which is cash money spent by everyone involved in the construction and running of that operation on their daily living, which means energy in some form..
The small gas operation total lifetime costs are $US25,750,000, which is also spent by everyone involved in construction and lifetime operation of the energy production.
The wind farm’s planned contribution at the 37% capacity factor was 10,695,960 MWh of intermittent energy over it’s lifetime to humanity, while the gas plant will contribute 15,000,000 MWh of energy. The wind farm’s actual performance has been well below what was planned, due to both less wind than expected and turning off the turbines when prices were negative. The gas plant will possibly return a lot more energy as the 15,000,000 MWh is based on certified reserves, not the known resource which might be much greater..
At the actual energy return for both of these plants, it should be obvious how something that returns only half of the energy, yet costs 10 times as much to build and operate is not going to work in the real world, especially when the wind farm totally relies upon cheap oil, coal and gas to be built as cheaply as it was built. If it had to rely upon the energy from expensive sources, like wind energy to be built with and operated, the cost would be much, much greater!!
Again the complexity of our entire system comes into play here as we don’t try to build and operate any of the energy suppliers off renewable energy nor nuclear power, we rely upon the entirety of the system as it is to produce everything we need in our modern world..
LikeLiked by 5 people
Hideaway, I have been in the EroEI trenches with Charlie Hall and family for more than a decade. And the one thing I have learned is that in the determination of viability of any civilization on earth when it gets complex and you have to use monetary units to make sense you have already caused damage to the forecasts you analysis makes.
Each time this has happened I have tried to limit the analysis to the flows of mass and energy (no dollars allowed. every time I tired ( Charlie and family tried) the short timeframe advanates obscured the long time frame outcomes.)
If the system does not remain viable over time at the mass and flow levels then any policy/ behavior can not make it viable.
This video helps determine the viability of any proposed civilization design 10 min.
LikeLike
Jack, I’ve been researching the entire topic of sustainability for 50 years, since I first learned about “Limits to Growth” as an undergraduate in a tertiary Environmental science course. I’ve waxed and waned over the decades about what’s possible, being a huge fan of renewables at one stage until I couldn’t get them to work.
I’m also fully aware that using money is not a perfect method, but using narrow boundaries of energy use, like just about every EROEI research paper does, while leaving out huge gobs of energy used by every person involved in every aspect of the process of making oil rigs, or solar panels is a lot more ridiculous. Without using money how could we include the energy value/use of an education to become a lawyer, accountant, manager, or electrician involved in the process of making/building a solar farm?
Complexity of all the chains of processes involved with building of anything in the modern world has to be taken into account.
However, the complexity issues are vastly misunderstood or not understood at all in the environment field as it applies to modern civilization. It was Prof Geoffrey West’s work on scale/complexity that opened my eyes to the real problems we have, that are completely unassailable in term of a modern industrialized future.
The very short version of complexities meaning to civilization…
Complexity has given us huge material and efficiency savings as population has grown and become urbanised.
Complexity is only possible in a large and growing human environment. (separating out energy and materials issues for this short version, though using up all the easy to get close resources first is important).
We can only mine both the low grade energy and materials required for modernity with the complexity and therefore technology we’ve attained and become use to using.
As the system shrinks, so does the complexity.
Many aspects of a civilization that were possible early on at small size, end up becoming impossible as the civilization becomes much larger, without continuing growth in complexity. Then with the simplification of a shrinking civilization, many of these early simpler activities become impossible altogether, and lead to collapse, which has happened many times before.
The physical laws of the universe apply to civilizations, particularly entropy and dissipation.
….
I’ve watched all your videos before and once again watched the one you linked to.
The recycling you mention is impossible. Think in terms of everything we use something like galvanizing on, like farm fencing. It’s used to reduce the rusting of steel posts, fences etc. Yet the important component of the galvanizing is zinc. However the zinc coating only lasts a limited lifetime of 25-30 years. The zinc is lost to the environment (entropy and dissipation at work). Even if the fencing wire is sent to the recyclers, the zinc coating on it is no longer there, so can’t be recycled.
At present humanity recycles around 10% of all products used. A large percentage of this is not “recycled” as in back to original purpose, but is “downcycled” to a lower form of use. Plastics are a great example of this.
Also recycling of metals involves either hydrometallurgy processes or pyrometallurgy processes or a combination of both, which both rely upon consumption of fossil fuels and/or fossil fuel products. Hence in your video where there is no longer any mining of anything, then there is no recycling either!!
What I never see from anyone suggesting a circular economy, or any derivative of such, is anything in regards to exactly what needs to be built to make it all possible. How much separation of goods needs to happen, where it happens, how everything is transported to the different places, how any of it will work on just electricity.
I often see people give a hand wave of future goods will have to be made of totally recyclable materials that come apart easily, so it’s all possible. However there is never any mention about how such goods will function, compared to the way complex goods currently function. Of course it has to be remembered that all capital goods/machines that we make everything with in factories are also part of this and have to be fully recyclable.
If you or anyone could show the total path, energy and materials it would take to recycle every separate component of a mobile phone back to original form and use, I’m all ears, yet all I see is the term recycle bandied about, never any hard numbers of flows of energy and materials to show if it’s possible. Then think of how much more impossible it will become in a world of shrinking energy and material availability in the very near future.
LikeLiked by 6 people
Have been in the trenches with you since before Meadows limits to growth. I entered from mechanical engineering and from dynanic systems theory, in terms of how people utilize information.
While I have progressed through a series of conclusions similar to you, I have designed a small civilization with initial stocks that as you suggest will be consumed because they they cannot be recycled.
I still think that we can have a conversation between the two of us using zoom or WhatsApp or FaceTime I don’t know which time zone you’re on, but would you be willing to open that channel with me?
Jack. Alpert@skilorg. 9137082554
LikeLike
So, we’re at a point where even attempting to soften the landing is futile? I could see many people reacting to this by simply turning to hedonism, enjoying modernity while it lasts and then “un-aliving” themselves when things finally unravel. (Un-denial doesn’t have a keyword filter does it?)
LikeLiked by 1 person
To my eyes people are already in party-on mode. Not one person I know, including a few “green” people, is trying to live small.
LikeLiked by 2 people
Unpopular opinion: homo sapiens is always in party mode.
LikeLiked by 2 people
You’re paraphrasing the title of one of Richard Heinbergs best-known works: The Party’s Over. This “party mode” will be over when mineral resources become hard to extract.
LikeLike
Complexity theory is a field of science, not your idea or creation.
LikeLike
That’s wonderful news.
It means many smart people are discussing in peer reviewed journals the implications of human overshoot and how any attempt to mitigate our predicament will accelerate the collapse of modernity.
Can you please provide a link to a paper that you think best captures this discussion?
I’ve been looking for evidence that Dr. Ajit Varki’s MORT theory is wrong for a very long time and it’s wonderful to meet someone with this evidence.
LikeLike
Here’s a fun exercise in the spirit of pay attention to what they do, not what they say.
Ask your favorite AI for a list of all electricity generation projects planned to support AI expansion. You will get a long list including conventional nuclear, small modular nuclear, fusion, solar, wind, and natural gas.
Then ask it for a list of all projects under construction. The answer is only natural gas.
LikeLiked by 1 person
Thank you Rob, and Hideaway,
I am on board with the analysis made by Hideaway right up the point where he and you suggest “Complexity Theory, if true, is important because it implies….” there is no path forward except being driven back to a group of hunter and gatherers though an unpleasant process of civilization collapse, environmental destruction and a population die off by starvation and conflict.
While his computations support such a forecast as soon as 2050 2100 or 2150. I think the same analysis tools can forecast different outcomes that result from alternative behavior.
I am not suggesting that 8 billion people come to these behavior through bottom up or top down coercion. Or even self coercion created by universal upgrades in their cognitive abilities that give perception and value to unfolding future images.
I am suggesting that a single person or AI agent sterilizes 8 billion people tonight establishes some new initial conditions.
Hideaway starts his analysis given:
and a view
His analysis includes:
These 10 – 25 million person city states together (totaling 50 million ) use less than 10% of the ecological output of earth and have house rules to not extract non renewable crustal resources. (instead they depend on recycling with losses non renewables from initial start up stock piles.
These cities need some guard rails to manage limbic behavior so supporting resources are not squandered in petty conflict or ill use of stockpiles.
However, given these guard rails can a proposed design be shown by Hideaway’s computations that the life boat community does not run out of supporting resources for 200 years (2100 to 2300.) That is it has a chance to advance science enough to proceed after the initial supports run out.
Jack Alpert. http://www.skil.org
PS: Hideaway please open a direct communication channel with alpert@ skil.org
LikeLike
Jack, I have a huge problem with this bit of your post and thinking, in today’s world…
“I am suggesting that a single person or AI agent sterilizes 8 billion people tonight“
This falls in the realm of sedition or conspiracy against the existing order and it is possibly a crime in many areas to incite a person or people to do such a thing. From AI…
“Seditious conspiracy is when a group of people agree to use force to try to stop the government from functioning or to overthrow it. It’s a serious crime because it threatens the stability and legitimacy of the government. “
So unless someone deliberately does it, and suggesting it’s the only way forward would/could encourage such minded people, which is totally against the laws of most places, makes those suggesting it, a co-conspirator.
While your original plan, of self regulated population rapid decline by governments is the only realistic way of continuing modernity for a longer time frame, your recent additions could get you in a lot of trouble..
Also by successfully sterilizing 8 billion people from an unknown agent is the end of the human race. To limit a quickly spread, effective sterilizing agent, to just people alive, while hoping it doesn’t spread to other species, or linger in the environment to effect everyone else, is wishful thinking at best. It’s the type of science that would take many years of research to perfect, or work the way you envisage.
A student or lab assistant tinkering in the lab and releasing what they thought was a sterilizing agent, could end all life on earth, by releasing something experimental. Only years or decades of careful research would produce something that did as you think, with the required level of safety. I’m not sure of your background in biology, but this is the stuff of science fiction, not practical science.
The other aspect I have difficulty with, in your overall earlier plan of people around the world cooperating in population reduction, is that I don’t expect the nature of people to change. If we did get to a group of cities, with the associated towns providing services for local communities of a total of 50m, sometime in the next 30-50 years (we don’t have much time at all!!), then what is to stop them, or some of them, deciding to grow to gain the other cities resources? This is what has happened throughout human history, so why wouldn’t humans resort to being humans?
I do not expect humans to change from what there genetics tell them about being human, so expect future generations to act/behave very much like all past generations have acted/behaved.
Humans are such a new species, in geologic terms, with a much shorter existence than most other animals. We don’t know for sure, if even a hunter gatherer lifestyle is possible in the longer term, as all the examples we have are measured in the tens of thousands of years at most, not the millions of years that many other large mammalian species have existed. During those tens of thousands of years a lot of megafauna went extinct, so in my opinion even this lifestyle is questionable in the long term. Perhaps Homo sapiens is just a short term species that self terminates because our way of living (using fire/language?) is not compatible with the natural world.
Also for reasons of scale and complexity which I hope to write up a full article in the future, a total human population of 50m cannot have anywhere near the complexity of today, even if they started with full complexity.
There simply isn’t enough market or people to produce everything needed to maintain what we have complexity wise. Therefore there will be zero chance of inventing newer higher forms of energy production like fusion with the reduced overall complexity. Which means the future of the starting cities has to unravel anyway, once the hydroelectric dams become silted up, and/or the generators fail.
I’ve come to the conclusion that civilization itself is just another form of entropy and dissipation, just like all the other forms of highly adaptive complex systems, like an animal, an ecosystem, stars, or storms that exist in the universe, that have a lifespan, or series of processes, from beginning to the end.
LikeLiked by 5 people
In the above post you have migrated your position from:
jacks’s suggestion that a sterility virus should be evaulated and compared to every one dying of starvation or conflict this century is sedition.
To: humans have have no legitimate presence in the earth system. Isn’t this similar sedition?
I repeat, I like the way you use tools to perceive and compare outcomes of different behaviors.
I suggest that we use your tools to compare the outcomes from untried behaviors.
The conception of sedition implies overturning existing norms. Abolition prohibition woman’s rights. Civil rights the Magna Carta are all seditious
Is proposing to change the convention of discounting the furure sedition.
How about private property belongs to the next 100 generations and the present generation is only lessors. Is that sedition.
I would rather do the calculations than worry that the implication is sedition.
I respect your tools.
Jack
LikeLiked by 2 people
It appears I have got under your skin Jack. Just back up a little bit…
“humans have have no legitimate presence in the earth system.“
This is not what I stated at all. What I stated was more of a questioning…
“We don’t know for sure, if even a hunter gatherer lifestyle is possible in the longer term, as all the examples we have are measured in the tens of thousands of years at most, not the millions of years that many other large mammalian species have existed. During those tens of thousands of years a lot of megafauna went extinct, so in my opinion even this lifestyle is questionable in the long term. Perhaps Homo sapiens is just a short term species that self terminates because our way of living (using fire/language?) is not compatible with the natural world.“
Please do not take me completely out of context. We simply do not know if a hunter gatherer lifestyle is compatible in the very long term as in geologic time that I also mentioned.
I’m not actively suggesting people do anything, I’m not trying to suggest that someone makes a virus, bacteria or ‘agent’ to sterilize billions of people at all.
Your original plan of the people of the world coming together to decide to not have children unless by lottery, was fine, nothing wrong with suggesting that. However you know as well as the rest of us, that this will never happen.
It’s your more recent suggestions, in knowing that people will not get together to make it happen, and I quote your comment from above “I am suggesting that a single person or AI agent sterilizes 8 billion people tonight“, is one that crosses the line.
What I’m pointing out, is that what we are doing is clearly unsustainable and my position is that civilization itself based on metals and minerals, in other words non renewables of all types is not sustainable at all. The physical laws of the universe, entropy and dissipation, guarantee it.
LikeLiked by 2 people
Real-life-experiment:
Getting humans to not reproduce voluntarily is something that anthropology has documented, the term anti-natalism comes to mind.
Here’s an anti-natalist movement: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Voluntary_Human_Extinction_Movement – estimated members globally are a few hundred individuals. Clearly, it’s not something that gains a lot of traction, even over the course of decades.
Here’s an anti-natalist ethics: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Benatar%27s_asymmetry_argument
If you do a statistical analysis, you will see that there are no human societal structures that have anti-natalist ethics, this is especially because subscribers of anti-natalist ethics do not have children and thus do not pass on the anti-natalist ethics memes to them, which means that anti-natalist cultures self-terminate for obvious reasons.
The likelyhood of every reproduction-capable human female to immediately convert to anti-natalism seems quite low.
We also know that humans tend to reproduce faster when they are exposed to death: https://link.springer.com/article/10.1007/s00148-009-0255-6
Homo sapiens went almost extinct during the last interglacial maximum, so it makes sense for a species to be more in heat when it is exposed to mortality shocks, otherwise, they would have gone extinct already. My personal expectation is that as collapse gets ugly, people will try to have more children, not less.
LikeLike
I would liked to make this conversation productive to the next 100 generations.
The human condition is a sequence that follows from hunter and gatherers taking the opportunities made available by their cognition using non renewable crustal resources which are soon to be unavailable.
My objective to identify behaviors and pathways that a) do not extinguish cognitive abilities that have carried our species to these conditions and b) potentially advance them.
You are pretty good at using mass energy flows to describe a) what humankind has been doing, b) is doing c) can not continue to do.
I am suggesting that the structure of your work, can be used to describe behavior that alters humankind’s path to human oblivion.
Of course that behavior lies outside the cultural norm. It has to be — given you have correctly described (using mass energy flows) that the cultural norm is terminal for any group that follows it.
Outside the cultural norm by definition crosses lines.
I don’t want to get into the arguments that because of culturally accepted hierarchy and property ownership, there is a group that wants to maintain their splendid living conditions on this house boat, whether they can see nor not see that it is about be be destroyed going over a falls.
You work clearly shows that neither the behavior of the masses or the behavior of the leadership has any chance of avoiding the falls.
You have not addressed the facts that my calculations based on your calculations can identify a possible implementable behavior that keeps human kind on earth from termination.
This includes the arbitrary culling of the human community, universal sterilization being only one mechanism, maybe the one with the best productivity of the remaining non renewable crustal resources.
Neutron bombing the global population is another.. there are others more expensive on the energy mass spectrum.
The reason I am raising these considerations is that if someone implements one of these rapid population decline (RPD) events, it would be nice to have two projects worked out to lifeboat humankind through Catton’s bottleneck.
By worked out I mean reflecting a) the mass energy flows in your calculations and b) the required guard rails on limbic human behavior that are missing from current civilization.
If we can get through Catton’s bottleneck not terminating ourselves we can think about processes that accomplish universal upgrades to cognition that can drive humankind at the grassroots forward onto a more viable trajectory.
I am inviting everyone interested (and beyond denial, despair, or other cultural fantasies) in getting involved in two projects.
Project 1: The design of lifeboat civilizations circa 2100.
Project 2: Imagine (implement) the 80 year transition from present conditions to the life boats.
It’s the project I have been working on for 50 years. Here is a thread to find much of the previous and on going work.
Again, I think this is a discussion that would advance more quickly by face to face communication. Please contact me directly. alpert@skil.org
LikeLike
Most political revolutions start out as seditious conspiracies. I am of the opinion that any serious attempt to mitigate overshoot would require a revolution, because our current system is too wedded to growth. But as you pointed out, out a soft landing may not be possible due to complexity.
We may already be doing that unintentionally by releasing endocrine-disrupting chemicals into the environment. Sperm counts are plummeting.
LikeLiked by 1 person
There is evidence that some combination of the mRNA transfections we coerced into billions of young people who were at no serious risk from the bioweapons virus that leaked from a lab, or the toxic spike protein the virus engineers decided to use, has caused a drop in fertility, and an increase in mortality.
It would be a simple matter to determine the cause if our “leaders” released fertility and mortality data for transfected versus untransfected people but they haven’t and won’t because it would make them look bad.
If the data confirmed our leaders did the right thing you can be certain it would have been released long ago.
LikeLiked by 1 person
Hideaway: you sem to be saying that the idea is unthinkable because it horrifies you, the partial sterilisation and pregnancy interruption global project has clearly, to anyone paying attention, already been initiated – the Covid ‘vaccines’.
CCRAAPP.
Controlled Covert Reduction and Adjustment of Population Plan.
It also includes ‘turbo’-cancers, easy-access euthanasia, and shutting down a lot of farming. All well-documented.
LikeLiked by 1 person
As a doctor I have used a simplified version of this explaining why healthcare has to be profitable in some way. At least 100 persons is in direct line behind a doctor. Everyone in the supply chain has to have salary for buying food, electricity, house, etc. Everyone from the miners, factory workers, sailors, lorry driver, etc. If you include shipbuilders etc its a never ending list of people who makes it possible.
LikeLiked by 3 people
Hideaway,
Thank you for your interesting and thought-provoking article.
In the EROEI calculations have you included the effort/costs for abandonment and reclamation/remediation of land, groundwater and surface water associated with all the quoted forms of energy production?
Those costs are typically not easy to obtain and are often deferred for many years/decades before they are fully realized, as we have seen with numerous former mine sites, petroleum facilities, etc.
LikeLiked by 1 person
Hi Nony, In my calculations I wanted to show the EROEI calculations exactly as we humans have obtained and used energy over time. which of course is zero consideration of reclamation or remediation.
If it had been included, imagine how poorly nuclear would actually be if we had to allow the 300,000 years to look after nuclear waste. Of course us humans have never bothered to include these long term costs.
Realistically if humans had included the full environmental costs, we never would have used coal in the first place. However we did use it without concern for the environment, and continue to use all energy forms with no real concern for the environment, except for the lip service about reducing carbon for renewables, while allowing huge damage by copper mining, lithium mining, smelters using coke to bake silicon into large crystals etc. etc.
Thanks for reminding me of another aspect that should have been included in the original essay.
LikeLiked by 3 people
Excellent, thank you.
I had anticipated this post ever since you first explained your way of calculating EROEI. In particular, I had these two comments bookmarked: https://un-denial.com/2024/01/21/by-hideaway-energy-and-electricity/#comment-93315, https://un-denial.com/2025/02/15/rfk-jr-confirmation/#comment-110966.
This is a fascinating time: the opportunity to experiment how nature has mastered the art of abundance from scarce inputs.
Best.
LikeLiked by 1 person
Accepting the concept that “money is the measure of environmental impact”, it seems clear that the ethical position for individuals who wish to minimize harm is simply to spend less. Whether one does this by taking one’s leisure at home instead of in Thailand, continuing to drive a low-cost ICE-propelled vehicle (when one travels at all), riding a cheap steel-framed bicycle instead of one built of carbon fiber, cooking what you eat (instead of having pre-cooked food delivered), and growing what you cook… we don’t need to investigate in detail. Just minimize spending.
Lathechuck
LikeLiked by 5 people
One would have to spend less and destroy money / keep only cash. Even a spendthrift, secondhand shopping, bike riding person is doing harm just having money in a bank account.
LikeLike
And for those that didn’t get enough number crunching and EROEI discussion, here is a link to more technical background and a very deep rabbit hole:
http://euanmearns.com/eroei-for-beginners/
Euan Mearns ran an excellent site with good technical discussions in the comments. This post was my first in depth exposure to EROEI, and this article is from 2016. I don’t recall the site addressing the complexity trap, especially as succinctly as Hideaway has. There are loads of other interesting posts, some of which have aged fairly well. Too bad he stopped posting.
LikeLiked by 1 person
Thanks, I remember following Euan Mearns many years ago, he’s famous for the Net Energy Cliff graph.
Lot of overshoot aware people have either stopped writing or seem to be in the process of losing their minds and going woo-woo.
To the regulars here, please let me me know if you spot any signs of me going crazy and I will shut this site down.
LikeLiked by 3 people
Another aspect I left out of my essay above was how just about every research paper that went beyond the boundary of energy used in the factories and transportation, seemed to end up converting some of the energy used to dollars and back again through various methods anyway. For instance the article from Euan Mearns you linked to includes the following….
” This provides a means of converting MJ to $ and we can then look at the $ earnings of a labourer to get a rough handle on the notional energy use that may be attributed to his salary scale. This is far from perfect but is currently the only practical method available.”
My thinking about using dollars to represent energy, then linking the dollar return to energy return at the current average wholesale price of that energy, came from all the more realistic papers that tried to include the energy used by labor by using something like the above.
If dollars are being used anyway in some parts of the equation, then why not rely upon them always where it can be worked out.
Also from Euan’s essay……… ” Some argue that the energy cost of the highway network, power distribution network and services like schools and hospitals should be pro-rated into new energy production systems. My own preference is to generally exclude these items from an ERoEI analysis unless there are good reasons for not doing so.”
My argument is of course it should be included, because without all that existing, then the energy source could not be exploited. Of course it has to be pro rata as well, but how can it possibly be worked out unless we include the dollar cost turned into an energy amount..
Leads to the question of why not just use the dollar cost in the first place related back to the average cost of energy as I’ve done?
Another aspect that paper highlights, is the use of references all the time to prove up the authors findings. In that paper from Euan he refers to some papers on EROEI, like the 2010 paper from Kubiszewski et al. does it have the methodology of what they came up with? No, not at all. It’s a meta study of other papers, and references Bullard CW et al from 1978. Does this paper come up with their methodology? Again No!! It refers to ways of Input-output energy data for different sectors of the economy worked out by the US dept of commerce in 1963 and 1967 where you just plug in the numbers for that sector.. but nothing about how that data was collected or what was included and excluded…
I just spent 3 hours going back through references of references to find out exactly the numbers used in this paper, yet all I find is more references not exact methodology and accounting for every aspect in EROEI analysis. Yet fantastic numbers keep appearing out of nowhere, with a reference next to the number, with the reference not showing any working out!! I’m going round and round in circles as I always end up doing trying to find how they get magical numbers…
LikeLiked by 1 person
Further background for the complexity of figuring all the embedded energy in any human artifact is H. T. Odom’s emergy analysis concept. It would be superior to using money as a stand in, it’s just too devilish complex, and to this day, no consensus on a standard boundary definition has been established. We are stuck with the money stand-in, which Hideaway uses, but really, it’s still good enough to give us the bad news.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Emergy
LikeLiked by 1 person
I also like the perspective that if an energy source pays taxes and is profitable without subsidies then we know its EROEI is high enough to support our civilization’s current level of complexity.
And if an energy source does not pay taxes, or is unprofitable, or requires subsidies, then its EROEI is too low for our current civilization.
This is simple and is all we really need to know.
LikeLiked by 3 people
Green tech people on LinkedIn always annoy me by saying oil industry gets subsidies too
LikeLike
Hideaway on why complexity tends to grow until it can’t, and the forces that conspire to cause a fast collapse.
LikeLiked by 4 people
Hideaway on the nature of civilization…
https://peakoilbarrel.com/open-thread-non-petroleum-july-10-2025/#comment-790769
LikeLiked by 3 people
Financial experts with wisdom often advise that rising long duration bond yields are the best signal for trouble. I also like the price of gold as an indicator of trouble.
https://wolfstreet.com/2025/07/12/30-year-treasury-yield-jumps-to-4-96-despite-solid-auction-long-end-of-yield-curve-steepens-mortgage-rate-spread-historically-wide/
LikeLike
B today is also thinking about EROEI.
He argues that the rationale for solar panels has nothing to do with climate change. Rather solar panels are a means of more efficiently converting coal into electricity and thus keeping complexity growth going a little longer.
B also includes an interesting deep dive into the non-renewable minerals and energy required to manufacture “renewable” energy devices.
https://thehonestsorcerer.substack.com/p/the-world-has-a-serious-coal-problem
LikeLiked by 1 person
Maxojir with a nice 4 minute summary of US shale oil forces and responses, and the fact that the rig count and oil extraction rate is falling.
When Iran regime change operations resume in another attempt to control their oil this trend is likely to reverse.
LikeLike
For me to wrap my head around. They attack Iran to increase oil prices? So oil production gets more affordable?
LikeLike
Money is a claim on energy. Therefore oil is power, and old oil is more powerful than fracked oil, because the EROEI is higher.
Russia and Iran have some exportable old oil, and are friends with China, a peer rival of the US.
The west attacks/bleeds/destabilizes Iran and Russia in an attempt to change their governments so they can control their oil.
My guess is that only a few people in the deep state (aka CIA) understand this and their figurehead idiots in denial we see on the teevee believe they are defending democracy or preventing nuclear weapon proliferation.
Another attack on Iran will probably increase oil prices because Iran may attempt to close the Strait if Hormuz and/or the oil markets will worry that they might do so.
LikeLiked by 2 people
Mike Shellman agrees…
https://www.oilystuff.com/forumstuff/forum-stuff/going-down
LikeLiked by 1 person
“Peak tight oil will occur in late 2025 or 1Q26.“
Shellman’s a real expert and I’m just an amateur observer but peak tight oil feels like a big deal to me.
All of us who thought the 2008 GFC was the beginning of the end got it wrong because we did not anticipate the rapid growth in tight oil that made up for flat or declining conventional oil.
Tight oil bought us more than a decade of normalcy at the cost of a mountain of debt because tight oil is not as good for growth as conventional oil due to its lower EROEI.
If tight oil is about to decline I think this implies that total energy is about to decline which is the trigger for collapse that Hideaway’s Complexity Theory warns us about.
Any comments Hideaway?
LikeLiked by 3 people
“Any comments Hideaway?”
LOTS!! however like so much else it’s a books worth to cover it all!!
One aspect of my way of working out EROEI was that the tight oil had a EROEI of 1.76 compared to the wholesale price of oil, pretty much lines up with Mike’s conclusions about the oil industry not be able to pay the loans or be profitable.
If I had to guess, I’d say the oil fracking industry, with all the consumption involved associated with it, is what’s been keeping the official US GDP number in positive growth over the last decade. Huge borrowings, huge cost, not really breaking even economically, only producing a little more energy than it uses at best.
As you stated above…. “Money is a claim on energy. Therefore oil is power, and old oil is more powerful than fracked oil, because the EROEI is higher.”
It suddenly reminded me of another aspect of EROEI that I didn’t include in the original essay above, because the entirety of the situation is so complex!!
With money, well enough of of it at least, we can go and buy energy at the current wholesale price, being $US64.36/bbl for West Texas intermediate delivered in December 25. That’s $US38.85/Mwh of energy. There are similar types of contracts for every other form of energy. I could even buy a 2035 futures contract for delivery of WTI crude at $60/bbl or $US35.30/MWh..
With enough cash I could buy a contract for every month delivery of 1000 bbls (contract size) between now and 2035. Taking 120 months for delivery of 1000bbls of crude/mth gives me 1700MWh of energy/mth, or a total of 204,000MWh of energy over the next 10 years for ~$US7.5M.
To buy that much energy by installing solar panels and enough batteries to cover night and winter, would cost me, at the wholesale rate of the New England Solar farm, including just the batteries to cover daytime cloudy periods, before adding overnight or winter coverage, ~$US16.7M. Of course adding batteries to cover overnight plus allow for just one cloudy day in summer, autumn and spring would add another ~$US16M (assuming you can get batteries fully installed for $US200/KWh.. We are up to ~$32M before covering the storage of energy from summer to winter, which would be many millions more..
Of course there are lots of arguments that you have to turn the oil into electricity, with my counter of oil supplies both product and energy, so how do you make product from electricity?
Of course to buy wholesale electricity futures contracts (1700MWh spread over 24/7) over the next decade for around $US15M.
Interestingly the futures prices of oil go down over the next decade, while the average cost of wholesale electricity via futures contracts rises. (While renewables are advertised as ‘cheaper’ it’s interesting that the wholesale price of electricity is expected to go up as the percentage of renewables increases on the grid!! LOL self delusion everywhere except when it concerns money!!).
Now what about storing a months worth of electricity from summer to winter? That is around another $US340M for solar, so time to change subject for all solar will save us enthusiasts..
Goodness, this post long enough already and several other important aspects still to cover….
LikeLiked by 2 people
So the market believes the price of oil will fall.
Is that because the market expects:
1. supply will increase from ??
2. demand will fall because people will be poorer
3. demand for energy will shift away from oil
4. peak tight oil means the global economy will collapse
LikeLike
While I would like to think it’s a bit of 4, as the risk of non delivery by then is much greater due to collapse, I suspect it’s a bet that EVs will take over from ICEs by then and oil still is flowing well for all other uses.
10 years out is also outside the range that hedge funds etc are willing to bet on, so very thin interest out that far..
LikeLiked by 1 person
Imagine the “drill, baby, drill” administration trying to explain this. He will probably say that “radical environmentalists” or some other boogieman is sabotaging him.
LikeLiked by 4 people
Does not look good.
LikeLike
This video is unavailable in my country, so could you please give a synopsis. As in what does not look good?
LikeLike
Also not available in Canada.
LikeLike
I didn’t watch the video, but here’s the description:
“CBS Evening News” reports on communities struggling with food insecurity and how they’re addressing it.
00:00 Food insecurity on college campuses
2:34 “Food rescuers” get food waste to people in need
5:09 Non-profit food rescue works to relieve hunger
7:20 Mom buys “bare minimum” at grocery story
10:48 Some with six-figure incomes are struggling with food insecurity
14:22 Federal funding cuts are starving food banks
17:14 USDA cuts cripple food banks and school food programs in North Carolina
19:38 USDA cuts leave food aid groups and farmers struggling
LikeLike
I am guessing that video is Geoblocked.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Geo-blocking
A VPN might be useful for things like that…
LikeLike
Available in Germany!
LikeLike
The synopsis is quit easy: Rising hunger and food ques in America. People can’t afford to but food on the table. This is a society where does with less will be squeezed.
LikeLike
@Hideaway
What do you think the world will look like in the year 2040?
LikeLiked by 1 person
I can imagine. Here is a Norwegian teacher with a blog like this. Trying to describe. The picture in this blog perhaps describe it all. “Where will we get medicine from, when the super-cargo ships are not circulating on the world’s oceans? Where will our food come from, when the world’s granaries are drying up, or authoritarian states are taking control of the planet’s few remaining food bowls? Where will our energy come from, when the last drops of oil2 are being consumed on a gigantic military buildup, financed by debt, ecologically and economically, in every corner of the world?
https://agnarlirhus.substack.com/p/kan-du-se-det-for-deg
LikeLike
A few translated excerpts from the essay by Agnar Lirhus…
LikeLiked by 3 people
I agree that the complexity of EROI is greatly simplified by using money as a marker for energy, which is even more justified when comparing relative EROI from different sources. But if we use money for such comparisons, why not just go to Levelized Cost of Energy in the first place? It’s a common practice and deservedly so. Here’s an example:
https://www.lazard.com/research-insights/levelized-cost-of-energyplus-lcoeplus/
LikeLike
From Lazard’s 2025 report executive summary:
If energy sources with an EROEI of about 1.2 are the most cost-competitive form of generation today then they are saying we are screwed.
LikeLike
Hi Joe, welcome here at Un-denial..
There are many flaws with the Lazard LCOE numbers, which are all in their assumptions.
Firstly they have a price that humanity has to pay for coal, oil and gas, whereas I contend that they are just as free to humanity as wind, water, waves, metals and every other resource on planet Earth. We humans have to make machines to harvest the energy and materials into forms useful to ourselves.
Just because we charge each other for some of those resources does not change the energy equation at all, yet that is exactly what Lazard’s report has done.
Remember we built our modern civilization on a coal base where the plants were sitting right next to the resource, which the owners had ‘the right’ to mine.
Next are the assumptions on costs to build and capacity factors. They assume all renewables use 100% of the possible capacity factor, while coal, gas and nuclear have limited capacity factors, not an apples to apples comparison.
Then capital costs. Lazard has a possible cost of new coal power stations being between $US2B- $US4.2B for a 600Mw plant (pg 37). However a new coal mine, coal fired power station of 1,100MW and an Aluminium smelter is currently being built for a total cost of $US2B in Indonesia (The Adaro project if you want to look it up).
The Coal power plant and coal mine have a total of $US665M allocated for their construction, with the bulk of the $US2B allocated for the 500,000 tonne/yr smelter. Wood Mackenzie have an estimated cost of $US2B per 500k tonnes of new Aluminium smelter production, so it backs up the costing of the coal plant in Indonesia being the cheapest part of the $2B spend.
I used an Australian project where the 750MW power station cost $US750M and uses coal from their own pit, so no ‘cost’ to purchase fuel as included in Lazard and how we built our system.
Then they use a Nuclear power plant cost of below what Vogtle actually cost, for new large plants, even though the new plants in the UK like Hinkley, plus Finland and France all back up the higher costs.
Like so much in the world the Lazard reports are so biased trying to show what they want to show, which is not necessarily backed by reality.
They have a capital cost for battery storage of $122/KWh and lasting 35 years in their assumptions at using 90% of battery capacity per round trip, plus a solar capacity factor of up to 7.2 hrs/d on average throughout the year. However no mention of including whatever extra transmission lines would be required from the desert that, that plant would have to be located in, nor accounting for the degradation of batteries in desert heat. (Pg 36 Lazard).
The New England solar Farm example I used in the essay above, does match up with their solar and small battery installation costs, but not the capacity factor, nor the 35 years expected for the plant and batteries. Plus the 4 hours of “storage” is a ridiculous number as last time I looked night time could go for more than 12 hours for half the year, in most places, so it’s not real storage..
Lazard could be used if they just showed real numbers of costs, lifespans, capacity factors etc instead of using biased numbers.
The biases in Lazard’s reports was one of the reasons I decided I had to do the calculations myself, using actual real projects as examples.. Plus I tried to use ‘average examples like Kogan Creek and not Adaro for the coal power plant, and Australia’s largest solar farm, likewise for Hinkley PC, as it’s not that much different to Vogtle, though the capital cost keeps ratcheting up. Using Vogtle does not change the numbers by much at all, it comes out at 0.6 instead of HinkleyPC 0.57.
LikeLike
The point of my comment was to agree with your general approach, that monetary costs can be used as an indicator of energy costs, not that Lazard in particular was the sine qua non of levelized cost analysis. Using money as an indicator for energy is probably just as accurate as using average cost per square foot for estimating building construction costs or using total weight of motors and machine tools and cost per ton for estimating factory construction costs. In the end, if unsubsidized levelized costs are truly lower for some sources of energy, they will probably be built. If not, they won’t.
I also agree that renewables are no panacea as an energy gathering system. Even if they were viable as a substitute for fossil fuels across the board, the embedded energy in a totally new renewable energy system plus a greatly expanded grid would raise atmospheric CO2 concentrations significantly, perhaps as much as a few more decades of fossil fuel use. A new energy system has to be built with the energy available, and that energy is still 80% or more fossil fuels. The time for switching energy systems to avoid climate change was probably in the middle of the last century, before most fossil fuel use had ever happened.
And regardless of what energy system modern civilization uses, it would support the massive overshoot in humanity’s use of other resources and the destruction of biodiversity and reduction in total environmental biomass. What needs to happen, but won’t happen deliberately due to Maximum Power Principle effects, is a rapid shutdown of almost all human energy use. But I expect that the only way our energy consumption will be significantly reduced is either destruction of energy infrastructure by war or by some uncontrolled economic collapse. I vote for the latter.
LikeLiked by 4 people
Lazard is a team of people supporting their families by selling their analyses. Making a living is much more important than truth.
Nobody will pay for Hideaway’s EROEI analysis and conclusions.
Nobody will pay to figure out how our brains deny obvious overshoot and how to override this suicidal behavior.
LikeLiked by 3 people
how our brains deny obvious overshoot and how to override this suicidal behavior
I doubt that our behavior can be overridden. The human biology underpinning our behavior and culture has evolved over many hundreds of thousands of years. It was very adaptive until the last couple of hundred years and would still be reasonably adaptive but for the discovery of how to use fossil fuels to power heat engines.
Our current predicament makes clear that most people’s brains don’t have the capacity for acting on information that would require a severe sacrifice of personal and familial affluence. We all want our children and ourselves to have more of what we value and a bountiful energy supply allows us to have more of everything. Aside from a few monks and other ascetics, we’ll just keep taking more until natural forces or other people take it away. It won’t be long.
LikeLiked by 1 person
I agree with you Joe.
I had high hopes about the utility of Varki’s MORT when I started this blog, but it’s now clear to me that the Maximum Power Principle trumps all other behaviors.
There are very few items on the menu for those aware people who have not given up on trying to find a good path out of our overshoot predicament:
I think my menu item has the highest (but still very low) probability of success, but others may disagree.
LikeLiked by 2 people
Elon Musk seems to be in complete denial of overshoot. He said that the Earth can support 80 billion people. I don’t know much about Eric Weinstein.
LikeLiked by 1 person
Here is a summary of Eric Weinstein’s work that Hossenfelder published today.
I think Weinstein is a little crazy and is seeking new physics that would solve our energy depletion problem or permit travel to planets in other galaxies because he understands our overshoot predicament, but because he needs to make a living does not explicitly discuss it and instead disguises it with worries about nuclear war.
Hossenfelder thinks Weinstein is no more crazy than many of her other physics colleagues who also work on nonsense like String Theory.
The difference is that Weinstein doesn’t burn up public tax dollars exploring bad ideas and by supporting colleagues doing the same, and Hossenfelder admires him for this integrity.
LikeLiked by 1 person
You forget to include the menu item that’s gaining the most traction.
5. A shift in the collective consciousness. Not sure what the plan is, but I know it heavily involves the word community. Also not sure who gets the credit for this winning idea… but just go to Nate Hagens site, throw a rock, and you’ll be in the vicinity.
I agree that #4 has the highest probability (by far), but there’s one more to consider.
6. The Budd Dwyer plan. Here’s an awesome song specifically about it. (no joke, look it up if you don’t believe me)
LikeLike
Yeh, everyone loves that shift in consciousness thing, especially the big names in the overshoot market. Great way to boost subscribers and likes without offending anyone or triggering their denial module.
Another closely related favorite is “more education”. Christ, we’ve got 10’s of thousands of PhDs with 20 years of education that think solar panels and EVs will fix climate change.
LOL!! ChatGPT started to explain The Budd Dwyer plan, then the screen went black and a red message popped up saying community guidelines were being violated. Elon’s who-gives-a-f**k Grok gave me the answer without blinking.
Let’s not forget the Dick Cheney plan:
7. Launch a surprise neutron bomb and EMP attack on Asia, Europe, and Africa, wait few years for the dust to settle and decomposition to clean things up, then move in and take advantage of more resources with fewer consumers.
LikeLiked by 2 people
Even the evil Cheney plan has a near zero probability of working because Complexity Theory says it is not possible to extract the resources without the complexity supported by the existing populations.
LikeLiked by 3 people
#4 is what Taylor Guthrie is studying at Yale? and soon moving to Netherlands. see interview on The Great Simplification 191.
LikeLike
Bill Rees is now writing on Substack. A good article today explaining how we humans and civilisation are dissipative structures and we cannot escape the 2nd law of thermodynamics.
https://open.substack.com/pub/reeswilliame/p/the-law-that-cant-be-broken
LikeLiked by 3 people
Good essay from the king. And 1929 for that Eddington quote? Wow!
LOL, Bill is describing exactly how I was thinking about this stuff early on when it was tough to grasp (for me). I left this comment last year when I was new to Megacancer.
LikeLiked by 3 people
I wish we had emoji reacts on WordPress for your comments, LMAO that was funny
LikeLiked by 1 person
Good new essay by Gail Tverberg.
My take-away is that our leaders have inched a little closer to acknowledging reality, probably because the evidence is so overwhelming they can’t deny it any more, but still have a long long way to go.
https://ourfiniteworld.com/2025/07/14/worrying-indications-in-recently-updated-world-energy-data/
LikeLiked by 3 people
That’s a comment from Gail that I found here: https://megacancer.wordpress.com/2025/07/03/whats-in-a-picture/#comment-12125
This was my reply, but go to the link cuz it’s always worth reading what James has to say about it:
“There has to be a God behind it. But there are a whole lot of people in denial that…”
LOL, Gail is fucking with us by intentionally putting those two sentences together like that… but I see it was a comment and not the actual essay… which makes me think she’s not fucking with us, at all. Wow!!
(it’s so outrageous, I still think I’m misreading it or something)
end of comment…. Not sure, but I don’t think I’ve ever seen the god argument go to a place of “you don’t believe in god because you’re in denial”… Gail seems to be two steps away from being in that place.😂
LikeLike
I think I understand Gail’s view.
It’s true that biology is more complex than our brain can comprehend.
Gail thinks this implies there must be a god.
I think this implies there are limits to the abilities of our brain, and although biology is more clever than we can imagine, it still abides by the laws of physics which we do understand.
I’ve written about this before but there are a near infinite number of protein shapes (aka functions) encoded by DNA, and a near infinite number of shapes for each function, so we have an infinite times infinite number of things for evolution to play with.
Dr. Tom Murphy’s essay today explores a similar theme of nature being more complex than we can comprehend.
https://dothemath.ucsd.edu/2025/07/rivulets-of-life/
P.S. It looks to me like god provides a lot of comfort to Gail who has a rare and deep awareness of our coming collapse. I think that’s nice. I wish I had some denial genes left.
LikeLiked by 1 person
Ya, you’re probably right. The doomer religion that I had said I wouldn’t pick on… I really should try to stick to that better.
And ya, I liked Tom Murphy today. He has slowly taken over the top spot of the weekly bloggers. Just means he gets me to think the most. But you have to keep an eye on Tommy cuz he’ll stray over to the DQ worship zone in a heartbeat.
His comment section is always good. But this line from Bin is what I don’t like to see because I know it means more homework. (and Rob, your DNA paragraph is my weakest area and preventing me from becoming the ultimate know-it-all jerk😊)
ps. Art Berman is on a streak of 3 consecutive sane essays. His crazy seems to come and go.
LikeLiked by 1 person
Tim Watkins discusses Gail’s essay and seems to conclude that we could delay collapse if we eliminated bad policies that constrain citizens from consuming more non-renewable resources.
https://consciousnessofsheep.co.uk/2025/07/16/a-victim-of-its-own-success/
LikeLiked by 1 person
This clip was new to me. Love to see rich assholes squirming around.
But its got that same disheartening vibe that I get with movies like Erin Brockovich, The Rainmaker, The Insider, A Civil Action, etc… where we (the audience) are 100% in agreement of who the good guy is (average joe) and who the bad guy is (big evil corporation). And political affiliations don’t matter whatsoever, we are all on the same page here… but as soon as the film is over, its back to supporting the bad guys and not giving a fuck about the good guys.
Not sure how this mass hypnosis works… oh well, I gotta wrap this post up. I just remembered that I need to jump on Amazon and order me some Monsanto Roundup for my yard.
LikeLike
The Epstein story is the best evidence for unimaginable rot at the core of our elite from all political parties.
Today’s deep dive into the Epstein evidence and implications by Robert Barnes is the best I’ve heard so far.
LikeLiked by 1 person
He and his team campaigned on exposing the abuse of underage girls by the elite. Now this:
LikeLike
I keep a close eye on inflation with the goal of stocking up on any essentials that are rapidly increasing in price.
Most food, with the exception of coffee, seems to have stabilized over the last 6 months however I’m noticing a new inflation trend in plastic goods.
Garbage bags, freezer bags, and storage totes jumped a lot (up to 75%) in 1 year.
LikeLiked by 2 people
Is the increase in the cost of plastic due to an increase in oil prices?
LikeLike
I don’t know. Maybe tariffs. Maybe exchange rates. Maybe China manufacturing costs increasing. Maybe something going on in refinery economics.
LikeLike
Maybe once you have been out of public office for a while, you feel more free to speak your mind.
Israeli ex-PM confesses: We’re building a concentration camp.
LikeLike
A lot of people discuss MORT without knowing that’s what they are discussing.
LikeLiked by 1 person
Poor Sam. Few months ago he fell off a roof and damn near died. He has been recovering well, all things considered… but today his house (and his business) got swallowed up by collapse.
A week ago Sam posted this video Second Storm of the Century In a Week Saves Us From Heat Stroke
Nothing special, just a 10-minute hailstorm going over his house. But he had a very subtle anxiety thing going on while he did his normal commentary. I could pick up on it only because of listening to hours of him. I liked it because I could relate.
It made me write a post for un-Denial. I tied it back to my story of the power going out and how these things are no longer fun and exciting for the doomer. Not that I’m terrified every time there’s a power outage or a rainstorm… but in the back of my mind there is a slight feeling of dread, like this might be the one that takes me out.
I ended up deleting it because it wasn’t very good, but I wish I would’ve posted it now because it would’ve made me look like a prophet.😊
LikeLiked by 2 people
That’s very sad. I feel bad. I think Sam worked very hard on his property.
You know we can always edit a post after the fact if you’re not happy with it.
LikeLiked by 1 person
LikeLiked by 1 person
Events of this week have evaporated the off-ramps to avoid WWIII and Russia is staying calm and respectful in order to buy to time to prepare for the coming war.
LikeLike
I was fooled by an AI today.
Rick Beato posted this song by a new artist today. I trust Beato’s music taste so I listened, agreed it was good, and then went searching for more info on the artist and found nothing. I chocked it up to him being too new to be in any of the databases yet.
Later in the day Beato explained how he created the artist and the song with an AI.
From now on I think I’m going to ignore all new music from any artist I don’t know.
LikeLiked by 2 people
LOL, wait till this gets perfected and any jackass can create a grammy award worthy song in 2 minutes. Seems like it’s pretty much there already. Might destroy music, which I say good riddance. And let’s hope the AI machine can stick around long enough to destroy Hollywood as well.
ps. That quote is a lyric from this song. I know the rap genre isn’t a favorite around here… and rightly so, its garbage nowadays. But 1993 (and this song in particular) was the absolute peak for good, intelligent hip hop.
LikeLiked by 1 person
I wish no harm on musicians.
Medical professionals on the other hand are prime targets for being replaced by an AI and they can all burn in hell for their role in contributing to the unnecessary deaths of 20+ million people by the leaked bioweapons virus that they refused to treat safely and effectively.
Think how easy it will be to train an AI to replace an expert that looks at data and images to make diagnoses and prescriptions. We can send the doctors into the fields to pick our vegetables.
LikeLiked by 2 people
This post displays confusion between energy (MWh or GWh) and money (US $).
EROEIs must be calculated using *energy* inputs and outputs (in MWh, or another common unit). Otherwise they are meaningless.
LikeLike
With money you can buy raw energy at the wholesale price, with enough money anyway. All pricing I have used is around the average wholesale price of energy being in $US/MWh over the last coupe of decades.
With some forms of energy you can go and buy it now for around $US40/MWh and buy 100MWh for $US4,000. Instead of paying for this energy, you could go and buy an energy producing machine that produces energy over it’s life. What matters is does it return more or less money/energy that you invested in it. It is often quoted that modern civilization requires an EROEI of at least 10 to1 to survive, meaning every $US40 invested would have to return $US400 of energy or money, to keep civilization viable. The $US40 worth of equipment represents the cost of all the embedded energy to make it, which is around 1MWh.
In the examples above in the essay, the gas plant is effectively giving you/me/us $US920 worth of energy (23MWh) or dollars for every $US40 of investment. While the nuclear power plant like Hinkley PC is giving a return of $US22.80 in money, or 0.57MWh of energy for every $US40 of investment.
You can either use the energy for yourself or sell it at the average wholesale price of energy.
Now which do you think has the better Energy Return on Energy Investment, something that returns 23MWh for every $US40 of input or something that returns $US22.80 for every $US40 of input.
Money is a claim on energy and is the best way to include all energy costs into any built system. It covers the pro rata cost of ports, bridges, trucks, factories the equipment was built in, the mines the base materials were mined from, the education of all the builders and installers, the energy used by workers to get to the factories, the food they eat to survive etc, etc, etc.
If you have a better method, please let us know, as setting boundaries like every research paper on EROEI, I’ve ever read does, misses huge quantities of energy inputs., and therefore spits out highly incorrect answers in the way EROEI research is most often used, as if it included the full energy cost of solar, wind, nuclear etc.
LikeLiked by 3 people
As a former high school physics teacher I hate to admit that when I first read Hideaway’s superb essay I had no clue what the metric prefix P was (as in 2.3 PJ/GWe). After a quick Google search I learned that the P stood for PETA and represented 1×10^15 and was known as a quadrillion.
I did already know that GIGA stood for a billion but did discover that TERA stands for a trillion. It has occured to me that U.S. politicians could really capitalize on this info. So, instead of the national debt being expressed as 37 trillion dollars they could say it is only 0.037 PETA dollars!
In my classroom we worked almost exclusively with the metric prefixes kilo (k=1000), hecto (h=100), deca (da=10), deci(d=.1), centi (c =.01), and milli(m=.001). But, almost certainly everyone of this post is well aware of these prefixes.
To assist students new to these metric prefixes somone (I have no idea who that was) came up with this mnemonic: King henry died drinking chocolate milk.
For a recovering chocaholic like myself that may not be the worst way to go.
Class dismissed,
Teacher 314
LikeLiked by 1 person
Thanks for this thread. It is my life line in a sea of people throwing bricks that don’t help us float.
This thread is traversing ideas so quickly it is difficult to keep a perspective of variables as they unfold over time.
The ones that guide my search for human viability are “who gets injured and when” and I include all the life that does not get born because we made its predecessors go extinct.
Let me preface my contribution with a “thank you Rob” for including my “sterility virus / life boat” path forward in his 5 possibilities. For those that want to learn more see this video:
https://lite.evernote.com/note/ee411e1c-c69e-5e16-c340-c6d87c523fec
I would also like to contribute my work on processes for upgrading cognitive abilities high enough that normal human behavior overrides behavior that drives MPP. (Rob’s path 4)
I spent 30 years working on this solution before realizing it took too long to implement.
Here is an introduction to a series of 5 books I wrote.
https://lite.evernote.com/note/fb0dc558-03e5-83bc-95dc-d15322d321c4
Three of these books are now available from Amazon:
Time Blind Book 3: Why We Can’t See our Dangerous Future (1990)
Time Blind Book 4: The Development of Temporal Thought (1982)
Time Blind Book 5: On Knowing the Meaning of Your Decisions (1975)
I would like to focus attention on the temporal aspects of the system we are viewing in this thread.
The temporal considerations included in viewing its margins (e.g. the costs of delivering energy and the trends in these costs) do predict scarcity in the next two decades. However, the cascade of rocks thrown in the gears by this scarcity is a pale way of understanding the injuries that will occur when energy deliveries trip the scarcity conflict death spiral this century that I expect will kill 13.4 billion people.
Again, this is a difficult conversation using this communication format. I invite interested parties into small electronic face to face meetings which I will be glad to set up if you contact me.
Jack Alpert
alpert@skil.org
913-708-2554
Jack’s work 600 word summary
LikeLiked by 3 people
Last month I made this comment over at Jan’s great essay.
https://gnug315.substack.com/p/collapse-part-45-bargaining/comment/125987702
A reply email yesterday made me read it again. It’s pretty good, I even had to hit the like button for myself. LOL. It was an idea of an alien with the job of surveying all the planets with complex life and predicting when they’ll have their self-induced mass extinction. With fire usage being the predictor.
Keeping with my generous prediction of one fossil fuel peak for every one million galaxies… I think another good method for predicting things would be population count in regard to Hideaway’s complexity theory.
The combustion engine doesn’t show up till you crack a billion. Cars will be mainstream around 2 billion. No space exploration until you reach 3 billion. Cell phones and internet require 6 billion.
Because nuclear war is the death of nearly all civilizations that make it to 6 billion, all eyes are on earth right now to see if they can become lucky #13 by making it through to the very rare and coveted stage of full AI takeover. Where robots (instead of nuclear) are responsible for the extinction.
Only 12 others have done it so far. They all peaked between 9-14 billion. Except for one. A strange planet full of overachievers amazingly pulled it off with only 3 billion. Universe authorities are still investigating to figure out how the hell that planet bypassed the laws of complexity.
LikeLiked by 3 people
Very good.
My guess is that the only way to pull it off would be to use high intelligence to override MPP but that requires evolving an extended theory of mind without denying unpleasant realities.
Maybe evolution can discover a different method of denying mortality that does not have the side-effect of denying all unpleasant realities?
I have my doubts because that would increase the complexity of the required brain module and therefore would lower the probability that it could occur simultaneously with a mutation for an extended theory of mind.
Unfortunately even that lucky species will still have a finite lifetime because it’s not possible to have modernity without using some non-renewable resources, which as Hideaway explains, starts the clock ticking.
LikeLiked by 2 people
The Truman show for your average barnyard animal
https://postimg.cc/gallery/mB653SZ
Now that the useful idiots have done their job against Assad , Iran , Hezbollah etc , its time to dispose them ( It seems that they are no more freedom fighters and moderate rebels for the free press of NATO ) and start the official dismemberment of Syria .
LikeLike
You sound like FE. Welcome if that’s you.
LikeLiked by 1 person
The only way to achieve a fairer distribution of wealth while also addressing overshoot is population reduction.
https://energyskeptic.com/2025/disparity-in-wealth/
https://phys.org/news/2025-03-equal-wealth-bad-climate-expert.html
LikeLiked by 4 people
As the human population has grown, used more energy and resources plus gained in complexity, overall waste has increased and so has inequality.
These are both features of increasing size, energy and material use and complexity, not bugs..
Think of the waste of the process of photosynthesis, only around 1% of the sun’s energy is converted to carbohydrates by leaves with the rest of the energy being wasted.
In a new rainforest, because of climate change or a volcanic eruption or whatever, lots of species seeking high levels of sunshine will grow, yet over time only a couple of species that can grow the tallest and widest will eventually take most of the high level sunshine, with the others outcompeted. Sure lower layers of very shade tolerant species will grow, but of the primary high sun loving ones, only a few of the original ones remain. It’s inequality up there, while the complexity of the overall rainforest continues to grow.
In biology it’s just called succession in natural systems as the ‘ecosystem’ develops. We put the prefix ‘eco’ in front of system to sound more authoritative, but realistically it’s just another system. We call civilization a system then think the physical rules of systems don’t apply to us because of our hubris, err sorry, ingenuity.. Whew I caught that just in time…LOL
LikeLiked by 4 people
Oh you buzzkill. You might’ve just officially squashed my crybaby rants about inequality and the what if’s (what if anyone but the Brits had conquered America). LOL. In the past I’ve seen you talk about inequality being a feature, not a bug… but I don’t think I’ve ever seen that rainforest analogy. Really clicked for me. Nice comment.
Since Stellar sent me down this rabbit hole again, I’m gonna make a quick comment… but it might be the last time I ever do any research about millionaires or billionaires.
Of the links Alice provided, I like this one best. Visualizing the Pyramid of Global Wealth Distribution
15 million millionaires in 2000. Jumps to 59 million in 2022. And projected at 86 million for 2027. Ugghhh, please Lars Larsen, please be correct!!!
Made me go looking (to no avail) for a breakdown of global wealth by race. This is always the hardest thing to find because I think “they” have to keep it a secret that white only makes up 10% of population but has 90% of the money. LOL, that’s another one of those disastrous with big consequences attached ratios like the 90/10 “off the farm”.
LikeLiked by 1 person
This comment on Megacancer made me look for the video. Gave me a good laugh.
Secretary of Defense Pete Hegseth on X: “Unleashing U.S. Military Drone Dominance @DOGE https://t.co/esaQtswwDb” / X
LikeLike
LOL. How far a once respected nation has fallen. He’s still gonna have to send some fatties to the front line to fight with mortars and rifles. Little Russia is producing more weapons than all of Europe plus the US combined. China dwarfs Russia, imagine what they will bring to bear. Problem is, US will use nukes before they allow themselves to be humiliated.
LikeLiked by 3 people
Garlic harvest underway…
LikeLiked by 5 people
I can relate. The dry season started here a 6 weeks ago. I let the garlic dry in the ground for 2 weeks, they’ve been on drying racks in 90 ° heat for about 4 weeks. Soon to begin using them. This is always the best time of the year when you harvest something.
AJ
LikeLiked by 2 people
I’ve been eating eating steamed kale and a huge spinach or lettuce salad, with raspberries for desert every night for a couple weeks. Just starting to harvest some potatoes. Blueberries next week.
LikeLiked by 3 people
This year I was able to plant garlic from own saved bulbs. And I am still eating last year’s garlic. It is a great feeling
LikeLike
Hideaway’s rant today…
https://peakoilbarrel.com/march-world-and-non-opec-oil-production-rises/#comment-790939
LikeLiked by 4 people
Thomas Bernhard was an Austrian author who did not have the MORT gene. I’ve read quite a bit of his work. Here is a sample from the book “Gehen”! (Walking):
Reflecting on the facts and conditions of the world would reveal the catastrophic intolerability of existence:
“So every day becomes hell for us, whether we like it or not, and what we think, if we think about it, if we have the necessary mental coldness and mental acuity, always becomes something mean and low and superfluous in any case, which depresses us for life in the most shattering way. It is an art ”to endure the unbearable and not to perceive what is appalling as such, as appalling.”
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Thomas_Bernhard
Saludos
El mar
LikeLiked by 1 person
Cool quote.
When you finally come to that correct conclusion, you better have your coping mechanisms figured out.
Losing your sense of humor at this stage is the equivalent to being kicked out of your H&G tribe 20kya.
LikeLiked by 2 people
From The Journal of the Norwegian Medical Association
A sea of medicines
Et hav av legemidler | Tidsskrift for Den norske legeforening
But what pharmaceuticals are not made of oil?
I had a new un-denial in an professor in economy last week. I suggested degrowth to save oil for future healthcare. “you are right” he said and I did not hear from him again.
LikeLiked by 1 person
https://theseagypsyphilosopher.blogspot.com/2025/05/are-sea-gypsy-tribes-humanitys-last.html
Nice blog!
Unbelievable as it may seem, there are still places where 10 boats can have a small island or cove to themselves. In fact, I am writing this essay in one such archipelago. Other examples include, Patagonian Chile, the Philippines, Vancouver Island, Indonesia and the Pacific coast of Panama.
Saludos
el mar
LikeLike
Thanks. I remember Dmitri Orlov, before fracked oil saved us, lived on a sailboat for similar reasons. He thought a sailboat would be the safest place to live when the peak oil storms began.
Now he lives in Russia and never discusses peak oil.
LikeLiked by 1 person
I managed to un-denial an economist this week. I argued degrowth to save oil for pharmaceuticals when I am old. “You are right” he said and probably went down a black hole. I had good intentions I really mean it. I would like healthcare (and food when I am old to).
There is some side effects from pharmaceuticals. This is from The Journal of the Norwegian Medical Association. “A Sea of Pharmaceuticals” from The Journal of the Norwegian Medical Association highlights the widespread presence of pharmaceutical residues in aquatic environments, including Norwegian fjords, drinking water, and wastewater. Studies—both global and national—have detected substances like carbamazepine, metformin, caffeine, antibiotics, NSAIDs, and hormones in the environment, often at levels that can harm aquatic life. Certain substances, such as levonorgestrel, ciprofloxacin, diclofenac, and ibuprofen, pose especially high environmental risks.” I know ciprofloxacin is expecially worrisom. I dont think it ever is going away and is killing micro algae and clams.
LikeLiked by 2 people
Sarah Bils is geopolitical analyst I’ve not encountered before.
She has some fresh intelligent observations of what’s going on.
LikeLike
How much growth is required to achieve good lives for all? Insights from needs-based analysis
https://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/pii/S2452292924000493
Abstract:
Someone on a Discord server sent me this during a long and heated discussion on overpopulation. We might have been able to do this several decades ago, but due to declining EROEI and declining ore grades, a soft landing may not even be possible at this point.
LikeLike
Hi Stellarwind72, I invariably read these types of research, then start to look up the references they quote and rely upon for their positions and always get frustrated at the ridiculous assumptions they totally rely upon..
This paper refers to some degrowth documentation, even though it’s not part of their arguments at all, but rely upon the findings of those types of papers..
All this economic types of “we can do this, or that” types of nonsense totally disregards the real world. They make assumptions about how we can change the way people think and act, plus change from making all these unnecessary goods (without ever explaining which ones) like luxury yachts and build more low cost moderate housing and basic appliances to raise living standards to reasonable levels around the world..
Here is one example…..
” Continued growth would occur in some areas of the economy, made possible by reductions elsewhere. Spending on fossil fuels, armaments, private jets, sport utility vehicles, second homes, and advertising would need to be cut in order to provide room for growth in such areas as regenerative agriculture, food production, decent housing, clean energy, accessible health care, universal education, community welfare, public transportation, digital connectivity, and other areas related to green production and social needs
Do they ever discuss actual energy and materials required? No never. Do they ever explain that building yachts might take a totally different skill set and capital machinery than for building housing and appliances? No never!!
The thought that we could reduce spending on what provides 92% of all industrial energy and that we’d have plenty of energy to maintain civilization plus build a lot of new things, defies logic..
They always make the assumption that money will make everything that needs to happen actually happen. They often even refer to a future world of constrained resources, but never state how we’d build all the new technology (there is always the assumption of increased technology and human ingenuity making the production of goods cheaper and more efficient), with the last of the resources while maintaining all of our existing civilization.
It’s always the Magic Money Tree (sorry Modern Monetary Theory) providing for the new building of everything, not actual energy and resources. Yes this document refers to MMT to do the lifting..
Take a luxury fit-out of a luxury yacht, money spent $10M. That $10M goes to craftsmen and women with limited amounts to the actual base materials. It’s lots of people earning money for all the time and their expertise on doing the job to exceptional standards, whether its the cabinets or the pillow and cushions, and linen on the beds. The people earning this money currently spend it on housing, food, hot water, showers, heating etc, just like the rest of us..
Stopping the spend of $10M on the luxury yacht fit -out will not provide extra housing, food, health services, public transportation etc, and to think it would is delusional…
It’s not that we could have done it several decades ago.. We could never have done it at all. Several decades ago we also had limited resources available with the efficiency of the technology available at the time. Now we have more efficient methods of gathering all the energy and resources, but only because of the growth that allowed everything to become more complex which gained the extra efficiency.
The bar of universal improvement for everyone, is and always has been, just out of reach and the justification to keep growing so everyone can be better off, with just a little more resource, technology, energy and material use… then when we get there we can save the world, environment, climate etc etc..
Civilization is a process of using finite energy and materials to grow until it can’t, than it all unravels quickly. The larger the civilization the faster the collapse because the larger civilizations have the greatest reliance upon the greatest complexity. As our civilization is hundreds of times the size of the Roman and other ancient civilizations that took decades to hundreds of years to collapse, we’ll likely end hundreds of times faster than they ever did, at the end, because of our vastly greater complexity, which means …. a very short period of time..
LikeLiked by 3 people
Nice.
10 years ago I wrote an essay on why everyone wants economic growth and I argued the real reason was not what most people assumed.
Back then I thought the main driver for growth was the need for credit. It’s still important but I now understand that complexity and energy growth to maintain the supply flow of depleting non-renewable resources is even more important.
LikeLiked by 3 people
Good essay. I’m sure I’ve told you this before, but I love that you never shy away from showing us what your awareness level was in the past. I know my ego would have to do some editing before I reposted a ten-year-old essay. In fact, on some of those posts where I show you guys a letter I wrote to my inner circle in the early days of my journey… I guarantee that I deleted a sentence or two so that they wouldn’t be so embarrassing. And those were only from 2 or 3 years ago. LOL
Like this line here. It wasn’t from the actual essay, just a comment you made:
See, that’s hilarious compared to where you’re at now.😊
LikeLiked by 1 person
Was gonna just email this to Charles to see if he likes the song and lyrics… but what the heck, it might work as a post. (but still let me know Charles)
This was one of my theme songs during my brief religious era. I still love it. The lyrics are phenomenal. 1:38 is my favorite part.
Lightning crashes, a new mother cries
Her placenta falls to the floor
The angel opens her eyes
The confusion sets in, before the doctor can even close the door
Lightning crashes, an old mother dies
Her intentions fall to the floor
The angel closes her eyes
The confusion that was hers, belongs now to the baby down the hall
Oh, now feel it comin’ back again
Like a rolling thunder chasing the wind
Forces pulling from the center of the Earth again
I can feel it
And this quote from the lead singer/writer reminded me that when this video came out (mid 90’s), some of us incorrectly took it as the mother giving birth had died. Oh the good old days when you could be wrong for years. No annoying metrosexuals to correct you with their wikipedia connected phones. LOL
LikeLike
A very good approach to tackle the EROEI debate. Thanks Hideaway.
LikeLiked by 2 people
Here’s a good laugh. At least technology’s still good for something.
Imagine the singer of the band saying that on stage after he sees your cheating-ass duck for cover on the kiss cam. https://www.instagram.com/p/DMQwsTQJbTd/?igsh=aWw0cGgyYTY5ZHow
If a login box pops up, just click the “x”. Hit the r arrow a couple times to see the video.
The link is now making me sign in, so I might’ve ruined anymore free peeks. If so, here’s the story.
Astronomer board investigating CEO Andy Byron after Coldplay kiss-cam video – CBS News
LikeLike
Best laugh of the day.
LikeLiked by 1 person
To maintain sanity with overshoot awareness, some people go for a walk in the woods, or tend their gardens.
Others channel Q’uo:
LikeLike
At first glance I thought you were going for best laugh of the day… so I checked it out to get some ammo to try and make a joke. Somehow I ended up watching most of the video. But I have no jokes because there’s absolutely nothing funny about it.
Not even any entertainment value. It’s more of a bummer to have to sit through and witness exactly what Ligotti means by “the nightmare of full consciousness”. These people are doing everything in their power to make sure they never come close to reaching the same conclusions as Thomas Bernhard (in that quote from El mar above).
But maybe they’re the ones that are correct. Not correct about reality… hell no!!! Correct that humans should never be intentionally seeking a Bernhard type level of awareness… I don’t know.
LikeLiked by 1 person
I’m sure you know this, but just in case…
Andrii Zvorygin leads the monthly Peak Oil Chat which is the ONLY regular discussion by the best overshoot experts, and he does an excellent job. He has run for mayor in his community pushing a local food/sustainability agenda. He seems to be an accomplished small scale farmer, and I think he has strong computer software skills.
LikeLike
Ya, I know.
And he might have superb computer skills, but he has atrocious denial control skills. LOL
But I’ve seen enough of Andrii to know that he’s a good man. If I had a choice between two planets, one is full of people identical to my brain and the other is full of people identical to his… I’d choose to live on his planet for sure. (just so that I could end up corrupting them all… just kidding😊)
LikeLiked by 1 person
A 20ish friend of a friend’s daughter just died while swimming.
Our “leaders” are still silent. No one has been held to account for 20+ million and counting deaths. Not for the bioweapons leak. Not for the coerced unsafe and ineffective mRNA transfections. Not for blocking safe and effective treatments.
LikeLiked by 2 people
Blog discussing denial: Waking Up To Reality: The End of Denial – Itsovershoot
LikeLike
Thanks.
The author of this fairly new blog seems to understand our overshoot predicament and offers a different story than MORT for why humans exist and deny unpleasant realities.
I didn’t find it as persuasive as MORT because he ignored what I consider the salient facts:
– why only one species?
– why the big bang?
– why god?
– why polymaths can’t understand certain things?
It’s odd to present a new theory for denial without explaining why your idea fits the evidence better than MORT. In fact he doesn’t even mention MORT, not even to say it’s wrong.
I smell denial of denial reinforced by his comments that he believes he did the right thing by being transfected with mRNA.
LikeLike
I dont know, but in some degrees I agree with him. I cant see in real life a run for hospitals with vaccine injuries. I do see a ever increasing demand for hospitals by older people that never was in a hospital 30 years ago. If healthcare dos not collapse becouse of declining globalization, one could estimate a collapse just with the shere numbers of eldery people. In Noway the deats per 1000 is estimated to rise from 7 to 14 deaths per 1000 in twenty years. With a dependecy percent going from 50% to 70%. Thats not possible either.
LikeLike
Does the Norway government publish all-cause mortality data for transfected vs. un-transfected?
If not, why not? This data would end the debate.
LikeLike
I do agree that its worrying that Norway does not publish publicly all‑cause mortality data stratified by vaccination status.
LikeLike
No government publishes transfected vs. un-transfected all-cause mortality data.
How is this possible?
Imagine you are a health minister with good ethics and integrity at the beginning of covid. You are operating in an environment of herd panic and incomplete information. You believe we face a health emergency and that there is justification to approve a brand new gene therapy technology with no track record using a much shortened testing protocol. You understand your decision carries significant risks so you know you should monitor safety and effectiveness data to confirm you made the correct decision, or to halt further transfections if the data indicates you are causing more harm than good. You want every citizen to inject this gene therapy but you know some will refuse so you make the all-cause mortality data public so everyone can see that your policy is correct.
Not one country did this despite the data being easy to collect and report, and despite it being the most useful data for understanding safety and effectiveness.
No one has been held to account for 20+ million deaths caused by a bioweapons leak and unsafe and ineffective responses.
Nothing has been done to prevent a recurrence.
Dangerous bioweapons research continues.
The “success” of covid mRNA transfections (without supporting data) is being used as justification to create many new mRNA gene therapy products.
No one discusses the high and unfixable? risks inherent to mRNA gene therapy technology including uncertain dose, uncertain activity time, non-locality, dangerous side-effects of instructing cells to produce non-self proteins, etc.
Our health care systems therefore have unacceptably poor ethics and integrity.
The majority of citizens don’t care and/or don’t want to know what happened.
Fauci walks as a free man.
LikeLiked by 1 person
Can’t have conclusive evidence like that revealed Rob. But who knows maybe soon with AI help someone will pry the data out and release it. There should be a way to make many comparisons by other related data too. AI could figure that out. Maybe you should ask it for other patterns it would potentially see patterns in. I think the next gen of ai maybe better at this from what I have been reading.
LikeLiked by 1 person
159 countries used mRNA gene therapies during covid.
Not one reports all-cause mortality with and without mRNA.
If the all-cause mortality data showed that their policies were safe and effective, what are the odds that not one would publish the data to prove they did the right thing?
How is it possible that not 1 in 159 countries has good ethics, or integrity, or even common sense?
Seriously, are there no leaders with integrity in this world? Not even in opposition parties? WTF is going on?
LikeLiked by 1 person
Rob …”Seriously, are there no leaders with integrity in this world? Not even in opposition parties? WTF is going on?“
Doesn’t it tell you a lot about the state of the world in general?
I make the assumption that it’s just as bad in every field, which is why we are fed the BS about resources, transition, renewables, climate, small modular reactors or what’s happening in the war/wars etc..
LikeLiked by 1 person
Regulars here know I get much more upset about healthcare than overshoot issues.
Investigating energy and resources leads down a rabbit hole that will trigger the denial circuit in most people. Or will prevent someone from being elected if they speak about it.
On the other hand, all politicians want the best possible health for themselves and their family, and even the dimmest politician can understand the value and simplicity of all-cause mortality data when comparing two groups with one difference. Opposition parties could use the data to overthrow governments, but they too remain silent. There’s no excuse for bad integrity and ethics with covid.
Hell, there’s a possibility I’m wrong and mRNA transfected people are living longer than un-transfected. Or maybe there’s no difference in health outcomes in which case we’d know our leaders burned billions and destroyed the social fabric for no reason.
Publish the damn data and we can put this debate to rest.
LikeLike
I am pretty certain they won’t because it is very clear already that there is a noticeable problem. Then heads would roll. My main issue is whether people have woken up to the situation and won’t repeat the same response and blind acceptance again. I am not very hopeful. People are sheep not goats.
LikeLiked by 1 person
What’s wrong with heads rolling? That’s exactly what’s needed to put the fear of god into people so it never happens again.
20+ million dead is not a small thing. That’s 3x the holocaust that still traumatizes us 85 years later.
And it’s not like they quietly learned a lesson and are making amends. They are rolling out new mRNA products including a scary technology called self-amplifying mRNA.
Even if you forgive unsafe and ineffective treatments due to panicked morons, we still need to hang the people who funded the bioweapons research at Wuhan to circumvent gain of function laws in the US.
We don’t do accountability for anything anymore. Not even genocide in broad daylight, or the same murderers trafficking underage girls to pervert elites. I pray I live long enough to see Israel overrun by millions of angry neighbors seeking revenge.
LikeLiked by 1 person
LikeLike
If you quietly reflect on the events of covid what stands out was the singular obsession by authorities to transfect every citizen, including young and healthy people who did not need protection.
Now we understand why.
They wanted to eliminate the control group so they could not be held accountable.
Both sides failed.
We still have a control group but it is not being used to hold our leaders to account.
LikeLike
The damage and criminal responsibility are so massive that it will likely remain a non-discussed elephant in the room. The majority of the population having received these poisons do not want to contemplate the fact they could just drop dead. Though I think people should want to know if you could offer safe guards such as a sleeping heart monitor and a defibrillator device at home. I would invest in one if I was vaxxed.
The thoughts that I came back to regarding all of this is that as collapse continues weird and horrible situations are going to develop and there will be little we can do than adjust to them if that is possible. Best to not engage with most of the modern world as we can. All of us should be growing our food as much as possible to keep us in better health.
Sometimes it overwhelms me with depression but usually for only a day or two. My farm animals snap me out of it. They have no time for that.
LikeLiked by 3 people
Yes, things are getting very weird.
https://x.com/MJTruthUltra/status/1947075656967176203
LikeLike
Pretty good essay. Liked this line best – “How absurd is this? There goes a fire ape in synthetic clothes, riding a machine built from mined metals and ancient sunlight.” – it’s funny when you begin looking at the world like that. It’s kind of like James’s splodge goggles.
And I agree that this guy’s denial story is not nearly as persuasive as MORT. But he seems new so hopefully he continues to evolve his story.
But I always feel like I’m in Bizarro World when reading an author who is correctly pointing out how this carbon pulse blip in time has caused total chaos and craziness. Where denial runs rampant. Where everything about our lives and worldviews is a lie. Where it’s so easy to see that there’s no concern whatsoever for the overall well-being of the citizens… other than the concern of keeping enough of us alive & reproducing so that the exploitation game can continue in order for the all-important elite lavish lifestyle to continue.
But when it comes to the mRNA thing, the hidden agendas and craziness all of a sudden get tossed out the window by the author. In fact, it flips to being a somewhat noble and heroic agenda, 100% about protecting the citizens. And those of us that didn’t go along with it are the real idiots who can’t see that this is the one and only time where “they” actually care about our well-being. LOL, Bizarro World.
LikeLiked by 2 people
I’ve highlighted this outstanding channel by a fellow British Columbian before. Here’s another good one released today that weaves exotic motorcycle technology with the science of innovation, some witty humor, and a poem by Robert Frost.
You’ll probably enjoy it even if you don’t ride a motorcycle like me.
LikeLiked by 2 people