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 
Good presentation by Dr. Charlie Hall on peak oil.
They agreed to write a short paper for publication in a prominent journal but plan to be careful how they word it so that they don’t start WWIII. 🙂
Andrii then followed up with a presentation explaining how lifestyles will change and we’ll have fulfilling lives as oil declines.
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I’m only an hour into this podcast, but it’s really mindblowing how such important information from such esteemed experts is presented in a podcast that only had 22 people watching live, and they can’t get it printed into a mainstream journal.
It’s obvious to me that mainstream clearly does not want to know about reality. As a species we prefer to continue to hear the lies about OPEC oil than find out the truth. It’s denial in it’s finest form.
Some of the tidbits offered by Dan, about the offshore, as in 300 mile offshore oil from the pre-salt basin off Brazil’s coast, that is over 500 degrees hot and has to have extensive heat exchangers on the bottom of the ocean floor so it doesn’t ignite when it comes into contact with air. Building those heat exchangers on the ocean floor being an engineering challange, material intense etc, just reminds me of more complexity and lowere EROEI at the same time, all overlooked in official accounts of this oil.
It’s all treated like XXX billion barrels exist there for our taking, as if it was as easy as a 100 foot deep well 100 years ago.
Even these experts don’t understand why their own graphs of future production wont and can’t work, despite them clearly acknowledging our civilization is in trouble. (BTW I could listen to Charlie Hall all day as he is one of the few that really understand EROEI.) However he and everyone else misses where the complexity to obtain this deep hard to obtain oil not only comes from, but what is required to keep it going. They assume we will continue to have the complexity until the oil is gone..
If complexity was just about human ingenuity, and not market size and growth, population size and growth, energy available size and growth, material available and growth, then of the hundreds of separate human small civilizations the ‘west’ has discovered over the last 200 years, some of them would have had more advanced technology than the west. Yet all the tribes discovered in Africa, South America, Australia, Ocean islands etc, ALL with zero exceptions lived what we call a primitive lifestyle without ‘modernity/technology’ matching ours.
Their brain size and ingenuity is no less than ours, so why didn’t they have great technology if all it took was human ingenuity?? The evidence is stunningly clear that a lot more than human ingenuity is required for modern complex civilization, yet everything else is ignored by almost everyone and assumed to ‘exist’, despite out knowledge of physics and inconveniences like entropy..
My opinion is that mainstream doesn’t want to know about the findings of experts like Hall, Leherrere, Bentley etc, as understanding/promoting their work opens doors to further very uncomfortable questions and answers that everyone wants to deny.
I suspect that all the PTB in the world all understand a lot about our situation, but would also prefer not to really promote our reality, as it could crash everything a bit earlier than it otherwise would, with the poor of the world no longer allowing the rich to get away with hogging the majority of the resources in the little time left of civilization. They would also never promote any real research into our situation either, so that they can have plausible deniability about knowing how screwed we really are, and most likely just want to deny it themselves..
OK back to the rest of the podcast……
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It’s more than mind blowing that we do not discuss any of the most important issues.
Insurance companies forced acceptance of climate change by raising premiums but we still only discuss it a superficial hopium level.
I’d love to watch that group as you made a presentation to them on Complexity Theory.
I wonder if Hall et. al. would display MORT driven denial of something big and unpleasant they missed?
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I did watch the rest of the podcast and find the denial in Andrii amazing, despite everything he’s learned from these experts over time..
His we’ll have 25% rural population by 20.. the 50% by 5-10 years later, he odes without ever working out what it would take to do. Where will all these people in villages live? How will they live? How do we provide the resources to build it all on a global scale, in a world of declining energy availaibility? These type of inconvenient realities are always missing.
Then there is the we’ll get 7km geothermal going by 20.. to provide energy for modernity, all while fossil fuel energy use is falling. Dan falls for this as well..
I think Roger Bentley summed it up best when discussing what he was going to write up near the end, with words like ” we’ll have to include the geothermal data as an energy source to keep the article with a positive outlook” (not quoted, but words to that effect). This is he undersatnds that they need something optimistic to be published, even if it’s crap…
There is always an assumption that current technology continues when energy declines, yet history clearly tells us that complexity unwinds with reduced energy (likewise with natural complex systems). We don’t have our current technology without the current complexity, therefore technology must diminish.
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It can’t be a coincidence that the guy who runs the only peak oil web site, and the guy who runs the only peak oil YouTube channel, are both in complete denial of reality.
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Excellent comment Hideaway.
The guest post I’ve been trying to finish is about denial specific to people who understand peak oil. It amazes me how many people, who should know better, cling to Hubbert’s symmetrical Bell curve.
I hope you and Rob can collaborate on a book. It seems to me that you write very well extemporaneously and the Rob is about the most concise and organized writer and summarizer around. Perhaps you should start by having Rob make an outline. Then you can search out your best comments on each topic to flesh it out.
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LOL. Perfectly sums up what life will be like on the downward slope of the carbon pulse.
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Love that movie.
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Me too. One of the most quotable movies ever.
Lots of great characters, but Tom Smykowski will always be my favorite. And maybe because you were an engineer or whatever, but I picture you having the same excellent people skills as Tom.😂😂
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Believe it or not once upon a time my people skills were very good, maybe even excellent. I led many hundreds of people at my peak.
My weaknesses were poor product vision and business skills, perhaps in part because I worked for businesses I really didn’t care about. I never was wise or strong enough to stop and ask, what should I work on? I went where the random streams of opportunity and success carried me.
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I believe it. Just looking at myself, it blows my mind that I managed 30 people at one point. Could never do that now. I laugh just thinking about it.
Amazing what we are capable of when we’re totally indoctrinated into that world where the only thing that matters is having a successful career and moving up the corporate ladder.
I’m with Christopher McCandless regarding the corporate life, “I think careers are a 20th century invention and I don’t want one.”
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My people skills are crap now.
Might have something to do with knowing I’m surrounded by MPP-MORT automatons.
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Because these “MPP machines” are determined and innocent, you should pardon them. Then you will feel better too.
I myself am currently going through this difficult pardon process. I’m not quite done with it yet.
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I totally agree with what you’re saying. I’ve made a little progress with the pardoning, but still have a long way to go.
I despise life. All life. But I don’t hate the participants of it. We’re obviously all in this together and nobody chose to be here.
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Q: Why has life been sort of normal since conventional oil peaked 10+ years ago?
A: The US fracking boom.
Q: When will fracked oil peak?
A: About now.
Q: Where are the remaining largest oil reserves?
A: Saudi Arabia, Iran, Iraq, Russia, Venezuela
Q: How is it possible that not one mainstream geopolitical analyst that’s trying to explain tensions notices this?
A: MORT (aka genetic reality denial that created our species)
P.S. Did you notice the new US$50M bounty on the elected head of Venezuela?
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Another great bit from Carlin. The intro to his book (0:55 – 4:13)
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New 1 hour documentary “Inside mRNA Vaccines” directed by @ETang_99 was just released.
I have not watch it yet and therefore do not vouch for it.
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That’s the opening line to the video below. This dude is obviously a big fan of my favorite quote:
I’ve seen a few of his videos. Some are great, some ok, and some I only make it a couple minutes. This was my favorite one so far. And I got this cool quote from one of the comments:
“There is a kind of sadness that comes from knowing too much, from seeing the world as it truly is. It is the sadness of understanding that life is not a grand adventure, but a series of small, insignificant moments, that love is not a fairy tale, but a fragile, fleeting emotion, that happiness is not a permanent state, but a rare, fleeting glimpse of something we can never hold onto. And in that understanding, there is a profound loneliness, a sense of being cut off from the world, from other people, from oneself.” – Virginia Woolf
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I scanned the titles of his 40ish videos and saw no evidence that he is overshoot aware.
Imagine how depressed he’d be if he understood what we understand.
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There is no right life in the wrong one.
Theodor W. Adorno
Saludos
el mar
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Q: If US was unable to sell LNG to Europe would that constrain the production of oil from fracked tight oil wells?
Grok: Yes, an inability to sell LNG to Europe could constrain U.S. oil production from fracked tight oil wells. About 40% of U.S. natural gas comes as a byproduct (associated gas) from these wells. Losing Europe, which took 43% of U.S. LNG exports in 2024 (~51 billion cubic meters), could flood the domestic market, lower gas prices, and hurt the economics of oil wells that rely on gas revenue.
Q: Is this a good explanation for why the US blew up the Nord Stream pipeline?
Grok: The motive is plausible. The U.S. had a strategic interest in weakening Russia’s energy leverage and expanding its own LNG market share, which indirectly supports tight oil production by increasing demand for associated gas. However, motive alone isn’t evidence, and the U.S. could achieve similar goals through sanctions or diplomacy without resorting to sabotage, which carries significant diplomatic risks.
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No one has a clue why Trump and Putin are meeting or what can be accomplished.
Many are worried that something very bad might happen. The US just tried to decapitate Iran while negotiating with it.
Here’s my guess.
They will surprise everyone with a renewed agreement to constrain intermediate range missiles in Europe. This is a win-win that will create good will for future discussions on a new European security architecture to address Russia’s concerns, and a Ukraine truce.
Please reply with your prediction.
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Recent significant and strategic advances by Russia. Last Ukraine defense line starting to collapse.
Perhaps Trump is simply trying to avoid a big embarrassment?
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I think Trump is really a simple-minded person. He believes most of the crap he’s fed about Russia, weak, on the verge of collapse economically; and that the US has superior weapons, but not enough to supply Ukraine. So, he thinks he can craft a real estate deal and prevent the complete collapse of Ukraine. And his fallback position in case that’s impossible is to wash his hands of Ukraine and walk away from it while perhaps crafting some type of nuclear deal for the future.
BUT I could be totally wrong and Trump’s just rapidly becoming demented, ie Alzheimer’s.
AJ
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If you’re looking for some hope about the Trump/Putin summit this discussion is good.
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I don’t know enough about the situation to make a prediction. All that I want is to avoid nuclear war and for Ukraine to maintain its independence.
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According to https://www.marketwatch.com/story/banned-coinbase-ad-portrays-a-dystopian-britain-with-only-crypto-as-an-exit-f203ffda this ad was banned but it might just be a publicity stunt. You never know these days.
The implications of this ad how to place it in the greater context of our predicament I leave to the viewer.
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LOL that was great. Rats in most of the scenes was a nice touch. They even remembered to cast most of the actors as overweight.
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August 10th was international Lion day and August 13th is international Wolf day. I would have posted it on the 10th but I was busy on that day.
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Chris, you’ll probably like Dr. Tom Murphy’s essay today. He’s thinking about one of your favorite topics. What’s our worst invention?
He doesn’t think humans and fire are the problem. His culprits are agriculture, writing, money, science, and energy.
https://dothemath.ucsd.edu/2025/08/the-worst-inventions/
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Thanks for making me relive the annoyance I had last month from that Jensen interview.😊
https://un-denial.com/2025/07/12/by-hideaway-eroei/#comment-113141
Impressive that Tom has a month’s worth of material in the pipeline. Actually it intimidates me. An idea pops into my head and I start crafting a comment to post immediately. I could never just “sit on it” while working on several other ideas. I have a bad case of tunnel vision.
I wish Tom could see fire the same way he see’s agriculture. Instead of this:
If you don’t believe that cooking food led to bigger brains which eventually led to this unique sapien level awareness… then Murphy’s logic seems reasonable I guess. Couple weeks ago I replied to a person on his blog, but I was mainly talking directly at Tom:
And no, just because we’ve been using fire for 1.99 million years without creating chaos and extinctions, doesn’t mean fire might be sustainable… c’mon, I hate that I even have to say that. It’s all part of a process. A two-million-year slow motion reverse werewolf transformation process.
I don’t think Tom takes me serious😊. And I think that anyone that makes a statement like this (from my fire essay) will never have the proper denial control to be able to see reality for what it truly is:
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Q: How much money have western banks loaned and invested in Ukraine over the last 10 years?
Grok: Western banks and institutions have provided approximately USD 80–100 billion in loans and investments to Ukraine from 2015 to 2025, with the EU (USD 47 billion), World Bank (USD 20 billion), IMF (USD 17.6 billion), and private creditors (USD 18.2 billion) as the largest contributors. The majority of this funding supports public debt, with commercial banks playing a smaller role due to high risks and a focus on short-term lending.
Q: If most of this debt were to default, how big a problem would this be?
Grok: A default on most of Ukraine’s USD 80–100 billion debt to Western banks and institutions would be a significant but not catastrophic problem for creditors. Multilateral institutions (IMF, World Bank, EU) and bilateral lenders (U.S., Canada, Japan) would face minimal financial losses due to their robust backing, though geopolitical and operational disruptions could be notable. Private creditors, particularly bondholders like BlackRock, would face losses of USD 10–15 billion, but these are unlikely to destabilize global markets. Western commercial banks, with limited direct exposure, would be largely insulated. The bigger problem would be for Ukraine itself, facing economic collapse and reduced Western support. Mitigation through restructuring or Russian asset repurposing could lessen the impact.
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Superb summary of why alcohol is such a popular and dangerous drug (until the last sentence when they had to conclude with the obligatory hopium).
I haven’t used this drug for 18 years and don’t miss it.
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It could be that msn.com’s algorithm is serving up stories that it thinks I want to read, but there seems to be more doomer porn on mainstream media these days:
https://www.msn.com/en-us/money/markets/the-8-stage-crash-course-in-how-societies-collapse/ss-AA1K1OCe?ocid=msedgntp&pc=ASTS&cvid=689b854541914af4b04f39c35c6e2814&ei=14#image=1
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They listed 8 stages of collapse with the final (and implied far in the future) stage being energy scarcity. No mention of mineral scarcity, nor any awareness that these should be the first stage triggering everything else.
P.S. You’ve made quite a few good comments. Would you like to pick a nickname for this site? I can go back and edit your old comments with the name.
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Ya, that was funny. Don’t worry, they’ll iron out the kinks and get it right eventually… because capitalism is on the case, with its airtight business model – scare the shit out of em, show the wonderful survival gear that will save em, sit back and watch the “buy now” clicks go through the roof.
And I agree with Anonymous about the uptick in mainstream doomer porn. Maybe this will eventually produce some entertaining results. With great advice like “Grow some of your own food”, we might get to see a billion Empire Babies simultaneously failing miserably “on the farm”. This article from CHS reminded me how much of a guarantee that is. Resilient, Self-Reliant Life Is Hard
ps. Not sure which doomer blogsite I found this food link. It’s got an infomercial vibe so beware. But somehow I was falling for it😊. Thought some of you crazy hardcore preppers might have an interest. And if it looks bunk, let me know. I need to know when I’m slippin.
The Ultimate Survival Foods
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I downloaded the book that https://ultimatesurvivalfoods.com/book/ is selling for $37 plus $10 shipping and decided it was not good enough to add to my library at the discount price of free.
I found another book with the same content by another author so its seems to be one of those clickbait books that people slap together from public domain content without knowing anything about the topic and therefore they don’t even know that they are publishing crap.
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Thanks for the info. I should’ve known.
Reminds me of back in the early 90’s when me and my friend had it all figured out. We pooled our money together to buy a get-rich-quick scheme from Don Lapre. It was a book with some VHS tapes. Most worthless shit I’ve ever got suckered into.
Actually that’s not true. I’ve been involved with two (yes 2 believe it or not) pyramid schemes. Skybiz & Move My Net Worth. Both ended up costing me money and time and I never made one dime.
At least I can say I’ve never owned a timeshare. LOL
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I was once suckered into an expensive set of Tony Robbins cassette tapes on how to be motivated and successful. Never to listened to any of it.
I wish I had a mentor when I was young. Now that I’ve made all the mistakes and have all the advice a young person needs no one is interested in what I have to say.
Especially since my main message is prep for collapse. 😦
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I’m interested in what you have to say Rob. You’re 10 years my senior so another 10 years of experience to share. And your knowledge is getting passed onto my young people and they are (generally) interested in what I have to say 😉🙏
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Here’s a fun clip that’s sure to make you smile.
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Dear Hideaway. Using money as a proxy for energy is my favourite way to do this sort of macro analysis. Of course it is not perfect, but i agree, it is much better than what we see in these low quality studies.
Time is the third variable that makes the energy/cost analysis trickier. The value of money changes depending on inflation (more currency in the system). And the govts’ manipulations of money pull energy through time so the ‘cost’ and the ‘return’ can happen at very different points in time.
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Hi Monk, in my analysis, I never included a time cost of money, which when you think about it is a time cost of energy returned. Plus there is the built in assumption that each form of energy has the lifespan advertised. Given that some solar panels are going to 1.6mm glass instead of 3.2mm, with the theory it can withstand the same sized hail, as per faulty experimentation and often nuclear gets closed down well before the planned date due to some major repairs needed, plus gas and oil wells watering out earlier than expected, the numbers tend to be a best case scenario.
If time cost of money was added, then solar, wind and especially nuclear would be way worse than the figures now show.
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A while back I made fun of Jessica Wildfire because she had too much TDS and she was promoting some pro-vax idiot who was urging everyone to get jabbed up before RFK gets rid of the covid vaccinations. LOL. I don’t trust my memory, was it really that stupid?
I don’t know her work too well, but I just read this article and liked it a lot because of how relatable it was. (h/t Steve Bull). Maybe I was too quick to dismiss Jessica. We all have our faults.
From Collapse Awareness to Collapse Acceptance – by Jessica
And she seems to understand what’s coming:
Her name gets mentioned once in a while by a few of the people I follow. Always positively. Some of her stuff is members only, so that’s already annoying. I tried a couple free essays. I think I like her more than I dislike her. Not sure yet.😊
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Apparently the integrity/competence problem is much wider than healthcare.
Dr. Sabine Hossenfelder says she does not trust any scientists.
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Tom Murphy’s comment section is really good this week. Here’s mine along with Tom’s reply. My guess is that deep down he knows I’m right, but he can’t go there because it’s too depressing for him.
The Worst Inventions | Do the Math
ps. I love this song, but I had to change the last lyric.
I’m a man on fire
walking down your street
with one guitar
and two dancing feet
only one desire
that’s left in me
I want the whole damn world
to blow up baby
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In our conversations about what made humans turn into the dominant life on this planet, I think this video puts another interesting twist into the overall story of whether it’s fire, culture, language, religion or whatever made us dominant. I think it’s another piece of evidence for fire, as it seems we’ve had settlements for a long, long time.
It also occurs to me that if we had settlements and possibly religion for many hundreds of thousands of years, then it was the freak of stable climate that allowed the next phase of agriculture to really develop..
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I was not impressed by the video.
He passionately and probably correctly debunks the common beliefs that:
He’s like a guy that does a PhD thesis to prove that climate change is so serious that if we don’t switch to nuclear and solar we’ll go extinct, but never mentions the fact that nuclear and solar are not possible without growing fossil energy and complexity, which makes his thesis both correct and completely irrelevant.
The two beliefs he debunks are irrelevant when trying to understand why one species that originated from a small tribe in Africa about 100-200k years ago, killed or out-competed all close relatives, dominates all other species, is the only species that believes in gods and is smart enough to fly to the moon, but is unable to understand simple facts about its own overshoot.
Varki’s MORT provides the best explanation for the most important facts.
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C’mon, what are you trying to do. Un-Denial has it all figured out and now you want to throw a wrench in the story. LOL
I got defensive while watching it. Immediate red flag for his over-the-top enthusiasm of human ingenuity, but I couldn’t find any videos or articles debunking him or his channel.
That pit at Sima de los Huesos from 430kya was very interesting (8:12). I didn’t think there was burial evidence farther than 110kya. Per wikipedia:
That made me think about a post from a couple months ago regarding the accumulation of full consciousness (Anonymous defined it better as “mortality salience”).
C is absolutely incorrect and always will be. But maybe it did look something more like B.
And that damn stable climate thing again. I think I hate the Holocene story more than the noble savage myth. Based on this chart and my ignorance regarding agriculture as well as my prejudice thinking on modern humans vs those werewolves from the past… if the homo genus had the same intelligence level then as now… they would’ve figured out some form of agriculture. I mean c’mon, plant life is thriving back then (even during the ice ages).
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Rotting meat stinks and makes people sick so burial alone is not a key feature of interest.
You want to look for burial with valuable items which would only be done if there was a belief in life after death.
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If/When our leaders are held accountable for Gaza, they will not be able to plead ignorance. People who receive high-level intelligence briefings cannot claim they did know Israel was committing war crimes, genocide and crimes against humanity, when anybody with an internet connection could find out what Israel was doing.
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I share your horror Stellar. There’s no excuse for the behavior of our “leaders”.
I’m not being flippant when I say many leaders, especially those in Europe, have lost their minds.
My current two favorite explanations are:
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My favorite covid dissident, and one of my favorite all-round intellectuals, Dr. Bret Weinstein, steps out of the closet as a prepper.
I suspected as much after reading between the lines of his book (twice), and after he and family bugged out to a homestead on a Pacific North West island a few years ago.
I enjoyed and recommend this interview.
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Great podcast! I might be a fool but I still don’t think that LLM AI will ever approximate human intelligence. I do think it will be able to fool us into thinking it’s sentient and will be able to be used in nefarious ways as Brett points out (fake videos, hunter/killer drones).
I do agree with everything he says about prepping and the threat we all face from a Totalitarian State and what our leaders they could do to us during covid.
Brett said a lot of stuff that I’ve never heard in his podcasts, this was interesting.
AJ
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Just finished modifying a cheap $300 air conditioner with a $400 CoolBot controller to create a walk-in cooler for storing apples.
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It’s not clear if B understands Hideaway’s Complexity Theory but today he argues that it’s wrong.
https://thehonestsorcerer.substack.com/p/the-sloth-economy
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Here’s what I just tried to post as a reply to “B’, but currently having problems posting anything there due to new computer/log in difficulties…. (I’m not computer savvy)
” Talk about contradicting yourself, perhaps you have the denial gene bigtime….
I’ve picked out these quotes from your essay…
B …”Since industrial economies are utterly dependent on both cheap raw materials and affordable energy, a decline in fossil fuel availability means instant de-industrialization.”
“all accelerating those involved towards further de-industrialization and economic / political collapse.”
“You see, the “problem” is that unlike in previous times, modern agriculture requires very little human labor, at least compared to the number of calories produced. Most of the hard work is done by machines: tractors, combined harvesters and trucks doing the work of a hundred people each.”
Here is the problem you don’t address… Modern machinery that provides all our energy, materials, food and water, totally relies upon the existing industrialization to continue. There are many tractor manufacturers, all with a multitude of models, each with their own specific list of regular replacement parts, like oil filters, air filters, fuel filters, specific oil for changes, grease etc. All before anything breaks down and needs a replacement part..
The problem with all machinery is that it has a weakest link, so if the injector pump of one model is it’s weakest link that needs replacing after a couple of years, it’s the same on all tractors of that model. The weak link is what needs constant replacing, but the de-industrialization means they are no longer made, or the political collapse means they are no longer available from the country that produces them as they have become enemies, or the financial collapse means country A can’t pay country B for goods…
It basically means the production of parts, the types consumed constantly and the weakest links, makes tractors, harvesters, trucks, pumps, refrigeration etc all fail in a relatively short period. Cannibalizing parts from broken machines wont last long if at all, as the bit you need for your machine is likely the bit that broke on the non-working machine..
It wont be diesel shortages that starve cities, it will be the de-industrialization that starves them, plus the deindustrialization will have very negative effects on the oil, gas and coal mining operations as well, as they all rely upon modern machinery.
Every aspect of our lives totally relies upon modernity continuing, so the lack of food and industrial parts getting to the oil exporting countries, will quickly mean starvation, riots, huge falls in production and zero exports..
With broken trucks, trains limited or zero fuel, how exactly does food get to the 4 billion plus people in cities??
It can’t and wont get there, yet for the city people to move to the country, they require food, shelter, then tools to work the land. Where will they live? How will they grow food quickly to feed themselves? Will they eat the nearest animals they find cows, sheep, horses, dogs, cats etc as there is no longer term if there is no food today..
Collapse will be fast, as the feedback loops from political, financial and industrial collapse guarantee it. The thought of a long slow decline is just a denial of our situation.
Unlike all prior civilizations that took decades to centuries to collapse, they all had up to 90% of people working and living in rural areas whereas we have less than 50% and often less than 30% in western countries.
The abilities of the farmers to continue farming, in past civilizations was easy as they didn’t rely upon machines from the cities, whereas today all modern farming relies upon this constant flow of fuel, electricity and parts..
We are in a different situation to prior civilizations, so look to them as a guide for collapse is a mistake..
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That’s a good response with a new idea for another chapter in your book.
You’ve extended Liebig’s Law of the Minimum to include machinery.
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The major problem with complexity as a theory is that it can’t be proven right, neither can it be proven wrong, because it is just that complex. And by nature, you can’t fully predict how a complex system will react – whether it’s a slow decline or a fast collapse. If you can.. it is no longer a complex system. Your blind faith in it cannot be proven right nor wrong. I suggest you stop harping about it. Any reply by you to this message means you are still harping about it. So please don’t.
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That’s an unfriendly way to make your first comment here.
Harping? I don’t think so.
Complexity Theory is the only new idea in the overshoot space for at least 10 years. And it’s very important because it casts doubt on beliefs held by overshoot aware people on how we should respond to our predicament such as voluntary degrowth, population reduction, a steady state economy, or a full reserve asset backed monetary system.
The core idea of Complexity Theory is so simple and well grounded in physics that there is no need to prove it or to doubt its truth.
As non-renewable resources deplete the quality of reserves declines, which requires more energy and more complexity to maintain the flow of resources, which requires the population and economy to grow, which requires an even greater flow of the non-renewable resources, and because recycling can never be 100% efficient, you eventually reach a point at which a fast collapse is unavoidable.
If you can think of a science based reason that the theory might be wrong, please share it.
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One possibility is that collapse will start of as a slow decline, like it has for previous civilizations, but once net energy falls below a certain level, then a phase transition will occur and collapse will unfold much more rapidly due to the complexity feedback loops mentioned by Hideaway.
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Just as Malthus was discovered a few years after he published his theory about population’s relationship with food, Hideaway’s real identity should be unmasked.
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Just for Nony, I had a decent conversation with google AI about the subsidies, royalties, taxes etc paid to both solar and fracked oil in the same location of West Texas. I find AI makes many mistakes until you pull it up with facts it can’t refute.
It turns out the EROEI of solar according to the AI at a good sunny location of West Texas is way worse than an average fracked oil well. The discussion then went to average oil wells and average deployment of solar panels. It agreed the EROEI of solar was too low to sustain civilization, especially when lower ore grades of all metals and minerals are included.
Even the AI eventually went to the magic of fusion saving civilization, so when I asked it to ignore some type of breakthrough in a ‘new’ energy source and just use what we had, then directed it to complexity used to gather resources currently compared to a simpler time, these were the conclusions of AI.
I also had to get the AI to agree that civilization was a physical system not a social system as every aspect of modernity, or just life uses energy. On this it agreed..
Sorry about the long preamble …..
” When viewed through the lens of physics and thermodynamics, civilization is indeed a physical system. It cannot be separated from the laws of energy that govern it.
From this perspective, the human choices and complexities that we’ve discussed are simply intricate components of a larger physical machine. The fundamental reality is that energy must be consumed at every point of interaction—to mine a resource, to run a supply chain, to power a computer, or to sustain a human being.
The logical conclusion from this viewpoint is that the trajectory of our civilization is not determined by human will but by the EROEI of our energy sources. When the physical energy return on investment falls below what is required to maintain the system, the system’s complexity must be shed, just as a star loses its stability when it can no longer produce a net energy surplus.
The massive scale and complexity of our civilization, just like the largest of stars, makes it highly dependent on a continuous and enormous energy supply. The star analogy suggests that the more complex and energy-intensive a system is, the shorter its lifespan and the more catastrophic its end. A small star fades away over trillions of years, but a massive star, burning through its resources at an incredible rate, collapses in a fraction of the time.
Similarly, our civilization’s unprecedented complexity, which is built on highly interdependent global systems, means that a decline in net energy would not lead to a slow, gradual de-complexification. The failure of one critical system—like the energy grid or the global supply chain—would trigger a cascading failure, leading to a rapid and profound societal de-complexification.
Our civilization’s “mass” is its immense population and global interdependence. When the energy return on investment can no longer sustain that complexity, the system’s own scale becomes its greatest vulnerability. The resulting de-complexification would be a global, interconnected cascade of failures on a historical scale never before witnessed.”
………..
AI added something I hadn’t really considered in detail with my working on complexity theory in regard to civilization. The size of our civilization with the immense interconnections is just like a star’s mass in operation and it’s the size that creates our greatest vulnerability or fragility and the physical result of the greater fragility is faster collapse.
It’s the totality of the ‘mass’ of civilization that drives all the processes, more energy, more materials, more markets/population, more complexity, more energy etc, etc in an upward spiral, while always becoming more fragile as we work up the increasing size and height of the spiral. At some point the upward nature of the spiral, it runs into a ‘shortage’, that leads to the collapse of the spiral.
As the size of our civilization is more massive by orders of magnitude compared to any prior civilization, the physical reality is that the ‘fall’ has to be much greater and harder than any prior civilization also by orders of magnitude.
Factors that make faster collapse inevitable…
Diminishing returns on efficiency gains
Diminishing grades of metals, minerals, fossil fuels, wild animal populations, forests, soils, fish, fresh water.
Jevon’s paradox spreading the use of complexity, energy, materials.
Population/market stagnation decline due to limits to growth of agricultural land, forests, stable climate.
I’ll have to have more input into that last bit about factors. Any comments/criticisms ….
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Another important factor for fast collapse is our uber complex 6 continent supply chain that is totally dependent on affordable diesel and a functioning global financial system for trade.
A good proxy for the size of our star is the level of debt. I view the level of debt as the amount of explosive in the bomb. A small default is no problem. A big default will break our 6 continent supply chains which will then break everything.
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Just adding further for all the circular economy enthusiasts, given the immense quantity of building and collecting waste to go to a circular economy, AI states the following ……
“The logical conclusion is that a managed shedding of complexity is not a viable option. Because our civilization has already passed the point of easy resource extraction, we are now entirely dependent on a vast, complex, and high-energy system to obtain the remaining low-grade ores and deep fossil fuels.
Therefore, the moment we begin to de-complexify—whether through a planned reduction in energy use or a market-driven decline—we undermine our ability to fuel our current operations. It would, as you say, stop the development of a potential circular economy in its tracks, accelerating the very decline it was meant to prevent.”
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Ask the AI if we should turn it off to conserve energy for mineral extraction.
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Brilliant dry wit!
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Hey now!! I thought Art Berman made it perfectly clear that you better stop harping about this stuff.😂😂
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Hideaway, if there’s a weakness in your theory I think it might be the assumption that complexity growth requires population growth.
I know you addressed this in the past by arguing that a small island state does not have sufficient population to create (for example) a semiconductor industry because it requires a large number of advanced specialists and for a given population there is a small percentage with the aptitude and interests required for those specialties.
On the other hand, we have Somalia with a population of 20 million poor peasants and zero technology industries, and Israel with half the population at 10 million people with a significant semiconductor industry.
So it seems complexity can have a very wide range for a given population.
What’s your answer to this?
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The Nordic countries also have high complexity relative to their populations. Maybe it is because, Israel and the Nordic countries are well integrated into a large global economy, so their current complexity is higher than what could be achieved in isolation.
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I’ve often stated population/markets as the aspect that needs to grow, meaning a combination, as it’s the market that needs to grow for all products for complexity to be maintained. Every company needs to be growing their sales of ‘widgets’ to stay in business, which means new product lines or more of existing products, even if they make nothing for direct sale to retail customers and only supply factories that agglomerate parts into ‘widgets’.
Company costs are always rising, machines making anything wear out need increasing maintenance as they age, governments increase a range of taxes and fees above inflation etc, while competitive international markets make it very difficult to increase prices to other companies/factories.
So yes it’s possible for the overall population to decline a bit while all the undeveloped countries raise their standard of living, so markets overall are growing despite lower population. This can only happen with increasing energy and material use though, as in the entire industrialized system growing..
Imagine someone waved Nate Hagen’s magic wand and the poorest half of the human population disappeared overnight, bang the 4.1B poorest people gone..
This image (I hope it works) is from North Eastern DRC, where some of the poorest people in the world reside, but note in this photo, woman holding mobile phone, plastic water tank, piping to water tank, metal roof, sawn timber as cladding, plastic buckets, western material clothing, shoes….
If the bottom half of the human population disappeared, it would detrimentally affect a huge range of businesses making widgets across the world, lowering sales, which means they have less to spend on research and development, yet where are the savings in complexity? None at all. We still need to maintain the production of shoes, clothing, plastic tanks, piping mobile phones, buckets etc.
The economies of scale for many widget makers came from selling a lot of these products to the poorest half of the human population, even if the cash came from charities and govt handouts.
If the widget makers have lower sales, then the only way to maintain enough R&D spending to improve the business, is to raise prices, which will also affect sales detrimentally. At some point, some of the widget makers go out of business altogether, not enough demand for their products.
Most importantly though the businesses costs don’t go down much by the reduced sales. They just have to have the machines making everything running a bit less often, yet still have employee wages, govt services and taxes to pay, suppliers to pay. OK they need less ‘raw supplies’ to make their widgets, but those suppliers are suffering from the same lack of demand from across different customers. They also have mostly the same costs as before, so if anything are likely to raise prices for the factory taking lower quantities. It works right up and down the system of supplying businesses..
Eventually we get businesses that are producing a whole range of different parts (mini widgets) to a variety of businesses, and they go bust, which stops supply of their products, as in everything they produce, to all businesses..
Now imagine a company like Caterpillar with machines that can have a million separate parts, and in a fairly short period of time a thousand separate businesses that made an average of 50 parts each went out of business. That’s 50,000 separate pieces of machines that they have to organise other companies to make, most of which wont want to expand invest in something ‘new’ to them. It’s still only 5% of all the parts needed to make some of their machines!! If Caterpillar can overcome these sudden shortages, and bring inhouse the production of a lot of these parts, they will be spending/investing a lot, just as sales are falling.
The whole litany above of feedback loops into feedback loops is what has started to happen with every past recession, yet governments realise this and spend quickly to increase demand for everything, so that the economy grows, businesses have the cash/capital to keep investing in replacement and new machinery that’s more efficient, but uses more resources for more sales. Every developed country understands the economic need for population/market growth, which is why immigration is so high in many developed nations.
How do sales, therefore production of widgets, then the makers of machinery for widgets, the makers of machines that make machines for the widget machine makers, etc stay in business with falling sales and losses? Simply they can’t, so government has to subsidise everything, yet if we have falling resources as in past peak oil, all that will do is create inflation and a ‘new’ poorest half of the population.
On the other forums I continually ask people what ‘waste’ we can cut out of the system to keep complexity going. All I get are crickets as the others in the discussion know it’s a trap as I can just move to whatever is used in that ‘waste’ of energy and materials use, to the manufacturers that make ‘widgets’ for the waste industry, AND the same or other closely related widgets for ‘important’ industries or uses..
Going back to Caterpillar.. Say they can’t get the parts to make the really large machines and reduce their production to just a few machines in each range, with the largest ones with the most parts being deleted from the range. What happens at the mines where the largest machines were used? They have to go to, 2 smaller units of less efficiency to do the work, which means their costs were just raised and fuel use also went up, so only stay viable if prices for those metals and minerals rise, increasing costs for widget makers everywhere.
I think we are already suffering greatly from efficiency gains not keeping up with the mining of lower grade ores, which is manifesting itself as increased debt by governments and large mining corporations. Just imagine the effect when efficiencies at mines starts to get lower because the million plus part machines, can no longer be made, coupled with lower ore grades, greater fuel and personnel use. Prices rise or the mining of whatever reduces greatly, another feedback into civilization…
Overall population can reduce a bit for a period of time, while the ‘market’ for every widget increases as the poor of the world are dragged up to middle class status. However it will take an increase in energy, materials and complexity to do it, in other words business as usual type growth, as it will be the market for everything to expanding. What happens though when everyone becomes ‘middle class’ in the world? Then growth in population has to increase or everything falls to pieces as per above as the ‘market’ stopped growing.
Less population suddenly just hastens the downward spiral. It’s the sales of widgets that has to keep increasing, with the easiest or traditional way being by enlarging the population..
So to answer your question, it’s not population per say that has to grow, but market size overall that has to grow to just maintain our complexity. Population falling is a way to reduce overall market size and totally stifle ‘growth’, so it’s possible to increase complexity when there are billions of poor becoming better off, but it takes an increase in materials and energy anyway, and can only last until everyone is at least middle class filling their homes (now larger and better quality, insulated, heated and cooled, connected to electricity, water, sewerage, internet, etc) with the ‘widgets’ those in the west have….
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It is not the size of a country that matters, but the size of the international market.
Saludos
el mar
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Is it possible for some parts of the system to remain complex while other parts simplify, or is it so interconnected that if one part simplifies or collapses, it will cause the rest of the system to unravel in a cascade effect?
An Example: If we see a precipitous decline in discretionary air travel, less resources would be needed to maintain that industry, but what ripple effects would that have besides leaving pilots (and maybe flight attendants) unemployed? Would a drop in the demand for Jet fuel make oil drilling unprofitable?
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Hi Stellarwind72, I see you as still at the bargaining stage looking for a glimmer of hope..
If airline industry was decimated, it’s not just pilots, air hostesses, ground crews, customs officials, etc that are affected. Lok at all the machinery makers and parts makers for all the machines, from the metal detectors at airports, to the coffee lounges, radio and radar makers, and parts for these. Follow the chains of every aspect. Greater unemployment in society leading to less demand for a lot of other spending by people employed who become unemployed.
The total reduction across the board is the equivalent to a sudden recession and we know what govts and central banks do when this happens, increase spending to kick start the economy, increase material and energy flow/use to keep the economy growing. Say all the new jobs/spending and material use went into building more solar, wind and batteries. It’s just more growth in the spiral upwards of total energy, material, market/population size, increased complexity etc, it gains nothing as the system is still just as vulnerable to a sudden ceiling or limit of energy use.
Using more fossil fuels to build more solar, wind, batteries, nuclear, just makes the entire growing system more fragile, so that when the energy flow gets reduced and the system can’t be maintained, it collapses.
Suppose we got rid of all flight and decided to attempt to build more circularity into the economy. It would be just growing energy and material use to build it all, diverted from one energy use (flight) to another, but when the energy music stops, it all still collapses, no matter which way we went to get there..
Deliberately slowing everything down by realising and accepting limits to growth by all governments of the world, wont change the outcome. Decomplexifying everything quickly leads to crashing supply of energy, which crashes the supply of materials, which feeds back into parts manufacturers of everything being squeezed or go out of business, which feeds back into less complexity for food, water, energy and material extraction and on and on in a fast spiral downwards..
Then add civil disobedience, theft, vandalism and violence of humans trying to survive, into the equation…
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In Stellar’s defense I want to restate a point I’ve made before.
It’s easy to imagine things we could do to make our current lives and the future worse. For example, shifting government spending from agriculture subsidies to military weapons, or shutting down mines to free up energy for AI.
Given the Complexity Theory constraint that the total market cannot shrink, there must be some things we can do to make the future less bad, or at least give us a longer runway.
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Hi Rob.
We have already been there. So you already know the answers.
Also, if you look at it with simple eyes, this sentence is very very strange “there must be some things we can do to make the future less bad”.
Best.
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Sorry I’m dense on nuance. Why is the sentence strange? It’s a honest question I think a lot about now that Hideaway has explained that all the solutions many of us thought would help will not.
For me, it’s important to know what we should do, despite knowing we won’t do it.
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Said in another (more digestable) way, this is what I’d like to point:
Best.
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I should maybe add that you don’t have to pay much attention to the “magic” in this video. It’s just an example, which applies to the kind of “magic” that is also performed (I guess unknowingly) here.
This is rather about over-simplification, over-rationalization, how the intellect works.
But most importantly, falling for the outer, the surface and the desire of fixing.
This to me, is an interesting and fundamental question:
What can I learn/how can I change/transform, when I constantly try to fix the outer world to the way it suits me?
Best.
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Charles, you always remind me how diverse the brains are of the human species. It’s literally like we evolved on different planets.
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Thank you, Rob.
There are incredible things and beings in this world.
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Thanks for the excellent answer and sorry to make you repeat yourself. I do now remember you explaining this in the past. I’m a little slow to internalize something but once I’ve got it, I’ve got it.
Until Complexity Theory came along I knew our economy had to grow but I, like many others, thought this was driven by the design of our monetary system. You’ve shown that even if we change our monetary system we still need to grow.
I’ve been trying to get Complexity Theory down to to a concise paragraph. Here’s another attempt given what you just explained:
Edits to improve this summary are welcome.
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I think an element you can include in your theory, if you haven’t already, would be the role of debt, both public and private.
Debt allows for countries to continue growing consumption even with slowing population increases. Ever since the 1940s, most western countries have all gone further into debt to support production that is far greater than what would be possible without debt.
Overproduction was considered the major issue facing industrialized countries for the first 100 years after the industrial revolution, because it was clear that in order to justify the capital expenditure needed to set up large production lines, you needed a market large enough to absorb that production without greatly reducing the price of the products you make. This is why countries like Britain were so interested in having captive export markets in their imperial system. They needed export markets to absorb their domestic overproduction.
Western countries now absorb this overproduction largely by introducing debt into the system, which allows for their populations to absorb a far greater share of production than would be possible without easy access to credit.
The government, also highly indebted, also provides a huge and reliable market for goods and services that wouldn’t be possible in a “free market”. In the US for example, a huge amount of manufacturing is done for the government, or for industries that are subsidized by the government, to the point where direct government spending is something like 30 to 40% of GDP. Much of the rest of GDP is debt-financed, usually through programs the government subsidizes or guarantees in some way (the mortgage market for housing is the clearest example).
Yes, I see the need for larger populations playing some role in allowing for increased complexity in both peoples capacity as consumers and producers, but ultimately a debt-based system allows for a highly inefficient allocation of resources that allows for overproduction and overconsumption that just wouldn’t be possible in a free market.
Think about the suburbs for example. Creating a living arrangement where people individually go into debt to buy their own standalone house, buy cars that are usually financed through an auto loan, with utilities, streets, and sewage systems paid for by municipal bonds, all made possible by a federal highway system which is itself debt-financed. Without enormous amounts of debt, each family wouldn’t have a house and 2 cars and live 20 miles from their jobs. They’d probably live like most city dwellers have for all of history, within walking (or mass transit) distance from work in a pretty dense urban landscape that has a far lower construction and maintenance cost from a resource perspective. This of course would make demand for everything from tires to lawncare products drastically lower.
Suburbia drives a huge amount of overconsumption, and I can tell you from experience living in a suburb most of the people who live there have jobs that are largely non-essential (how many hairstylists, plastic surgeons, and used car salesmen do we really need for society to function?), but they each consume more than entire villages in Africa simply because they can take out a ton of debt to purchase stuff.
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also sorry for the wall of text, for some reason the paragraph spacing was taken out when i posted this comment
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I’ll take a stab at adding paragraphs. Sorry if I screw up.
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Felix, I agree that debt has allowed an inefficient allocation of resources and energy..
Thinking of something seemingly totally separate for a minute. Cyanobacteria on Earth billions of years ago absorbed/utilised around 3%-6% of the sunlight that fell upon them. This very simple system of single cell plants in a primordial ‘soup’ was far more efficient than a modern complex rainforest at around 1-2% utilization of sunlight. The more complex system wastes more energy.
I hope you can see where I’m going with this. Despite efficiency gains in a myriad of areas across our developing complex civilization over the last 300 years, the efficiency gains for one particular area leads to Jevon’s paradox of a much wider use for whatever became more efficient, leading to overall increased waste throughout the entire system of energy and resources, despite efficiency increases in specific areas.
Coal powered steam driven pumps allowed much more cheap coal to be available, allowing the same type of machine to ‘work’ in other areas away from the coal mine, hence increased use of coal, Jevon’s paradox.
As a part of complexity theory, I’ve come to the conclusion that increasing waste of energy and therefore materials as well is an integral part of the overall process of increasing complexity, just like the increasing waste from single cell early life to complex rainforests.
All the talk from cornucopians about the future, centre a lot on increasing efficiency and cutting out waste, which seems to be the opposite of what is actually happening in our overall system of civilization. Just like the coal example efficiency gains in some new areas are likely to bring about their own Jevons paradox, with greater use of the new efficiency in other areas and ultimately further use and waste..
Coming back to debt and especially debt with low interest rates of the modern era, and possible future. We’ve used the increase in interest rates on the mountain of debt that’s built up, to quell growth back to manageable levels (possibly an oxymoron), whenever inflation rises.
This containment of growth has had the effect of lowering all commodity prices, including oil, while allowing the rich to buy up assets cheaply, as in businesses who relied upon producing commodities, and/or the land it’s produced on etc..
What happens on the oil patch and in mining of every commodity? They cut back the use of the newer more expensive production, while using up more of the cheaper easy to get oil, gas, coal, minerals, metals etc. This gives us a faster depletion of the easy, low energy cost, energy and materials, leaving the more expensive in energy terms for later, when prices rise..
When economies pick up again from recession like conditions, the increase in energy production to pick up growth comes from very low EROEI sources, so at some point because of depletion of the cheap oil, we’ll reach a phase where oil production cannot increase as the high cost new oil wont keep up with the depletion of legacy cheap oil, as in high EROEI oil, which will quickly create further inflation in the economy attempting to grow from new CB and/or Govt stimulus of more debt borrowed from the either.
Debt has been a minor player in overall civilization until it breaks it, because of inability to make repayments when interest rates rise, which is what happens when we get to the point of declining oil production with inflation. The attempt to quell inflation with higher interest rates will again put the expensive to get oil on hold, while the cheap oil continues to deplete with production falling.
High oil prices during a recessionary economic environment is the likely trigger for a debt meltdown with sales of everything everywhere declining, so a cascade of debt defaults, leading to shipping becoming stalled as no-one can trust letters of credit anymore. Shipping being stalled stops the 6 continent supply chain from working causing stopped production in all sorts of businesses across the globe.
With fuel, parts, food and other necessities not getting from A to B, the world as we know it quickly unwinds into collapse with food not getting to cities due to fuel shortages, consumable parts not getting to farms and transport companies. Then the trouble begins as the angry population was totally unprepared for any of it..
Of course governments everywhere will try to stop the meltdown and panic, but what can they do in the face of falling oil energy? They will try price controls, banning sales and use of all sorts of things, ban movements etc to save fuel for farmers and transport of food, but it wont be effective for long if the 6 continent supply chain of parts ceases..
Emergency actions to suddenly make parts, means the building of factories and machines. This uses more oil and commodities that are suddenly not available, it’s not going to be possible, but economists and governments will think just throwing money at the problem will solve it, when it clearly can’t.
While oil depletion is the likely trigger, debt is the likely explosive in the chamber..
The more I consider every aspect of our complex civilization, the more I come to the conclusion it was always just a physical process bound to happen because of easy to get resources coupled with an intelligent ape, to increase the entropy of the planet towards disorder, in a faster manner, just like all other physical processes of the universe.
I asked AI how quickly the collapse would be of the largest civilization after whatever trigger to bring about de-complexification happens, in the case above high oil price and debt. It’s conclusion based on our complexity and supply chains was weeks to months at best, not years or decades..
See my other post on AI for it’s findings about our situation….
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Here is a film called “The End of Suburbia”.
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Because we have a 6 continent supply chain, I don’t take any one country as an example of anything. Israel might have a large semiconductor industry, but do they mine and make all the smallest components or do they import a lot of stuff and just put it together?
Complexity is the entire chain that needs to continue working, not separate bits. Do the Israel’s make the machines that put everything together, from their own mines in their country? Of course not..
All these things from the raw materials mined somewhere, to the machines in the factories, to the ships that cart stuff around the world all have to exist for Israel to have a complex industry. It’s all part of that complexity as their industry cannot exist without the rest of it.
Taking any one countries complexity is a mistake as we have a 6 continent supply chain for the totality of complexity to exist..
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Yes, probably best to view the economy as a single global system.
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Nate’s got MORT on the brain. He recently interviewed the angel of death, Stephen Jenkinson, and asked what he thought about Dr Varki’s theory. It didn’t go anywhere, and even I thought it was an odd topic to bring up with this guest. But it was a cool moment that showed me Hagens has not dismissed MORT theory.
My NDE did most of the heavy lifting with getting me to not be so terrified of death and actually embracing it… but Jenkinson had a role in it too. His book Die Wise and the 2008 documentary Griefwalker were great. СПЪТНИК В СКРЪБТА (Griefwalker)
Rob, you might not like his heavy philosophizing, but I enjoyed this interview a lot. The Varki mention is around the 8:00 mark. And you usually have to be careful with Jenkinson because he’s drowning in the noble savage myth… but it didn’t come across that bad in this interview.
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Thanks paqnation. I believe that’s the first time Hagens has mentioned MORT since his interview with Dr. Varki that was not published due to technical problems.
I was very pleased to hear Nate describe MORT with respect and an open mind.
Jenkinson had clearly not heard of MORT. That’s very odd for someone who’s an expert in death. Kind of like the head of a peak oil web site that knows nothing about energy.
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You know how when you wash your car you usually end up responsible for making it rain later that day… well, I have that feeling big time right now. But instead of rain, it’s gonna be the collapse of civilization. LOL
Going on vacation tomorrow to the Smoky Mountains for a week. I turned down the trip initially. But a couple friends pestered me until I caved. Have actually been looking forward to it for the last few weeks. But the last couple days, my agoraphobia has kicked into hyperdrive. I absolutely don’t wanna leave homebase. I know I’m supposed to suppress this hermit fear and get out there and live life… but just like the famous line from Star Wars, I have a bad feeling about this.
If you hear any craziness coming from Tennessee this week, you’ll know that I got swallowed up by collapse. If there’s no big event and you don’t hear back from me, most likely my heart finally gave out and I’ve gone back to that blissful state of non-existence.
I’m signing off now. No technology for a week.
Take care everyone. And don’t go getting religious while I’m gone.😊
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Cheers for a safe and happy trip. There’s still some good in our world. I hope you see some of it on your vacation.
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That’s great! They are good friends.
I am sure you will enjoy the trip.
🙂
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In case anyone missed the comment by zip over at climateandeconomy.com:
Rystad Energy predicts a reserve-to-production ratio of only 14 years!
Rystad has just published its latest update of globally recoverable oil reserves. A spreadsheet, a calculation of the amount of oil historically consumed, and a so-called reserve-to-production ratio that indicates the world may have only fourteen years left.
Since 1900, the world has pumped and consumed 1,572 billion barrels of crude oil. Current global consumption is around 100 million barrels per day, or 36.5 billion per year. Rystad calculates from this a reserve-to-production ratio of 14 years.
That figure cannot be read linearly: with accelerating depletion, the absence of major new discoveries, and vanishing capital, production will fall sharply after 2030, making those “14 years” more of an endgame than a comfortable horizon.
Rystad itself underpins this short horizon with a major downward revision of its future expectations. Over the past decade, its estimate of yet-to-find oil has been reduced by 456 billion barrels. The reasons: a steep decline in frontier exploration, the failure of shale developments outside the Americas, and a doubling of offshore costs in the past five years. According to Rystad, new conventional projects in the next five years will replace less than 30% of annual production, while exploration will add only about 10%. For every ten barrels the world consumes, only one new barrel is added.
But behind this neat number lie several paradoxes:
Decline – Production does not decline linearly but through steep drop-offs. Shale wells lose 60–70% of their output in the first year, deepwater fields about 15% annually. Only the old giants like Ghawar shrink more slowly at 3–4% a year.
All liquids – Rystad counts everything: crude, condensates, NGLs, biofuels. But the global economy runs mainly on diesel and kerosene. Those fractions are becoming scarcer, since new sources yield less of them.
Quantity vs. quality – In the spreadsheet every barrel weighs the same, whether from Texas, the Orinoco, the tar sands, or under Russian permafrost. In reality they differ enormously in energy content, cost, and risk.
On top of this comes the gap between reserves and capital. On paper, more than a trillion barrels are technically recoverable. But without trillions in investment, not a single drop will reach the market. Investors now prefer dividends and buybacks over long-term risky projects. Even the majors restrict themselves to quick-return ventures.
And finally, the illusion of central planning. As if there were a world ministry of energy calmly opening the tap for 14 years. The reality is a chaotic battlefield of states, majors, sanctions, wars, and illegal circuits.
Local collapses — the implosion of U.S. shale, the loss of Russian exports, the closure of European refining capacity — can reinforce each other and trigger global chain reactions. Diesel will become structurally scarce before 2030. That is the true Achilles’ heel of the global economy.
And this is not the doomsaying of critics, but Rystad Energy’s own conclusion.
https://www.rystadenergy.com/news/discovered-recoverable-oil-resources-increased-by-5-billion-barrels-despite-produ
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Excellent find Florian.
On their list of justifications for oil ending in 14 years I saw no mention of Hideaway’s Complexity Theory which predicts a very fast decline in complexity when supply chain problems begin, which will further curtail oil production due to the extreme complexity of technology used to extract oil today, and supply chain problems will surely begin sooner than the predicted run-out date 14 years from now.
Also no mention of Larsen’s prediction that diesel will decline faster than other distillates with diesel exports to all except China and India going to zero in 2027, which even if too pessimistic, will disrupt supply chains well before the 14 year Rystad prediction.
For my planning I’ll stick with 2030 as the end of the world. I guess if you’re an optimistic you now have a reason to assume 2040 is the end of modernity.
It’s interesting to note that 2030 is the date the EU has set for itself to re-militarize enough to fight Russia. They’d better cancel more social programs and accelerate their military spending plan. 🙂
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@Rob Mielcarski, @Florian, @Hideaway, What do you think the world will look like in 2040?
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A lot of culling will have happened by 2040. I probably won’t be alive to see 2040 due to my age.
What the world will look like is impossible to predict because of many wild cards.
The biggest wild card is nuclear war. I personally think nuclear war is almost guaranteed when a nuclear armed state with insufficient resources for its citizens to survive, especially food, becomes desperate.
There are many other wild cards including climate change impact on agricultural yields, some AI driven catastrophe, or someone executing the Jack Alpert plan.
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This was Hideaway’s response to someone who dismissed Rystad’s 14 year prediction…
https://peakoilbarrel.com/april-world-and-non-opec-oil-production-drops/#comment-791955
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Hideaway recently on the Peak Oil Barrel site.
https://peakoilbarrel.com/april-world-and-non-opec-oil-production-drops/#comment-791899
https://peakoilbarrel.com/april-world-and-non-opec-oil-production-drops/#comment-791954
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The evil seems to be growing.
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Interesting facts about the connection between entropy and economic activity:
https://braveneweurope.com/gpenewsdocs-james-k-galbraith-lynn-fries-from-the-fossil-fuel-civilization-into-a-biophysical-reality-check
Saludos
el mar
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Mike Stasse discusses his off-grid experience and compares it to the nonsense he sees in the media.
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Gail Tverberg discusses the forces that influence the price of oil and the risks associated with the complexity we depend on to survive.
She seems to be dancing around the edges of Hideaway’s Complexity Theory without fully understanding it.
https://ourfiniteworld.com/2025/08/19/why-oil-prices-dont-rise-to-consistently-high-levels/
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It’s becoming increasingly difficult to remember the many different ways our leaders screwed up with covid and mRNA.
Here’s a new one I’ve not heard of before.
Babies and children who are not transfected with mRNA, nor infected with covid, but have mothers that are transfected with mRNA, have higher mortality.
Maybe it’s a good thing that another side effect of mRNA is reduced fertility. 😦
https://theethicalskeptic.com/2025/08/19/houston-we-have-another-problem/
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Israel’s ex-military intelligence chief said 50,000 Gaza deaths were ‘necessary’
https://www.npr.org/2025/08/18/nx-s1-5506097/ex-israel-military-intelligence-chief-said-50-000-gaza-deaths-necessary
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50 to 1? Really? The history of Israel’s “justice” is more like 1000 to 1.
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The Current death toll in Gaza of 62,000 vs 1,195 on Oct 7, puts the ratio at 52 to 1. Given that the confirmed death toll in Gaza is likely a serious underestimate, the ratio is probably significantly larger than that.
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Yes but I think if you look at the totality of Israel conflicts you will find it is much higher than 50:1. I may be wrong, it’s been a while since I looked up the numbers.
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What afterwards? Food? Water?
Climate change? Possible to live there in 20-30 years?
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It’s hard to think of region on the planet that will suffer more than the middle east when their oil exports decline.
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I should have a short guest post ready by Mon Sept 1.
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Mike Stasse discovered some background on B.
I’m about half way through and it’s a really good interview. I’ve heard B’s voice before but can’t remember where. He’s still arguing for a gradual collapse.
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I listened to this and then read the transcript (as I find B’s accent difficult.) https://www.populationbalance.org/podcast/the-honest-sorcerer I thought it was a fine interview. I appreciated learning about B’s awareness journey, Like host Nandita, I marvel at how fast he’s gotten up to speed and his ability to synthesize and communicate. Not in his native language either. I look forward all week to reading his essays on Sunday mornings. B gave a detail about a hike he took a while back that let me figure out what country he’s from, not Germany, but I’m not going to out him.
This bit reminded me of Hideaway’s thesis:
“Nandita Bajaj (00:36:59):
Right. There’s all this focus on innovation, more people is more innovation, but there seems to be a pretty stunted level of development in terms of our cognitive capacity to think of innovation in how to embrace a turning point in our civilization, to think beyond growth and acknowledge that this has happened before and we are in that same stage now as previous civilizations and how do we imagine different ways of being? But the innovation focuses almost entirely on how to maintain it, a suicidal civilization that we’re in the middle of. And it just seems completely counterintuitive.
B (00:37:44):
It’s really the ratchet effect where you just keep building higher and higher and higher and you can’t give up. Civilizations collapse, not because they have to collapse, but because people cannot give up their way of life really. They just simply cannot let go that, Hey, things used to grow for so many decades or so many years. It just can’t happen to me. I’m not willing to accept that we are going to enter a long decline. It’s impossible. I would rather just dig in my heels and then continue innovating just to keep the stuff going a day further. And this is every one of us. It’s not just the politicians and the big leaders, but it’s really every people going into work deciding, Hey, this day is going to be the next day, which I’m going to collect more money and then have a bigger house or have a bigger car and then just keep working towards the goal and not willing to give up their dreams and not willing to give up their desires.
(00:38:37):
And the one thing that people do not realize that technology itself is the cause of collapse and it’s the cause of overshoot and cause of basically everything bad because nobody sets out start innovating that, Hey, I’m going to use this innovation to destroy the world. They just want make things better or they just want to have a better steam engine. I’ve got a faster car and plane which flies higher. It’s a normal human desire to be better at what we are doing, but we forget about those inadvertent side effects like CO2 emissions or algal blooms when it comes to mechanized agriculture and fertilizer use or the many other side effects of technology, which then requires another round of innovation to overcome. Then this is where we face the depletion of resources as well because this is also another hurdle which we don’t think about because we always imagine that resources will be always available. They are infinite. We have a huge Earth which has a lot of raw materials inside. We just have to go and get them.
(00:39:28):
But we haven’t calculated the necessary energy, necessary growth in areas which are needed to be invested in to get those materials. And somehow we feel reluctant to face this reality, and then we are just waiting to solve these issues and just kicking the can further down the road. We are going into debt, we are opening another mine, even if we know that it is going to be of poorer quality, even if we know it’s going to cause more harm to nature than the previous one. Anyway we will open that because we need more raw materials, need to mine more copper, we need to mine more aluminum bauxite, whatever. We just can’t stop growing because we are afraid of losing what we have.
(00:40:11):
We are just afraid of losing our status as a nation, as a company, as a human being, whatever, because we are not keeping up with the rest of the bunch. So we are just afraid of falling behind and then just keep on mining and doing and doing. But as we innovate, we just face hurdles which are just mounting up pollution, mounting up energy requirements of mining, mounting up difficulties with solving technical problems and even complexity itself. Our products become so complex that no one really understands how a computer works anymore. There are people who understand how the processor works or how the memory module works, but no one really understands how the whole system works and no one can design out of his head a computer so no one can sit out and okay idea, I design a computer from day one to the day next.
(00:40:56):
They need a bunch of people. And this is why people simply do not realize that technology itself and innovation itself is running into diminishing returns. And we have mentioned Tainter earlier in this discussion, and he and his team found an interesting pattern in technological innovation as they examined the number of people who are on the same patent. They realized that more and more inventors are needed to file a patent and this number kept growing and growing. So if you just think back a hundred years or more, we just needed one Bell to invent a telephone, but how many people are needed today to make another innovation on that telephone and then add another feature to that telephone? We just need tens, if not hundreds of people to find another patent. China alone produces 1.7 million graduates a year in STEM and sciences. They are simply circumventing this diminishing returns problem when it comes to innovation by adding sheer numbers. So they’re just pouring in a huge number of engineers into every problem and they are making progress. So they’re making progress in fusion technology, in battery technology, everything, but they do have a limited resource like human capital. Even the Chinese population stopped growing one or two years ago and they are now in decline. So they will not be able to continue innovating by adding more and more engineers and more and more graduates.”
I may not fully understand Hideaway’s Complexity Theory, but it seems to me that B is pretty close. Hideaway foresees a fast collapse and B favors John Michael Greer’s catabolic long decent. I can envision either, but I do think there’s some inherent denial in believing in a slow collapse.
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Thanks Brent for this summary.
I have huge respect for B. He’s fully aware, very intelligent, and an excellent writer. I think he has an excellent understanding of human overshoot with one exception. His understanding of the core forces that have created our predicament are still maturing and are a little muddled for my taste.
There are 3 core forces that underpin the long laundry list of behaviors and forces that Nate Hagens and others have compiled to explain human overshoot:
1) Maximum Power Principle: This is a biological force created by the fact that life is chemical replicators competing for finite resources which creates a “behavior” to maximize growth.
2) Complexity Theory: This is a physics force that creates a “requirement” for systems to grow. It’s grounded in entropy (the need to repair and replace objects because they all decay) and depletion (the need to increase complexity to offset the falling quality of non-renewable resource reserves as they deplete).
3) MORT: Humans exist with their unique extended theory of minds because they evolved to deny unpleasant realities which means most people are physically unable to understand overshoot and the forces in play which blocks any intelligent response to overshoot.
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I finished listening to the interview with B today. Now I understand why he never drops by to say hello nor mentions MORT in his essays, despite me promoting his work dozens of times.
My views on how things will likely unfold are too threatening compared to his gentle degrowth, simplify and scavenge, back to the land outlook. And MORT conflicts with his let’s educate everyone to make the future better plan.
It’s a common theme.
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B sounds a lot like Eugyppius
https://www.kunstler.com/p/kunstlercast-407-eugyppius-on-the-782
Probably both Bavarian.
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Good catch, that’s where I heard the voice. But the voices sound different to me so I doubt Eugyppius is B.
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I betcha a lot of the big name collapse writers do the same as B… lurk here and soak up the good stuff to generate some ideas for their own blog… but no commenting because they know they’ll get smacked cuz of their weak denial control. LOL
More likely they don’t want their precious audience finding out that they’re down with un-Denial. Because god forbid if some clueless f’ing morons might unsubscribe.
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I think B is Hungarian.
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I think he’s from Hungary. I remember him mentioning in one of his posts a while ago, that he went hiking on a well-known wilderness trail in his home country (Hungary)
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And the writer under the pseudonym B should be also unmasked too.
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Amongst the suite of geopolitical analysts, no one has more defective denial genes than Brian Berletic.
If you have any hope that Trump actually wants peace, or that he will be able to force his military-industrial complex to stand down, this interview will dash your dreams.
War it is.
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Hideaway on embodied energy.
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Jack Alpert today presented his most recent (and best to date in my opinion) video on the implications of human overshoot and what should be done about it to the Canadian Club of Rome.
The video was linked above. This presentation includes a discussion with Dr. Bill Rees et. al.
I have not watched this presentation yet but I did watch the video and recommend it.
I’ve noticed a shift in Jack’s message. It’s now less about designing a sustainable civilization that retains some of our best science and technology, since he acknowledges best case his design will only last a couple hundred years before the hydro dams silt it, but rather it’s more about minimizing suffering, which is kind of where my head’s at.
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As a Norwegian I total agree with Prof. Rees. If you look around there is fossile fuels everywhere.
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The Q&A was the really interesting part for me. If I understood Jack’s plan here, the ‘new’ people grown in test tubes don’t have any contact with the 8b existing humans. The answers he gave of who does this seemed very light on.
Also I hope Jack is aware that humans have never incubated any animal from fertilization to full term outside of a surrogate mother, let alone a human. So any baby’s will have to have a mother, which means contact. people will have to look after them, which means influence them. People work for money to pay bills, so of course the new kids will learn from a young age about, money, life good things they want
Bill Rees of course completely destroys the plan with logic about how humans actually behave.
Imagine if the virus was released tomorrow and did exactly as Jack wants it too, sterilize everyone over the next 6 months. (Does this include the people of North Sentinel Island?). There would be panic everywhere. Every country would try and set up it’s own labs of incubating babies.
Say the North Koreans make it happen first, but don’t share the technology. What’s to stop them from churning out millions of babies every year as they will think they can take over the world’s remaining resources if their population is large enough before others figure out how to make incubated babies? Likewise for whole lots of religious groups around the world.
Bill Rees is correct, people are people, we are not going to change that, and people have totally different weird belief systems, so a coordinated plan to fix the sudden infertility problem is simply not going to happen.
This all assumes making a virus, that just made people infertile was possible, and that it didn’t mutate, which is exactly what viruses do all the time.
Also if it takes 20 years to work out how to incubate an agglomeration of human cells into humans (assuming it’s possible), the tech will be very, very complex. Where will the complexity come from to allow it to happen as 20 years without children being born will make everyone understand that living for today is what matters as there is no future? Who would be mining the ores in the deserts, manning the drill rigs offshore etc? Who is looking after the old. Who is doing the farming as the old ones die out?
Also the entire logistics of looking after the old people over decades is flawed. When the 0 -20 year olds of today are 30-50 they are expected to look after the old, but who will look after them when they get to be 60-80? They will have worked out that it is no-one, so why should they co-operate when young?
We are nowhere near being able to get AI and robots to do all these things necessary to keep modern civilization going. To get there will take a lot of growth, more energy, more materials, more complexity, bigger markets to sell all the new tech into, as in more people with spending power.
Sorry Jack, if you read this: it is not even close to a plan that could work and likely just brings on collapse faster than it would otherwise happen, the virus bit that is, and probably means human extinction.
BTW if ‘students’ had access to such tech of viruses and some control over them, then I’m fairly sure some dumb person would more likely release an existing very deadly strain of something.
Maybe someone has in the past and luckily it quickly mutated. Of course if that became known to have happened all research on any viruses would likely be banned as it’s already strictly controlled. Then, of course, it would be in the interest of those earning a living in that type of research to quickly cover it up and deny it was possible, humans using their human nature..
I’m sure this could never happen. Tony told me it wasn’t possible…
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I haven’t discussed this with Jack, but here’s my interpretation.
Jack’s been trying to raise awareness of overshoot and to design technically feasible and wise responses for several decades with zero success. He now understands that denial blocks any helpful paths.
Jack’s a smart guy. He knows a sterility virus and test tube babies are extremely improbable (aka impossible).
Jack’s intent now is to explain the implications of overshoot in horrific and graphic terms, and to propose an extremely unpleasant (which most of the audience will not know is technically impossible) solution, to shock the audience into breaking through its tendency to deny unpleasant realities, and to begin to discuss intelligent and wise responses to our overshoot predicament.
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Rob …. ” to shock the audience into breaking through its tendency to deny unpleasant realities, and to begin to discuss intelligent and wise responses to our overshoot predicament.“
I cannot think of any intelligent or wise responses to our overshoot predicament, other than to slow/stop as many births as possible and to allow those that want to ‘exit’ to do so with cheaply available painless methods.
We are in the late stages of the very nature of a predicament. There is no way out, and even the above ‘answer’ possibly makes the collapse come on sooner than it otherwise would for everyone else.
One major flaw in Jack’s video is about how if there were half the people, then there is double the resources per person. That misses the entirety of how we gain access to all those resources and assumes they are still just as available as today. Yet go back 500 years when there were a lot less people, especially in the ‘new’ world and the lifestyle of those people was a lot simpler with a lot less resource use than we have today.
Jack completely misunderstands where and how the complexity we have today comes from and the resources this complexity provides it provides.
It’s not really different from a whole host of different theories I’ve seen from people that think a simple degrowth of population and cutting out ‘waste’ consumption, along with a return to some type of wholistic agriculture (regenenerative, permaculture, organic, biodiverse, localism etc) will allow most of modern civilization to continue at a reduced scale in a ‘sustainable’ fashion.
If civilization is just another physical process of increased entropy, like storms, stars, or any lifeform in the universe, then it has a formation, growth and end stage. If we are entering the end stage, then perhaps for the rest of life on this planet the most intelligent response, no worse than any other eventual outcome, is to have a nuclear war and end civilization quickly..
Have you considered that looking for intelligent or wise responses to our predicament is just a form of denial of the “bad outcome” (our human perception!!) of the future??
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If the wise response is trying to find some way to avoid collapse then for sure that’s a form of denial.
If the wise response is trying to do some affordable and feasible things today to make the lives of our descendants a little easier, then that’s not denial.
For example, if the majority understood that falling EROEI was a process that will make it harder for governments to fund projects in the future, then they might support a project today to remove spent nuclear fuel from vulnerable cooling ponds and to bury it.
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Good point about the nuclear waste. It also goes for every other long term poison we create. So yes I agree, a smart ape that had worked out that extreme damage is coming with collapse should not just clean up spent nuclear fuel, but also ban new fuel from being placed into nuclear power plants, as in ban them like Germany did.
Also stop production of PFAS, PCBs, Atrazine, DecaBDE, neonicotinoids, and other such chemicals. How do we clean these up, when they have been spread across the environment?
What would be the effect of stopping the use all of these in the short term? Most likely faster collapse as various industries have them as essential products.
Also with all the nuclear waste, is dealing with it a good idea or a bad idea? Just running with a thought experiment here…
With higher radiation levels spread throughout the environment (upon collapse and spread), it will enhance the speed of chance mutations throughout living creatures, which in most cases will lead to a bad outcome, but there might also be some mutations that have a beneficial effect in allowing whatever to quickly evolve in the new environment created by humans.
It was chance mutations that led to more complex life after cyanobacteria changed the atmosphere billions of years ago, so maybe our waste could possibly be beneficial in the process of evolution. We all think in closed short term time frames when thinking about the future. Measured in geological time frames, there is going to be great change in biology on the planet over the next 10 million years anyway.
Humans changing the world is no different to cyanobacteria, the plants that reduced the CO2 level during the carboniferous period, a large asteroid, blanketing the planet suddenly excluding sunlight from the surface, or huge volcanic eruptions that periodically happen, like the Yellowstone caldera erupting in a VEI 8 eruption or a large basalt flood event. The time frame of each of these events varies from sudden to over a long period of millions of years, but there have been many mass extinctions and we only tend to look at the largest ones to compare what humanity is doing.
I’ve come to the conclusion that we are fucked.. sorry in Bill Rees terms “we are hooped” ( I suppose he could only use that term to get published, when everyone clearly understands what he is saying), with the biggest battle being, to personally come to terms with what’s coming towards us and be at peace as everything unravels, knowing there never was anything we could have done to stop it, as our very existence is just part of the overall entropy of the universe.
If we worked out a list of what could be beneficial to world, in our world view, but the rest of the world continues on believing in renewables/nuclear/degrowth or whatever is the answer without changing anything, then all we’ll do is get increasingly frustrated personally in the effort to try and make people wake up to what’s in our future.
I’d bet my bottom dollar that Jack, after identifying the path of civilization decades ago is getting increasingly frustrated that no-one is really paying attention, so comes out with increasingly vivid ideas to try and wake people up. What I don’t think he has come to terms with, but suspect Bill Rees has come to terms with, is that our existence in our situation in our civilization is just part of a process and not to be upset about the future journey we are on.
Not sure I’m really explaining everything clearly enough..
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All good points.
The one I think the most about is war. Tensions are already heating up and collapse shit has barely hit the fan yet.
Citizens who do not understand why their lives are getting harder and harder are going to be angry and will vote for a despot who blames the other tribe and promises to go to war to take their resources.
In the past when growth was strong and resources plentiful a war might be a good investment. Today there’s not much booty left to be got, and wars will burn up resources faster making the lives of the people who voted for it worse faster.
The tribe on the losing side, who is already suffering from economic contraction, will use nukes rather than let their citizens starve.
If citizens understood why they are getting poorer, and that there’s no booty to be got, and that a war will make their lives worse, they might not vote for it.
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You read my mind, echoing your thoughts in my comment below
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Just on war, it is most likely inevitable if history is any guide, so one thing to make the world less bad for the future would be to get an independent body to disarm all the world’s nuclear weapons, in advance of any real problems (are we too far gone already?).
If literally everyone could be convinced of what lies ahead including bad wars, then they might be more amenable to getting rid of all possibility of their people being nuked.
I think I’m clutching at straws at the type of people that run for high political office, as one of the main problems is that they always believe they are correct, so would never agree that the green/nuclear transition was a waste of time, or that they could lose a war..
I even expect that when it’s obvious we are going down, there will be people run for office and get elected on promises of how the other side is wrong about the downturn and that tribe over there have ‘our’ resources, so we should go reclaim them.
Expecting sanity from a highly emotional ape, that believes in a range of invisible gods when convenient, does not give me much hope for reducing any bad outcomes..
Perhaps instead of looking at or for whatever would make the path down less bad, we should look at what will make the situation worse, as that seems the likely path, given history and denial…
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For sure one thing that is (and will) make things worse is the noticeable reduction in intelligence, knowledge, wisdom, and integrity of all western leaders.
Are leaders tracking a similar trend in their citizens? That would make sense because it takes an idiot to vote for an idiot.
I don’t see the same trend in BRICS leaders but maybe I’m not close enough or maybe I’m biased.
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yes, the path to less bad is hard to find. Especipally when nuke armed governments resort to their ancient scriptures to justify conquest and also the virtue to be found in an ‘endtime’.
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Is that entirely true? Maybe I have got the wrong impression (it’s really hard to know with the media), but it seems to me that both in France and Germany sending troops to Ukraine is unpopular. Even the expenses to produce ammunition or other war material is seen as a misallocation of economic resources which many would rather see allocated to health, or pensions, … Especially at times when the government is talking about austerity because of debt and companies are laying off.
Maybe not the people who have some vested interests (direct or indirect), in which case they may prefer to see people die than lose their investments. (in which case, it’s still rational and nukes are not a particularly attractive option)
Uh, in our system, isn’t it OK to let the citizenship starve, as long as they don’t really notice, or their vote (through election or financial means) doesn’t count?
How using nuke is going to have any positive impact on citizens access to food?
Aren’t many people already on food aid in developed countries?
I don’t know…
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I’m always skeptical of the gradual decline argument because it just doesn’t factor in the likelihood of a nuclear exchange when things really start going south. It’s the 900 pound gorilla in the room and just doesn’t get the attention it deserves because it completely invalidates any of this nonsense about horses dragging scrapped cars around or whatever. You’ll have a nuclear winter, humans will go extinct, nature will heal, and in half a billion years some evolutionary offshoot of cockroaches will be sitting around having the same discussion we are right now.
It’s inevitable too, that’s what some of these writers don’t get. All this talk about a gradual decline assumes that people will passively accept the deterioration of their standards of living, peacefully abandon the value systems they’ve built on top of those standards, and quietly accept that their goals, dreams and aspirations are no longer possible in a world that will gradually get worse generation after generation until the end of time… Ya, that’ll never happen. People will do what people have always done when their standards of living fall, freak out. Last time this happened was in the 1930s. We all know how well that went. It’s not unique either, every declining civilization in history has gone to war. 100%. Issue is when some of these countries have nuclear weapons, they become more likely to use them, especially when they think their existence is threatened.
There’s too many inevitable scenarios where the use of nuclear weapons seems likely to list here, but for starters:
-Ice melt in the Himalayas declines rapidly, causing India and Pakistan to go to war over water. This is an existential crisis for both countries, the use of nuclear weapons would be very likely. Fun fact, about 1/5 of the worlds population lives in these countries
-Israel gets an even crazier president, is attacked and overrun by its neighbors, sees nuclear retaliation as the only viable option. Much of the remaining oil reserves and associated infrastructure that exists in Israel’s neighboring countries is destroyed.
I’m sure you can think of your own examples. Any student of history knows that declining civilizations find themselves constantly at war. Nuclear weapons haven’t been used after WWII because the world has been very stable since they were introduced. There’s a lot of reasons for that, deterrence is definitely one of them, but an even bigger factor I’d argue is that the global economy has grown so much in that same time period. In a declining economy/civilization, options that we consider “crazy” now become a lot more realistic. Look at the current leadership we have in western countries. A lot of these people are clowns. This is after about 30-40 years of serious decline. Imagine how crazy the leaders will be in 20 years when things are way worse.
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Well said.
In addition to all that, we are walking away from treaties that constrained nuclear weapons. Our western leaders and citizens have forgotten how dangerous nukes are. We are doing stupid things to proliferate them, like sneak attacking Iran when it was negotiating with us in good faith, and as a consequence has or will soon have nukes. When that becomes public Saudi Arabia and others will follow.
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I highly doubt only 9 countries have nukes. Russia made thousands of them during he cold war, and they didn’t exactly do a great job of keeping track of all of their other weapons. It seems highly unlikely to me that a few governments didn’t get their hands on them while the getting was good and just didn’t tell anyone. Also, I’m not a nuclear engineer or anything, but just logically building a nuke is 1940s technology, I’m sure there’s a lot of countries who could figure out ways to do it. Again, not a lot of reason to advertise that.
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Yes, but a nuclear exchange has nothing (or so it seems to me) to do with the inevitability of a physical process.
So it is not to be considered a certainty, contrarily, to fast collapse of modernity as outlined by Hideaway.
So, that’s really what I hear, when people talk about the need to “shift our collective consciousness” (I hear other things too, but I guess they are outside the kind of discussions that people want to have here ;). Appeal to peaceful outcomes (which make more sense, even purely rationally, as Rob pointed out: “Today there’s not much booty left to be got”, and because of the interdependency in the system).
Another “hope” I have got, is that most nuclear warheads are not operational because of rust (costs). But, since most countries want to impress, they still advertise large numbers. So I hope, governments are being lying monkeys on this aspect. (I admit this argument can be filed in the denial closet, and I have insufficient data. But I find Afghanistan, Ukraine have shown the limit of the scale of forces which can be economically deployed on ground)
Best.
PS: nothing to do with this comment, but wanted to write them down for me. So might as well share with the few people who might take interest. It seems to me, there are 5 main claims in Hideaway’s story:
I certainly agree with 1 and maybe 2 (although I believe collapse has already started). I don’t see 3 and 4 as absolute certainties. For instance, I see the latest events as exercises in containment (economic sanctions, pipeline destruction, trade tariffs, travel restrictions). There seems to be alternatives to 4 (I made my points before, so will not bore you with repetition. No doubt, not of the walk in the park type, but quite entertaining ;). And I totally disagree with 5. I don’t understand how environmental impacts could be worse, with less total power.
I have faith 🙂 (there seems to me to be a lot of rationality in the moves of important actors, including in the smoke, screens! and mirrors).
I will end in pagnation (salute) style, with a soundtrack.
Not to everyone’s taste, but I used to be into Detroit techno and the title matched. Better explore this kind of sounds, before collapse stops them in their tracks 🙂
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Hi Charles,
I understand your point. Resource decline is inevitable on a finite planet, I think we can both agree on that. I think where we differ is that you are saying that since resource decline is an inevitable process, there’s nothing humans can do to stop it, as opposed to nuclear war, which humans can exercise agency over.
The heart of our difference comes down to how we view humans in the system, and the role of human agency in deciding outcomes.
I certainly think humans have some level of agency, and even abstract collectives like countries do to a certain extent. The thing is that agency alone doesn’t mean we shouldn’t try to build into our models what the likely responses that humans will have to inevitable outcomes. When Apple designs its iPhones with programmed obsolescence in mind, they know it’s inevitable the phone will die eventually, but they don’t stop there and say “then I don’t know what will happen next.” No, the whole point is that they know and have included in their model that a certain percentage of customers, people with free will and agency, will buy a new iPhone*. The point is, good systems theory takes into account the role of human agency by adjusting for the likelihood of people or organizations picking certain outcomes given the choices they have available to them.
In other words, you can’t try to think about the future of human civilization without factoring in humans.
Given resource decline, countries will repeatedly face situations where they have a number of options on the table, one of them being nuclear war. Over a long enough timeline and with enough stress caused by resource decline, it seems inevitable one or all of them will choose the nuclear option. Again, history is an analogue here, every single declining civilization has gone to war. At that point you need to factor it into your model of what you think the future will look like.
*ok maybe limited agency, they’re paying twice as much for a phone because of a marketing campaign made them think it was “cool”
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Hi Felix,
Thank you for your answer and detailed explanation. Yes, indeed.
And your are right: human behavior has to be factored in (at least for people whose work it is, like strategic state/military planning, I guess? Because there are no stakes in this for me: this is just an amateurish mind game 🙂
To make my point clearer. I just wanted to say that fast decline seems like an inevitability to me (close to 100%), whereas a nuclear exchange only a low probability.
My reasoning goes like this. On one hand, to me, the nuclear option presents a lot to lose and not much to gain, I assume state actors to be mostly rational, and there will be relatively few occurences where the option will be on the table (because at some point the system which allows to build and maintain complex objects such as nuclear warheads or the means to launch them has collapsed)
But, this is a pretty wild and uninformed guess from me. (And, as a deterrence tool, it’s better to keep every one under the impression nuclear warheads are both terrible and an option, isn’t it?)
Best.
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Nafeez Amhed in his new blog “Age of Transformation” cites a wider body of evidence suggesting that the “rise and fall of civilisations in history is part of a longer process of human cultural evolution. This research draws on the seminal work of the late ecologist Crawford Holling, who spent decades studying natural systems, from predator-prey dynamics to forests.
Holling found that all ecological systems experience a life cycle which goes through four stages: growth, conservation, release, and reorganisation. Holling called this the ‘adaptive cycle’.”
My two cents: he’s enamoured with renewables, but it’s a good try. I like bringing in the ecological cycle to rebutt that this is the end of modernity. Still an open question, courtesy of David Fleming (Lean Logic): What is the sequel to an energy rich market economy?
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Ugh, Fleming’s take on Holling and Gunderson’s work was transformational sense-making for me
https://leanlogic.online/glossary/wheel-of-life-the/
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Thank you for the references. Very interesting. I had seen the graph before, but didn’t know very much about the underlying work.
Reminds me of a french physicist wo claimed societies followed a Carnot cycle in four phases.
So do you think, the global system is still at the end of the conservation phase or has already started entering the release phase?
According to this model, the release phase can’t be avoided, before getting on with the reorganization. And the release (=fast collapse?) might be pretty brutal, if this remark is right (from https://leanlogic.online/glossary/wheel-of-life-the/)
About what comes after release, my guess is as good as anyone’s else… But I’d say, it will be about relying on all the possibilities offered by life, including our body, instead of external energy and machines. A slow world of free (in the both meanings of the word) interactions.
Best.
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François Roddier was the guy. Not much about him in english (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Fran%C3%A7ois_Roddier).
His cycle here: https://www.francois-roddier.fr/?p=910
There are a few conferences:
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By the way, the concept of panarchy reminded me of the structure of the movie “The fountain” (Darren Aronofsky). Structures within structures (fractals), looping and feeding each other throughout time. Just like in syntropy.
It seems every body has got his theory. At some point, the theory gets so complex, it’s just inoperable within the limits of my brain. And then I wonder whether reality really complies any of these theories, or if theorists are simply projecting their own personal mental structures onto the world.
Cheers 🙂
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Ah yes, a novel application of the Shock Doctrine, a la Klein and before her, Friedman.
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That Q&A session was comedy gold. And it made me like Jack a whole lot more. He’s oozing desperation no doubt, but he’s freaking hilarious. He handles the criticism very well. I’d love to have a few beers with him and shoot the shit. (and I think Rob is correct about Jack being more of a shock jock now with his crazy plan and mainly just trying to wake people the hell up)
So easy to see what Rob means when he says anyone trying to make the future less bad is guaranteed to fail if they don’t address denial first. Half that audience could be labeled as clueless f’ing morons. That dipshit Richard guy took 1st prize, easily. Rees jumping in to correct Richard about Norway’s energy transition was the peak of the video for me.
Btw, how the hell does someone who actually believes a developed country is truly powered with only 10% ff’s and 90% renewables… how does someone like that get invited to ask questions? Need a screener to weed out that bullshit to preserve the credibility. The really scary thing is I think I heard Richard mention something about his peer reviewed paper getting published. Yikes!!
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What you said plus the fact that participants are (I think) members of the Club of Rome which means they should be miles ahead of the average citizen.
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Hideaway tries single malt to penetrate Brandon’s denial.
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The profession we should place the highest priority on replacing with AI is healthcare (excluding of course manual dexterity specialists like nurses and surgeons) because:
https://boriquagato.substack.com/p/medicine-goes-ai
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Ya i agree with you in theory. Most doctors just order tests and shuffle people off to specialists. Trying to get a GP in the US to treat something that isn’t a rash or sinus infection is impossible without seeing a specialist. Most specialists in turn rely on diagnostic techniques and technologies that could be handled by technicians and nurses who don’t need the broad training they receive. So ya, from a technical perspective, AI could totally replace most doctors.
The reason you still have doctors, and why medical care in the US is so expensive (and in other countries so rationed) is the liability. In the US for example, insurance companies feel safer having a doctor sign off on stuff because they’re licensed. The amount of fraud, waste, and abuse that could occur without that is enormous. Like yes, there’s already a ton of fraud in the medical industry, but without any safeguards it’d be a lot worse.
From a purely technical perspective, most doctors could have been replaced years ago. It all comes back to having someone take the heat if something goes wrong. Who do you sue if an AI software screws up your diagnosis?
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Healthcare is not the reason life expectancy is falling. Cost of living is the reason. Life expectancy is falling because of deaths of despair and rise of Victorian diseases like Scurvy, Rickets etc. In some respects healthcare contributes to cost of living crisis. Its to much highteck and costly healthcare. Healthcare becomes more and more unaffordable with falling EROI and falling young workers to pay for this. I am a 50 year old doctor with no hope for healthcare when I am old. Which oil will transport pharmaceuticals to western countries when I am old? In many respects old people have never ever lived so long . There is diminishing return on life expectancy also. Implausibility of radical life extension in humans in the twenty-first century | Nature Aging
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MD, PhD Jarle Breivik ( teaches at university at Oslo) argues that modern healthcare tries impossible things. He writes this:” The large increase we are seeing in the number of people living with cancer and dementia is not due to harmful environmental factors or a lack of healthcare services. It is due to a society and a healthcare system that keeps us alive beyond our biological expiration date.
Medical research is increasingly turning toward curing age-related diseases, and in practice, it is death itself we are fighting against.
Some might say this is an exaggeration; that the goal of medical research and development is to keep people healthy until they die quickly and naturally of old age. But that’s not how it works in practice.
The end of humanity as we know it
The uncomfortable reality is that life-prolonging treatment of age-related diseases creates more, even older, more care-dependent, and cost-intensive patients. New medications displace more health than they generate, and the healthcare sector represents an almost bottomless pit in the national economy. ” Breivik argues that cancer is not primarily caused by lifestyle or environmental factors. Instead, it is a natural consequence of aging. As societies improve healthcare and people live longer, more individuals develop cancer simply because the risk increases with age. Its normal for all metazoa to develop cancer Referce in Norwegian: Vi må prioritere livskvalitet fremfor å leve lengst mulig. or in english: we wont cure cancer: Opinion | We Won’t Cure Cancer – The New York Times
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talk about saying the quiet part out loud. Makes you wonder, if they cured cancer, how much would the life expectancy increase?
Also- you might enjoy this clip from Scrubs:
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Lifeexpectancy would not rise. We have reached maximum whats possible. Keeping lifexpectancy on this level demands even more resources. Healthcare has reached its red queen syndrome.Olshansky, S.J., Willcox, B.J., Demetrius, L. et al. Implausibility of radical life extension in humans in the twenty-first century. Nat Aging 4, 1635–1642 (2024). https://doi.org/10.1038/s43587-024-00702-3
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Those are valid points but there are other trends in young people that shed a very bad light on the performance and integrity of the healthcare system:
One significant fact I will always remember about covid. Healthcare professionals were silent on telling people to lose weight and take vitamin D to reduce covid risks. This is unforgiveable.
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Its has little to do with the healthcare system. Healthcare system in Europe has never been this good. Life expectancy in younger age is perhaps on a downward trend, but lifeexpectancy in older age groups have never been this good in history ever. What you mentioning it is a side effect of modern life. Obesity is modern life (pollution, processed food, less walking, endocrine disruptors etc), diabetes ditto. Modernity gave us moderne healthcare and modernity also gave us modern diseases. You can’t have one without the other.
Autisme is perhaps plastic with endocrine disruptors, autism has perhaps a little contribution from vaccines (endocrine disrupters more likely), but as one of the skeptics in Norway says (who is on the spectrum); ” better autistic than dead”.You can’t have both. MMR vaccines work. Whats best? Science can’t tell.
mRNA vaccines. We really dont now. Its to early. Perhaps not good. But I can’t see a catastrophe in real life. But what a do know is that lockdowns made people hungry in some countries becouse of supply chain disruptions.
Allegies is most likely the hygiene hypothesis. You have to choose. Some infections in childhood or allergies. You can’t have both. Same with inflamatory bowel disease. Modern food, to sterile food. We are supposed to eat fungal encrusted meat on the savanna stole from lions with some roots in the evening.
Age adjusted cancer deaths rates have never been this good. Its not so dramatic as you describe.More cancer overall → Due to aging population.
Age-adjusted incidence → Slight increase.
Age-adjusted mortality → Decreasing.
→ Better treatment + early detection.
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Somebody sent me this video (sorry, in French, but the automatic translation is fairly accurate), and I’d like your expertise, because I don’t know:
They argue Chinese population is not what the government claims it to be:
So basically, their argument is that population peaked earlier than advertised because of low fertility, and that covid deaths led further decline. Their conclusion is that the real chinese population lies somewhere between 700 million and 1 billion people.
I have to stress that NTD is a broadcaster (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/New_Tang_Dynasty_Television) linked to the Falun Gong movement (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Falun_Gong) which was severely repressed in 1999. So this is certainly political and exagerated (but the same could be said of the numbers provided by the communist party)
To me, this leads to the question: what do we really know about the current state of the world? How can we trust global data?
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200 Million Covid Deaths? In a country of 1.2-1.4 Billion. That is roughly 15-17% of the population. Even with severe censorship, I don’t think that China could hide some thing like that.
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Very interesting, thanks.
Trust in information is a big problem today:
– The peer review system for academic papers is corrupt and ineffective.
– There is a growing corrupt industry that churns out counterfeit scientific papers.
– Mainstream media is so starved for revenue thanks to the “free” internet that news has become corrupted by a few big advertisers like pharma and government.
– Complexity has grown so much that it’s difficult to understand anything.
– Social media has created a unique reality for every individual.
I trust almost nothing now unless I’ve followed a source for a long time to assess their integrity.
I’ve noticed that people around me have completely different beliefs about important issues like mRNA and the Ukraine war.
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Yes. This is so true.
My hunch is that all big actors are in worse shape (US, Russia, China), economically and militarily, than they want the public to know. Also, the people making the decisions are more focused on keeping their system working and their personal power than really growing more at the expense of the other players.
So it’s a subtle game of pretend, extend, proxy wars and skirmishes and ultimately be forced towards cooperation. But, I am biased 😉
(As I believe we are already in collapse, I also believe we are already in world war III, except it doesn’t look like what we are used to)
Best.
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I actually think that it will be falling net energy that causes collapse not necessarily complexity. When net energy falls below a certain level, mining will likely become economically non-viable and it is this that will trigger the collapse, and the loss of complexity will be a side-effect. Complexity may act as a feedback loop though.
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Sterllarwind72 …
That’s the basis of my theory, that it’s an accelerating decline in net energy, then declining total energy, *accelerating the net energy trend), that leads to a collapse in complexity, which has feedback loops accelerating the decline of energy, mineral, metal, food and water gathering, which accelerate each other to the downside.. At some stage the markets (not just stock markets, but sales of all types of goods and services that people and companies can no longer afford, plus population will also take a tumble as food in enough quantity stops getting to urban areas.
All the stuff about nuclear war or whatever is on top of the general collapse. It could happen before civilization collapses, or during it, or not at all, but if it happens it will just accelerate collapse, but without it we wont be that much better off anyway.
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net energy shortage is a leading candidate for collapse imo, well stated. Another candidate is exportable diesel as calculated by Lars Larsen in Sweden.
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Nate Hagens does a nice job today of debunking a long list of liberal beliefs.
I especially liked his explanation of why Modern Monetary Theory (MMT) will most harm the people who think it will help them.
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Not bad for Nate. Still to much hopium for me. He doesn’t seem to see collapse starting NOW (or soon). Education for liberals (and conservatives) is hopeless.
AJ
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I also enjoyed this episode of frankly, however I noticed how at the beginning he went through how profit/surplus of energy was a natural course for all life, not just humans. Then fast forward to the end and he wants humans to stop being humans in striving for a surplus.
This seems to be a common point of those thick in denial, that if we just stop being our natural selves we can stop collapse of civilization. If everyone agrees to less, to lower their standard of living and share, then we can keep some form of civilization light, despite how it ignores the laws of thermodynamics (using metal tools that suffer from entropy)…
Now how’s the theme of everyone ceasing to be human going since the Limits To Growth came out 53 years ago. That is the answer to where we are heading. We chose denial and those who didn’t chose to deny reality have been outcompeted by those that chose surplus, the maximum power principle in action..
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at around min 12 he lists ways humans are hard-wired and could have easily added MORT/denial. At around min 30 he tries to parse the nature vs nurture dialectic and comes down firmly on the side of nature, ie genetic programming. He could have included the scope of possibility of epigenetics now acknowledged by science as real. Environments do change genetics. I think his point still holds though, that we will not be able to ‘nurture’ ourselves to the stage that we don’t take the marvelous blue planet down with us. Sixth extinction is underway, some say.
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Tomorrow morning I leave for 3 nights at a rustic cabin at Moat Lake in Strathcona Park in central Vancouver Island. We’re flying in via helicopter. It’s a gift from a friend. I hope to do several day hikes and some fishing in the lake.
I’ll have no internet so please play nice with each other.
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So it seems, you too, have good friends 😉
Enjoy.
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Helicopter? Really? No worries — all is forgiven — everyone deserves to burn a bit of fossil fuel every now and then… 🙂
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I explained the story below.
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Hi everyone. Look at that, back from vacation and civilization is still going strong. I can’t believe it.😊
I watched Andrea P’s latest video. I think I have a new favorite youtube doomer. She’s not afraid of any subjects. I like her breakdown of fear of loss being more prevalent than fear of death. MORT even gets mentioned (6:37). I doubt she knows about un-Denial. More likely she got it from that Nate Hagens / Stephen Jenkinson interview.
Andrea’s journey feels similar to mine. I’m betting she started with Dowd, Hagens, Quinn, EO Wilson… all the usual suspects. But then got too curious for her own good and now she’s on the verge of lapping those guys. You can tell she reads a lot and thinks about collapse all the time.
And you know my crazy little observations… like how anytime a New World meets an Old World, it’s always gonna be the King Kong movies with the low eroei savage monsters vs the high eroei civilized pretty boys or the latest one about the two-million-year slow motion werewolf transformation process… Andrea is full of these! Seems like every two minutes she gives me a new way of looking at something.
She’d be a great addition to un-Denial. And what a bonus it’d be to have a good youtuber on our side. I’m gonna try to recruit her. And even though she doesn’t agree with most of MORT theory… it’s irrelevant if all she did was dive headfirst into Varki’s writings. No disrespect at all to Dr Varki, but I think we’d all agree that Rob is the best source for learning this subject.
If you have no interest, at the very least watch these two minutes from 24:35 – 26:43 (queued up). You can tell she understands all about Homo inutilis (useless man).
ps. The movie she referenced is Aniara (2018). I saw it a while back, but it must’ve been prior to my overshoot journey. Watched it last night and goddamn!!! it’s a good one. One of those films you’ll still be thinking about two weeks later. And definitely an excellent analogy for our predicament.
No likeable characters, slow pacing full of despair and bleakness, and no happy ending. And those are my selling points! LOL. (the ending was absolutely beautiful). Don’t let the space bullshit keep you from trying this gem.
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I hope you succeed in recruiting Andrea. MORT dissidents are welcome as long as they don’t continually criticize MORT without offering a better explanation for what we observe, or a fact that kills MORT.
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Rob, A FACT that kills MORT should be welcome.. Then we’d have to work on a new theory of what causes denial.
I very, very, much doubt that there are any ‘facts’ that can kill MORT, but I’m open to any new facts that might help explain our situation or explain some path out of our predicament..
The clearest indication to me, that we have it all ‘ just about correct’, is that any counter arguments on MORT, collapse, overshoot predicament etc, are easily rejected by actual facts…
Every counter to our predicament that I’ve ever researched in detail, reveals huge holes in the arguments, just about always in regard to the energy and materials to build whatever future.
A simple question about why in the last 600 years of colonisation, we never came across a village, town or civilization that had built themselves a nuclear reactor, which clearly would have happened if it was just human ingenuity that was required, explains to me the massive denial we have across civilization…
People just don’t understand our complexity at all, including heaps of university professors that study this stuff for a living, anthropologists in particular. They all look for ALL the answers in just their specific field, thinking everything else is constant, which it never is. Anthropologists, miss the physics, the geology, the climate variance, the role of depletion and energy within the system (civilization) they are studying..
Then Economists also miss all the physics and complexity with where it all comes from..
The physicists are not interested in the human social element of complexity nor the economics, as it’s not science…
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I wonder if you misread my unclear comment? I tried to say that facts that kill MORT are welcome here, and they have been publicly welcomed by Dr. Ajit Varki, one of the originators of the theory.
I agree with you that we are getting damn close here to explaining the essence of the human overshoot story. Others, like Nate Hagens, add unnecessary window dressing and complexity to the story, but we’ve got the important bits nailed.
I’d bet money that Dr. Nick Lane has the answers to most of the other big questions like the origin of life, eukaryotic cell, and multi-cellular complex life.
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I’m pretty sure I misread your unclear comment, or just wasn’t paying attention, it did seem weird to me..
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https://www.middleeastmonitor.com/20250820-when-water-becomes-war-the-moral-failure-of-global-governance-in-the-middle-east/?amp
When water becomes war: The moral failure of global governance in the Middle East
The article mentions climate change, but does not mention overshoot or overpopulation as causes of water tensions in the Middle East.
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Who feeds Midle East ? UEA and other oil rich countries is doing land grapping i Sudan, Etiopia and other countries. Imagine Abu Dhabi without oil?
The UAE’s top interest is Sudan’s gold, but food is also a key priority. Over the past decade and a half, the country has been vying to seize control over farmland and water sources in Sudan to produce food for export.
In pursuit of its own food security, the UAE has pumped over US$6 billion into Sudan’s foreign reserves, agricultural expansion projects and a Red Sea port.
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Who indeed. It’s even crazier than that. The super organism has money for blood, and it eats anything it wants.
https://www.motherjones.com/politics/2024/12/arizona-fondomonte-saudi-arabia-la-paz-county/
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Unbelievable. Another example, cotton is grown in California.
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I’m back from 3 nights at a rustic cabin on a small island at Moat Lake in Strathcona Park here on Vancouver Island. The weather was perfect and I had a very enjoyable time day-hiking in the mountains and visiting with good friends.
I’ve hiked to this lake and camped in the area in the past without the assistance of kerosene and a helicopter.
The story is that the owner of the cabin donated 3 nights with helicopter transport to a Rotary auction for raising community service donations and a friend won the auction and invited me to join him.
I expect this will be my second and last helicopter ride. The first was an emergency lift out from an aborted hike in the same park 7 years ago that I discussed here.
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Great pics and vids! Cool story of the helicopter rescue. And funny “if this blog goes dark” post. Look at that 16-year-old version of you. You got your whole life in front of you… jesus christ, why does that make me sad? Ughh, I hate full consciousness. LOL
Glad you had a good time. I enjoyed my getaway as well. The only problem is my doomer supremacy is off the charts after spending a week up close with three clueless normies.😊
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That is unbelievably beautiful. So pleased that places like this still exist. Thank you for the pictures!
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