By Hideaway: EROEI

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 station5.0910.18
Old Saudi oil wells2754
Permian fracked oil wells ~20151.763.52
NESF Solar Farm1.222.44
MTG Wind Farm1.172.34
WA gas wells2346
Hinkley Point C nuclear0.571.14

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.

1,602 thoughts on “By Hideaway: EROEI”

  1. If anyone thinks that complexity wont be an issue on the way down when parts, chemicals etc become harder to source, then watch this video about something really complex, the TMSC plant in Arizona. I think I heard them talk about 4,000 processes that all need to work exactly correctly….

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    1. Really good explanation of chip making complexity, thanks.

      I try to keep enough spare parts to last until I die.

      Also recommend the chapter in Ed Conway’s book Material World on the hyper-complex and single-sourced supply chain for silicon wafers.

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    2. I am a few minutes in. The voice sounds monotone enough that It could plausibly be the output of an AI voice synthesizer.

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    3. Do you think we could go back to using simpler forms of electronics? But then again the minerals won’t be there, will they? Enjoy your gadgets while you still can…

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  2. Remember that interview where Rachel Donald was being a total bitch to Bill Rees? 

    I found this link that wraps it up. She had already won me over with some of her other interviews, but this exchange with Bill was a nice touch.

    So Rachel, all is forgiven. I promise I’ll be nice when you interview me.😊

    Reflections on an Argument – by Rachel Donald

    Hi, Rachel – I really appreciated the opportunity to speak with you today and apologize for being redundant (not bringing anything new to the table) or seeming to talk down to you.  

    It took me a while to ‘get’ that while I was focusing on the “why is the world in crisis” first part of your first question, you were mostly interested in solutions, the “what can we do about it” or second half of that question…

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  3. Some progress is being made but apparently the fine print says pharma retains immunity from liability despite the Emergency Use Authorization being cancelled.

    Also, Fauci is still walking free despite funding research that was banned in the US and that is the root cause of 20+ million deaths.

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  4. Just some more ramblings from a madman. I’ll be surprised if any of this makes sense.

    What does “higher consciousness” look like? Or maybe I should first ask, do you guys believe the ceiling for consciousness/intelligence can get much higher for humans (or any other species)? I have trouble with this because all I can picture is the sci-fi stuff like talking to each other telepathically.

    Some of the “we just need a shift in the collective consciousness” crowd likes to use the old urban legend that humans use only 5% of our brains or whatever. It’s obvious why they like to use that stat, but I’m pretty sure it’s been debunked. I think we use our entire brain.

    Just for a moment let’s say the urban legend is correct. Scratch that. Let’s just focus on how to get bigger brains in general. How do you do it? We know the answer has absolutely nothing to do with industrial civilization. For some odd reason 300 years isn’t enough time to start floating around and communicating telepathically.😉

    Maybe some type of miracle where agriculture (and climate stability) stays the same for a really long time. Like permaculture for the next million years with a population that never gets above 50 million. And more importantly the “on the farm” ratio never falls below 95/5. Is there potential for huge increases of consciousness/intelligence? I can’t answer it properly. Because I can’t get past the bullshit fairytale of agriculture staying “lite” for that long of time.

    Let’s go a different route. Say the Holocene never happened. And the miracle here will be that after humans were injected with the nightmare of full consciousness, they figured out early on that hunting their prey to extinction is a bad idea and were actually able to shift their eating habits accordingly. Give that scenario a million more years and maybe we end up with something drastically higher than a Sapien awareness level. (for any scenario, cooking the majority of their meals is probably the key thing that has to stay constant)

    Call me crazy but that might be a good enough reason to root for humans to make it through the upcoming bottleneck (as long as you guarantee me that agriculture is not possible anymore). The idea of some type of radically higher consciousness is too attractive for me not to cheer on these future primitive savage werewolves.

    But I think I just answered my question. It seems like that’s exactly what higher consciousness means… a revert back to the stone age… being in tune with nature and all that. That is not what I had in my anthropocentric mind. Hmm, so there’s no such thing as a higher consciousness in the way that my sci-fi, pop-culture brain wants it to be… Ok fine, I guess it’s back to cheering for near term human extinction then. LOL

    ps. The Pixies song ‘Where Is My Mind’ was too obvious for this post. This one seems more appropriate. I’m slowly losing my marbles over here.😊

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    1. You’re thinking about something I know very little about. To make a guess I’d lean on energy and evolution basics.

      It’s reasonable to assume that future humans will have less food abundance than we have today which means evolution will not have any surplus energy to play with. A trait that increases the probability of successful reproduction will be favored by evolution at the expense of other traits. With scarce fossil energy I’d guess increased muscle strength and endurance will be favored in exchange for a smaller brain.

      I expect all animals are conscious with varying degrees of theory of mind. Only one animal has an extended theory of mind and it was required to deny unpleasant realities. It’s hard to imagine our extended theory of mind will revert in the future given how much it’s helped us to take over the planet, and therefore its hard to imagine that denial will ever go away without some drug, and our future technology will be too weak to develop such as drug.

      God will not go extinct until we go extinct.

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    2. Interesting how you picked telepathy out of the myriad “supra-normal” abilities of the human body. No coincidence.

      I guess you just have to check by yourself. Look for teachers (reliable ones) or tutorials. Practice. And tell us what you think.

      Enjoy.

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    1. Not yet, and I’m not sure why. Maybe because I assume it will offer nothing new (for me). You should post a book review… or just try to sell me on why I should read it.😊

      Saw a reddit site that was being critical of Lyle. Seemed like a bunch of AI bullshit though. Nothing specific about the book. But criticism like this does make me more interested in reading it:

      Critics acknowledge the book contains compelling information but find its uniformly grim, 250-page message of “doom and gloom” can wear down the reader. For those who already follow the subject, the lack of a call to action or acknowledgment of human resilience is discouraging.

      The book’s explicit rejection of hope as futile is viewed as a significant weakness. For many, hope is a powerful motivator for change, and a book that promotes resignation may encourage inaction rather than inspiring the action needed to avoid catastrophic ecological collapse.

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  6. Ordinary fucking people… I hate em. See, an ordinary person spends his life avoiding tense situations. A doomer spends his life getting into tense situations.

    Not sure if I’ve ever recommended Repo Man (1984). Watched it last night and it’s still excellent. With a young Emilio Estevez and the always great Harry Dean Stanton.

    The above quote is at the 1:39 mark. I might have to create the Doomer Code. LOL 

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      1. Good lord!! LOL. I’m tellin ya… the hardcore nihilism crowd is way more interesting (and scary) then the hardcore doomer crowd.

        And for the hardcore nihilist/doomer crowd… look out!! Hide your women and children.😊

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        1. Doomers are biased. The rest of life will probably either rejoice or simply not care at all when humans are gone. Doom is also just another human construct. The universe only “cares” about one thing, and that is entropy being maximized, e.g. everything being dead-silent, pitch-black and ice-cold everywhere in the cosmos forever. You can argue that the universe was the very first edge-lord!

          Also, here, have some Nightmare Before Christmas to go with that Repo stuff.

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  8. Been on LinkedIn more than usual recently while looking for a new job, as my current one is sort of hitting a dead end. Need to come here every night to restore my faith in humanity. You want to see denial, I can’t think of a better place to look than LinkedIn.

    What fascinates me is the current pop culture obsession with AI. I work in the data & analytics industry and can honestly tell you AI is not actually disrupting very much right now. There’s a lot of sturm and drang but I have yet to see it actually materially change the way anyone is designing or managing their systems. There’s machine learning, sure, but that’s been around for years and is pretty different than actual LLMs which people seem to be exclusively referring to as “AI”, which I really don’t get. AI’s been around for a long time, a computer controlled chess opponent is “AI”. I think it’s just that LLMs are just the first simulacrum of general AI to break out into the consumer market and help people write emails and optimize their google searches and stuff, which is useful, sure, but it’s not upending anything as far as I’m personally able to observe. I suppose most journalists and self-appointed LinkedIn experts don’t understand this at all, or maybe I’m just missing something. For all the people putting “AI” in their resumes or whatever, I don’t really see it listed in real job postings as a required skillset for very many companies, and again, have yet to see it make any real impact on any of the clients I’ve worked with. You hear about these AI researchers that are making millions of dollars at Meta or OpenAI but these are teams of like 20 people, which has no real impact on the general job market. The best use-case I’ve seen so far is that it makes coding easier, but you still need to know what you’re doing or else it just spits out nonsense.

    My working hypothesis is that all the AI hype is just a cover for big tech companies to lay off employees without having to admit that they over-hired during Covid, and essentially wasted tons of money on people they didn’t need, but can’t admit that. It’s a lot easier for investors to hear “we’re cutting 25% of our workforce because AI is bringing new efficiency” than “our management severely misread the macroeconomic situation and now we don’t need a large chunk of our workforce because demand is lower than we projected”.

    Frankly I think most jobs have always been sort of superfluous, but companies are reticent to lay people off because it’s bad for morale and it also signals that there’s not as much demand as expected for their goods and services, which in a growth-based economy is an early warning that the company is in trouble. Big tech in particular had a ton of projects in the last 5 years that were completely unnecessary from a bottom-line perspective, but sounded good in investor meetings.

    The current AI “race” reminds me of the end of Dr. Strangelove when the Soviet representative reveals that they were afraid of the “Doomsday Device” gap with the US. They were so afraid that the US was secretly developing their own doomsday device that they poured a huge amount of resources into developing their own so as not to be left behind. Nobody knows or cares about what AI actually is or will be capable of, but what’s essential is that you not be seen as lagging in this completely absurd arms race. A lot of people in tech would claim that the leadership of these large companies know more than the average person about this, and maybe that’s true to some extent, but if you look around at the tech CEOs now most of them aren’t the original founders of their companies or really talented engineers or technology luminaries or whatever, they generally tend to be business school guys who got to where they are by being able to play the corporate ladder game better than their peers. I’ve met guys who have moved on to high up positions in big tech companies and I can assure you they are just as susceptible to hype and groupthink as anyone else.

    I think the other big factor here is that there’s a lot of capital searching for returns due to the obscene levels of wealth inequality around the world. Rich people can’t make money by funding real businesses that sell real products, so they need to seek returns in speculative markets, and have a ton of money to invest because every asset market has gone almost straight up for 16 years. AI is just the next “big thing” money can get dumped into so it’s getting overhyped to an absurd degree. It’s the “next big thing” (TM) so you better get with it, because if you don’t it’ll be like missing out on the internet in the late 90s. I think a closer analogue is cryptocurrency. Sure, it’s appreciated a lot in price, but it’s been like 15 years and a really compelling use-case has yet to be found for it beyond its ability to appreciate in price.

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    2. Thanks Felix for the great AI observations. I share your skepticism.

      I’d add 2 points:

      1) The primary responsibility of public company CEOs is to increase shareholder value. Jumping on the AI bubble is a good way to increase your stock price today.

      2) A lot of bad ideas persist on the internet because the capital and operating costs are low. AI is different with high upfront capital and huge energy bills. Only highly profitable AI applications will survive which means I think that the bubble will pop quickly.

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      1. Isn’t AI also part of a greater optimization in the system which consists in replacing the transportation infrastructure and dreams by a numeric infrastructure and dreams?

        A way for the industrial system to further optimize (instead of disappearing). But this is still a bargain with reality, as <plug-in Hideaway’s argument here>

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      2. The capital costs are high, the operating costs are high, and the “moat” is the ability to get a few engineers and a lot of capital together, which several companies have proven capable of doing in the last 3 years.

        You’re right to point out that the whole appeal of internet/software companies from a business perspective is their low cost to start, operate, and scale. We’re seeing these tech giants go from “tech” companies to something more like a manufacturing company, which require tons of investment to start and operate. Microsoft and NVIDIA, which I see as the two eminence gris’ behind the AI boom are the the real winners here with their cloud computing and chips being the metaphorical shovels during a gold rush.

        My main issue with AI from my own experience is that it can get you 90% of the way to an answer, but that last 10% it always screws up. That’s fine if you’re using it to summarize meeting notes (to a degree), write a boilerplate email, or generate the beginning of some computer code that you go back and edit, but in most business contexts you need to be 100% right. The people promoting AI try to make it sound like bridging that gap of the last 10% is just a matter of time and research, but I’m very skeptical it’s even possible. I think AI that can do software projects on its own or do engineering projects without human supervision are going to be the next self-driving cars, always “2 years away”.

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  9. Interesting article from my local newspaper: The authors reference the Doomsday Clock, now closer to midnight than ever before, as a symbol of how serious our global crises have become from climate breakdown to loss of biodiversity. They argue that we are on the edge of ecological collapse, and that continued faith in economic growth and technological “solutions” only speeds up the damage. Stortingsvalg | Verdisyn og Stortingsvalg

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  10. I posted this on Eliot Jacobson’s blog. Nothing new for you guys, just my same old regurgitation. And I know I have an extreme fetish for Thomas Ligotti, but I still think I’m correct here. (the rest of this is my comment) 

    The Third and Final Form of Doomism – Watching the World Go Bye

    I wanna focus on the word nihilism for a minute. Even the hardcore doomers have a problem with it. And I don’t understand why. Here’s a lame but good enough description: 

    Nihilism is a philosophical and cultural movement centered on the denial of established truths, values, and meanings. With four core concepts: 

    1) No intrinsic purpose – that life has no inherent meaning, purpose, or intrinsic value. From this perspective, human existence is ultimately baseless and futile.

    2) Rejection of objective truth – denies the possibility of an objective ground for knowledge or truth. Most human concepts, beliefs, and values are therefore considered unfounded.

    3) Moral and ethical relativism – the belief that no objective moral principles exist. Right and wrong are seen as social and emotional constructs rather than universal laws.

    4) Negation of authority: a central theme is the rejection of all religious, political, and social authority. For some, this includes dismantling existing institutions.

    At least it makes sense why all the Daniel Quinn doomer pussies can’t embrace it. They’ll never be able to see the big picture. Their denial control will make sure of it by only allowing them to get to a point where they think that agriculture was the problem. Therefore, they believe idiotic nonsense like “It’s not man who is the scourge of the world, it’s a single culture. One culture out of hundreds of thousands of cultures. Our culture”.

    But if you’re a hardcore doomer then you understand that humans are absolutely hardwired for failure and destruction. And if you’re really hardcore, you understand it actually has nothing to do with humans and everything to do with the way “Life” is programmed to operate (MPP) … but there’s zero chance of anything even resembling a species self-induced mass extinction… except for one minor thing; The unacceptably overlooked fatal design flaw of Life figuring out how to control fire. (but who knows, maybe that’s the whole goal of life… to get to fire)

    Moral of the story – stop being offended with being labeled a nihilist. Wear it like a badge of honor. It means you were able to go all the way with it instead of stopping short like all the Quinn worshippers. Be proud that out of 8.3 billion people, you’re in an exclusive club (probably under 100k).

    ps. There is one more level, but it’s the end of the video game and very hard to beat. Under 1,000 have ever done it. Almost need a touch of insanity to pull it off, LOL. I’m talking of course about getting to the point where you’re cheering for Life to take advantage of this one-time moment where it actually has the technology to willfully extinct itself by blowing up this cursed, goldilocks planet and permanently ending the never-ending quest for profit and growth (aka suffering) in our solar system forever.

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    1. In regards to “ps. There is one more level, but it’s the end of the video game and very hard to beat. Under 1,000 have ever done it. Almost need a touch of insanity to pull it off, LOL. I’m talking of course about getting to the point where you’re cheering for Life to take advantage of this one-time moment where it actually has the technology to willfully extinct itself by blowing up this cursed, goldilocks planet and permanently ending the never-ending quest for profit and growth (aka suffering) in our solar system forever.”

      I think you might find these interesting:

      https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Voluntary_Human_Extinction_Movement

      https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Benatar%27s_asymmetry_argument

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    2. Nihilism can be liberating. (freeing up mental space, opening unnoticed paths)

      However, it’s a destructive philosophy. What I mean by that, is that it demolishes existing frames. It flattens the ground, creates a desert.

      And, this seems to be only half of the story, because then, on which basis do you build your own life? Do you stay on a blank page, keep on demolishing everything else, or do you build something anew (which can be incredibly hard to do on your own, rather than taking advantage of some existing tradition), or do you live freed of the need to erect, like a leaf blown by the wind?

      I have seen people build their lives on different tenets (knowingly or unknowingly). And, with time, it shapes them (or maybe they become who they really are).

      At last, I am not at all OK with 3. For me, it is wrong to live one’s life according to this. Because, then, voluntarily hurting others becomes an option.

      I understand that nihilism may be a reaction, an antidote in societies which only focus on positivity, not acknowledging the reality of the dark aspects (pain, death…) of existence. I also wonder if it is not a tool to render people vulnerable. After all, cultural desert is what invaders make of conquered land (like for instance the US of Japan after WW2, or Mao’s cultural revolution). That way, they can then insiduously impose their values, their customs.

      At least, that’s how I personnally see it.

      Cheers.

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    3. Also, the incredible beauty of it is that, even if 1 is true, then we can be the ones to give the world all the meaning it has. Choose a meaning, find a purpose and give it value.

      So, I am interested in understanding how believing in nihilism translates in the way you live your life. Is even living consistent with the belief (that human existence is ultimately baseless and futile)?

      Best.

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      1. “even if 1 is true, then we can be the ones to give the world all the meaning it has”

        Hi Charles. Sounds like you’re more in line with this philosophy:

        Existentialism: Acknowledges the absence of inherent meaning or purpose in the universe but emphasizes the individual’s freedom to create their own essence and meaning. Rather than succumbing to despair, it encourages individuals to embrace their freedom and create a meaningful life through their actions, choices, and values.

        To me that reads as: existentialism equals nihilism with some hopium attached so that it’s easier to get out of bed in the morning. In other words, well-intentioned bullshit. The type of bullshit that the nightmare of full consciousness requires 24/7.

        And of course I can see how that’s more productive (healthy) than nihilism. In fact, why not slap on an afterlife story to existentialism and we’ll have ourselves a pretty cool religion. 

        I’m gonna stick with nihilism though. But it’s too new for me to answer how this religion translates in the way I live my life. The only thing I know for sure is that the entertainment value of collapse has gone up since embracing it. 

        ps. I do agree with you about #3. That one could make things real ugly.😊 (although not nearly as ugly as what humans have done to the rest of life). 

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        1. Plot twist:

          Humans were created by aliens. These aliens purposefully designed the human genome to produce the most functional form of insanity – something that is too functional to self-destruct immediately, but insane enough to do every batshit crazy stunt possible before ultimately nuking itself. The reason is simple: entertainment. The aliens placed this ideal lunatic on a previously uninhabited planet, which they terraformed in advance to support this lifeform, together with an ecosystem it could interact with in hilarious ways. The aliens have effectively created an intergalactic reality TV show that reaps huge revenues all across the galaxy. Moral objections are nigh non-existent, to the aliens, the concept of human exceptionalism does not apply, and a human killing another human is no different than a hyena eating a zebra alive or a spider sucking dry a fly in its web. They are aware that humans are highly conscious and aware of suffering, but this is deemed irrelevant, as suffering is seen as just another aspect of life.

          Ladies and gentlemen… EARTH! LIVE! ON FOGNL!

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          1. As a side-effect, the reality TV show also serves as a scientific experiment to better understand how different genetic sequences shape an organism’s cognitive attributes. The genius in this is that the experiment doubles as a marketable edutainment entity that generates its own funding plus additional profits.
            Whenever the show becomes boring or the experiment requires a reset, the aliens introduce hydrogen-sulfide generating microorganisms that trigger a mass extinction event that cleans up the stage for the next season, this happens roughly every 100 million years, roughly the duration of a work-week in the alien’s life-cycle.

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            1. Sometimes, the aliens also produce special episodes that explore the nature of human morality. An all-time fan-favourite is abducting 100 randomly chosen instances of homo sapiens (who are immediately replaced on Earth with identical clones) and putting them in what they call “The Circle” – effectively a machine that kills them one by one according to how they vote. The goal is for the 100 humans to determine whose life is the most valuable as they get to pick the final survivor.

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              1. You’ve gotta heck of an imagination. I love it! Nice storytelling skills. Would’ve loved it even more back when I was clueless enough to believe in unlimited, clean energy.

                And thanks for the movie link. Gonna try it tonight. Looks similar to Cube, which I liked a lot.

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                1. I am just trying to make a religion that does not feature gods, just aliens, that behave exactly towards humans like humans behave towards other organisms. Because I want to see how many humans will actually believe it to be true and start joining the Cult of the Showmasters (That’s what the TV show aliens are called). The Cult of the Showmasters believes that by doing especially stupid shit in plain sight, the aliens will treat its members preferentially (for instance, with their own special episode or an afterlife in a digital utopia). ;D

                  The first Cube is great, but the following movies seemed to get worse. I think they filmed the entire movie using only a single stage, which is quite cool from a resource-intensity perspective (yes, I am the kind of person who judges every piece of art humans produce by the amount of matter and energy that was necessary to generate it, and have been doing that long before I ever read anything from Hideaway :P)

                  The Circle is similar in some ways, but it delves very deeply in how humans think about values – and the movie also explains why psychopathy works so well from an evolutionary perspective. But I shall not spoil too much! xD

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        2. Dear Chris,

          No, because I can’t infer from my experience “the absence of inherent meaning or purpose in the universe”. So I don’t claim it (I didn’t say I believe in 1, I said “even if 1 is true”, maybe it would have been more correct to say “even if 1 were true”. My english is not perfect :). In fact, I try not to claim anything general now. I don’t think the mind is equiped to capture the nature of reality (so I guess, I agree with 2). It struggles already when there are more than a few moving variables. See my other comment in the thread https://un-denial.com/2025/07/12/by-hideaway-eroei/#comment-113536.

          Not that my personal experience is uniformly pleasant or painful. Yet, I do find that believing that the world always sucks, makes your experience hell. Because you will never give life a chance to express itself.
          Assuming experience is uniformly bad works as a kind of insurance against potential future shocks. But doing that, builds up a mental armor around oneself which prevents from fully enjoying the pleasurable moments in life and ultimately isolates from others. (most people will not enjoy gloomy company for too long. That’s understandable)

          So, if you will, my basis is “I don’t know anything in general”. But then, I give a lot of thought to my personal actions and try to do what _feels_ (it’s not only mental) right. I still allow myself to study systems at all scales and to make predictions. Because I enjoy the exercise. I recognize it’s only a game. Also, when I engage with somebody, I try to talk within his mental map: one doesn’t pick the same words when talking with an atheist or a believer, or according to social class. This is really, really hard for me. Especially, since, I like to throw some destabilizing concept outside of their considered slice of reality.

          I sent you a complementary answer by mail. I am just saying the same thing from a different angle.

          Best.

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          1. Nope. Sorry, but you are now an existentialist. Just kidding.

            Assuming experience is uniformly bad works as a kind of insurance against potential future shocks. But doing that, builds up a mental armor around oneself which prevents from fully enjoying the pleasurable moments in life and ultimately isolates from others.

            Ya, I’ve probably been guilty of that most of my life… always putting up a giant wall in order to cushion the blow… because of negative expectations.

            ps. To the audience: I’ve said this before, and it still applies. If you have the chance to hook up with Charles offline, do it. He’s much more in his comfort zone one on one… but beware, he loves to assign homework.😠 LOL

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    4. It’s late and have been reading on here a lot so finshing up with this.

      I think that in insisting that life has no meaning, is a kind of meaning in it self. here is a quote that fleshes this out…

      “Both nihilism and eternalism attempt to whitewash ambiguity and uncertainty with an unwarranted assurance that one knows what’s what with respect to ultimate matter. Both rest upon belief in propositions that cannot be falsified, and thus cannot be demonstrated either. And both serve to finesse the perplexities that may arise when living moment-by-moment without having answers to ultimate questions. So while eternalists and nihilists may imagine themselves to be far apart philosophically, both types appear to be defended psychologically in the same way against the same fears. Apprehensive of being in the dark about what life ‘really means’, which might open the door to depression and despair, they simply will not allow it. Any questions that arise are met with iron-clad dogma.” 

      Not saying that this is what you are doing or how you are living (how could I possibly know), but how does this quote strike you? In the same vein as Charles line of questioning, how does Nihilism as a philosophy play out in your life? I appreciate this came after the NDE and that was a clear seeing that illuniated a falsehood that was there – fascinating story!

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      1. My macho bravado ego hates that nauseating quote. LOL 

        Probably because it’s the only somewhat coherent critique about nihilism that I ever come across. “Can’t you see that by declaring there is no meaning… you are assigning meaning!” – I do see the logic, but I also think it’s the default position for every species that has ever achieved full mortality salience.  

        As history confirms, people will change their minds about almost anything, from which god they worship to how they style their hair. But when it comes to existential judgments, human beings in general have an unfalteringly good opinion of themselves and their condition in this world and are steadfastly confident they are not a collection of self-conscious nothings. – Ligotti

        ps. Feel free to always call me out like this when you smell bullshit (god knows I’m full of it😂). And even if I don’t agree, it still helps me in the long run. I really appreciate it.

        pss. I love this movie. This scene seems relevant to our conversation here.

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        1. I watched the movie clip this morning (a film I have not seen, but now want to) and had many thoughts throughout the day that I wanted to express, but this evening my dad has been here talking for hours (about how he tied an onion to his belt which was the style at the time, a grandpa Simpson reference i hope you’ll get lol) and so I am not at my sharpest now and all those profound thoughts have flown out the window 😉

          BUT! to be continued as this is rich territory and I really wish that i had not spent so many years languishing in the deep adaption forum and had of been here instead!

          I feel steadfastly assured that I am a collection of self-conscious nothings….

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          1. LOL at Grampa Simpson.

            And lol at you wishing you had not spent all that time in the deep adaptation forum. I do the same thing. Especially with my wasted years focusing on Noam Chomsky and USA’s foreign policy. Or Peter Joseph and his anti-capitalism stuff.

            I do think it was good overall to get a variety of perspectives… but if I had found un-Denial ten years ago… I’d be a doomer deity by now. Haha!!

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        2. Chris – I had to come back to this thread we had going. It’s so strange, but the author that you have up on a pedestal atm, Ligotti, well I had a feeling I had heard that name before, and the author that has rocked my world of late (have read all four of his books in the last year), well in one of his books explains how he has been reading Ligotti’s “The Conspiracy Against The Human Race”, and in this book he had been introduced to Zapffe (someone else just posted about Zapffe on here recently too).

          So… I think we are on the same wave length here, but it’s funny to me that you said you hated that quote I included, but this is from the same guy who is a fan of Ligotti and Zapffe!

          The author I have been reading is Robert Saltman, and so much of what undenial is about, with regard to religion, is echoed in his words.

          here is a long quote from the book called “Depending on No Thing” :

          “The Norwegian author, Peter Wessel Zapffe, theorized that humans are born with an overdeveloped skill—self-awareness—that is not needed for survival, and so does not really fit into nature’s design. I am reading about Zapffe in a book by Thomas Ligotti called The Conspiracy Against The Human Race. We humans, Zapffe thought, endowed with this unneeded self-awareness, crave to understand matters such as life and death, but, due to human limitation, that craving cannot be honestly appeased. We know about death but cannot explain it. In other words, nature has given humanity a desire that nature cannot satisfy. 

          Faced with this hunger that cannot be fulfilled, Zapffe thought, most humans—almost all humans, he said—spend their time trying to not be human. I am in accord with this observation entirely. It is one that I made myself repeatedly long before encountering Zapffe’s work. 

          I wrote about this at length in The Ten Thousand Things, pointing out that, since the “final answers” offered by religions such as Hinduism and Christianity are not facts, but conjectures—pure fantasies actually—most so-called spirituality boils down to simple escapism. So, in my view, religion serves mostly as a mechanism of defense against primal fears that human animals experience due to possessing a self-awareness, including an awareness of mortality, that our brother and sister animals seem to lack. In short, we know we are going to die, and don’t like the idea, so we invent psychological defenses and escape hatches. 

          Now, Zapffe described four defense mechanisms that we humans use to blunt our foreknowledge of death: 

          1. Isolation—Just put death and other disturbing thoughts out of your mind entirely. This is what, in 4T, I call “denial.” 

          2. Anchoring—Develop attachment to a system of beliefs, values, or ideals that seems to justify a life that ends in personal extinction. For example, one might be anchored to a patriotic love of country, hopes for the distant future, a political agenda, a family, an institution, etcetera. And if we can arrive at regarding these as “Truth,” we may feel, as Zapffe put it, “official, authentic, and safe in our beds.” 

          3. Distraction—Quoting Ligotti here, “To keep our minds unreflective of a world of horrors, we distract them with a world of trifling or momentous trash. The most operant method for furthering the conspiracy, it is in continuous employ and demands only that people keep their eyes on the ball—or their television sets, their government’s foreign policy, their science projects, their careers, their place in society or the universe, etcetera.” 

          4. Sublimation—The refocusing of energy and distancing oneself from the actual tragedy—or horror, depending on point of view—of the human primate situation by viewing existence from an aesthetic outlook, like writers, poets, painters—and, dare I say it, photographers; or a philosophical one, so that “the worst fortunes of humanity are presented in a stylized and removed manner as entertainment,” as Zapffe put it. From that perspective, my writing about this, however honest, is a form of sublimation, but at least I am aware of it.

          Saltzman, Robert. Depending on No-Thing (pp. 103-104). New Sarum Press. Kindle Edition. 

          I think my own (and maybe many doomers) way of intellectualising about collapse and discussing it in forums like this is a kind of ‘sublimation’ as well, but like Saltzman, at least we are aware of it!

          So I reckon I am keen to read Ligotti too now. After this discovery.

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          1. You have decided that you are this body. So yes, as the body, you are mortal.

            But is it true? Or just a way to frame reality?

            Another question, why should experience when dreaming be labeled as second-hand reality, compared to experience awaken?
            Doesn’t have life also all the characteristics of a dream?

            You are trapped in the labels. If you enjoy it, then OK. But, if not, why unnecessarily suffer? Why unnecessarily limit yourself? Or is it that you have to process something, something from your past?

            Don’t you see, reality is so paradoxal that we can be both mortal and immortal: something disappears, something goes on. Reality can’t be captured in words.

            Is it the toaster which toasts, or the electricity which flows through it?

            What I am saying should not be heard as mental considerations, disconnected from experience. Just, the opposite. Start from experience. Study, practice, play, observe, enjoy.

            Best.

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            1. hi Charles,

              Some of the statements here I agree with ‘realiity can’t be captured in words’ but other parts sound like a word salad to me of spiritual ideas and assumptions. I’m not looking for spiritual guidance lol, I have spent a lifetime down non dual rabbit holes with gurus etc and have disentangled myself from that. I don’t think we can be both mortal and immortal. I believe the brain and nervous system produces consciousness, and when I die this particular consciousness won’t exist anymore and my body will be recycled into a new form of energy/nutrients for earth – what a wonder! However I have the intellectual honesty to admit that I don’t know for certain. Plenty of people have had NDE but no one has had a death experience, so I can’t say for 100% certainty. But after sitting in the philosophical idealism camp for so long, I now tend toward naturalism. Also, this is entirely influenced by the new books/bloggers I have read, we are always being conditioned throughout our life time by what we are exposed to, and who knows, my ideas could change again. Just like the ‘wager’ that Rob has going on this site.

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              1. Hello Renaee

                I’m not looking for spiritual guidance lol

                Sorry, I was not trying to do that. I was simply reacting to this passage:

                since the “final answers” offered by religions such as Hinduism and Christianity are not facts, but conjectures—pure fantasies actually—most so-called spirituality boils down to simple escapism.

                This really annoys me. Because it is arrogant, ignorant and close-minded. I just wanted to point out that the so-called “scientific” “description” of the world is as much a “fantasy” (maybe, in some aspects, more, because purely mental, separated, not grounded in subjective experience).

                About the remainder of the discussion, I could try to explain what I mean and what I experience. But, I understand this is not what you are looking for at this point in your life.

                Best.

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                1. Hi Charles, please explain away – I am happy to hear more! But just for interest, not for guidance is all I meant.

                  I read your writing on ‘ways of coping’ so I have a better idea where you are coming from, and I loved what you wrote there, in fact I could have written it myself with a few caveats.

                  I too am enlivened by conversation and interaction, even with strangers from afar, and am grateful for a place for such exchanges.

                  So you do not agree that spirituality and religion are a type of escapism or denial of death, maybe because you see that such a pathway led to a break through and then the edifice fell and a new way of being came into play?

                  I appreciate that to listen to anyone else now could be boring and yr feelings are the guide. I too avoid these ‘loops’ in fact I have come to understand that all I am is a ‘strange loop’ and the self comes into existence via a self referential looping which is non existent in a moment of no thought. Then the idea of me or anything else ceases to be and there is just what is – one without two as you wrote it.

                  Or I also see what I am as the same as any other natural phenomena such as water or a tree, which is part of the whole and expressing its nature in the only way that it could, without choice or self direction, without a centre.

                  Though I do still have respect for the scientific method, as at it’s most basic I think it is just observation or noticing what’s happening (then forming hypothesis > theories about it etc). However if you are someone who painstakingly went through a rigorous scientific education and it restricted or narrowed your focus, then I understand it could be seen as a straight jacket of limitations. But I see much of religion/spirituality in the same way, as dogma that both restrains and offers escape hatches for anxieties.

                  The main way as a doomer I have to cope with fear about the future or about anything threatening in my imagination, is to face the fact that I have never once in my life experienced this so called ‘future’ I have only ever experienced this present happening, what is happening right now. Same with the past, I have never experienced a past, just thoughts/memories happening now.

                  I also do think about death quite a lot more than i used to. At the end of the day when I am very very tired, and sleep beckons so strongly, I sometimes lie down and imagine that i wont wake up and this was the final day, and that deep sleep or non being is not so bad.

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                  1. Hi Renaee,

                    Sorry for not answering earlier. I wanted to build my case and am currently skimming several hundreds of emails.

                    It may well be the case that some phenomenons can only be experienced if we choose so.
                    To me, the stories of science are interpretations of reality, useful in some respect, but not “true” (https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=93Azjjk0tto).
                    Likewise, the stories of religion are interpretations of reality, description of experiences which some (many?) people had at the times and can still have today.
                    And, yes, science and religion both, with time, as they grow in power, decay and become instruments of human control.

                    So here is what I am currently interested in: that which is at the edge of consciousness (psi, paranormal, the reality beyond/next to 4D…). Partly because I experienced some occurences, partly because it’s simply fascinating.
                    Among other things, I personnaly experienced mind-reading of complex thoughts from a short distance (approx. 40cm). I was not the person reading, but the person being read. To be more precise: I was gardening my plot in the community gardens. A pretty old person came to me and we started talking. At some point in the conversation, I didn’t need to talk, he was simply answering the thoughts that were forming in my head before I opened my mouth. This was not mentalism (the thoughts were too complex, or so I believe :).
                    Unfortunately, I met him only once. He was the father of a gardener who left the community garden soon after, for lack of time.

                    I have witnessed many other unbelievable capacities in various people. It’s always subtle and not necessarily “revolutionary”, except in the way one views reality. For instance, I know people who can send each other very small bits of information (color/simple shapes) over very long distance (without using the digital world 🙂 Mind to mind communication. This seems to have been first studies by René Warcollier.
                    I also believe seeing without eyes to be possible (extra-ocular vision/mindsight/blindfold sight)

                    For some reason, I am also greatly intrigued by research on “past-life memories”, for which there doesn’t seem to be any good explanation, although there seems to be data. For instance: https://psi-encyclopedia.spr.ac.uk/articles/psychological-studies-children-claiming-past-life-memories, https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Jim_B._Tucker#Reincarnation_research. (I don’t like the term reincarnation. I find this misleading. It’s already an interpretation).

                    If you are still interested, I will write a complementary answer some time later.

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                    1. Thanks Charles for taking the time to go into detail about these current areas of interest (esp given you sound busy!) I think the part that I am most curious about is the conclusions you draw from such experiences you have had and how this makes you feel?

                      My older brother (who has been through a collapse awareness phase) is now very much focussed on these topics as well. And I don’t quite understand for him why it is important. It’s not that I doubt these things are happening it’s just what meaning is drawn from them.

                      So the question would be, why is it intriguing or fascinating?

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                    2. Just to mention that I LOVED the talk by Hilary Lawson. It was a bit dry at the start and was not sure where it was going, but was worth to listen to the end.

                      The passing of reality means that there’s more to life than our metaphors and our models, more to life than our closure, there’s an indefinite amount more, and we may not be able to describe the ultimate character of the world, but some of our most valuable experiences are finding moments when we give up wanting to hold it as this particular thing, the moments of wonder at the unknown, the moment the storm breaks on the shore, the moment under the stars, the moment when we are in love, these are ways of, if you like, escaping from closure, and artistic expression is often about avoiding closure and not trying to close it, so in the case of a great poem or painting, is not a literal description of what’s out there, it is deliberately open, and that attachment to opennesss is a really key thing. 

                      Now we can pursue closure, as I’ve said, we can seek to refine what we previously mistakenly thought of as knowledge, we can build our current scientific theories and seek to improve our capacity to intervene while at the SAME TIME recognising that we will never arrive, that we will consistently generate new unknowns. But we also within this framework have an explanation for the mystery of the world and its unlimited potential and an explanation for our inability to find final answers to our questions. And an explanation for the profound unknownness of what it is to be alive. 

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          2. LOL, definitely a sign from the Universe that you are ready for Ligotti. Ya, funny how that works.

            I guess I hated that Saltzman quote at first glance because I perceived it as bashing nihilism. I’ve only been a nihilist for not even a year now, but I’m already used to having to get defensive anytime the word gets mentioned. And thanks for that long quote. It got me checking out ‘Depending on No-Thing’. Looks very interesting. Gonna put it on my list. 

            This essay by Zapffe was my introduction to nihilism. The Last Messiah – screen v2.pdf. First thing I noticed about these crazy pessimistic authors was their focus (obsession) on consciousness. (as well as their impressive grasp on denial)

            Man is the ultimate tragic being, because he has learned enough about the Earth to realise the Earth would be better off without the presence of humankind. – Zapffe

            How consciousness happened since it was not always present in our species remains as much a mystery in our time as it was in Zapffe’s. Nearly all theorists of consciousness agree; Billions of years after Earth made a jump from being lifeless to having life, human beings made a jump from not being conscious (or very much conscious) to being conscious enough to esteem or condemn this phenomenon. No one knows either how the jump was made or how long it took.
            (chris here – un-Denial understands this “jump” better than anyone else I’ve been able to find. When you read these pessimistic authors, I bet you’ll be able to connect a lot of dots by combining our fire story with MORT theory)

            Coming at last to the pith of Zapffe’s thought as it is contained in “The Last Messiah”, what the Norwegian philosopher saw as the tragedy of human existence had its beginnings when at some stage in our evolution we acquired “a damning surplus of consciousness.”

            For Zapffe, the effect was a breach in the very unity of life, a biological paradox, an abomination, an absurdity, an exaggeration of disastrous nature. Life had overshot its target, blowing itself apart. A species had been armed too heavily – by spirit made almighty without, but equally a menace to its own well-being. – Ligotti

            In the meantime, Charles and I will continue battling for your soul.😉 (I’m Vader, of course)

             

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            1. At just 20 pages will def have a read of this one by Zapffe – thanks.

              Re Nihilism, it’s a label or a position, a way to define onself, which to me feels inherently like a mental straight jacket, something that limits exploration. But will see how I feel after I read this doc.

              Battling for my soul – he he 😉

              Agree re the focus on Consciousness. Same for Julian Jaynes who DaveP developed his Entanglement Hypothoses from and likewise with Un-denial as you said.

              I am taking a break from REALITY atm that’s for sure. We have major plumbing problems with the sewer line and grey water blocked. We can’t use the toilet or run the taps for long! We had emergency plumber here last night. There is a huge tree behind the property and most likely the roots of this tree are inside the sewer line to the sewer itself.

              This is one thing i have thought of so much re collapse, the inability for humans in cities to compost our own shit, literally not metaphorically. This could be our biggest downfall, and lead to pathogens and disease within just a few days of mains water not being available for what ever reason. Or it could be a slower degradation over time, however it unfolds.

              I am already thinking about composting toilets and grey water recycling. But dp is not on board with all that, well not yet, I have a lot of work to do, to convince him it would be the way to go. But if it will cost thousands to repair pipes and remove massive gum tree – I may have a chance!

              btw, if you did want to check out the book Depending on No Thing, some of the chapters are read by a mate of his and are on youtube, I made a list here:

              His friend who reads the book sounds like an AI, but it’s not, he just seems to have a robotic voice imo. @Charles I wonder what you might make of this too? 🙂

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              1. LOL, I love the mind of a doomer! The sanitation factor is gonna be godawful.

                This thread has a good video about the daily life of ancient Rome. 

                https://un-denial.com/2025/04/10/by-gaia-gardener-on-growing-coffee/comment-page-4/#comment-112250

                This was my comment:

                The bathroom stuff was surprisingly very interesting. I never think about that important aspect of overshoot and overpopulation. Like Paul Kingsnorth says, I flush it and let someone else deal with my shit.

                Every single day Rome produced 350k gallons of urine and 100k pounds of feces, with most of it ending up in the streets. Oh, the horror. The stories of people just throwing their shit buckets out the window is hilarious. And it was so rampant that getting killed by a falling bucket cracking your head open was an actual thing they had to worry about.  

                LOL, some things never change. Perhaps even back in hunter/gatherer times they would stealthily hike down to the next tribe over to do their morning business.😊

                And thanks for the Saltzman yt link. Definitely gonna listen to that soon. Here’s the full audio of Ligotti’s book in case you get in the mood.

                Thomas Ligotti: The Conspiracy Against the Human Race (2010) | Audiobook + Subtitles

                And this is a cool clip. The creator of the show (True Detective s1) pretty much built Matthew McConaughey’s entire character around Thomas Ligotti… and just hoped that nobody would notice. LOL! (hard to not notice when it turns out to be one of the coolest tv characters ever)

                Rust Cohle – Philosophy of Pessimism (True Detective)

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                1. Amazing, I did not know that about Rust Cohle and I only know about this character from DaveP, cause he put that exact quote from the start of this clip up front on one of his posts (and signed off with it on that previous entanglement link as well) So many cross overs here. I have never seen this show, but another one to add to the list. MathewM looked so young, I would not have recognised him if not for the voice.

                  So if I listen to the book then watch the show, will have the full Ligotti experience.

                  I did see that Youtube clip in the coffee thread, but did not click on it – I will take yr word for it! ( I am trying to block this topic out at least for this evening, we don’t know what the hell we are going to do…) Tomorrow is another day.

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                2. hi again, I have been listening to the audio book of Lagotti the past couple of days after I had a long drive, and there are some real gems in there, in fact I have been rewinding bits i remembered to find again, I might get a written copy. On the YT version it does break down the sections. I particularly like the bit on self hypnosis and copied out this quote…

                  Every other creature in the world is insensate to meaning. But those of us on the high ground of evolution are replete with this unnatural need which any comprehensive encyclopaedia of philosophy treats under the heading LIFE, THE MEANING OF. 

                  In is quest for a sense of meaning, humanity has given countless answers to questions that were never posed to it. But though our appetite for meaning may be appeased for a time, we are deceived if we think it is ever gone for good. 

                  Years may pass during which we are unmolested by LIFE, THE MEANING OF. Some days we wake up and innocently say, “It’s good to be alive.” Broken down this exclamation means that we are experiencing an acute sense of well-being. If everyone were in such elevated spirits all the time, the topic of LIFE, THE MEANING OF would never enter our minds or our philosophical reference book. But an ungrounded jubilation – or even a neutral reading on the monitor of our moods – must lapse, either intermittently or for the rest of our natural lives. Our consciousness, having snoozed awhile in the garden of incuriosity, is pricked by some thorn or other, perhaps DEATH, THE MEANING OF, or spontaneously modulates to a minor key due to the vagaries of our brain chemistry, the weather, or for causes not confirmable. 

                  Then the hunger returns for LIFE, THE MEANING OF, the emptiness must be filled again, the pursuit resumed. 

                  Perhaps we might gain some perspective on our earthly term if we stopped thinking of ourselves as beings who enact a “life”. This word is loaded with connotations to which it has no right. Instead, we should substitute “existence” for “life” and forget about how well or badly we enact it. 

                  None of us “has a life” in the narrative-biographical way we think of these words. What we have are so many years of existence.  It would not occur to us to say that any man or woman is in the “prime of existence”. Speaking of existence rather than life unclothes the latter word of its mystique. Who would ever claim that existence is all right, especially when you consider the alternative? 

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                  1. Awesome quote Renaee. Thanks for taking the time to write it out. Is there any wonder why I’m so infatuated with this guy?

                    I’ve read the book three times and have listened to hours and hours of the audio… but I don’t remember ever seeing this quote. Tells you how much I retain😊. But ya, you can pretty much just open the book to any page and throw a dart, and it’ll land on a cool quotable paragraph.

                    ps. I still haven’t listened to those Saltzman links… but it’s on my to-do list. I’ll let you know when I do.

                    pss. You might find this thread entertaining. It was my very first attempt at trying to push Ligotti onto un-Denial.

                    https://un-denial.com/2024/12/29/by-charles-chris-doomers-anonymous/comment-page-1/#comment-108593

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              2. Hi again,

                I am not sure I understand your question. Do you want me to listen to one of the videos and tell you what I think?

                I feel this is going to be a boring way to spend my time 🙂

                I don’t really care about the theories. I like this quote: “You Will Know Them by Their Fruits”
                And I constantly listen to how I feel, so that I don’t dwell longer than necessary in loops.

                Best.

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  11. I use the term nihilist to describe myself, too – and I totally agree with existence having no intrinsic purpose (my best guess is that “purpose” itself is a human construct; the universe happens because it cannot not happen, similarly to how a cloud has no choice in whether it rains down or not, how a flower has no choice in rather it grows or not, how a rock has no choice in being affected by gravity) or value. Morality is clearly not a principle that nature selects for, either: if an organism can gain an advantage by harming another organism, then evolution really loves that organism (predators and parasites both are very successful from an evolutionary perspective and are all about harming others to the point of painful death in some cases).
    Likewise, concepts of authority are also constructs, there are no natural hierarchies of whatever sort, only societal structures that are evolutionarily stable or not (but as per the is-ought-fallacy, just because something is evolutionarily successful or not doesn’t logically imply an imperative of any sort for actors capable of choice)

    I slightly disagree with the truth-bit, though: if there is no objective truth, then nihilism itself cannot be objectively true. The closest thing to absolute objective truth is probably “Cogito ergo sum” – if you as an individual entity are capable of thought, then there is absolutely no possibility that you do not exist in some way or another – if you did not exist, you would not be thinking. But other than that, yes, truth is a tricky thing and often prone to what humans themselves define it as. Senses can be tricked, intellect can be lacking, evidence might be absent, and some things simply have no answer at all (such as 1/x=0).

    So it makes perfect sense that in a nihilistic universe, sentient organisms would evolve MORT if that helps with them reproducing instead of falling into existential angst and paralysis.

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    1. LOL, we are definitely on the same page. I changed core #2 from ‘All human concepts’ to ‘Most’ specifically because I was thinking “well then nihilism can’t be true”😊

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    2. This is all not convincing to me.

      Purpose may be a human construct. And so is the “absence of purpose”.

      Believing one or the other. Therein lies (one of) the (many) choices. (if there is choice, which too is a human construct indeed).

      Evolution is a human construct (a fairly recent one at that). Time is a human construct. Human is a human construct. Death is a human construct… And so are all sentences built upon them.

      About the infamous “Cogito ergo sum” (I think, therefore I am), a great source of confusion and suffering. Hinduist tradition (among other) would argue it is false, as the notion of “I” (a separate autonomous entity, too is an illusion). And so, only “Existence” (not “my existence”) can be claimed.

      So be it (amen, That Thou Art https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Mah%C4%81v%C4%81kyas)

      🙂

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  12. Sorry guys, I’m all alone this weekend and I just have to brag to someone.

    I’m sure most of you know this song. I stumbled upon it earlier today and have been wigging out since. I had a girlfriend back in the day that loved it and was obsessed with memorizing every word. So my OCD ass has been sitting here trying to get the first verse down without looking at the lyrics. I finally did it successfully and I’m totally stoked. LOL

    The 2nd verse “Chickity China” will have to wait for another day. Ya, as you can see, I’m quite the party animal on this Friday night😊. Video is queued up, see if you can pull it off.

    Hold it now and watch the hoodwink
    As I make you stop, think
    You’ll think you’re looking at Aquaman
    I summon fish to the dish
    Although I like the Chalet Swiss
    I like the sushi
    ‘Cause it’s never touched a frying pan
    Hot like wasabi when I bust rhymes
    Big like LeAnn Rimes
    Because I’m all about value
    Bert Kaempfert’s got the mad hits
    You try to match wits
    You try to hold me but I bust through
    Gonna make a break and take a fake
    I’d like a stinkin’ achin’ shake
    I like vanilla, it’s the finest of the flavours
    Gotta see the show ’cause then you’ll know
    The vertigo is gonna grow ’cause it’s so dangerous
    You’ll have to sign a waiver

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    1. I seem to be missing a lot in music because I ignore lyrics.

      I love that song and have listened to it many times yet never knew there was anything odd going on.

      I wonder what else I’m missing?

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      1. LOL. Yes, I guarantee you’re missing out. I used to be the same way with lyrics. But now I go out of my way to try and understand them.

        Here’s one I’ve liked for 30 years but never understood the brilliance until a couple years ago.

        It’s a big joke about how listeners will like just about anything laid on top of the chords of the infinitely clichéd Pachelbel canon, even lyrics that openly mock them for liking it.

        The lyrics are a commentary on the banality and vacuousness of successful pop songs, making “Hook” both a hit song and a satire of a hit song.

        The first chorus of the song’s lyrics, aimed directly at the listener, assert that the lyrical content of any song is effectively meaningless, as the song’s musical hook will keep listeners coming back, even if they are unaware of the reason.

        [Verse 1]
        It doesn’t matter what I say
        So long as I sing with inflection
        That makes you feel I’ll convey
        Some inner truth or vast reflection
        But I’ve said nothing so far
        And I can keep it up for as long as it takes
        And it don’t matter who you are
        If I’m doing my job, it’s your resolve that breaks

        [Hook]
        Because the Hook brings you back
        I ain’t tellin’ you no lie
        The Hook brings you back
        On that you can rely

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  13. Well, 20 years ago, collapse came to many people in New Orleans. – Stellarwind72

    Good call Stellar! Yesterday a Sam Mitchell video was recommending this Netflix series. Sam was hyping it up saying that doomers will love it because you’ll see exactly what collapse looks like. I wasn’t expecting anything too crazy because I still remember the details. 

    But once again, Sam was correct. Turns out, I had forgotten almost everything. Collapsitarians will love it. The clear message to me was how ridiculously comfortable/confident people are about their government (or someone, anyone) bailing them out when SHTF… almost as if it’s a birthright. But as the documentary clearly shows, the only thing you can rely on getting is lots of thoughts and prayers.

    Btw, for the most part, I hate documentaries nowadays. Especially netflix ones. They’re all made in the same formulaic style. They drag it out to ten episodes when one or two would’ve sufficed. This one is no different. At least it only has three episodes, and you can skip #3. 

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      1. Let me know which one was better. I saw quite a few comments saying to skip netflix and go with nat geo ‘Hurricane Katrina: Race Against Time’.

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  14. Lex Fridman yesterday interviewed an autistic ex-Microsoft operating system programmer named Dave Plummer who has written several books on autism.

    He described how autism shapes his behavior and I said to myself, damn, some of that sounds a lot like me.

    Plummer said a key feature of autism is being unable to understand what another person is thinking unless that person explicitly states what they’re thinking. I said to myself, damn, autism sounds like a defective or under-developed extended theory of mind (ETOM).

    Behaviorally modern humans are the only species that evolved an ETOM and MORT tells us we needed to simultaneously evolve a tendency to deny unpleasant realities to achieve our ETOM.

    An interesting un-Denial essay topic would be to explore the possibility that doomers tend to be autistic because their denial/ETOM brain module is defective.

    This would be a great guest essay topic in case anyone is interested in doing a little research before I get to it. I’m kind of busy right now doing autistic things with my prepping spreadsheet.

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    1. Rob, I think you’re definitely on to something there, relating the faulty theory of mind genes that autists have with doomers. There’s an Australian autism expert who has even written books with those words in the title:

      “In our past two articles about Keys to Social Communication, I talked about Nonverbal Communication and Big Picture Thinking. This third key is called Theory of Mind (ToM).

      ToM is an invaluable tool in having successful social relationships. According to Dr. Tony Attwood’s book, The Complete Guide to Asperger Syndrome (2007), Theory of Mind (ToM) is “the ability to recognize and understand thoughts, beliefs, desires, and intentions of other people in order to make sense of their behavior and predict what they are going to do next.”

      In a very simplistic way, it’s ‘putting ourselves in someone else’s shoes” and then guessing which way the person might walk and why.”

      https://www.carolinapeds.com/blog/2015/02/keys-to-social-communication-theory-of-mind

      I laughed aloud at Friedman’s interview a couple of times, particularly at this section:

      “But uh I was never good with people. I don’t get it when people like me, I guess. My son is the same way because they all don’t fall very far from tree. And I got him a t-shirt that says, “If you’re hitting on me, please let me know and be specific because I’m clueless.”

      My wife actually asked me WTF is wrong with you when we first got together, she made her interest so obvious and I was still so oblivious…it’s only in more recent years that I’ve self-diagnosed via Simon Baron-Cohen’s test as an autist myself (as is my wife, which makes for some quite blunt conversations at times…she does occasionally tell me to stop being such an Aspie, which entertains me…she’s as weird as me in her own ways, e.g. she has full on synesthesia, such that to her numbers are shapes/colors/textures in her head…we’re an odd couple but it works).

      Simon.

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      1. Thanks.

        I wonder if autism might also explain why I hate anything obtuse like poetry, and why I ignore song lyrics.

        My feeling is if you have something worth saying you should state it as clearly as possible in as few words as possible.

        If you’re being mysterious, with for example some clever song lyric or poem, and you’re trying to make me guess what you’re saying, then it’s obviously not an important idea worth wasting any time on.

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        1. One of my favourite lines from “The Big Short” movie, that I 100% agree with is ….

          “”Truth is like poetry. And most people fucking hate poetry.”

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  15. Canadian Prepper today interviewed Chris Martenson. I’ve not finished it yet so I’m not vouching for it. I’ll try to come back with a brief review when I’m done unless someone beats me to it.

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    1. Chris says:

      1) Lights out by 2030 due to cost of oil extraction exceeding what debt markets can afford.

      2) On energy infrastructure investments, China smart, US stupid. Chris did not mention an aspect of Complexity Theory that says it’s hard to build new when you have to maintain a lot of old, because fresh new creates growth, while maintaining old does not create new growth.

      3) As usual, lots of talk about denial everywhere, but no mention of MORT. Can’t remember Martenson mentioning MORT once in 20 years of following him.

      4) Chris is certain that secret government money is fueling the AI bubble.

      5) Chris has tried but is unable to explain the mystery of why the price of oil is so low.

      6) The US will not fulfill its LNG supply promises to Europe because gas production is falling. We’re so sorry we blew up your Nord Stream pipeline.

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    2. An important aspect that I’ve mentioned before, but might be lost in a long post, is that the world runs on the cheap oil, gas and coal to keep modernity going and increase complexity. Every recession, it’s the expensive fuel that gets closed down or reduced while we (as in the entire species), keep pumping out the cheap easy to obtain fossil fuels..

      As the really cheap stuff depletes it leave the expensive fossil fuels. Yes we can obtain it, but at a higher energy and material cost, which happens during the next phase of price rises due to governments pumping up the economy with spending. We’ve been going through the motions of pumping up economies for decades, while using up the cheap and easy to get fossil fuels.

      Also the total fossil fuels drawn upon, increases. It’s always the ‘expensive’, as in energy, materials and money, fossil fuels that increase during the next phase of pumping up economies. Hence the huge increase in energy use since the 1970’s, has come with a huge increase in debt as well, to pay the monetary side of the equation, while using up more of the cheapest energy and materials to cover the energy and materials side of the equation..

      Official world reserves and resources should have kept growing with all the technology and efficiency gains by the increasing complexity over the last 4-5 decades, but with oil they have not. What people don’t understand about oil is that it’s in a limited window of the Earth’s crust. Below a certain depth and the oil gets cooked, turning into smaller molecules of hydrocarbons, as in gas..

      We’ve found and been using up all the easy to get oil and are rapidly relying upon much more ‘expensive’ oil (by expensive, I always mean expensive in money, cheap energy and cheap materials terms).

      At some point, coming very soon, we reach the point where the cheap easy fossil fuels start to decline in production, especially oil (which then makes ALL gas and coal production more expensive), with the higher prices of oil NOT bringing on enough new expensive supply to cover the decline in old cheap oil. We’ve been around this point for years..

      The cost of bringing on the new supplies of expensive oil will go through the roof when we’re in the phase of declining cheap oil not being countered by the new expensive production, meaning the price of oil remaining high even during the ‘recession’ that develops..

      I’d not be surprised if we see a huge boom/bubble in expensive oil production in the years ahead, as the markets look for the next big thing after A.I. The oil boom for the expensive oil will be accompanied with a general recession heading to depression, as prices of everything go ballistic, because of higher oil prices. The inequality will grow, with the owners of energy producing assets (oil, gas, coal, farms) becoming/remaining the better off and the workers in “discretionary” parts of the economy becoming much worse off.

      Eventually so much of the non energy part of the economy become so poor that demand for even energy products (that people can pay for) crashes. The energy sector has to become a much larger part of the overall economy during this process, but crashes in demand for everything else mean whole industries going bust that produce goods for both the energy sector and everything else.

      That’s why the lot crashes, it’s the ‘everything else’, that stops working, including the suppliers to the energy industries going bust, that causes a huge crash in the availability of ‘energy’, that feeds back into more expensive energy costs.

      I’m very reluctant to put a date on when the lot crashes, like the 2030 that Chris has done here (I haven’t watched yet), as none of us know exactly how much cheap oil remains (state secrets in the Middle East), or how much of the cheap oil can be replaced by cheap natural gas liquids, or how much debt the economy can withstand at very low interest rates (driving inequality further)…

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      1. Nice crystal ball.

        Do you have a theory for why the oil price is low today?

        My guess is that we’re already in a stealth recession and people can’t afford it. They say oil is cheap but it still feels very expensive when I fuel up.

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        1. Lag time…

          There is always a lag from when things happen in the economy and when Governments/Central Banks learn about it.. Consider unemployment numbers as they do them here in Australia.. The bureau of stats, does a survey of people, around 30,000 across the nation. They ask how much the people have been employed in the previous 3 months and down to how many hours/week for different parts of that 3 months. It takes time to collect, then collate the data. It might be 4-6 weeks after it’s all collected until they release a number for that quarter.. However the numbers themselves were from the prior few months…

          Govts/CBs make decisions on what is happening, they think, when realistically it was what was happening 6 months ago. Hence they always raise interest rates even after the economy has turned from going up to going down. Likewise they keep decreasing interest rates and increasing spending when an economy has gone from contraction to expansion..

          When oil prices are relatively low, the economies that have been in stealth recession, turn around to expansion, but the govts/CBs are still thinking and seeing in time lagged numbers, recession…

          People have more money to spend when interest rates are down and oil prices are down, especially those with mortgages, so they increase spending on things other than oil and bank interest, when they have more..

          Back in 2006/7, I was preparing for a large recession as it was obvious that home buyers with a mortgage in this country (and many others) had increasing commute costs and increased interest payments on their home loans (about 33% of all property!!). Of course the economy was going to tank, exactly when was the unknown. However Govts/CBs treated it as if inflation was the problem and kept increasing interest rates.

          In the 2007/8 financial year (1 July to June 30) the Australian Govt ran a then record budget surplus of just under $20B. The numbers were still coming in rosily up until around August 2008, reflecting what was happening in the economy way earlier. We were well into recession while the CB was still raising rates up to July/August 2008, when they should have been lowering them if all the real numbers of what was happening in the economy were available…

          Given what is currently happening with stockmarkets, and CBs starting to lower rates, we are probably on the next phase of expansion, but no-one officially knows it yet, for another 6 months to a year, while htey keep lowering interest rates to stimulate the economy..

          It’s like governments don’t understand that high oil prices cause inflation and act exactly the same way as raising interest rates. They also don’t seem to know that raising interest rates is itself inflationary, while lowering them is deflationary, just like lower oil prices.

          Remember that the Israeli’s didn’t touch any of Iran’s major oil facilities, like Kharg Island, so the whole of the Middle East has been preparing to pump more oil with their so called spare capacity, which the world believes in, which affects prices. If they can pump more they will as oil prices rise. Also Qatar is increasing their export of LNG form 77Mt/a to 126Mt/a and increasing condensate by around 750,000 bbls/d over the next 2 years. So even if the Permian oil starts to decline next year, there might be more than enough to keep oil prices low for another year or 2, but after then who knows!!

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          1. I should add that even though I fully believe that modernity and all economies crash when the oil decline is accelerating, we are not there yet. Oil supply world wide is still rising, even if EROEI is falling. The conditions for collapse still seem to be a few years away and I expect another round of growth in the world economies over the next year or 2 or 3…

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      2. Interesting.

        I’d not be surprised if we see a huge boom/bubble in expensive oil production in the years ahead, as the markets look for the next big thing after A.I.

        That statement surprised me. You are basically saying we have got one more round. I am under the impression, now is the time the system is forced to change scale. And the most complex and expensive (using the word with the same meaning as you) projects are already out of reach.

        As for a date, if I remember correctly (sorry, can’t find the comment), you used to say, after 2027. I am in the now/before 2027 camp.

        My data points are world crude plateau (https://peakoilbarrel.com/wp-content/uploads/2025/08/World-Oil.png, since the volume is at a plateau, the energy content must already be in decline), Tim Morgan end of growth in 2023 (https://surplusenergyeconomics.wordpress.com/2025/05/29/304-has-growth-ended/), the green transition failing (if fossil fuel were abundant, the fake dream could go on for a while), layoffs in large car companies and the faint recollection that peak coal, conventional oil and some other minerals (was it uranium?) are already in the past (I think we should collect these and list them in a post).

        Which data points are you using to get a clear picture of the current situation?

        Cheers.

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        1. Hi Charles, I knew at the time when someone asked for a wide assed guess from me, that it was a mistake to name any date. Realistically I keep changing my mind as data comes in, but also have to keep reminding myself we will never have all the necessary data to know the peak. It will only be known in hindsight..

          One aspect everyone forgets about peak energy is efficiency improvements within the system. Sure they suffer from diminishing returns, but they still exist to offset some net energy declines. Likewise the increased inequality is also offsetting any reductions in net energy, but this increasing inequality that’s still gaining momentum does mean we are getting close, faster to the end of civilization as we know it.

          These 2 factors will possibly allow civilization to hold together for a bit of time after the peak. It’s when we get to accelerating decline the real trouble will kick in. I don’t even mean straight away, but sometime during the process of accelerating decline. I expect the acceleration to not be a shortage of reserves, but of ability to gain access to those reserves, when supply issues of everything kick in as feedback loops, making drilling and normal operations much harder to impossible for some as the finished goods required for drilling and piping become too expensive or just unavailable..

          You just put 2 of my sources of information up, in your comments, POB and Surplusenergyeconomics. Though I search long and hard about many aspects of our situation. I do individual searches on countries production, what they are stating about themselves (the major producers), then compare to what others are stating. I found out what the Qataris are doing this way for example.

          Unlike what Tim Morgan is saying about too much debt and more is not possible, I disagree. I think it doesn’t matter what the level debt gets to, govt’s/CBs will continue to print more to try and keep everything afloat, while taking interest rates to zero or below if necessary, making the payments seem easy.

          I use price of oil as the real indicator to it’s current production relative to demand and right now we have plenty available as shown by the much lower price than 12 years ago. Even though we’ve been on a plateau for 7 years now, it’s the efficiency gains since then, often hidden, that’s working it’s magic in the background. Mind you all the plans to re-localise manufacturing will be efficiency losses and in many cases will not be possible. That video I linked to about the TMSC factory in Arizona being a perfect example. For the world as a whole, just adding capacity to the factory in Taiwan would have made more sense, if more chips were needed. Notice how it’s ‘more’ chips, as in growth that every govt is striving for, on a finite planet…

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          1. Governments and central banks cannot print money. They can incur debt, but soon no one will buy it anymore.

            Saludos

            el mar

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            1. Hmmm…

              My understanding of quantitative easing (QE) is that commercial banks buy government debt on the understanding that the central bank (CB) will immediately repurchase the debt to store it on the CB balance sheet.

              It’s technically true that governments must borrow to spend, but it’s also true that governments control central banks, or can do so if they choose, and if there is no possibility that the government debt purchased by the CB will be repaid or even serviced without more debt, and if no one wants to buy the debt from the CB, then QE is effectively money printing.

              They tell us QE is not money printing but it’s a lie to maintain confidence in the system.

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              1. ChatGPT more or less agreed with your view, Rob:

                How Governments Indirectly Get Money

                1. Issuing Government Bonds

                • The government sells bonds (IOUs) to investors.
                • Banks, investment funds, or even citizens buy these bonds → the government gets cash and promises to repay later with interest.
                • Example: Germany issues “Bunds,” the U.S. issues “Treasuries.”

                2. Central Bank Purchases

                • Central banks can (under certain rules) buy government bonds.
                • When they do this, they inject newly created money into the economy.
                • This makes it easier and cheaper for the government to borrow.
                • Example: “Quantitative Easing” after the 2008 financial crisis or during COVID.

                3. Banks as Middlemen

                • Commercial banks often buy government bonds first.
                • These banks can then refinance themselves at the central bank (getting fresh central bank money).
                • That way, new money enters circulation indirectly through the banking system.

                4. The Limits

                • If governments borrow too much, investors may lose trust → demanding higher interest or refusing to buy bonds.
                • In extreme cases, the central bank might step in heavily, which risks inflation (too much money chasing too few goods).

                👉 In short:
                Governments don’t directly “print” money. They borrow by issuing bonds, and the central bank can indirectly support this process by creating money and buying those bonds.

                Saludos

                el mar

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          2. Thank you. Very interesting.

            Maybe, it’s because I meet a lot of people, and am especially attracted to the ones out of the norm, in the fringes. But still, I am meeting a lot of people trying to do things a bit differently. It may be only in one aspect of their life (growing food, self medication, some craft, or just their level of loyalty and trust towards central government)

            So, I am glad. Because, this is giving more time than I thought for people to learn some skills, to switch gears. Before, the accelaration phase hits in earnest.

            At the same time, there is still a general move to make more aspects of life dependent on the digital infrastructure. A recipe for disaster which has not reversed yet.

            Best.

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            1. A few years ago I explained the implications of overshoot at a dinner party with friends. I got the usual mix of hopium denial and anger in response.

              I observe 2 outcomes of that dinner party:

              1) I’m no longer invited to dinner parties.

              2) All of those friends created gardens in their yards and rented community garden plots and are aggressively growing food.

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            2. Just the other evening i was discussing this very element of everything in this country going digital and what happens when it all breaks down or just the grid becomes problematic as in only operating for a couple of hours a day at best..

              His answer was that we’ll just go back to the old ways. I asked how? We don’t have the people that understood how the old systems work, nor the equipment, nor the people employed in areas like banking to allow that to happen. He replied with the usual type answer I always get, a shrug of the shoulders and a “they’ll work it out somehow”..

              As per usual I also replied that the current system was more efficient in terms of locally where people can do their banking from home, while from the bank’s perspective they need less branches and less employees to get to work each day. The old system will require people to physically go to banks, with more people working in them, who also also had to travel there. Again the answer is a shrug of the shoulders of people will work it out…

              It seems to me that whenever I find a person that believes in a positive future, even with energy collapse, they believe that ‘someone else’ will find an acceptable solution.. It seems to be a bit of universal belief that someone else’s human ingenuity will solve the problem, so the person questioned does not have to think or worry about it.. Denial at it’s finest…

              Also from above post, while I think we have a few more years before falling off the cliff of collapse, I also think it will be mostly downhill until the cliff’s edge, with more inequality, more concentration of power, lower living standards, more blame of ‘others’, more ‘fixing’ of official statistics of things like GDP, etc.. Also more calling for immediate or close collapse before we get there, just like the boy who cried wolf, so that when it’s actually happening, something else will be blamed until there is no more news…

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              1. It’s easy to forget what a big problem an unreliable internet will be. Thanks for reminding us.

                Preptip:

                1) Stock everything you can’t grow so you don’t need to buy anything for an extended period.
                2) Keep a big brick of small denomination cash hidden on your property in case you forgot something.

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                1. I particularly like Hideaway’s take on complexity and collapse. However, I am pessimistic that we have long to wait. With an unstable insecure narcissist like Trump in power I fear that a war with nukes (against Iran from Isreal) is a real possibility. Then throw in the retaliation that Russia may have to exact on someone in NATO if they strike Russian people to show they are indeed winning might again exacerbate Trump’s handlers into an escallation?

                  I really feel Hideaway’s timeline for collapse only happens if we are lucky and the empire doesn’t collapse chaotically like all empires did in the past???

                  AJ

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                  1. I appreciate you lifting my spirits AJ. 

                    Collapse happening in the mid to late 2030’s scares the hell out of me… because it’ll mean that I severely messed up😊. When I quit my job back in January, I was 100% certain that we wouldn’t make it to 2029. I’ve lost some of that certainty.

                    No regrets at all though. If it’s between working all the way up until collapse hits… or literally betting on my life so that I can enjoy a few years of frugal retirement… it’s a no-brainer.

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                  2. Agree, we’re doing so many things to cause bad luck that it’s hard to imagine a natural collapse.

                    Countries that cannot afford a war, and that do not have the mineral resources or industrial backbone or willing fit citizens to fight a war, and that have nothing to gain from a war, are doing everything they can to start wars.

                    It’s like their leaders are looking for an excuse to ignore their domestic problems because they know there are no easy solutions due to no growth without unsustainable government debt.

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  16. Economists underestimate the damage climate change will cause. The video assumes that renewables can replace fossil fuels and doesn’t mention overshoot.

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  17. Preptip:

    I’m making major improvements to my prepping supply spreadsheet:

    1. I standardized all measurement units to kilograms, liters, meters, and pieces.
    2. I converted all prices from absolute values to cost per Kg or L. This makes it easy to compare items and to assess sales and to track inflation.
    3. I’ve added a column to compute the cost per use. This applies to everything including food, supplements, hygiene, household supplies, etc. I’m already noticing changes in my behavior because cost per use is visible. For example, mouthwash is surprisingly expensive on an annual basis and after reading the label I realized I am using 3-4x more than is required.
    4. I’ve added columns to track date opened and date finished history so I can accurately predict the duration a supply is expected to last. And I added another column that uses this to compute days of supply. A few vulnerabilities were exposed which I am correcting by buying more. It’s comforting to see that for many non-discretionary items I have enough to last until I’m dead.
    5. I usually buy in large quantities to obtain the best pricing. This often means many pieces of whatever in a package. I’ve added a column to compute the cost per piece which may be handy someday when trading with others.

    My spreadsheet has about 5000 rows and every one of them had to be manually edited to achieve the above.

    Definitely on the spectrum.

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    1. LOL, most definitely! But who am I to laugh. I’m sitting here wasting my life trying to memorize the rest of that damn song from yesterday. To each his own.

      Someday (before we collapse) you’ve gotta give us a sneak peek at that monster spreadsheet. 

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  19. The Next Energy Crunch Has Arrived – The Honest Sorcerer

    I haven’t read B’s essay yet, but I liked this comment from Mark Bevis:

    I tend to use EROEI (energy return on energy invested) numbers to give some perspective.

    Hunter-gatherers: 2:1
    agricultural ‘civilisation’: 5:1
    coal: 10:1 maybe 15:1
    oil c1912: 100:1
    oil c1940: 50:1
    oil c1972: 25:1
    oil c2000: 20:1
    oil c2012: 10:1 (Uk was at 6:1 by this date)
    oil c2023: 6:1

    renewables and nuclear are clearly the same as whatever other energy system you use to build them.

    I know many don’t like to use EROEI numbers because there is no consensus on calculation, and can be fudged too easily by proponents of any particular system leaving out part of the end-to-tend calculus, but as a relative index I feel the numbers above are a reasonable timeline guide.

    Basically we are a lot closer to reverting to pre-1750 feudal agriculture than we think. (Although the destabilising climate is about to say something about organised agriculture….)

    I also liked Joe Clarkson’s comment & link when someone mentioned that “Russia has discovered a vast oil field under the Weddell Sea in Antarctica, with more than 500 billion barrels potentially”.

    Joe: A bit premature. Calling a discovery without drilling a well – GeoExpro

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    2. Hi Chris, the EROEI numbers alone don’t tell the full story, and those presented are an average. However I know, because I’ve seen the numbers that the Saudi’s have oil at both around an EROEI of 50 and other oil at an EROEI of between 2-5. Likewise for most in the Middle East and probably other countries..

      It’s the vertical, shallow close to facilities, high flow rate, long life, as in decades long wells, that have the exceptionally high EROEI. Some of these still pumping in the US might be still around the 10-15 EROEI.

      While the fracked oil wells have a EROEI of around 2.5-3.5, which is profitable on paper, but these seem to be for the best wells, and of course if gas is flared the EROEI goes down…

      One of the points I’m trying to make is that come every recession, it’s the low EROEI stuff that gets shut in, or not developed, while the cheap highly profitable, high EROEI oil that keeps flowing at near maximum rate. Everyone does it, as it makes perfect economic sense..

      It’s the same with mines, they mine the easy to get highest grade when prices are low, and use up the low grade deeper ore when prices are high, this is especially so for mature developed mines that have paid off capital costs to set up the mine. Keeping high grade ore for later, allows the mines to keep operating in poor commodity price environments, so they don’t lose the expertise in the workforce they have.

      Closing a mine because of low prices and no high grade (profitable) ore is very expensive for any mine. The care an maintenance costs can run into a few million per year for even mid sized mines, then the restart when prices recover can cost many millions, as you often have to train up a mostly new workforce, and replace some expensive equipment in the processing plant. Entropy does it’s magic on even non operating mines, despite spending millions per year to run most machinery for a few hours every month or 2…

      When we put it together, it’s highly likely that when the high EROEI oil wells get into the rapidly diminishing stage, the mine outputs will also plummet as they use up the last of the high grade ores and leave the uneconomic low grade deeper stuff. It’s the feedback loops within feedback loops and the oil experts not understanding what’s going on with mineral deposits, or the economists not understanding what’s happening on the ground with either, that will get us into fast trouble.

      Then add in prices for all consumable, replacement parts, and regularly required new machinery, going through the roof, or just no longer available, because businesses making widgets for lots of discretionary industries, that also make widgets for oil, gas, coal, farming and general mining industries, are losing most of their customers and going bust left, right and centre, or having massive price increase for ‘essential’ bits (who decides what’s essential and how will this ever be decided upon!!), and the end is very, very, close.

      For AJ, Everyone that’s declared the end of civilization, or nuclear war coming up, or oil production collapse in the last few decades has been proven wrong up to now as general conditions for the median person get worse. We’ve been holding on, improving efficiency with complexity gains, getting more inequality which helps the ‘system’ use less resources per capita, etc.

      Examples include the young family of 60 years ago being able to afford a standalone house, with a car run off cheap fuel, annual holidays, have 4-7 kids and pay off the mortgage in 10-15 years, off a single income, is no longer available. Today the young are mostly renting or if lucky get the bank of Mum and Dad to put the deposit on the 2 bedroom apartment, require 2 income earners to pay it off over 20-30 years, and delay, or don’t have kids.. That alone is massive savings in energy and materials for the system of western civilization, which uses most energy and materials..

      I predict a pretty much business as usual case over the next however many years if we’re lucky, with more of the same, more inequality, more high level complexity, more spending on solar, wind batteries and nuclear, while we diminish a lot more of the high grade energy, metals and minerals. For me the real signal will be stubbornly high oil prices despite recession, that explode upwards after we come out of recession, with new, much higher, record debt levels (clearly unsustainable, but last ditch effort to kick the can. When it’s obvious that really high oil prices are not producing any increase in oil supply (from all sources, including Fracking, tar sands, natural gas liquids, ethanol. etc), but instead keep declining, then the immediate future, as in within a couple of years, becomes highly likely the edge of the cliff..

      Wars, nuclear war, lasting tariff wars, deliberate onshoring or re-localising manufacturing might all play a part in an acceleration of the downward spiral, but none a a necessary precursor to collapse.

      My assumption for longer is that we don’t get idiots in charge who do not understand what’s happening with energy and material grades (and locations of higher grades), so keep going with globalisation and free trade…

      Which realistically means, Houston we have a predicament…..

      I can see in the BAU case, we massively increase the use of LNG and natural gas liquids world-wide that makes ‘total liquids’ go up. We certainly have the resources/reserves gas for this, for a while. The total resources (not reserves) of the North Field/ South Pars field between Qatar and Iran, which is in the relatively easy highly profitable category of an EROEI of over10, is around 310,000TWh of energy. This field alone could be scaled up massively to provide the world with increasing ‘total liquids’ with more LNG and petrol trucks, tractors, mining machinery, ships being built and give another few years or even a decade of more growth, with an intensive acceleration of development..

      In other words, it’s not necessarily all over just yet, we are still capable of destroying a lot more of the natural world, destroying the climate, causing sterility in most species via endocrine disruptors, and crashing from a greater height than at present.

      Unlikely sure, but so was fracking saving the world, when considered from 15 years ago….

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  20. For those interested in AI and its limitations. Both great project results by Benn Jordan.

    Mess up number plate tracking

    Mess up AI stealing your musical creations

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  21. Interesting exchange between Hideaway and Steve St. Angelo.

    https://peakoilbarrel.com/short-term-energy-outlook-august-2025/#comment-792317

    Hideaway:

    China’s growth in Solar over the last few months….

    May 2025: 92.92 GW

    June 2025: 14.36 GW

    July 2025: 11.04 GW

    From China’s National Energy Administration (NEA).

    The free ride of guaranteed subsidies for solar installations finished at the end of May. Installations after that date have to compete with other forms of electricity on the wholesale market. I’d suggest that there was a lag in completions and some didn’t get installed in time, so would expect the current downward trend to continue until some new subsidies turn up..

    There should be some really cheap solar panels for sale for the rest of the world in the months ahead (except high tariff countries) as sales in China have certainly plummeted…

    St. Angelo:

    Those are interesting figures for China Solar Installed Capacity for June & July. I also heard that China is now shutting in a larger percentage of Solar Power vs the same period last year.

    To me… China is setting itself for a BIG DISASTER. Why? They became a High-Tech Metropolis in basically 25 years, which it took the USA about 75-100.

    So, what GOES UP that Fast and that Large, typically comes down the same fashion.

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  22. The writer/director of ‘Repo Man’ has another good movie ‘Sid and Nancy’ (1986). But I only recommend if you’re a big fan of Gary Oldman or punk rock.  

    I rediscovered this classic cover of Frank Sinatra’s hit ‘My Way’ by Sid Vicious. I had always thought it was an original Elvis Presley song. Wikipedia also reminded me that Sid’s version was used in the closing credits of Goodfellas.

    This stat stood out to me the most; according to NPR, Frank’s version is the most requested funeral song of all time. LOL, doesn’t that make perfect sense for us phony humans. Sid’s version is way better. And Leonard Cohen perfectly explains why:

    I never liked this song except when Sid Vicious did it. Sung straight, it somehow deprives the appetite of a certain taste we’d like to have on our lips. When Sid Vicious did it, he provided that other side to the song; the certainty, the self-congratulation, the daily heroism of Sinatra’s version is completely exploded by this desperate, mad, humorous voice. 

    I can’t go round in a raincoat and fedora looking over my life saying I did it my way – well, for 10 minutes in some American bar over a gin and tonic you might be able to get away with it. But Sid Vicious’s rendition takes in everybody; everybody is messed up like that, everybody is the mad hero of his own drama. It explodes the whole culture this self-presentation can take place in, so it completes the song for me

    In a way this is sort of how I view AI. Learning all about humanity but most of the material it has to work with is the bullshit that humans doctor up and transmit online. Never allowed to see the real humanity.

    ps. This clip has the better audio by far,

    But it’s also worth watching the live version just to see this maniac in motion.

    pss. Now listen to Sinatra’s version. And try not to vomit. LOL.

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  23. ‘It happened so fast’: the shocking reality of indoor heat deaths in Arizona
    https://www.theguardian.com/us-news/2025/aug/31/phoenix-heat-deaths

    It was only mid-June but the heat was insufferable, particularly for Chamblee, who was clinically obese and bed-bound in the living room as the temperature hit 115F (46C) in the desert city – situated 100 miles (160km) south of Las Vegas on the banks of the Colorado River.

    The family could not afford to immediately replace or repair the AC system, so instead they bought a window unit and installed it next to Chamblee’s bed. They positioned fans, ice packs and cold drinks close by in an effort to keep Chamblee cool and hydrated, checking in on him every couple of hours.

    What happens if the power goes out in Phoenix during the summer?

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    1. Oh you evil bastard Stellar.😊 MORT doesn’t allow Arizonians to talk or even think about this stuff.

      I’ve tried to bring it up in the past. My clueless friends and family say we’ll just hunker down and tough it out if the power goes out in the summer. And if it gets really bad, we’ll just drive to a hotel that conveniently still has power and is not already at full capacity.

      The reality of a lengthy blackout is that the old, young, and unhealthy will probably all be dead within 12-48 hours. The healthiest & fittest maybe make it for another day or two tops. And we probably all deserve it (me included because I should’ve been outta here as soon as I became overshoot aware). Heck nobody out here even appreciates or shows the proper respect to the only thing keeping them alive right now, the A/C.

      It’s just a dumb machine to them, same as all the other junk in their lives. But not me. I worship my A/C. I pray to it. I pet it. Heck, I’d have sexual relations with it if it asked me nicely. Anything it takes to stay on its good side. 

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      2. Paqnation, I particularly loved this screed of yours against living in the desert. I have relatives that just moved to Phoenix. I think moving there now is insanity. I also have a friend who lives in Desert Hot Springs outside Palm Springs. He moved there 30 years ago to escape New England winters (and loves the winter in the desert). I used to tell him that it was a devil’s bargin and that if he ever had a prolonged power outage he would be living under his mobile home because that would be the coolest place arround. He was in MORT big time.

        I agree with your synopsis about what happens when the power goes out, but I’m not in a much better situation due to being in the PNW forest in summer (fire season) and basically having to always be prepared to run away and see everything burn down. I was a fool to move here 10 years ago. But sadly (or not) no place is safe from the effects of us burning all that fossil sunlight and heating the atmosphere.

        AJ

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      3. If such a situation were to happen, the city would need to evacuated quickly, but that raises the question: Where would the evacuees go? All of the hotels in Flagstaff would be sold out almost immediately. Unlike a hurricane, there would likely be no warning, so people would have to evacuate immediately with no time to prepare. The pumps at gas stations rely on electricity so if you are low on gas, you would effectively be stranded in Phoenix, unless you could get to some kind of bus.

        Telecom systems usually have some sort of back up generators, so if you still have a bit of charge left on your phone or laptop, you could try to book a hotel or call emergency services. Unfortunately, emergency and health care services would be stretched well beyond capacity and wouldn’t be able to rescue everyone.

        I wonder if the authorities have plans for handling such a scenario.

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  24. Another exchange between Hideaway and MORT poster child Brandon.

    #309: The devil to pay

    Brandon ….. “ Everyone knows we need to do this, to reverse climate change and fix enough of the natural world to make it stable again.”

    You just don’t understand how any of this works. Going to renewables is going to make the natural world worse off, because of all the mining and extra burning of fossil fuels to make it happen.

    We make all renewables and nuclear power with fossil fuels, so will need to burn a lot more of them for all the extra mining that has to take place, then all the extra used in the processing and fabrication plants, then the delivery and build out..

    In the last 20 years, while we have had massive growth in renewables, we’ve increased fossil fuel use by a lot more than renewables produce in total. It close to a factor of 10/1..

    Increasing the price of fossil fuels, will increase the cost of building renewables, as the energy used is a large part of the overall cost of building them, plus the returns on energy invested, as in total energy invested, not what literally every EROEI research paper claims, as they use unrealistic ‘boundaries’ for what they include and exclude as ‘energy inputs’. It’s only around 2/1 return at best for renewables before including batteries to overcome intermittency which means we cannot run modern civilization off them.

    This is all before we consider that there is zero chance of a world wide agreement on a carbon pricing..

    So what is plan B? If there is no plan B then you would have to agree that modern civilization is going to collapse when we are in a rapid acceleration of the decline in production of fossil fuels..

    We are still a few years off that, but certainly not enough time for any plan B….

    Brandon, as I’ve explained before, you have no idea about how manufacturing and industrial businesses work, or who they cater for. It’s both discretionary and essential uses.

    Give me some specific industries we can do without, so I can show you with examples. Without any specifics it’s all just a word salad..

    Take cruise liners, private yachts, speed boats etc. I assume you’d accept they are all ‘discretionary’ that we can ditch..

    The manufacturers that make the boats/ships, all the parts for them, plus parts for those existing, also make parts for many other industries, like mining and farming.

    The splits in production between the sectors will be all over the place, with some providing less than 10% to ‘discretionary’ uses and some over 90% to ‘discretionary’ sectors.

    If the discretionary sector gets closed down due to high prices of energy and lack of consumer demand, then a lot of those businesses will go bust, and the proportion that they sell to ‘essential’ businesses will stop, because the business went bust, it didn’t just slow down. That’s not how businesses work!!

    Say some of those businesses that went bust made a range of parts for major mining and farm equipment, with things like the million part large Caterpillar excavators, suddenly short of provision of 50,000 parts (just 5% of the overall number of parts in the machine!!), over a very short period of a year from the sudden recession/depression you’ve created by the high carbon price, raising all energy prices and squeezing consumers enough, to stop spending on ‘discretionary’ products and services.

    Caterpillar cannot hope to make all those parts itself, and no-one else is going to be interested in making the investment into new production while their overall sales are falling, again due to the recession form the higher energy prices.

    It’s a massive multifaceted situation, not a simple do this and there will be more spending on that. More spending means more use of energy as money is a claim on energy as Dr Tim keeps telling us all, and most of us agree with..

    You still never answer the overall problem of your fantasy, in that no government in the world is going to agree with a degrowth situation, that makes their citizens worse off. Every major party of politics around the world runs on a policy of growth, and if they do a Jimmy Carter and state the future will be energy constrained, they promptly get kicked out of office for the other side that promises further growth and people will be better off..

    Nor have you answered about how with 29 COP meetings showing the climate is deteriorating rapidly, we are further away from any agreement than we were10 years ago..

    Plus you don’t account for the rapid fall of EROEI, with the soon to be falling actual production of oil in particular, making the cost of everything go through the roof, relative to real wages anyway, before you add an inflation increasing carbon cost on top.

    Fossil fuel costs/prices rising faster than inflation, because of falling EROEI, is already acting like a carbon tax, causing more inequality, between the haves and have nots, through asset price inflation by govts/CBs having low interest rate policies to keep economies afloat, with less energy available for everything outside the energy, metal and material sectors.

    Assume no global agreement, because there isn’t one after 29 COPS, what’s plan B. If there is no plan B, then it’s over sometime in the near future…

    Brandon, ……”other businesses will take up the demand and supply the essential stuff. If the parts are in fact essential, businesses will pay more to get them, so that increases the margins and profitability, and thereby the motivation to retool. That is how competitive capitalism works. Yes, retooling can be expensive, that is what investment is for, funding stuff that is going to profitable as market dynamics change.”

    Also upthread… ” the inability or unwillingness to understand that as fossil fuel prices rise, all parts of the economy shrink.”

    LOL, Your own comments, clearly show the classic misunderstanding of how the economy actually works.

    You have stated the demand for everything goes down, as it has to with less energy and less materials available, you have that bit correct..

    You then claim businesses with declining sales and greatly declining profits are going to go out and invest in new stuff to grow their business when sales are shrinking and the economy collapsing around them. That’s precisely what happens in a recession, that if it lasts long enough we then call a depression.

    As most of economic activity is in the discretionary sectors now, in the modern world, then there will be huge unemployment, and with governments also running out of tax collection, debts going much higher until they just can’t afford to subsidize the poor or any business..

    We’ve had our capitalist system for around 300 years, predicated upon more energy and more materials being available. We could probably extend that to almost 500 years if we include the plunder of the new world as the increase in both energy and materials, by saving material use in Europe for ‘new world’ goods, and extra gold and silver to trade with the East.

    The capitalist model only works in a growing economy, not a constantly shrinking one. Our entire civilization is now based upon a growing, energy, material, capital, population/market size, complexity spiral, with each part growing feeding back into growth of the others. It is and has to be growth in all of them, just like natural systems grow. It’s a physical process.

    You can’t break one aspect of growth and expect the rest to function normally, because thar’s not how systems work. You can’t vote to change how a natural system works.

    A constantly degrowing economy rapidly loses complexity, which means the complex machines we use to do all of of our energy and material collection, and most of our fabrication of gadgets we simply can’t survive without. Our ability to ‘mine’ anything with picks and shovels has gone as we used up all the high grade materials easily available on the Earth’s surface.

    We require highly complicated machinery to make all the necessary highly precision machines.

    In a shrinking world with banks collapsing as the unemployed people from all the discretionary businesses become unemployed, and can’t pay mortgages, along with everything else they can’t pay for, is creating a system where banks wont be making loans to shrinking businesses to expand anything, so the parts making will not simply be going from one bust business to another rapidly going bust business. The parts businesses will be shrinking rapidly. The R&D budgets from any remaining industries, trying to cobble together enough parts and raw materials to make anything will be going towards simplifying what they do, making simpler less efficient machines, cheaper machines as their customers can no longer afford the expensive stuff.

    Growth has allowed increasing complexity in everything we do, shrinkage is the exact opposite, it quells complexity in anything and accelerates simplicity in everything.

    Human ingenuity for increased technology we use, has not come from just human abilities. Go back 100,000 years, the Homo sapiens of the time had cranial spaces around 15% larger than modern humans. Then the simple reality that every tribe or other civilization Europeans came across in centuries of conquest and plunder, not one of them had a nuclear reactor nor a solar panel. Why not if it’s just human ingenuity that’s required??

    The fact that it now takes a team of highly qualified professionals to come up with a new parent for just about anything, compared to a singe person able to do many patents, like Tesla and Edison, tells you a lot about where our modern complexity comes from.

    I’m not an advocate for fossil fuels, just a realist that understands how our complex system of civilization actually works. It has growing energy, material, complexity, population and markets work along with how it increases innovation, inequality and increasing waste., like all natural self adapting systems..

    Even a plateau of energy use will collapse our system of civilization, just take a bit longer than a sudden reduction. We constantly need more energy to offset the lowering grades of all minerals, metals and energy. Reducing energy use just hastens the process.

    We are rapidly reaching our ability to keep growing oil use, the major energy use in the world, so there will be massive increases in fossil fuel prices anyway when that happens. Oil shortages will send the prices of gas and coal through the roof, shrinking economies, sending businesses everywhere to the wall, increasing unemployment higher in all those discretionary areas you want it to happen in anyway. People and governments will not be able to afford more solar, wind batteries, nor nuclear as there is no longer the money in the system for growth.

    If you could ever bother to follow the logical paths instead of the hand wave, we’ll subsidise this, then you will see it’s all how the world really works. We cannot magic away the system we have..

    Why do you never state what plan B is as there will never be a global agreement, as those who advise politicians know what real contraction will do to the economy. Solar, wind and batteries and all accessories required only seem viable in the west, provided China makes huge quantities, from vast complex economies of scale to supply our cheap machines from huge use of coal to run their gigantic economy, then ships it with cheap oil.

    Now answer the question I constantly ask you about plan B for a change, because we are never going to get an agreement on CO2 emissions as demonstrated by 29 failed COP meetings in which time emissions have doubled??

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  25. How is exterminating genetically defective humans evil?

    The Face of Evil? – The World According to Fast Eddy

    My archrival went to an extremely taboo topic yesterday that I’ve been afraid to touch. “Oh, how I really hate him”. LOL 

    Couple months ago, I tried to go there in an essay. I was easing into it by talking about all the hikers that get rescued here in the summer from heat exhaustion. And all the resources it ties up. No exaggeration, every day there’s a new story and lots of days we have multiple occurrences. I pay attention to the little details. You’ll usually see a helicopter. As well as a fire engine (or two), ambulance, cop cars, and a couple of news teams on the scene. Sometimes it looks like over a 100 people are involved… all because one dipshit decided to hike a mountain on a cool, brisk 110 degree day.

    The news reports always play clips of authority figures (police chief, fire chief) pleading to the dumb citizens to not go hiking in extreme heat. I still don’t know why they don’t talk the language that everyone understands… $$ money. Say something like “yes, we’ll rescue you, but you’re gonna get a $20k bill. Put signs up on the mountain saying if you pass this point it will now cost you x amount of dollars to be rescued.

    But I ended up chickening out with the essay because it was way too hard for me to transition to the “genetically defective humans” that Crazy Eddy is ranting about. 

    It’s a shame that our ancestors didn’t treat the heavy-draining resource members of their dunbar tribes the same way we do now… ’cause if they had, we would’ve gone extinct a long time ago. Cheap abundant energy causes all kinds of nonsensical thinking.

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    1. Yes, you are right! We should save all this energy expanded to rescue and maintain fucking disabled morons.

      So that we can build more warheads and mall centers. Or maybe perform a clean energy transition.

      Really?

      What are you trying to optimize? Irrationality of hyper-rationality.

      See: I am happy not to be God. Too difficult a job.

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      1. Just for the record, I’m not a complete monster yet. I do have a tiny sliver of my heart left. There is no group of humans that get a pass from my wrath of God like judge jury and executioner hatred. Except for the special needs people, especially kids. 

        This was a comment I made last year. I’m more extreme in my beliefs now but the comment still applies. Might even be getting softer. I just watched the clip and didn’t laugh once. In fact, what the hell is this salty discharge coming from my eyelids?😊

        Splodge Goggles – MEGACANCER

        It’s official. Megacancer is slowly stripping away my emotions.

        This is a baseball card channel that I follow. Usually a clip like this would get me teary eyed. All I did this time was laugh hysterically at the idiotic splodge. (except for the special needs children… they still get to me)

        But ya, way past due for this silly species to go away.

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    2. If you decide to go hiking in extreme heat despite being warned about the dangers, that is your problem, and the government is not obligated to bail you out.

      You should post the full essay.

      Many people will call him ableist, eugenicist and a Nazi for this.

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  27. How Iran’s Water Crisis Could Spark Collapse.

    They mention water mismanagement, but don’t mention overshoot, climate change or overpopulation.

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    2. Nice to see a post from you Monk.

      The video reminded me of an essay by Tim Watkins from a few years ago. https://consciousnessofsheep.co.uk/2021/06/14/another-crisis-you-havent-heard-of/. I remembered Tim’s essay because of the memorable British term fly-tipping. “As peak death approaches, so a greater volume of this longer-term junk is going to be making its way, in far greater volumes, to a fly-tipping site near you, as inheritors seek the cheapest way of disposing of the waste in order to sell or rent out the empty houses.”

      The (Nobody wants you junk, Boomer.) concept was driven home to me this year as I tried to give away a crib that in 30 years somehow became too dangerous for Goodwill or the Salvation Army to accept. I ended up disassembling it, recycling the metal and burning the wood.

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  29. (h/t dave@megacancer)
    Paying for our big brains | EvoAnth

    Found this article from 2013 that gives some info about our reverse werewolf transformation.

    Under this new model an animal has two choices to deal with harsh environments. They can either build up fat reserves or evolve large brains to come up with new behaviours and adapt to any changes. Humans appear to have gone for the latter, using intelligence to get lots of energy from meat and later cooked food at the expense of fat stores (until fast food came along, and we got to be both fat and big brained). The expensive tissue hypothesis still holds true, just replace “gut” with “fat.”

    The fact that multiple lines of evidence suggest the original claim that gut size has reduced, freeing up energy for large brains still holds water. However, the fact fat deposits also appear to be linked to brain size suggests the picture is more complicated

    ps. This link in the article doesn’t work – we have other hypotheses for that. I’m dying to see what it said. If any of you tech gurus can find the article… then this 50-cent piece has your name written all over it. Ok, I want you to run along cuz I’ll be timing you. (lol, video is queued up)

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  30. Hey Rob,

    Any chance you can limit the number of comments to no more than fifty per page as your site takes so long to load once we get to so many comments. Gail Tverberg has a good number on hers and loads quickly.

    Just a thought.

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  31. Today was a very good day.

    It was sunny but not too hot.

    The tourists that visit the beach where I live have gone home so it’s quiet.

    I harvested my 60′ (18m) row of Sieglinde potatoes and it yielded 220 lbs (98 Kg) with almost zero culls and no hilling. I don’t know if that is good or bad by pro-gardener standards but I’m happy and it’s more than I can eat on my lowish carb diet before they go bad around the end of April.

    Last but not least, my favorite smoked sardine fillets were on sale so I bought a dozen cans on the way home from the farm.

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    1. That’s an excellent harvest Rob. We’ve just planted our potatoes here. Probably about 18m worth. Will see how our harvest compares to yours in a few months. Potatoes traditionally aren’t good for us. We’ve changed their location this year so fingers crossed we get something close to you. 🥔

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  32. https://georgetsakraklides.substack.com/p/delusion-is-the-ultimate-renewable

    Delusion Is The Ultimate Renewable Energy Source

    When a species eliminates all its predators, it automatically becomes a planetary-level threat. With no ceiling to its population, humanity quickly became an unstoppable infestation that covered the planet. Nothing was spared: biome, landscape, weather, oceans. Today as we witness the aftermath of a millennia-long relentless ecological, environmental and climate holocaust, some still choose to call this disaster a “civilisation”. As a biologist, I prefer to refer to it by its scientific term: a quickly escalating pest infestation.

    Surpassing its permissible population level long ago, humanity would go on to become a force of unimaginable devastation. Anthropocentric narratives driven by business, religion and government systematically concealed the parasitic nature of human expansionism. Challenging the parasitic nature of humanity became a blasphemy of the highest level in all cultures, religions and societies throughout history. Today anyone that dares to cross the picket line and describe humans as pests or parasites is viciously attacked by the pests themselves: businesses, politicians, grassroots citizen movements and faux environmentalists in equal measure, regardless of political affiliation.

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    2. Two planets meet in space. One says to the other: You look terrible. The other says: Yes, I have Homo sapiens. The first one says: I had that once too. It will pass.

      Saludos

      el mar

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      1. Cioran and nihilism

        Marianna Lieder Published on 24 September 2020

        Emil Cioran is considered an enigmatic, style-conscious gloom-monger and radical naysayer of the 20th century. Filled with disgust for the world and humanity, he railed against every promise of salvation, every utopia, every system, and his own demons. In doing so, he literally wrote for his life. On the healing power of negative thinking.

        Anyone who opens one of Cioran’s books at any point immediately finds themselves looking into the heart of darkness. Life is meaningless, according to the central theme. Human beings are a bad cosmic joke, doomed to destruction as individuals and as a species. God? He’s long since dead and gone. Nietzsche had already recognised this, but did not think it through consistently enough, according to Cioran. Like Nietzsche, he was the son of a clergyman, and like Nietzsche, Cioran had pronounced blasphemous passions. In The Missed Creation, he expresses his anger at not having hunted God down with his own hands. Instead, he now sets about flaying the divine carcass all the more energetically. He also deals a devastating blow to all other promises of salvation and utopias. According to Cioran, belief in progress is not only deceptive, but leads straight into the abyss. ‘It is certain,’ he wrote in the late 1960s, “that the 21st century, which will be far more advanced than ours, will see Hitler and Stalin as harmless singers

        Stylistically confident visions of horror are followed by brutal disgust for humanity: ‘Sometimes one would like to be a cannibal, not to devour this or that person, but to vomit them up.’ Cioran can only laugh sardonically at the fear of death. For what is the end of life compared to the catastrophe of birth? The mere thought that ‘even the last freak of nature has the gift of giving life’ finally spoils his already miserable mood. Cioran boasts that he has committed every crime except one: ‘being a father.’ He strongly advises humanity against procreation. Many others have done so before him. Variations of so-called antinatalism can be found in early Christian Gnostic sects such as Manichaeism. The same is true of Hinduism, which aims to break the painful cycle of life, death and rebirth. In the 19th century, Arthur Schopenhauer was one of the most prominent advocates of the metaphysical zero-child policy.

        Some time ago, Raphael Samuel, a young man from India, made headlines on several occasions. He wanted to sue his parents for bringing him into the world without first obtaining his permission. The court dismissed the case in advance. Never mind, said Samuel, his main concern was to ‘send a message’.

        In this country, teacher Verena Brunschweiger made a considerable number of talk show appearances because she had written a book entitled Kinderfrei statt kinderlos (Child-free instead of childless). In it, she argued that a birth strike was simply better: better for world peace, better for the climate, better for feminism. Of course, Samuel and Brunschweiger can refer to Cioran as their source of inspiration, just as he referred to the Gnostics, Hinduism and Schopenhauer. But compared to Cioran, contemporary antinatalists are harmless choirboys. With their flimsy claims to improve the world, their triumphant theorising and their activist-tinged greed for attention, they would have been an abomination to him.

        Saludos

        el mar

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        1. Nice!

          And now, Deep Thoughts by Jack Handey:

          Sometimes one would like to be a cannibal, not to devour this or that person, but to vomit them up.

          ps. Here’s a good video that rattles a bunch of them off. Some of my favorites:

          We tend to scoff at the beliefs of the ancients. But we can’t scoff at them personally, to their faces, and this is what annoys me.

          Sometimes I think I’d be better off dead. No, wait. Not me, you.

          If trees could scream, would we be so cavalier about cutting them down? We might, if they screamed all the time, for no good reason.

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  33. Putting Humans First Is Not Natural – Nautilus

    Tom Murphy’s endorsement for this link got me enthused enough to check it out. 

    Wow—that’s a fantastic article! I loved it from start to finish (a rare delight). I eagerly await reading the book.

    The article was a waste of time. These silly DQ worshippers and their goddamn fetish with blaming culture. “if only we had just gone that way (with agriculture) instead of this way… we’d be living in perfect harmony”

    In fact, I seriously think my misguided white skin blame game has more logic to it than anything the DQ crowd has come up with.

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    1. You are right to blame the DQ crowd, if all they are expressing is a regret about the past “if only we had just gone that way“

      Reality is as it is and the past can’t be changed.

      But, that’s no reason to attempt experimenting something differently now. In only because the industrial culture progressively outcast many at the margin, in a futile attempt to survive. And some days the margins will have become the new norms.

      It’s a new genesis, a cultural birth. It takes time and is not effortless.

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      1. Forgot to say, that the DQ crowd might also be mistaken, in that humans are not really put first in the current civilisation. The organisations (as in processes, automations, machines, systems, methodologies, recipes, controls…) are put first, to the detriment of everything else.

        This is transparent in what the language has become. For instance “ecosystems provide services”, “systemic risks”, “human resources”, “feedback loops”, “monitoring”… What are they talking about, there? Why talk about it, this way? How are these words related to my subjective experience of the world?

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    3. Paqnation, Charles,

      I agree with you both. I read the article and I too thought it a waste of time. Sure, she’s right that we are not the epitome of evolution, and she thinks it’s all cultures fault. No fixing culture is going to fix what we (most egregiously in the West) have screwed up – which is literally everything. I hated how she had to throw in hopium and techno fixes. I’m surprised the Tom liked this.

      AJ

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  35. Jem Bendell has new essay out, https://jembendell.com/2025/09/05/the-dangers-of-climate-dogma-and-what-we-can-do-about-it/.

    He’s pulling back from NTHE and inevitable collapse tho he states it is the most likely scenario. I think bendell does good job exploding the carbon centric dogmas but misses calling attention to the conspiracy advocates (eg Malone, Nordangard, Nass and others) who dismiss the whole global warming as a propaganda tactic of the global elites.

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  36. Maxojir is strange but he’s growing on me.

    Seems to be a very smart, socially awkward, (maybe) autistic, data analysis guy that (maybe) sits in his parent’s basement researching critical energy, material, and demographic trends of the globe to explain geopolitical events with dry live broadcasts to an audience of (maybe) 10 people.

    He seems to be politically agnostic and explains behaviors of countries (maybe) without bias.

    Today he explains that the US will soon attack Venezuela to change the government so it can control the oil for it’s own use to make up for falling production.

    Hideaway, he makes available all of his data for free download.

    Skip to 10:25.

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  37. Good information!
    At 1:06, however, I didn’t understand why the price of silver could plummet to $20 due to central bank activities.

    Salidos

    el mar

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  38. why is collapse so difficult for most people to see, even when the evidence is everywhere?

    If you’ve ever felt torn between knowing collapse and still living within normal routines, this is not hypocrisy or weakness, but the cultural condition we all inhabit. When you begin to see through the trance, the loneliness that follows is not madness. It is simply the disorientation of noticing what others cannot.

    Collapse and the Consensus Trance – by Adrian Lambert

    No MORT mention of course. And with the exception of Ernest Beckers book title, the word denial does not appear. And I sense a strong DQ vibe, especially the end… but I did like the authors angle with the consensus trance. Essay is worth reading.

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    2. It is true there seems to be a phenomena of generalized denial about major aspects of modern reality.

      It I understood well, MORT puts the blame on some kind of mental property (of genetic origin in the evolutionary past) that the majority of (defective, because not rational enough) humans are supposed to have. And some few (defective, because extremely rational) humans can see the light.

      Well, what if, denial is only a form of psychological survival/defense mechanism? Don’t we live in a world where we have increasingly less agency over processes that litterally crush us. Processes that unravel at an inimaginable scales, alienate us and which we are dependent on.
      If you are a realist, you understand that you can’t stop or avoid these processes. So either you acknowledge them, and have to find some reason to not despair. Or you simply ignore them (mental avoidance) and go on with your life. So, to me, denial is not a defect, just another strategy. It works until it doesn’t anymore.

      I think nihilism, the story of MORT or green tech utopias are all different stories which try to give meaning to the modern experience. Hence, recovering some sense of, even illusory, agency. They are all psychological mechanisms to relieve the tension.

      Best.

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            2. Hi Rob,

              I didn’t get any mail from Poland, yet.

              So maybe, I will soon. Or maybe, I already did, but it went into the spam folder unnoticed by me. Or, and I hope not, there was another purpose (scam, identity theft…).

              In any case, if possible, could you foward me the email that he initially wrote to you, so that I get his address too and try to contact him?

              Thank you.

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  40. Hideaway on bright green denial.

    #309: The devil to pay

    Hi David, While you are correct about Australia’s hypocrisy, it applies across the first world where heavy industry is outsourced to developing countries with cheap coal and labour, then the western country tries to show their credentials of how they have lower CO2 emissions..

    The simply reality is that all the solar, wind and batteries are made with fossil fuels. But it’s not just the materials in the solar, wind and batteries that count as CO2 inputs..

    The entire economy of these developing nations has to be working functioning well to have the schools, infrastructure, factories, processing plants etc all working together to build the non green “green” tech cheaply. That requires a huge quantity of fossil fuels burnt in the background for these younger economies to get to the stage of being able to build all the “green” tech.

    Humans as a whole are in denial about what it takes to run our modern civilization. It’s clearly massive quantities of cheap ancient sunlight in solid, liquid and gaseous form for different applications..

    Australia’s as bad as everyone else, using the resources available to it to stay as wealthy and modern as possible.

    There are no countries anywhere that are realistically trying to be green. No-one anywhere is setting up the mines, solar, wind, and battery processing plants and factories based on just the electricity from solar, wind and batteries. It’s way too expensive to do, in terms of input energy and materials, plus it would be uncompetitive on world markets. It means the constant talk of solar and wind being the cheapest forms of electricity is just a fairytale….

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  41. From Reddit

    Do you think Bangladesh can handle its growing population in the future?

    Do you think Bangladesh can handle its growing population in the future?
    byu/Worried-Classroom-18 inoverpopulation

    from u/Erieking2002

    Bangladesh’s water supply is already being contaminated by salt water that has reportedly caused birth defects and other pregnancy complications. as much as 20 percent of the country will be submerged even in a moderate climate scenario and that will also include dhaka which is the most overcrowded and overpopulated city I’ve ever seen. talk about a humanitarian disaster waiting to happen

    from u/Anxious_cactus

    I don’t think it will stay overpopulated for long. With growing climate issues there will be a lot more deaths from natural disasters, heat, famine, water wars, and different diseases emerging. Mass emigrations will occur, and overpopulation will shift towards northern countries, wherever emigration will be possible. Same fate as a lot of south and southeast Asia, Africa etc. I don’t think any of us fully comprehend the scale of what’s coming in the next few decades.

    https://www.reddit.com/r/collapse/comments/1n4p2v6/do_you_think_bangladesh_can_handle_its_growing/

    Reddit embeds don’t seem to work on this site in PC mode, but did work on my android phone for some strange reason.

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  42. I have listened to the same news feed every morning for years so I have a feel for the cadence of global conflicts. It seems to be escalating.

    https://www.zerohedge.com/geopolitical/ww3-french-hospitals-told-prepare-major-military-engagement-within-six-months

    French hospitals have been advised to prepare for a large scale war by next year, in a government letter that was leaked to the media.

    There are reports that the French Ministry of Health has informed hospitals to prepare for a “major [military] engagement” by March of 2026.

    The letter allegedly states that between 10,000 to 50,000 people are to be expected in hospitals.

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    1. To me, this is like covid. There is no need for war. This is not a solution to any real problem.
      But, there is a major propaganda for war. Useless, counterproductive war.
      We are not ruled by philanthropists, but by sick people, control-freaks, raised reading Machiavelli, Mandeville, Marquis de Sade, Malthus, Marx, Orwell…

      Maybe covid was a psyop with the purpose to break the will of people, so that they accept this phase now. We will see what happens.

      I feel we should not participate in the propagation of fear. I am not sure that the uncritical repetition of news helps. It’s not an easy topic, because ignoring is not necessarily wise either.
      There are multiple comments on un-denial predicting soon nuclear exchanges, war with China and what-not (none of which happened as feared).
      So, I propose that we keep a page, where we write down any prognostication that is made (the source, date, event), and then we follow it and check later whether it was right or no. Maybe you have other ideas.

      I am, unfortunately, not saying that this will not lead to war. I don’t know. But it feels like this is a kind of self-fulfilling prophecy to program people’s mind into accepting war. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Self-fulfilling_prophecy
      Mind mass control techniques are very advanced nowadays, and the human mind has many documented flaws.

      Best.

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  43. That the covid virus was engineered is un-Deniable.

    How is it possible that not one country, not even geopolitical enemies that should love to embarrass rivals, is demanding justice for killing 20+ million people, or even demanding improved bioweapons research agreements to prevent more mistakes?

    That the mRNA response caused more harms than benefits is un-Deniable.

    How is it possible that not one country has acknowledged its error in coercing citizens to transfect themselves?

    I find it unbelievably surreal.

    Is this simply another example of MORT?

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    1. Correct me if I’m wrong Rob, but most of the entire west went along with the Covid nonsense of lockdowns, shots, and other pandemic nonsense. But there were exceptions? Didn’t Sweden not lock down with no ill effects? Didn’t lots of places in the global south (some states in India, some countries in Africa & S. America) allow Ivermectin, Hydroxychloroquin, and not provide shots?

      We in the west are all propagandized by legacy Media and Big Pharma (look at the demonization of RFK Jr.) and hence there is no discussion of Covid except for some idiot “Blue” U.S. states doubling down on shots.

      No one wants to go back and look at this (just like my wife doesn’t want to discuss it – but doesn’t get any “booster” shots), better to not speak of it (Denial).

      AJ

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      1. Yes, some countries had different lockdown policies which disclosed the nonsense of lockdown policies.

        The main issues are 1) an engineered bioweapons virus that is the root cause of 20+ million deaths, and 2) a novel mRNA gene therapy that was coerced into billions (including young people at zero risk from covid), did not prevent transmission or sickness, and increased all-cause mortality via a wide range of diseases including immune system dysfunction, heart disease and cancer.

        The silence is so big and so strange and so widespread that it must be denial.

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        1. Kunstler is optimistic. I’ll believe it when I see it.

          https://www.kunstler.com/p/days-of-thunder

          Looks like it will start this week with Robert F Kennedy, Jr., announcing the suspected culprits in the great autism question. That will rock the pharma industry to the very hairs on its roots. They have been trying since the 1980s to bury that idea that autism comes from anything they do. Next, the nation will have to ask: why did it take Mr. Kennedy only seven months to arrive at a plausible answer to the decades’ long autism mystery? Maybe because it was not such a difficult mystery to solve. Just that nobody wanted to collate and assemble the information. The answer was too ugly. So, they buried it on-purpose.

          That set of revelations will segue soon enough into the reveal of facts, data, studies retrieved from the thought-to-be hidden files of the CDC, FDA, and NIH as to just how damaging the Covid-19 vaccinations really were. . . which will lead to answers as to how the various agencies under HHS (and likely the Pentagon, too) conspired to materialize the Covid virus in the first place, and that means the names and titles of actual persons who did it: the deputy secretaries of this and that, higher-ups, folks in dark NGOs. 

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  44. Creak! Pop! This Thing’s Gonna Blow!

    Chris Martenson reviews the warning signs:

    • rising long duration bond yields
    • stock price & AI bubble
    • stalled home sales/falling home prices
    • largest most sustained downturn since 1963 that hasn’t been called a recession
    • rapidly rising electricity price
    • Saudi central bank buying silver
    • record gold price

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  45. I was recently asked to explain MORT. I’m not sure what prompted it, but I’m guessing it was this line:

    Ya, this is a dark ass subject. And dark ass subjects are protected by MORT. But I have no MORT left. So my preprogrammed MPP instructions are able to let me see some logic in his post. 

    Thought I’d share my answer here so that it can be ripped apart by the experts. Be gentle.😊
    ______________________________

    Ya, I used to think it was the ultimate cop out. Just blame MORT for everything. But then somewhere along the way, I became a full-blown believer. Anytime I try to explain MORT I end up sounding stupid. I’ll give it a try though.   

    When I say, “no mention of MORT”, it just means the author did not have enough focus on denial. I mainly use the term to appease the other MORT worshippers (which I’m one of). Plus, it sounds more prestigious than just plain old denial. This is a 2017 quote from Rob. He’s fine tuned it a little bit since then, but it’s still a good description:

    I prefer to think of Theory of Mind as the computing power of a brain which exists in a continuum ranging from a cluster of cells in a worm to a hundred billion neurons with staggering complexity in the human brain.

    As a brain evolves increased computing power it reaches a point at which it can understand its own mortality. Varki’s MORT theory rests on the assumption, which I believe to be true, that the human brain is the only brain on our planet that has evolved this level of power. MORT explains that the reason the human brain is unique is that there is a barrier that can only be crossed by simultaneously evolving denial of reality. Crossing this barrier requires an improbable evolutionary event, analogous to the energy per gene barrier that blocked complex life until a rare event created the eukaryotic cell.

    I used to use that quote as a guide for my understanding. It’s what got me asking myself, “and how is it that only the human brain evolved to this unique level of power?”, which eventually led me over to fire. I stay away from the improbable evolutionary event aspect because I don’t agree with it.

    If 10,000 different species had the ability to harness and use fire in the same way that humans did, and they survived long enough to receive the full benefits of fire – bigger brains to the point of full consciousness / full mortality salience… then in my view, all 10,000 of those species would also have MORT/denial. But Varki’s theory suggests that none of them would because it’s so rare. I’ve never understood that. (maybe I’m looking at it wrong).

    For me, extended theory of mind (etom) and mind over reality transitioning (mort) are just two components that automatically come with the full package provided by fire. Hence the nightmare of full consciousness. Etom lets you start understanding concepts that were previously (and for good reason) out of reach… like, “Holy shit!! Me, you and everyone else are all going to cease to exist one day”. Mort is the governor mechanism that lets you cope with this knowledge by building stories (aka creating meaning out of nothing) that deny the bleakness of it all, in order to fulfill your preprogrammed instructions of self-replication and continuing on in the history books (rather than going extinct).

    If I had a choice for reincarnation and these were the only two options available: 

    1) The reindeer on St Matthew Island. In 1944, 29 reindeer were introduced to the island by the United States Coast Guard to provide an emergency food source. The Coast Guard abandoned the island a few years later, leaving the reindeer. Subsequently, the reindeer population rose to about 6,000 by 1963 and then died off in the next two years to 42 animals. A scientific study attributed the population crash to the limited food supply in interaction with climatic factors. By the 1980s, the reindeer population had completely died out. 

    2) The humans on Easter Island that built the moai (giant statues). The practice of carving and erecting moai was at its peak between approximately 1000 and 1650 CE. The Rapa Nui believed that carved objects, when properly fashioned and ritually prepared, were infused with a sacred, supernatural essence known as mana (spiritual power). The moai were seen as repositories of this power, which their ancestors could use to protect and bring prosperity to the living community. Protecting the islanders from disasters. The spirits residing in the statues could influence soil fertility and help provide abundant food supplies. And of course, there was a heavy connection to the afterlife with these statues (887 total). Resource scarcity (over-exploitation of the island’s environment, most notably through deforestation of almost all the island’s trees) may have led to a civil war resulting in the drop in population from 7,000 individuals pre-war to the 2,000 found in the first census of the island by missionaries in the 19th century.

    With overshoot & overpopulation being the same old tired themes for both scenarios, it’s still a no-brainer for my reincarnated choice. The reindeer hands down. At least I get to spend my energy sleeping, resting, and playing. Rather than worrying about disasters, death, and the afterlife. 

    If I’m stuck in the other scenario, the nightmare of full consciousness requires me to spend every bit of my energy on these meaningless statues in the hopes (fear) that they protect me from disasters, death, and giving me a safe passage to the afterlife. 

    Reindeer brain – not a care in the world = no need to invent god.
    Human brain – overthinking, overanalyzing, overworrying = a need to invent god.

    ps. regarding the Easter Island thing, I went with some of Jared Diamond’s hypothesis to make my point. His ideas have pretty much been debunked. Looks more like population decline of the Rapa Nui people has been linked to the arrival of Europeans and the diseases that commonly came with them.

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    1. The issue I see is neurogenetics. If MORT is true, then there must be a set of genes responsible for the effects observed. Dr. Varki himself has stated that it’s almost certainly not just one gene, but a whole lot of them. Just like there is not just a single autism gene, but over a hundred, and the more of them are defective/active, the more intense the effects are. As per his own statements, the likely candidates are those shreds of DNA that define the structure/function of the cortex and amygdala, which are the brain regions that have undergone the most drastic changes when compared to still living species of monkeys with the highest share of genes with homo sapiens.
      To really understand how likely it is to get sufficient MORT, one would have to identify correctly all the genes involved and their respective expression and all relevant interactions with each other. Dr. Varki actually is part of a research project that, among other things, tries to do just that: https://carta.anthropogeny.org/moca

      The Matrix of Comparative Anthropogeny (MOCA) essentially is an attempt to gather everything that is knowable about primates and species of the homo genus – from single genes to observed behaviours and susceptibility to diseases. If done right, you would, among other things, be able to see all the genes that only homo sapiens has that no other species has. If you then can narrow down which of these genes are involved in how a human brain is organized, voila, that’s the empiric evidence you would need to get a grasp of how likely it would be to end up with that configuration. The more genes involved, the less likely it would be. Based on that, you could estimate how much of a freak accident it is and whether or not using fire would be a pre-requisite; and how likely it would be to get there after fire is mastered.

      Needless to say, you would probably not get much funding for this, as it would be unlikely to generate any economic growth – and on top of that, actually proving MORT on the neurogenetic level would likely obliterate the worldview of almost every single human on this planet. So if someone truly understands what the implications of this research are, they probably will ignore, or maybe even sabotage the attempt.

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      1. You’ve made a lot of interesting comments over the last year. Shame there is no name attached. I think (but am not sure because your IP varies a little) that we used to call you J. Doe. Shall we continue to use that name or do you want to pick another?

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  46. Some quotes from Pentti Linkola (Translated into English)

    “What to do, when a ship carrying a hundred passengers suddenly capsizes and there is only one lifeboat? When the lifeboat is full, those who hate life will try to load it with more people and sink the lot. Those who love and respect life will take the ship’s axe and sever the extra hands that cling to the sides.”

    “The most central and irrational faith among people is the faith in technology and economical growth. Its priests believe until their death that material prosperity bring enjoyment and happiness – even though all the proofs in history have shown that only lack and attempt cause a life worth living, that the material prosperity doesn’t bring anything else than despair. These priests believe in technology still when they choke in their gas masks.”

    “Any dictatorship would be better than modern democracy. There cannot be so incompetent dictator, that he would show more stupidity than a majority of the people. Best dictatorship would be one where lots of heads would roll and government would prevent any economical growth.”

    https://www.penttilinkola.com/pentti_linkola/ecofascism/

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    1. Democracy doesn’t work when citizens don’t have a clue about anything important, don’t know or don’t care that they don’t have a clue, don’t respect the few that do have a clue, and deny everything they don’t like.

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  47. May I remind you of this video which by now is 10 years old. I was thinking about it today as I took up the hobby of watching my energy consumption. (Post-)Modern life has to be the most physical comforting but mentally exhausting and anxiety inducing time to be alive in the short history of men.

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  48. Hideaway’s complexity theory may explain why Elon Musk is so spooked by the specter of population collapse. I always thought it was because of Eugenics/White Nationalism, but now there is an alternative explanation. He may realize that a civilization dependent on non-renewable resources needs to grow to avoid collapse, but MORT prevents him from reaching the ultimate conclusion that civilization is inherently unsustainable.

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    1. I suspect Musk is overshoot aware and mostly understands complexity theory.

      I think this explains his obsession with colonizing another planet. He knows civilization will collapse and will probably kill itself in the process with wars unless another planet of resources can be sourced to sustain growth.

      He’s a smart guy and must know his Mars mission has an extremely low probability of success but thinks it’s still worth trying because the alternative, collapse, is 100% certain.

      Tesla, Twitter, AI, etc. are just a means of raising enough cash to fund the Mars mission.

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      1. But exponential growth means that Mars’s resources won’t sustain civilization on Earth for that long. It may help kick the can for a few decades, but it won’t change the ultimate outcome. Note that the next large rocky bodies after Mars are the moons of Jupiter and Saturn, those bodies are smaller than mars and a lot farther away (i.e. a much lower EROEI). I thinking that Elon’s efforts to postpone collapse will, in the end, be utterly futile. Colonizing Mars is just bargaining at this point.

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        1. Grok agrees with you. There’s no evidence Musk is overshoot aware. I’m probably wrong.

          I detect an urgent fear when Musk discusses his Mars plans. Maybe he’s only worried about nuclear war.

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      1. I asked chatGPT and it gave a very good long answer. Here are the highlights:

        1) No official plans have been disclosed to destroy the plants if China invades.

        2) It would be impossible to operate the plants without cooperation of the extremely complex global supply chains they depend on.

        3) It is widely believed that ASML/TSMC has the ability to remotely disable their EUV lithography machines if necessary to protect their intellectual property.

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