Today’s guest post is by Hideaway, the originator of Complexity Theory, the only new idea in the study of human overshoot since Varki’s MORT 10 years ago.
For those who have not followed Hideaway at Peak Oil Barrel or here at un-Denial, Complexity Theory argues that any species that is dependent on any non-renewable resource must grow or it will collapse, because as a resource depletes the quality of its reserves declines, which requires increasing complexity and energy for extraction to maintain the flow of supply, and increasing complexity requires a growing population, because each brain can manage a finite level of complexity, which requires a growing supply of resources to support the growing population, and because recycling non-renewable minerals without losses is impossible, and since the energy that supply chains depend on is mostly non-renewable, a point is eventually reached where the complexity of supply chains must break down, and the species returns to a state that is not dependent on non-renewable resources, which for humans is a hunter-gatherer lifestyle.
Complexity Theory, if true, is important because it implies any plan to mitigate the effects of human overshoot like climate change, species extinction, pollution, or resource scarcity, with population reduction policies, or a steady-state economy using a full-reserve asset-backed monetary system, or voluntary degrowth, or balanced budgets, will cause a reduction of complexity, and therefore the population and its lifestyle that depends on growing complexity for resources will collapse, possibly quite quickly due to the many self-reinforcing feedback loops in supply chains, and the extreme level of current human complexity and overshoot.
In today’s post Hideaway focusses on a quality of energy that is required to support complexity, Energy Returned on Energy Invested (EROEI).
“EROEI is the ratio of the amount of usable energy (the exergy) delivered from a particular energy resource to the amount of exergy used to obtain that energy resource.” – Wikipedia
For anyone new to the concept of EROEI, here is a simple way to visualize it. Imagine we discovered an oil field with a gigantic quantity oil but it was so deep that the machines used to drill and pump the oil burned all of the oil obtained. This energy source has an EROEI of 1.0, because energy obtained equals energy used, which means it contributes nothing to civilization (except pollution), and will not be exploited for long because oil companies cannot make a profit.
Any useful energy source must have an EROEI higher than 1.
Most advocates of non-fossil energy believe it has a plenty high EROEI and therefore we can and should transition from burning fossil energy. Hideaway here calculates that their EROEI assumptions are far too optimistic.
Hideaway has spent several years patiently trying to educate and persuade dozens of alternate energy advocates, with, as far as I can tell, zero success. I believe this is yet more evidence that Dr. Ajit Varki’s MORT theory is correct because energy experts are plenty smart enough to understand Hideaway’s calculations, yet are incapable of doing so.
Given that Hideaway’s Complexity Theory predicts we will soon collapse no matter what we do, why is the truth about EROEI important? Because if Hideaway is correct and non-fossil energy is not making enough net contribution to our civilization, then subsidizing and prioritizing non-fossil energy will increase the rate of depletion of non-renewable resources, which will reduce the time to collapse, and probably worsen the pollution and ecosystem destruction our descendent hunter-gatherers must cope with. In other words, using non-fossil energy will worsen the problems their advocates are trying to solve.
Truth here therefore is a big deal.
Hideaway should be commended for the significant original research he did here.
His conclusion sheds light on why everything seems to be breaking all at once now, and why our leaders are obsessively fixated on regime changing Russia and Iran, two of the very few remaining big sources of exportable oil.
A few years ago, when I couldn’t get a mining project to work economically by using just renewables for the power source, despite the claims of “renewables” being the cheapest form of electricity, I knew I had to go and find out what I was missing. Using diesel to generate electricity at remote mine sites is extremely expensive, so if there was any truth in renewables being “cheaper”, it should be validated at remote mine sites.
I searched for every document I could find about how EROEI was worked out and found many documents discussing great EROEI for renewables, but precious little on how much energy went into building solar panels, wind turbines, or batteries. If I traced far enough back to references of references, I eventually found some numbers, but mostly just plucked out of the air with some basic calculations on Aluminium production and glass production, with a few about silicon wafer production and the energy used in the processes alone.
Even the nuclear industry had a way they worked out their often touted 100 to 1 energy return on investment. The following is from the World Nuclear Association, quoted!!
“Peterson et al (2005) have presented materials figures for four reactor types:
- Generation II PWR of 1000 MWe: 75 m3 concrete and 36 t steel per MWe.
- ABWR of 1380 MWe: 191,000 m3 concrete, 63,440 t metal – 138 m3 concrete and 46 t metal/MWe.
- EPR of 1600 MWe: 204,500 m3 concrete, 70,900 t metal – 128 m3 concrete and 44.3 t metal/MWe.
- ESBWR of 1500 MWe: 104,000 m3 conc, 50,100 t metal – 69 m3 concrete and 33 t metal/MWe.
The AP1000 is similar to the ESBWR per MWe but no actual data is given.
Using gross energy requirement figures of 50 GJ/t for steel or 60 GJ/t for metal overall, 1.5 GJ/t or 3 GJ/m3 for pure concrete, this data converts to:
- Generation II PWR needs: 225 GJ concrete + 2160 GJ metal/MWe = 2.3 PJ/GWe.
- ABWR needs: 414 GJ concrete + 2760 GJ metal/MWe = 3.2 PJ/GWe.
- EPR needs: 384 GJ concrete + 2658 GJ metal/MWe = 3.0 PJ/GWe.
- ESBWR needs: 207 GJ concrete + 1980 GJ metal/MWe = 2.2 PJ/GWe.
In common with other studies the inputs are all in primary energy terms, joules, and any electrical inputs are presumed to be generated at 33% thermal efficiency.
The figures now in Table 1 for plant construction and operation, and also for decommissioning, are from Weissbach et al (2013) adjusted for 1 GWe. They are slightly higher than the above estimates, but much lower than earlier published US figures (ERDA 76-1). Our fuel input figures are 60% higher than Weissbach. Hence our EROI is 70, compared with 105 in that study.”
My way of thinking is that if you dump 191,000 tonnes of concrete and 63,440 tonnes of metals, mostly steel with ‘some’ copper, aluminium, etc. all together in a pile somewhere, it does not materialize into a ABWR nuclear power plant all by itself. All the bits and pieces need to be carefully constructed into very certain shapes and combinations, plus built in the correct order to become a nuclear power plant, therefore their calculations had to be horribly wrong!
If we dumped that quantity of those materials, in there correct shapes, onto the North Sentinal Island where some of the most isolated primitive humans exist, would they turn it into a nuclear power plant? The answer is obviously also NO!!
What if we left a very specific set of written instructions for those people? Again NO as they do not know how to read, nor do any calculations.
How about leaving the cement, reinforcing steel, gravel, sand, and all the instructions of how to put it all together to make concrete in some sign language form, to just make the foundations? Once again NO. How do you give instructions for just the right consistency, or to get all air bubbles out, or to work the surface correctly when in the setting process? You can’t, it only comes from experience of working with concrete.
Even if we had a group of knowledgeable teenagers, who could read and follow instructions, would we get them to be totally responsible for the foundations of a nuclear power plant? Again NO, as we need engineers and experienced concreters to build something that will last decades and is highly dangerous with failure of something like the foundations of the reactor chamber.
From this line of thinking, extended to solar panels, wind turbines, batteries, geothermal, plus even oil , gas and coal, there has to be an inclusion of all the energy inputs, which includes the education of the people involved in construction and operation, as well as all the energy inputs to the trucks, bridges, ports, mines, roads to mines, etc., etc., that all have to exist for building of anything to be possible. We only have one possible way to include all the inputs, money, or the cost of building and operating any form of energy source.
Money, or cost is certainly not going to be a perfect way to work out the Energy cost of building anything, plus it needs to be compared to something to come to a conclusion about the EROEI.
Firstly, we know that fossil fuels certainly can or could provide the net energy for everything else in a modern civilization, from the simple fact that modern civilization exists at all, at least for ‘most’ in the developed countries.
As the price for every energy supply appears to be different all over the world and different for each type of energy, I decided to look at the wholesale price or cost of energy at the world’s manufacturing hub of South/East Asia as a starting point. The question is over what period? Going back to 2012 the average price of crude oil was often over $100/bbl, while in March 2020 it was $16/bbl.
Should the price be from a single year when a solar panel factory starts production, or should it be over the years when the factory was built?
Should it be when the adults who are working in the factory were at school, or perhaps when the engineers, accountants, lawyers and managers were at university?
Maybe it should be when the mine providing the silicon was established, or the ships and ports where they load and unload were built? OK no easy answer at all.
Anyway, I decided to look at the average wholesale price of energy in different forms over the last decade (from 2013- 2023) as it encompassed times of higher and lower wholesale energy prices. What surprised me most was that oil, gas and metallurgical coal all had around the same average wholesale price over that period of around $US43/MWh, with thermal coal cheaper. It was cheap enough that the wholesale price of electricity in Asia during this period was also around the $US40/MWh.*
*Of course there are variations from year to year and from one location to another, but interestingly when I worked out the average price for oil over the prior decade 2003-2012 is was also around the same number, roughly $70/bbl that corresponds with around $41/MWh for the energy content using 1.7MWh/bbl.
Once I had a base number it was fairly easy to just compare the total lifetime cost, both capital and operating and maintenance cost of any energy producer back to how much energy was produced.
I decided to use $US40/MWh as the average wholesale cost of energy for every type of energy producer, as the base for the capital, operating and maintenance costs over the lifetime of operation. This cost to build and operate the plant can then be compared to the total lifetime output for that plant. The actual base number doesn’t really matter as I’ll explain towards the end of this article.
For our purposes here is a simplistic example. If an oil well returned $400 worth of energy over it’s lifetime, while only costing $40 worth of energy in total, to build and operate, then the EROEI was 10/1. As in it cost 1MWh of energy and returned 10mWh of energy, in this case oil.
I had no idea at all about what type of results this form of calculation would give me, or if it would be close to the often touted 10 or 20 to 1 returns that are needed for modern civilization to exist, until I worked out as much as possible.
I was not interested in theoretical cost, I wanted actual existing examples so I could compare different energy delivery types. Finding the actual numbers proved a lot more difficult than I expected. All over the place are headlines of a new development with an expected cost of $XYZ. Often though, the completed cost was vastly different to ‘expected’ capital cost. Then there was also operating and maintenance costs which many projects are very coy about, again giving some expected costs, with nothing about actual operating costs released, this depended upon the energy source.
For some like the nuclear industry, it’s fairly easy to find average O&M costs from public companies or industry announcements. The nuclear industry reports this for US reactors, with the average being around the $30/MWh as per World Nuclear Association (includes fuel costs).*
*Anyone paying attention can immediately see that in a world of $40/MWh energy cost an O&M cost of $30/MWh means that this form of energy cannot deliver a 10/1 ratio of EROEI. It’s 1.33/1 before including any capital costs.
OK, here are some examples of what I came up with…
A relatively new coal fired power plant in Queensland Australia, that was a highly efficient design, based on super critical operating temperatures, situated right next to the coal mine, where they dig the coal themselves, so no “price” paid for coal, had an EROEI of only 5.09/1.
This coal power station cost $US750M to build, including all the costs associated with the coal mine and conveyor system (4km), with an operating cost of around $US4.68/MWh for staff and sustaining capital.
Assuming the lifespan to be 40 years then over the plant and coal mine life of 40 years at a 90% capacity factor, it will produce 750Mw X 24hrs X 365 days X 40 years X 0.9 capacity factor. = 236,520,000MWh of electricity into the grid.
Total cost of capital plus O&M over this lifetime = $US750,000,000 + 236,520,000 X $US4.68 = $1,856,913,600 or $7.85/Mwh, giving an EROEI of $40/7.85 = 5.09/1.
The overall formula is adding all costs in $US to keep everything consistent, then divide by the $40/MWh average cost of wholesale energy over the last decade or so. Then compare the cost to build and operate in MWh with the total MWh the plant will produce over it’s lifetime of operation.
Using exactly the same method, I came up with an EROEI of a new gas well, connected to the system and paying their share of O&M to the pipeline authority in Western Australia of 23/1. The capital cost of drilling 2 wells and building a simple processing plant, plus joining up to the main gas pipeline, plus the fees to pipeline operator comes to a total cost of $US25,750,000, while the return is 15,000,000 MWh of gas delivered to customers.
In Saudi Arabia there are still old wells that have a total capital plus operating and maintenance cost of $2.5/bbl. That comes out to an EROEI of 27/1. These are the old legacy wells drilled decades ago and still flowing well. The Saudi’s also have newer wells at a much lower EROEI, yet I can’t get data on this of actual costs.
The New England Solar Farm in northern NSW, is still being built at a capital cost of around $US858M for a 720 MW plant, an expected life of 25 years with an expected capacity of 5.5 hours/d on average. It also has 400MWh of battery storage, or about 35 minutes at the rated capacity. In terms of O&M costs in solar circles I’ve seen 1% of capital costs as the base used for the first decade, with costs expected to be 2-3% of capital costs thereafter. I’ve used a constant 1.5% of capital cost as the basis for my calculations.
1% of Capital cost of $858M = $8.58M X1.5 O&M X 25 yrs = $321,750,000. Add capital cost of $858M = $1,179,750,000. Divide by cost of energy $40/MWh = 29,493,750 MWh.
How much electricity will the plant produce over it’s life 720MW X 5.5Hrs/d X 365d/y X 25 Yrs = 36,135,000MWh ..or an EROEI of 1.22/1.
A wind farm near me of 132MW capacity, at a capital cost of $US193,000,000 and an expected O&M cost of $7.53/MWh, with expected production of 7,227,000 MWH over it’s life expectancy of 25 years. It was meant to have a capacity factor of 37% but has been running well below that at only 25% capacity, which is the number I’ve used. I’ve also noticed that fairly often during the day when I pass it, even with a good breeze, it’s often mostly stopped, and when I check the wholesale price at the time, it’s negative, meaning they deliberately shutdown the plant to avoid a cost to send electricity into the grid.
Anyway cost of $193,000,000 + 7,227,000MWh X $7.53/MW = $US247,419,310 lifetime cost. Divide by $40/MWh = 6,185,482MWh to build. The EROEI is 7,227,000MWH divided by 6,185,482MWh = 1.17/1.
Hinkley Point C nuclear plant with a latest estimation of $62,000,000,000 capital cost, an output of 1,564,185,600 MWh over a 60 year lifespan plus the same O&M costs of $30/MWh as in the US NPP fleet, works out with the following… 62B + 1,564,185,600hrs X 30/MWh = $108,925,568,000 lifetime cost, divided by $40/MWh = 2,723,139,200MWh to build while producing only 1,564,185,600MWh of electricity over 60 years or an EROEI of 0.57/1. In other words less energy produced than went into building and operating it!! (assuming there is any accuracy in the methodologies ‘cost to build’)
For curiosity I worked out a fracked well based on some industry numbers from D Coyne and others on the Peak Oil Barrel web page. Assuming the capital cost of the older wells was around the $US10,000,000 plus O&M costs averaging $US12/bbl, and a return over first 120 months (10 years) of 375,000bbls oil equivalent, then the cost is $10,000,000 + 375,000 X $12 = $US14,500,000. Divide by $40/Mwh = 362,500MWh for a return of 375,000 bbls which equals 375,000 X 1.7MWh.bbl = 637,500MWh. The EROEI is therefore 637,500MWH divided by 362,500MWh cost or 1.76/1.
Assuming the wholesale price of energy was a too low a number to use in the first place, because only the largest businesses pay this cheap price, while all the people involved in every aspect of their daily lives have to pay a much higher retail price, what does it do to all the EROEIs shown?
Lets take a quick example using a cost of energy as $80/MWh instead of the $40/MWh of the approximate wholesale price of energy to reflect the ‘retail’ costs people actually pay.
In the first very simple example we had an oil well that cost 1MWh of oil energy to build and returned 10Mwh of oil energy. In that case the energy cost was $40/MWH.
Let’s double the energy cost to the more realistic $80/MWh cost. However it still only cost $40 to build and operate, all we changed was the base price of energy we use to $80/MWh. It’s now only costing 0.5MWh of energy to build and still returning 10MWh of oil energy so the EROEI has gone up to 20/1.
Exactly the same happens to all the EROEI numbers we worked out, they all doubled. The ratio between any of the energy producers stayed the same. In fact we could use whatever number we liked for the overall energy cost, it’s just the EROEI numbers that change, but are always related back to each other.
In summary, assuming the original $40/MWh wholesale cost of energy, and $80/MWh for comparison, we get the following EROEIs:
| $40/MWh | $80/MWH | |
| Kogan Creek coal power station | 5.09 | 10.18 |
| Old Saudi oil wells | 27 | 54 |
| Permian fracked oil wells ~2015 | 1.76 | 3.52 |
| NESF Solar Farm | 1.22 | 2.44 |
| MTG Wind Farm | 1.17 | 2.34 |
| WA gas wells | 23 | 46 |
| Hinkley Point C nuclear | 0.57 | 1.14 |
None of the new energy types, including nuclear give us anything like the 10-20 EROEI that’s needed for modern civilisation to operate, yet the older fossil fuel plants have given us a much higher numbers on average well in excess of what’s often cited as the required EROEI.
Taking another new coal mine, the Leer South one in W Virginia USA, has a resource of 200,000,000 tonnes of metallurgical coal at an energy content of 8.33MWh/tonne. So the return for this new mine is around 1,666,000,000MWh in total over decades. The capital cost was around $380,000,000 and operating cost of $72.49/tonne. This works out at an EROEI of around 4.48 at the $40/MWh rate or 8.96 at the $80/Mwh rate for energy cost of building and operating the mine.
This mine and the Kogan Creek coal fired power station I mentioned earlier are both late coal developments, not considered viable in earlier times when easier to obtain coal resources were available. It’s the same with the fracked oil from the Permian, only left until recently as the energy prices were too low for them to be considered. The Leer South mine has seams of coal 2-3.5 metres in thickness with waste between the seams and between layers in the seams. Likewise for Kogan Creek.
These are not the thick, easy to mine types of coal deposits we built civilization with 50-100 years ago, so have a much lower EROEI than the easy to get and now depleted coal from around the world. Yet both are decent EROEIs at the $40/MWh cost and much higher EROEIs than any of the newer energy producers.
In conclusion, it should be obvious to everyone that any energy producing facility that costs a total of under $US26M over it’s lifetime (the small gas field in WA) and delivers 15,000,000MWh has a far better return under any metric than one that delivers only 7,227,000MWh (and intermittently at that), the Mt Gellibrand Wind Farm for a total lifetime cost of over $US247M.
All the ‘costs’ associated with any of energy producers are spent by the providers of the goods and services to build and operate the plants. People spend the money they earn working on these things, on food, heating their houses, cooling their houses, getting to work, their kid’s education and food, holidays, etc., the list is endless. Yet every single cent spent by anyone in the chain anywhere has an energy cost associated with it somewhere. Spending over $US247M must have a much higher background energy cost than something only costing under $US26M.
Understanding this cost difference, then comparing just these raw numbers to countless research papers that try to make out that wind farms have a better EROEI than the gas wells/plant costing only 10% overall, yet producing more than double the energy, has to make you think we are just deluding ourselves.
I know my numbers and methodology are far from perfect, yet they seem a lot more honest in comparing differences between the various energy providers and clearly show we have trouble ahead as the older much higher EROEI type energy producers are rapidly declining. These older types, even in the fossil fuel domain, are clearly the most profitable ones, so humans being humans are likely to use these much faster than the newer more marginal energy sources.
FYI, I’ll be offline starting tomorrow afternoon until Sep. 29. I’m going to a friend’s cabin on Upper Campbell Lake to help construct a water treatment plant for the little community of cabins there.
We should all take a break from the internet/social media from time to time.
The US Department of Homeland Security actually Tweeted this.
WTF?
Unbelievable, people trained with TikTok run the world now.
Super interesting deep dive into the complex global supply chain required to build an iPhone and why it costs so much, or so little, depending on your understanding of Complexity Theory.
https://indi.ca/my-mourning-routine/
Anyone that has damaged relationships over covid beliefs (like me), or other beliefs that seem common sense to you yet are controversial to others, will enjoy today’s essay by James Howard Kunstler.
https://www.kunstler.com/p/personal-note
https://www.rintrah.nl/a-sign-of-life/
Saludos
el mar
Thank you. A must read I’d say.
Rintrah has a remarkable mind. He struggles with mental health issues, in part perhaps due to his depth of understanding of some aspects of human overshoot.
I worry that Rintrah may soon go permanently dark. I hope he recovers.
Rintrah’s covid analyses and predictions are deep, unique, and more apocalyptic than even those of Dr. Bossche.
It will be interesting to see if he’s right that transfecting billions in the middle of a pandemic was a catastrophic idea. The idea is so bad that one wonders if it was a mistake. I honestly don’t know. That no one in power anywhere discusses the consequences of a gain of function research “mistake”, and the obvious fact that the response to the “mistake” had more harms than benefits, and that’s before even considering the longer term threats predicted by Rintrah, makes one wonder what the hell is going on.
Rintrah’s observation that covid damages the brain rings true to me because people everywhere at all levels of society, including our leaders and most respected scientists, seem to be losing their ability to think clearly.
On the other hand, maybe Rintrah’s hope that an apocalypse occurs to bring human overshoot back into balance with other life colors his covid analysis. I don’t know. I don’t have the virology and immune system understanding to judge his work but my usually accurate nose says he’s not making stuff up.
Working on a post for a medical journal. To late, but have a look:
Ecological Overshoot and healthcare: Lessons for Medicine from Bhutan Introduction: Overshoot as a Medical Diagnosis
Medicine is built on the recognition of imbalance. A patient who consumes more calories than they can metabolize develops metabolic disease; one who receives more intravenous fluid than the circulatory system can handle develops organ failure. At every level, health depends on maintaining a balance between input and capacity. Humanity today faces the same fundamental imbalance on a planetary scale: ecological overshoot. Overshoot occurs when humanity’s demand for resources and capacity to generate waste exceed the regenerative limits of Earth’s ecosystems. The result is progressive damage to soils, forests, rivers, oceans, and biodiversity. This is the ecological equivalents of vital organs.
The analogy to medicine is more than metaphorical. Overshoot follows a clinical trajectory recognizable to any physician: Early-stage overshoot resembles prehypertension or prediabetes. Subtle warning signs appear: Soil fertility declines, groundwater levels drop, forests recede, and pollinator populations dwindle, but standard economic or social metrics may mask the problem. Moderate overshoot resembles chronic organ stress. Local ecosystems begin to fail under strain: Rivers run dry, fisheries collapse and forests lose biodiversity. Societies experience intermittent food insecurity, malnutrition, and rising disease burdens. Terminal overshoot parallels multi-organ failure in critical illness. Local ecosystems can no longer sustain basic human needs. Croplands are depleted, freshwater sources are exhausted, fisheries are destroyed, and pollinator loss undermines nutrition. Societal collapse occurs, forcing migration, resource conflict, or population decline
Ecological Overshoot and Human Health
Overshoot is not an abstract environmental issue; it has immediate health consequences. Human survival depends on clean water, fertile soil, breathable air, and functioning ecosystems. When these are degraded, health declines.
Water: An absolute requirement for human health. Aquifers are being depleted faster than they can recharge, rivers diverted beyond ecological limits, and freshwater polluted. Without reliable water, hydration, sanitation, infection control, and food production collapse.
Soil: Industrial farming depletes soil nutrients, erodes topsoil, and relies on fossil-fuel-dependent inputs such as fertilizers and pesticides. Soil degradation undermines food quality and quantity, with long-term nutritional consequences. There is a hidden micronutrient deficit in 2 billion people.
Air: Industrial pollution and fossil fuel combustion produce fine particles and toxins that contribute to cardiovascular disease, respiratory illness, cancer, and developmental disorders. Pollinators and biodiversity: The collapse of pollinator populations threatens fruit, vegetable, and nut production. Loss of biodiversity reduces ecosystem resilience, leading to unstable food supplies and increased zoonotic disease spillovers.
Overshoot also drives inequality. Those with fewer resources are most exposed to declining water and food quality, extreme weather events, and pollution. Reduced dietary diversity, micronutrient deficiency, and food price inflation hit vulnerable households hardest.
Unequal Manifestations of Overshoot
Ecological overshoot does not present uniformly across the globe. Its manifestations are profoundly shaped by geography and inequality: In low-income countries, overshoot most often translates into food shortages, water scarcity, and social unrest. As fisheries collapse, soils degrade, and aquifers dry, basic security cannot be maintained. Even small ecological shocks can result in malnutrition, child mortality, forced migration, and conflict. These crises are already visible in the Sahel, the Horn of Africa, South Asia, and coastal megacities dependent on fragile ecosystems. In high-income countries, overshoot is more insidious. Fossil fuels and global supply chains buffer immediate shortages, but ecological costs are exported elsewhere. Here, overshoot manifests as chronic health decline among younger generations. Rising obesity, diabetes, asthma, allergies, infertility, mental health disorders, and non-communicable diseases are increasingly linked to pollution, processed diets, chemical exposuresn and lifestyles. Life expectancy has plateaued, and in some cases declined, especially among disadvantaged groups. The paradox is stark: those who contribute least to overshoot bear its most acute consequences, while those most responsible experience slow but significant health decline. Both are symptoms of the same systemic pathology: an unsustainable metabolism of human society.
Ecological Overshoot as Global Triage
In medicine, triage means prioritising limited resources to those most likely to benefit. In emergency departments, mass casualty incidents, or pandemics, triage is unavoidable: some patients receive immediate treatment and others delayed care. Humanity has already entered an era of ecological triage, though largely unacknowledged. Overshoot forces hidden decisions about who will have access to fertile soils, clean water, fisheries, energy, and even healthcare.
Food systems: Fertile soils in South America, West Africa, and Southeast Asia are exploited to provide cheap food for high-income countries. The ecological debt is carried by local farmers and fishers who face declining yields, polluted water, and malnutrition.
Polluted water and soil: Communities near industrial agriculture or mining sites already face poisoned drinking water, toxic air, and barren soils. Their suffering is the price for urban affluence elsewhere.
Children and future generations: The decline in pollinators, soil fertility, and clean air disproportionately harms the young, who face higher risks of asthma, obesity, neurodevelopmental disorders, and micronutrient deficiencies. This is a silent form of triage: current consumption is prioritised over future health.
Overshoot inevitably produces mortality, just as untreated organ failure does. Those most at risk are:
Populations in ecologically fragile regions (the Sahel, South Asia, coastal megacities) where water and soil collapse first. Marginalised groups in high-income countries who cannot buffer themselves from polluted environments or rising food prices. The working poor who provide cheap labour for global production systems, yet lack access to the healthcare their work enables for others. This is not a distant scenario but an ongoing process of silent triage. Just as in hospitals, not everyone can be saved when resources are overrun. The difference is that this triage is driven not by an acute disaster, but by the chronic and cumulative condition of ecological overshoot.
Cities as Drivers of Overshoot
Cities are the metabolic hotspots of overshoot. They concentrate millions of people in areas that cannot produce sufficient food, water, or energy locally, creating near-total dependency on distant ecosystems.
Urban living drives disproportionate resource throughput: High consumption of food, energy, water, and materials. Long, complex supply chains that amplify ecological impact globally. Cities also mask feedback. Resource depletion occurs elsewhere e.g. deforestation in the Amazon, fisheries collapse in West Africa, aquifer depletion in South Asia. While the urban consumer remains insulated until ecological degradation is manifest.
Cheap Products and Hidden Costs
Modern societies rely on cheap food, cheap goods, and cheap energy. This affordability creates the illusion of abundance: smartphones, imported food, medical devices, and travel appear widely accessible. But the cheapness is deceptive.
Ecological costs are externalized: soil erosion, deforestation, fisheries collapse, polluted rivers, and depleted aquifers. Labour costs are externalized: low wages, dangerous conditions, and displacement of farmers and fishers in producing countries. Even high-tech healthcare appears affordable only because it is subsidized by this hidden economy of extraction and inequity. The very system designed to preserve health is entangled with the same forces driving overshoot.
Modern healthcare cannot exist in isolation. It is part of a larger metabolic system that includes energy, water, food, logistics, and global trade. In ecological overshoot, each of these dependencies is vulnerable. Water crises or food system collapse threaten not just patient care but the very continuity of healthcare institutions. High-tech medicine is not self-sustaining; its survival depends on ecological stability.
Western Consumption and Outsourced Overshoot
High-income countries drive overshoot by importing food, energy, and materials from ecologically vulnerable regions. Soy from the Amazon, palm oil from Southeast Asia, cereals from dryland regions, and seafood from depleted global fisheries sustain Western diets. The result is an outsourcing of ecological collapse: forests cleared, aquifers emptied, and coastal fisheries destroyed to supply distant consumers.
This creates profound global inequity. Regions already facing ecological stress move closer to social unrest while Western nations continue to expand high-consumption lifestyles.
It is tempting to blame fishers, loggers, farmers etc. In reality, the driving force is our collective appetite for cheap food, cheap products, and reduced labour costs. Resource workers are responding to global markets that reward volume and low cost.
Bhutan: A Different Model
Bhutan offers a contrast. With a low urban population (≈36%), strong emphasis on primary care, and modest reliance on high-tech medicine, Bhutan integrates health with ecological sustainability. Over 80% of its citizens live within 3–5 km of a health facility, mostly small local centers. Its healthcare system is community-based.
Bhutan’s energy system is renewable and suited to scale, its forests largely intact, and its national policy oriented around Gross National Happiness rather than GDP. While not without challenges, Bhutan demonstrates that human wellbeing and ecological limits can coexist when priorities are aligned.
Places Too Large to Save
Overshoot forces difficult triage decisions. Just as in medicine, some conditions are reversible, others manageable, and some terminal. Large megacities such as Cairo, Karachi, Lagos and Mexico City face risks that may exceed adaptive capacity. As aquifers fail, soils erode, and pollinators collapse, local societies face existential threats. For many regions, overshoot is already terminal, meaning ecological systems will not recover within human timescales.
Treatment and Mitigation
Overshoot cannot be ignored, any more than organ failure can. Treatment requires systemic change:
1. Shrinking cities and re-localizing economies to reduce dependence on distant ecosystems.
2. Reducing consumption of cheap, resource-intensive products, replacing them with sufficiency-based, labour-intensive, and ecologically balanced alternatives.
3. Reorienting healthcare toward prevention, local resilience, and primary care, reducing dependence on fragile global systems.
4. Equity-focused policy, recognizing that the burden of overshoot falls unevenly and that solidarity across borders is a health necessity.
Conclusion: Overshoot as Prognosis
Ecological overshoot is the defining health challenge of our century. It threatens not only food and water security but also the very foundations of modern healthcare. The Western world’s demand for cheap products and services sustains lifestyles and medical systems that cannot persist in the face of ecological decline.
For medicine, the lesson is clear: healthcare cannot live for itself. It is part of a larger ecological and societal metabolism. Healthcare depends on workers in agriculture, forestry, industry miners and others. Bhutan shows that another path is possible: smaller, local, prevention-oriented healthcare embedded in a society that values ecological limits. But unless overshoot is treated globally, even Bhutan will be vulnerable. In clinical medicine, untreated overshoot leads to terminal decline. The same is true for societies. The only choice before us is whether to recognize the diagnosis in time and begin treatment or to let the condition run its course.
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Gleeson T, Wada Y, Bierkens MFP, van Beek LPH. Water balance of global aquifers revealed by groundwater footprint. Nature 2012;488(7410):197-200. doi:10.1038/nature11295.
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World Health Organization. Bhutan: Health system review. Health Systems in Transition, 2011;1(2).
Thank you for the high quality essay with an excellent analogy.
I know nothing about Bhutan. ChatGPT’s summary I think may explain its success. Bhutan has a low (770,000) population with an economy funded by hydropower exports.
For your first prescription:
Do you mean that the population must fall faster than the rate at which people return to smaller communities? If not you might want to study Hideaway’s work which shows that non-renewable resource consumption will increase if existing city populations are dispersed.
I don’t think this is going to happen. Regarding resource use. Individual consumption scales according to Kleibers law, but total resource use scales supralinear. Cities need in infinite growth in population an innovation to avoid collapse. While cities gain efficiency in some direct energy and infrastructure use (sublinear scaling), they drive superlinear indirect energy demand, leading to accelerated resource depletion and ecological overshoot. That means more energy and material per capita is embodied in city systems — especially indirect energy (in food, goods, services). While biological systems slow down with size (e.g. elephants live longer, have slower heartbeats), cities speed up more people, more ideas, faster interactions, more throughput.
https://www.pnas.org/doi/10.1073/pnas.0610172104
Rob, this one wasn’t me, it was from someone else..
Sorry, must have misread the IP.
Alright. I almost made it the whole day without taking any cheap shots at these lunatics.
The straw that broke the camel’s back was when I heard Lee Greenwood’s horrible rendition of his god-awful song. See if you can listen to the whole thing (video’s queued up). I’d rather listen to Frank Sinatra’s bullshit version of ‘My Way’.
The whole crowd is scary. That Stepford wife might be the scariest of all. Serious question: the crazy religious documentary we saw last year… is that what these people are? Christian evangelism or whatever?
David Cross had a great bit about Lee back in 2004.
I think the boss nailed the anthem for the USA…
Born down in a dead man’s town
The first kick I took was when I hit the ground
You end up like a dog that’s been beat too much
Till you spend half your life just covering up
Born in the U.S.A.
I was born in the U.S.A.
I was born in the U.S.A.
Born in the U.S.A.
Got in a little hometown jam
So they put a rifle in my hand
Sent me off to a foreign land
To go and kill the yellow man
Born in the U.S.A.
I was born in the U.S.A.
I was born in the U.S.A.
I was born in the U.S.A.
Born in the U.S.A.
Come back home to the refinery
Hiring man says “Son if it was up to me”
Went down to see my V.A. man
He said “Son, don’t you understand”
I had a brother at Khe Sanh fighting off the Viet Cong
They’re still there, he’s all gone
He had a woman he loved in Saigon
I got a picture of him in her arms now
Down in the shadow of the penitentiary
Out by the gas fires of the refinery
I’m ten years burning down the road
Nowhere to run ain’t got nowhere to go
Born in the U.S.A.
I was born in the U.S.A.
Born in the U.S.A.
I’m a long gone Daddy in the U.S.A.
Born in the U.S.A.
Born in the U.S.A.
Born in the U.S.A.
I’m a cool rocking Daddy in the U.S.A.
First time I’ve realized that the lyrics to that song said something intelligent. I thought it was about the joys of football and NASCAR.
Nothing doomer related. Just listening to some good tunes while I patiently wait for collapse.
Been wearing out this song lately. The group made an album in 2014 consisting of tracks based on uncovered lyrics written by Bob Dylan in 1967.
It got me looking into supergroups. Was surprised to how many (several hundred). List of musical supergroups – Wikipedia. I thought there were only a handful. Evidently, wikipedia and I differ greatly in our conception of supergroups.😉
And I can’t mention Dylan & supergroups without posting one of my favorites.
The Arc Angels are another I really like. Ditto on the Honeydrippers.
We took the gloves off’: ex-IDF chief confirms Gaza casualties over 200,000
https://www.theguardian.com/world/2025/sep/12/israeli-ex-commander-confirms-palestinian-casualties-are-more-than-200000
Yeah, and all of the political parties in the U.S. supported, armed and encouraged this genocide. No lessons learned from the Nazis, Pol Pot, or Rwanda.
AJ
B today converts Hideaway’s complexity theory and Varki’s MORT into a cartoon.
https://thehonestsorcerer.substack.com/p/whats-missing-in-this-picture
What people believe:
Reality:
B thinks the decline is close.
Fortunately he thinks it will be a positive experience because with less economic activity ecosystems will be preserved and we will strengthen communities and find meaningful work repairing things.
Someone in the comments said
New Zealand: keep hoping people keep leaving us off the world map 😉
When I wrote the original essay on EROEI I was unaware of the latest, largest Solar and Battery storage plant in the world being built, by Masdar in the UAE.
Rob linked to a comment I made about it upthread on Timm Morgan’s site.
The solar farm is 5.2GW in size and has battery storage of 19GWh. It’s purpose is to show how 24/7 is possible with solar. It also shows the woeful EROEI of such a system, which almost no-one wants to recognise…
Going through the numbers… It’s going to cost $US6B according to various articles I could find, which seems highly unlikely as it currently costs around $US400M for just 1GW of battery storage, so I’d expect great cost overruns..
No Matter, lets run with just the claimed numbers. The approximate breakdown is $US2.6B for the 5.2GW of solar panels and $US3.4B for the batteries.
Assuming the whole project is expected to last 30 years and the batteries get replaced at 15 years, then the entire project will cost $US9.4B plus they will have an operating and maintenance cost of around 1.5%/yr of capital cost (A.I. tells me this number is too low, but I’m running with it anyway). The O&M comes to $US90M/yr, or $US2.7B for life of project in today’s money…
Total cost of project $9.4B + $2.7B = $US12.1B.
How will UAE afford this? By selling oil, currently around $US67/bbl, (Brent crude) which is just a bit below the average over the last 20 years of $US70/bbl.
It will cost the UAE 180,600,000 bbls of oil to pay for the solar farm and battery..
The energy and product content of this oil has an energy value at 1.7MWh/bbl of 307M MWh..
The solar farm producing 1GW for 24/7 will produce 1GW X 24hr X 365d X 30yr = 262.8M MWh.
In other words less energy returned than it cost to build and operate..
Now the argument by every promoter of green energy, will be that a whole lot more of the total produced energy by the solar array can be used, as the actual output of the solar is around 10hr/d.. They ignore the energy cost of what extra has to be built to use this energy.. Anyway running with just total energy produced by the solar farm = 5,200MW X 10hrs/d X 365d X 30 yrs = 569.4M MWh..
It’s still not even an EROEI of 2, plus it ignores the not so minor details, like the panels get degraded over time, especially in desert conditions, the high heat of the desert will reduce the output of solar (my panels lose 20% of their capacity on really hot days of over 40 degrees C.
The total output ignores losses into and back out of the battery bank. The battery bank itself is unlikely to last 15 years in hot desert conditions, and neither are the panels likely to last that long being often sand blasted from sand storms. The batteries will most likely require active cooling to last the 15 years, which uses power not accounted for, plus extra costs of the cooling system also not accounted for.
Plus the theoretical 24/7 continuous power only requires 1 full day of cloud until it will shut down during the following night, so it’s only continuous providing the sun shines for at least 5-6 hours during a day, enough to run a 1GW while also recharging the batteries.
The fascinating thing for me is that no-one wants to look at the reality of the situation here. Assuming that oil price doubles in some future period, and then stays high, then the cost of building the solar and batteries is also likely to go up massively, most likely double, or go up more than double, because every input into solar and battery production will have also gone up in cost.
However a huge increase in input costs for solar and batteries and the expected price increase in their prices, is not in a vacuum. It’s all part of the complex system. The higher oil prices are likely to lead to recession, with businesses making all sorts of things going bust. This would include some solar manufacturers, battery manufacturers, plus all the suppliers to them from mines to processing plants to transport companies.
Less competition likely means higher prices from the survivors in the future. In the last 20 years, it surprised me that the average price of energy in East Asia, the factory of the world, has been around $US43/MWh, as in fairly consistent over a term of decades, yet having wild fluctuations around this level.
The world economy as a whole has had boom periods when the energy price was below this level for any period of time and tending towards recession when above this rate for any period of time. Right now a MWh of oil delivered to Asia is around $39.70/MWh while LNG is around $39.40/MWh and coking coal is cheap at around $26/Mwh. Thermal coal is around $16/MWh, but when burnt for electricity comes to $US41/MWh (at 40% efficiency)
In the long term we have had 2 examples of great increases in oil prices, the early-mid ’70’s and the 2005-8 period. On both occasions it took a long time for the world economy to adjust to higher prices, with general prices rising over the next decade or so, while oil production also increased and so did coal and gas use. Likewise inequality increased greatly during the readjustment periods and so did complexity.
What’s all this got to do with solar’s low EROEI at the beginning of this long post? Simple, solar and batteries have only been able to come down in price over the last decade or so due to the now cheaper/stable prices of other forms of energy they are built from, while the economies of scale allowed the factories to become huge and efficient. We’ve now used up all the easy efficiency gains. Meanwhile in the background all the ore grades at all the mines supplying these factories is continuing to fall, costing more energy to keep up supply. It all looks doable while oil prices stay at their low level, that can only happen if oil supply continues to keep increasing.
The current EROEI of solar and batteries of 2 is nowhere near enough to run a civilization, and that’s in just about the best location for this in the world, while assuming every bit of the energy produced is used with no degradation etc, etc, while the realistic EROEI of less than 1 is ignored. Yet, despite being this low the EROEI of this new solar/battery tech has to fall as energy required for providing the materials continues to rise..
It’s just more evidence of the direction that civilization is heading for, with 99.999% of the population not understand it at all.
We will get another spike in oil prices in the future, but when is the question. No-one thought that it was possible to increase oil production 15 years ago, but along came fracking, so the immediate future may not be as set as many think. Eventually though, the production of oil will start to decline massively, pushing prices way higher. If there is no increase in oil production, plus increase in coal and gas production as well due to higher prices, then collapse is immanent. Current energy prices suggest we are still years away form this point though..
Very nice addition to your EROEI essay, thanks.
There are many examples of this and they seem to be getting more extreme.
1) 20+ million dead from gain of function research and corrupt responses to it.
2) Genocide in plain site by a tribe that was genocided itself 75 years ago.
3) Climate change now guaranteed to be incompatible with civilization.
As you say, the oil price is signaling that collapse is a fair distance in the future. On the other hand, geopolitical tensions associated with limits to growth and the rising debt needed to prevent financial collapse have created an unstable situation in which a black swan could do significant damage to global energy supplies in a short period of time.
It will be interesting to watch how this unfolds.
https://www.thephilosophicalsalon.com/a-self-fulfilling-prophecy-systemic-collapse-and-pandemic-simulation/
4 years old! Did we show it here?
Saludos
el mar
No more thinking of stuff to write about. From now on I’m only gonna speak with Ligotti quotes.😂😂
https://www.bbc.com/news/articles/c70x500lkdno
Syria’s worst drought in decades pushes millions to the brink
Get ready for round two of the European Migrant Crisis.
If the US was not stealing Syria’s oil, they could do more to help their people.
But Americans need their SUVs, Exurbs and McMansions. /s
I’ve had a few comments on how green and good our pasture is looking from a few locals driving past. I won’t lie, it did make me feel good. It’s taken a lot of fossil fuel, hard work and $$$ to get it there and and it’s finally paying off. On our last slaughter I averaged 31kg per lamb carcass.
On a different note I haven’t been on the internet much lately. I definitely feel better about life when I don’t spend much time online.
I understand the internet problem. I used to listen to 2 or more geo-political podcasts every day (Judge Napolitano, Dialoge Works, The Duran (Sp.?), etc.). I have cut way back (maybe 2 or 3 podcasts a week) and feel just as well informed and slightly less depressed about the state of the world. . . mainly because I realize there is nothing I can do to change the course we are on (collapse, extinction?). I gave up on X (twitter) because it is a constant time sink. I find myself reading more which is good.
The only thing I don’t give up on is this blog (thanks Rob), as it keeps me grounded and generally well informed about collapse. The only problem I have is that I am surrounded by people (wife, kids) who are in general denial and desperately want BAU to continue (please no more “Project Runway”, “Dancing with the Stars”, etc. – that shit make me want to go insane due to its utter meaninglessness – other than it increases entropy which is the point of the universe).
AJ
I mostly quit X too, way too much noise. I should also cut back on Dialogue Works, Duran, Napolitano. It’s the same people saying the same thing over and over, and the really stupid thing is not one understands our overshoot predicament and therefore not one understands the why of world events.
Congratulations! A healthy pasture is much better than gold.
I felt so good after unplugging for a couple weeks this summer when camping. I feel pretty crappy right now trying to keep up with world events.
Then, don’t. What’s the point? Most won’t affect you. Don’t worry about humanity. The worst is behind us. Every day that goes by, I feel this more strongly, and I meet more people who have decided to live (each their unique way), who have disconnected from the machine.
Best.
I suppose you could say the same thing about having a web site that discusses a genetic denial behavior that everyone denies and that will never change no matter how much we discuss it. I seem to be an abnormal person interested in why. Sent on a break from pruning 3 acres of blueberries.
🙂
Well, as long as you have fun doing it. I mean, it’s interesting for you, you get to learn a lot of fascinating stuff and exchange with unique individuals from all around the world. So that’s all great. But if this makes you too crappy, and is not worth it, then, just stop or slow down.
Eating crap is not good for one’s health and will end up making you emit crap. I find this is true for both physical and intellectual food.
If you really can’t stop doing something which you feel is not positive for you, then I’d say it’s some form of addiction, or at least an inner unrecognized conflict, and from experience, I believe there is a root cause. Either find it out. Or keep doing what you can’t avoid doing, but eyes wide open, observe, in full conscience (not as a zombie, an automata, otherwise its grip can last a very long time).
That’s how I see things.
Great for the blueberries. I love blueberries. They don’t grow well in my soil and climate. I used to believe blueberries were blueberries (there used to be only one kind in shops), but it turns out there is a great variety of species and then diversity within each species. To learn that, as a city kid born in the cocoon of civilization, was incredible to me. And I still regularly learn about a new species of food we never ate, but for some reason now are able to cultivate. For instance, yesterday, I encountered a Solanum muricatum (sweet cucumber? https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Solanum_muricatum)
Best.
I harvested some beautiful red kabocha squash this week and am hardening them off for storage. I love roasted squash in the winter.
🙂 Tasty. I like this variety too.
Since you started gardening, it seems you have steadily increased and diversified your harvests every year.
Out of curiosity, in doing so, did you somewhat decrease the amounts you buy from store (especially coming from overseas or processed)?
Yes, I no longer purchase kale, chard, spinach, tomatoes, asparagus, rhubarb, beets, beans, squash, carrots, garlic, potatoes, blueberries, plums, and apple cider. Not all grown by me but I benefit from surpluses at the farm I help.
Nice.
https://www.ohchr.org/en/press-releases/2025/09/israel-has-committed-genocide-gaza-strip-un-commission-finds
Israel has committed genocide in the Gaza Strip, UN Commission finds.
Here is a link to the report itself.
Click to access a-hrc-60-crp-3.pdf
Here are a few highlights (I have read the first ~30%).
Another really good rant by Dr. Sabine Hossenfelder on the loss of integrity in science and its preference for censorship over reality.
If you step back and look at the big picture, all of our institutions seem to be degenerating.
Quite sad actually, there’s nothing with integrity left to hang on to.
Perhaps an end of growth symptom associated with diminishing returns of rising complexity?
Gotta feed the kids. If it’s too hard to discover something new then make something up to keep the grants coming.
It’s exactly the same in all the research on EROEI, papers based on nonsense, referring to nonsense.
As I was listening to Sabine I was replacing wherever she stated physics hypothesis, inflation hypothesis, quantum hypothesis with all the energy terms EROEI, EROI, solar ,batteries, nuclear, etc in my mind.
Overall it means it’s rife throughout academia, so also applies to all the medical stuff on vaccines, autism, diet, covid etc.
Ya I mean everything in academia is determined by grants, so pretty much without exception you as a scientist or social scientist are limited by what you can get funding for, so if you stray too far from whatever the funding organization thinks is “acceptable” they’ll either cut your funding or go with another scientist on the next grant.
Reminds me of all the scientists hired by tobacco companies to say cigarettes cured the common cold or whatever. You can make a guy say anything if you pay him enough.
Another issue that’s kind of related to this that I have is that anything related to “big picture” stuff seems to be the domain of economists for some inexplicable reason. Like I still find it absolutely absurd that, for example, the IPCC bases a lot of its work on what economists think will happen in the future when they can’t even predict relatively simple stuff like a recession or short term fluctuations in the inflation rate. It’d be like if you had a group of guys sitting around trying to design a building, and then you brought in a dentist to review the plans.
So ya, I’d imagine most of the stuff related to the “end of the world as we know it” is probably farmed out to economics departments, which almost guarantees its going to be nonsense.
Diminishing return on discoveries in medicine as been obvious for a long time.James Le FanuThe Rise and Fall of Modern Medicine
She’s great! And giving the bird at the end was the perfect touch. Would love to see an interview between her and Werner Herzog. Wouldn’t matter what they’re babbling about.
She made me think about the shadow incentive.
I spent a lot of time following Peter Joseph. Where I’m at now with my awareness, his material is pretty much “no shit, sherlock”. He’s really good at bullshitting (in that intellectual Schmachtenberger style). I always liked his shadow incentive stuff best.
I got the following from google AI… but trust me, it sounds way better when Peter’s selling it. (but either way, it’s just a bunch of fancy words when three letters would’ve sufficed – M… P… P)
________________________
Peter Joseph’s concept of the “shadow incentive” describes how the market economy is perversely fueled by the perpetual existence and creation of problems, rather than by genuine solutions. The system’s survival and growth depend on the sustained introduction of negative effects, because the economy would contract and collapse if all problems were truly solved.
Perpetual problems are profitable: According to Joseph, industries benefit from the ongoing existence of problems rather than their permanent resolution. Instead of true progress, the market provides an arc of new problems that feed economic expansion, such as an industry that treats symptoms of illness without ever curing the disease.
Misaligned aims: The shadow incentive highlights a core paradox in market-driven problem-solving: the underlying economic structures often work against the stated goal of resolving the issue. People may work toward solving problems, but the system’s inherent design rewards the perpetuation of those same problems. Consciously or subconsciously, an economic agent whose survival depends on servicing people’s problems will ensure those problems continue to exist, creating a need for their services.
Self-destruction loop: Joseph posits that this incentive creates a self-destructive feedback loop. The market system’s need for perpetual economic growth and short-term gains generates new societal problems, such as ecological and social instability, which then fuel more economic activity to address them.
Deeply interdisciplinary: The shadow incentive is not confined to a single sector but is a systemic issue woven into various aspects of society. For example, the “health” industry is not a health industry but a “diseases” industry, since it requires illness to exist and profit. This applies to any sector where solving a problem would mean eliminating the need for the product or service, leading to systemic inefficiency where solutions are often sabotaged.
Ignoring long-term harm:The pursuit of short-term monetary gain takes precedence over solutions that would provide lasting benefits for human life and environmental health. The market’s structure incentivizes prioritizing immediate profit & growth over what genuinely benefits and sustains human life.
_______________________
A compelling example of Peter Joseph’s shadow incentive concept within planned obsolescence is the “razor-and-blades” business model used by printer manufacturers. In this scenario, the market is incentivized to maintain a problem (the constant need for ink), not truly solve it (provide a long-lasting, affordable printing solution).
Creating a low barrier to entry: The printer itself is often sold at or below the actual manufacturing cost. This low initial price attracts a customer, who feels they are getting a good deal on the hardware.
The true profit lies in the consumable: The real profit for the company comes from the expensive, proprietary, and frequently needed ink or toner cartridges. Peter Joseph would argue that the company isn’t in the business of selling printers; it’s in the business of selling ink.
Designed to fail: To reinforce this model, manufacturers engineer the cartridges with built-in mechanisms for premature failure. A microchip on the cartridge can prevent it from working after a certain number of pages or a set expiration date, even if there is still ink remaining. This forces the customer to purchase a new cartridge unnecessarily.
Discouraging alternatives: The shadow incentive extends to using software to block cheaper, third-party ink cartridges, making consumers dependent on the manufacturer’s expensive brand. Manufacturers have been known to release firmware updates that render previously compatible third-party cartridges unusable.
The broader outcome: The “problem” of needing more ink is intentionally perpetuated by the system’s design. The manufacturer is incentivized to ensure customers need to keep buying the consumable, not to create a long-lasting product that would eliminate the problem. This systemic drive for recurring profit, which relies on product failure, is the very core of the shadow incentive.
I think this shadow incentive phenomenon is just a one more manifestation of the superorganism’s imposing its will on us in denial zombies.
Some people saw this a long time ago e.g Petter Wessel Zappfe. “Farvel Norge” (“Farewell Norway”, 1947) is a satirical and deeply pessimistic essay by Norwegian philosopher Peter Wessel Zapffe. In it, he delivers a sharp critique of Norway’s blind faith in progress, population growth, and the welfare state.
Framed as a dystopian future scenario, the essay imagines a Norway so overpopulated that every last patch of land even the bogs and mountains is cultivated. People live stacked in nuclear-powered greenhouse skyscrapers, and the population density becomes so extreme that individuals are “breathing welfare-onions in each other’s faces.”
The text is steeped in Zapffe’s existential philosophy, where he views humans as tragic beings cursed with too much consciousness, which leads to inevitable suffering.Microsoft Word – Farvel_Norge.doc
I’d hate to Imagine what the rest of Europe looks like in that essay. Norway is one of the most sparsely populated countries in Europe. If Norway looks that bad, the rest of Europe must be exponentially worse.
Calculation based on ideas from physicist Anastasia Makiareva. 100 watts per person, the net primary productivity of nature is around 0.5 watts per square meter. Assuming we can sustainably use 2.5–5%of this energy, the land needed per person for food ranges between 4,000 and 8,000 square meters (0.004–0.008 km²).
If we consider that only 3% of Norway’s total land area (~385,000 km²) is available for productive use, this corresponds to roughly 11,550 km² of usable land. Dividing this by the per-person land requirement for food alone, the sustainable population would be approximately 1.4 to 2.9 million people.
Including other essentials such as clothing (wool/hides) and shelter increases the energy demand substantially. Estimated to be about 5 times the energy used for food alone. This raises the per-person land requirement to about 0.04 km².
With this broader view, the sustainable population based on 3% usable land area shrinks dramatically to roughly 290,000 people.
So Even Norway is ~2000% above carrying capacity? Wow humanity is screwed. I did a back of the envelope calculation for the US. The US has ~1,600,000 km² of arable land. Based on the requirement for food alone the sustainable population for the US is between 200,000,000 and 400,000,000 (The current population is roughly 340,000,000.) But when you include other essentials, the sustainable population becomes ~40,000,000. For comparison, the population of the largest US state, California, is around 38,000,000. So the US has 8x its sustainable population.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_countries_by_arable_land_density
Dr. Tom Murphy today ponders if the 6th mass extinction is real and whether human overshoot collapse will be good or bad for other species.
https://dothemath.ucsd.edu/2025/09/is-the-6me-hyperbole/
😂😂😂
Another reason why population reduction is a biophysical necessity if we want to preserve what is left of the biosphere.
Also, feel free to post the guest post that I started. I am not sure what can be added at this point.
I drove like 700 miles through rural California a few weeks ago and didn’t need to wipe dead bugs off of my windshield once. If this isn’t a mass extinction event, then where did all the stuff that used to be alive go?
Also, maybe I missed this because I skimmed the article, but he doesn’t seem to account for the time scales of previous mass extinctions. In the past, mass extinctions lasted millions of years. The 5th mass extinction, you know, the one that killed all the dinosaurs when a meteor hit earth? Well that one was considered “relatively short”, only taking 1-3 million years to play out. The 4th mass extinction lasted 20 million years. Even the fastest mass extinction event, the 3rd, lasted 60,000 years. Humans hunted a lot of large vertebrates to extinction in the last couple hundred thousand years, but the pace of global destruction really picked up with industrialization 2-300 years ago. For reference, that’s like 10,000-100,000x faster than a “normal” mass extinction event
Nice rant today by Indrajit Samarajiva on the AI bubble.
https://indi.ca/the-ai-bubble/
This is a great article and perfectly matches with what I’m witnessing in real life. I see all this nonsense on LinkedIn (looking for new job) about “AI revolutionizing XYZ” but again, I work in Data Analytics, the #1 industry that should be the most upended by AI, and outside of saving a few hours a week writing code I don’t see any material impact, nor have I in like 3+ years this stuff has been out.
I think a big part of the hype is just that there’s so much VC and PE money out there looking for the next big thing to invest in, and as a result there’s now a huge and particularly shrill part of the working age population that’s entire working life exists solely to direct rich people’s money into the next big thing.
An example in my own life, early in my career I worked at a finance company where a significant number of the people I worked with went on to work for PE/VC firms. I see them on LinkedIn and they are all, without exception, hyping AI nonsense now. Some of these guys are very successful, but again, I know them, I know their backgrounds, they have 0 understanding of AI or computer programming/engineering. Doesn’t stop them from putting “AI” in their LinkedIn.
One guy runs a VC firm dedicated to investing in “deep” venture projects. The guy has no technical background, but is an unbelievably skilled bullshitter. His company invests in the most outlandish stuff like space mining companies and other things that are just complete nonsense. I remember when he left to go work for that VC company me and a few of the other data/engineering guys laughed about it because they had the intelligence, or in some cases direct academic credentials in the relevant fields to pretty easily realize that there’s no way the stuff this company invested in would ever make any money. It just sounded so completely absurd. It still is absurd. Nothing this company has ever invested in has ever turned a profit nor is it projected to, and it’s been like 10+ years. The thing is because the PE/VC world has grown so much, there’s been more firms of equal or greater credulity that are investing in these absurd companies, so as a result the guy I knew has been able to make an absolute killing by just selling his shares in moonrocks companies to greater fools. This guy lives in a mansion in one of the wealthiest parts of California now, and frequently goes on LinkedIn talking about how AI will disrupt [insert industry here].
(h/t Dave Pollard)
I love a good “dying well” story. Other than peacefully dying in your sleep, sounds like Rob Paterson got the kind of death that we all wish for.
My Father’s Final Magic Show – Hope Sparks
I had a horrific experience with this for my Dad. He basically got the opposite of Paterson because I was a coward and my extreme fear of death kept me from being there for him at the end.
It will haunt me for the rest of my days. I’ll never make those same mistakes again, guaranteed.
I just read this too, what a wonderful way to go for him and his family. A really beautiful story. I usually have a scan through most of Dave’s end of months links, but with my dad staying over, have not perused as yet. But a story like this does convey the pathos of life that is part of me not aligning with nihilism, even though i don’t believe there is a threshold, only that the lights go out for good, that I will go to ‘sleep’ for the last time and not wake up, and that’s the end of it. Of course I can’t know for sure!
But equally i have read stories from others about end of life that could be described as horrific, with ranting and delusions and the worst kind of torment for those in their dying days and yet the teller of this tale still said that moments like this can really convey the depth of life, that it could not be otherwise, and when that is seen clearly, it is a profound experiece, as we never know what life is going to deliver. Hard to fathom but it was communicated well, just as in this story too.
I take it the time with your dad was before you had the NDE yourself? I hope it does not haunt you, as you can see that you were acting according to the conditioning at the time, and it could not have been otherwise? We don’t choose this life or our parents. Paterson sounded like a wise old coot, not a Grandpa Simpson at all. Lucky for her and their family. But regardless, they are still our parents and both birth and death are incredible moments of life.
I am grateful for a space where death, suicide, exit plans etc can be discussed frankly.
Great comment Renaee.
Yes, it was prior to my NDE. And thank you for the “acting according to the conditioning at the time, and it could not have been otherwise”. I totally agree… but still, easier said than done.
ps. In case you’re interested, here are some links about exit strategies. 1st one is a serious essay. 2nd link is just an update to that with some corrected info. 3rd is less serious in tone but touches on exit methods as well.
https://un-denial.com/2024/04/09/radical-reality-by-hideaway-and-radical-acceptance-by-b/comment-page-3/#comment-96099
https://un-denial.com/2024/07/29/book-review-the-end-of-global-net-oil-exports-by-lars-larsen-2024/comment-page-2/#comment-104166
https://un-denial.com/2024/09/14/by-kira-hideaway-on-relocalization/comment-page-6/#comment-107191
Yes easier said that done for sure.
Thanks – read all three with much interest. i have a collapse buddy and we have long discussed this topic together, it’s so important and a big part of the psychological ability to cope and anticipate collapse. It is something where we always have had to bring some humour in as a way to cope with it as a topic. I guess I have found some one else like me and we both just had to ‘go there’, not everyone wants to. However this really helps with the specifics! 🙏🙏🙏
Interesting article on food trade. The text speaks for it self.
Global agricultural trade and land system sustainability: Implications for ecosystem carbon storage, biodiversity, and human nutrition
In many parts of the US, electricity prices are surging in part due to AI’s voracious appetite for electricity.
https://thehonestsorcerer.substack.com/p/the-end-of-the-road
The Near-term future of the financial system.
https://brainbar.com/en/person/balazs-matics (B’s identity)
Nice find.
He’s done a good job of hiding his identity because chatGPT could find no other confirmation. Apparently he works as a supply chain manager in Hungary.
Almost every overshoot aware financial analyst thinks inflation will occur as we collapse.
History agrees.
And yet we’ve never been in this situation before with a giant global debt bubble and a hyper-complex six continent supply chain supporting the complexity needed to keep the system running.
It’s possible that rather than inflation we will see unprecedented deflation as complexity unravels faster than central banks can respond.
Many years ago when I understood only a tiny fraction of what I know today, I concluded the only wise investment decision was to prepare for both outcomes with 50/50 cash and hard assets.
Think of what every mainstream economist has been taught about economics. These are the people that run central banks and advise every government on the planet.
Money solves every ‘shortage’ and the belief in substitution of everything, including energy, by market forces guided by policy. It’s taught that the 1930’s depression was brought about by a shortage of money. A former Fed chair, Ben Bernanke even wrote a paper on helicopter money if necessary to solve economic problems..
It’s more like a 99/1% odds of inflation/deflation, as every govt has demonstrated the last couple of times the financial world got into serious trouble, as in the bailouts of the GFC and the money handouts during the covid crisis. On both occasions the new printed money brought the world’s economy/confidence back (it wasn’t all the new fracked oil energy, nor the huge increase in coal production in China, that kept energy flowing after GFC.) …well according to economists anyway…
Next crisis they will use the same play book, with slight variations of course, but print is built in, then if that doesn’t work because there are no new oil resources to tap and decline has set in, they will print more for specific sectors, like renewables, or nuclear, or perhaps gas and coal or whatever, but something to make the official numbers (GDP, employment, etc look better.
Remember according to economists, it’s better to have a group of 10,000 people dig a large hole with shovels, and pay them for their work, then pay another 10,000 people to use shovels to fill that hole in again, than to have people sitting idle doing nothing. All the expenditure paying both lots of people, creates demand for a range of goods and services, so kicks the economy along. All the resources just turn up due to demand and human ingenuity, they are unlimited..
I’d expect more inequality as we get closer to the actual collapse, and some/a lot, of this will be caused by financial markets rising at an accelerating rate due to all the money from the already richer 5-10% of the population looking for a home for all the extra printed money. I’d expect the divide in power between corporations and individuals to become wider in corporations favour etc.
In other words, in exactly the same direction we’ve been heading in, for decades until the collapse comes.
Maybe. Probably?
However, you seem to be arguing against your own complexity theory which implies self-reinforcing negative feedback loops in the supply of critical components and resources could cause an economic collapse too fast for printed money to circulate and create inflation.
What if they offer interest free money but no one wants to borrow because they see everything falling apart?
What if they hand out stimulus cheques but everyone uses them to pay down debt because they know they’re about to lose their jobs?
What if the grid becomes unreliable and centralized financial transactions no longer work?
What if there’s scads of printed money and nothing to buy?
The last bit I worded poorly, and possibly a lot more. It’s not decades ahead I’m referring to, it’s the decades of the past we’ve been heading in the same direction. When collapse comes it will be way too fast for central banks and govts to keep up with, but in the period between now and collapse, it will be attempted business as usual, with more inequality, more corporate control/influence..
All the points of why people may not take/use the easy money I agree with, but they are all during the short collapse phase, when we will know we are in full on collapse..
Also most of the post above is meant to be about what economists will do and expect to happen.
I’m not convinced we are as close to collapse just yet as a lot of people think. Oil supplies are at record highs, gas use has grown a lot in the last decade, coal use is at record highs. All the renewable machines do provide energy, even if the EROEI is low, meanwhile we still have efficiency gains in the background offsetting any net energy decline.
Once oil prices go well above $US150/bbl without an increase in supply, for months or a year or more, then I’ll start getting worried about an immanent collapse, but we are not there yet. There is no current shortage of energy to drive the system, despite lower mined grades, more inequality etc..
I think there’s a non-zero probability of a depression and stock market crash, and big supply chain problems, before the final collapse, and I think there’s a good chance a hard asset bubble will form and burst in the process, so the questions is, how best to protect your savings prior to everything unravelling? I decided 50/50 cash and hard assets was the safest strategy.
My expectation based on complexity of the whole system is that TPTB already understand the system will totally crash with a large stock market crash, so will try to avoid it all any cost, while not understanding the reliance on supply chain complexity in the background.
My vision is one where we get a boom in stocks in the short term with constantly more printing as is happening now, oil prices eventually do rise which starts to reflect depletion, which brings on inflation and interest rises, just like in the past, but this time oil stays high even with obvious signs of recession in economies everywhere and bankruptcies of major companies around the world. All not unlike the build up to the GFC.
Then when the stock market does eventually collapse, with businesses and supply chains already in turmoil, all sorts of things break down, with collapse happening within months at most past the stock market collapse. All with confetti meaningless money by then.
Somewhere in there, governments will make promises to relocalise industries and jobs, ban imports from some countries, increase tariffs and a whole lot of other rules that I will never think of, that all make the situation worse as govts don’t understand the 6 continent supply chain that keeps all the factories fed.. International shipping seizes up at some point in all that mess, which is the point of no return. Perhaps just before stock markets collapse, perhaps shortly (as in days) after.
Of course it all assumes we don’t get a war that matters, or a pandemic that matters, or just civil unrest everywhere because of greater inequality first, which by themselves could cause the cascade of failures throughout the system.
Minor skirmishes like Gaza and Ukraine, or a fake/limited pandemic like Covid, with only a few million casualties (even 20m by poor wrong policies/choices) here and there, the complex system can easily withstand, with over 8.2B people involved and still growing by 60-70m/yr.
I think it’s markets collapse first, or supply chains deficit causing market crashes, but realistically expect both within a very short timeframe as part of the same initial stage of collapse.
With all the printed money circulating, I can easily see a mania type blowoff top for markets in the next year or 2, which leads to extra demand for everything,(because of people feeling wealthy due to market gains), which drives up the price of oil, leading to the conditions necessary for collapse.
Also without making a prediction, it’s possible that it’s not the final high as there are extra energy sources available to the system that keep everything going for one more cycle. We really don’t know about how much easy oil, gas and coal are still available as it’s often state secrets, but what I do know is that Qatar is about to increase LNG supplies by 49 million tonnes per annum, with others around the world also increasing gas supply.
Qatar alone is adding ~750TWh/yr to the total system in gas, plus 380,000 bbls/d of condensate over the next couple of years.
I’ve been reading about immanent collapse for decades, yet we seem to be able to find more energy to use, even if it’s just existing reserves used faster. We really get to see what is happening over the next couple of years as fracked oil in the US declines and whether or not the rest of the world makes up for it…
Great thread but it’s giving me the same frustration I had when I posted this:
https://un-denial.com/2025/04/10/by-gaia-gardener-on-growing-coffee/comment-page-3/#comment-112088
100 million barrels per day is especially amazing when you think about the life that had to grow, die, and be buried and cooked to produce it.
100 million barrels is about 16 million cubic meters (21 million cubic yards) and chatGPT calculates this required about 10 trillion Kg of wet biomass.
And we burn this every single day to feed and entertain 8 billion apes.
The US and many other developed nations are running wartime deficits right now just to keep things going. They’re already committed to throwing the currency under the bus to keep asset prices going up, because inflation is always preferable to default for governments. Basically as long as faith in currencies remains strong I can’t imagine a sharp decline in asset prices.
Trump, for all his flaws, is admirable for saying the quiet part out loud sometimes. He basically points to the stock market as his barometer for how healthy the economy is, so as long as that’s the top priority for the sitting president of the US I have trouble believing that his and many other governments around the world wont do everything in their power to keep the lines going up.
Net energy is declining despite the glut of oil and gas.
Tariffs are also contributing to deflation.
Conflicts are now increasing because shortages are foreseeable.
Europe is already running out of cheap energy. The collapse is already beginning, slowly.
The end of growth is the beginning of collapse.
Saludos
el mar
ya we’ve been in decline for years now. my grandpa had a blue collar job and could afford a middle class family with 5 kids and a stay at home wife. I have an undergrad and my girlfriend has advanced degrees from top institutions in the US and “white collar” jobs (engineering, data science, mgmt level). We put together a budget and would have trouble buying a house and raising 2 kids at the same standard of living we grew up with. My sister and her husband are in the same boat, they live in a small house in new england and can only raise one daughter comfortably. All the GDP and EROEI numbers and stuff aside, I just can’t think of a better metric than “are your material circumstances better than your parents/grandparents”?
All that’s to say the “economy” has been in decline for the better part of 50 years for most people. The stock market, on the other hand, has been on a tear. However, if you compare the stock market to assets other than money, it’s been pretty flat for like 20 years. that suggests that governments and banks (it isn’t just the government doing it, banks create most money) have been devaluing the currency for years now, but they are systematically understating the CPI so that they can point to the stock market as metric that’s easy to measure and say “look, asset prices are going up faster than the inflation numbers I report, things are all good!”
I could easily see a scenario where you’re having to fight your neighbor for a can of beans during the water wars of 2040 while the president of the US is celebrating the S&P 500 hitting 50,000
Saludos
el mar
yes to all, and esp don’t really know if civ is at bottom of FF energy barrel yet. To wit, Russia’s recent announcement of massive oil and gas discovery in Antarctic ocean.
Most likely, the stock market will crash if the AI bubble bursts.
https://www.theatlantic.com/economy/archive/2025/09/ai-bubble-us-economy/684128/?gift=ct_dec3PLoXg6mpO6KCl0nAEDKONyDwKzwz3Hx1pAcE&utm_source=copy-link&utm_medium=social&utm_campaign=share
We’ll see inflation and deflation at the same time. Inflation for things we need, deflation for things we don’t need. Some folks call it the “crack-up boom” process based on Ludvig von Mises work…
Comrade
From the blog of a climatic investigator in my country. It’s an excerpt of a longer post about the declining of the use of technology for research due to lack of funding (because, as we know, cheap energy is stagnating and will rapidly decline too).
Sorry for the quick translation:
“For this reason [his climatic research], I’m quite aware of the changes taking place in recent years in satellite Earth observation, and particularly of a process I call “technological finalization.
In July of this year, the Defense Meteorological Satellite Program (DMSP) was ordered to be terminated. This is a set of U.S. Department of Defense satellites used to improve numerical predictions of weather models, and particularly hurricane forecasting, by NOAA (National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration), the U.S. government agency responsible for weather, ocean, and climate forecasting.
NOAA made the decision months ago to postpone maintenance on the Joint Polar Satellite System (JPSS) satellites, one of the systems supposed to replace the DMSP. At the same time, staff reductions and restructuring have already been ordered within NOAA itself, and massive layoffs are expected when the new federal budget is approved in October.
Particularly serious is the decommissioning of the Terra and Aqua satellites, as well as the NOAA-15, NOAA-18, and NOAA-19 satellites. With them, the US loses AVHRR sensors (those onboard the European Metop satellites will be the only ones that still remain), thus ending the longest series of surface temperature data on the planet. Even more serious is the loss of CERES sensors, jeopardizing the continuity of a series that is currently crucial for studying the planet’s radiative imbalance.
Another recent event in the US confirm that we are entering a radically new era, one that goes beyond simple decline due to lack of funding. President Trump’s administration has decided that the OCO satellites, which measure atmospheric CO2 levels, will be phased out by the end of the year.“
Everything is slowly but steadily coming to an end…
Full article (in Spanish): https://crashoil.blogspot.com/2025/08/el-fin-de-la-observacion-de-la-tierra.html
Just fits the Trump administration/the “RIGHT” ‘s interpretation of climate change as a hoax and killing any messanger that might tell them different.
The political process in the U.S. is so disfunctional. Corporations have captured government for the wealthy class and no matter who you vote for you get war/genocide and accelerated collapse. I rue the day that I voted for Trump, but what was the alternative? – Woke, Green New Deal, Pro-Vax, Pro-War/Genocide democrats?
End stage empire collapse grasps at every opportunity to stay in Power and destroys itself and the world in a fit of rage when it loses – like the petulent child Trump is.
AJ
Thanks.
Sadly, satellite data (or any other evidence) has had, and will continue to have, zero influence on our overshoot trajectory thanks to MPP, MORT, and Complexity Theory.
We will only change when we are forced to change.
Ironically this means that shutting down the satellite program might actually be a net benefit by reducing the CO2 emissions and resource depletion associated with constructing and launching those satellites.
A new book out that is free in e book form on Amazon for a short period you may find interesting.
Forbidden Facts: Government Deceit & Suppression About Brain Damage from Childhood Vaccines By Gavin De Becker
Thanks for the tip. Also available from Z-Library.
A quick scan suggests it will be excellent.
It was only a couple years ago that I was certain authors like this were conspiracy wack jobs. Now having gone deep into the covid crimes I am certain that pharma is one of the most evil business complexes ever constructed by humans.
Yes I naively thought they cared too a while ago.
Hideaway on rebuildable electricity in China…
There is nothing sustainable about having to continually purchase machines.
Amen to that. We had a power outage about 2 weeks ago (a tree fell on power lines and the Power Company cut off our whole rural area for 3 hours due to danger from fires – fire threat was extremely high at the time)..
Well, my solar array/battery/inverter system is designed to funnel excess electricity (when the sun is up) to the Power Company. The system also keeps a bank of lead-acid batteries charged up that take over some critical house circuits (water pump, freezers) when grid power goes down (initially the battery bank was good for 3 days, now only good for 2). This is supposed to happen automatically, but didn’t in the above outage. I had no battery backup at all and the inverter/charge controller had a red fault light (first time that ever happened). So, now I have a call into the Solar Company and they will get out to me next Friday (3 weeks after the event). I will probably have to have a new inverter and/or charge controller (COMPLEXITY) installed for many thousands of dollars.
I was a fool to install any solar, I could have gotten a deisel or gas generator and fuel at FAR less cost/complexity and greater reliability 8 years ago.
AJ
Amazing. I think Gaia shared a similar story. Thanks to complexity it doesn’t work when you really need it.
Preptip:
If I was in the market for electricity backup I’d consider a dual fuel propane/gasoline generator with a great big propane tank because unlike diesel and gasoline, propane never goes bad, and is also useful for home heating, cooking, refrigeration, and lighting.
Hideaway continues on the same thread.
I invited Maxojir to join us. His videos are getting better and better and his followers have have grown to 12K, up from about 5 when I subscribed.
Today he confirmed he understands the net energy forces driving geopolitics but still believes BAU will continue at a lower level. I’m pretty sure he’s got defective denial genes and I bet he will grasp Complexity Theory and will change his views if he shows up here.
I live in a bubble that believes the US will decline much faster than BRICS.
Maxojir disagrees. He thinks the US will continue to weaken Russia via Ukraine, and will kick China’s ass when it soon invades Taiwan.
Nice to see a different perspective.
Sorry. . . I don’t see how you have the time to listen to what is literally a two hour presentation? Even at 1.5 X I gave up after 15 minutes because his analysis is so flawed. Really, Russia launched drones (which any number of analysts said don’t have the range to make it to Poland) to “test” NATO defenses? Preposterous. Russia doesn’t need to test NATO, they are destroying NATO’s proxy Ukraine as we talk. The more likely explanation is that this was a false flag by portions of the Polish government (NATO) to bring the U.S. in more forcefully to take NATO’s position and help Ukraine.
And to think that China would lose to the U.S. over Taiwan? again, Preposterous. The U.S. has no assets to defend Taiwan save Aircraft carriers that would be sunk in the first few hours of a confrontation from Chinese hypersonic missles. After that the U.S. would have to go to Nukes – end of the world. China has a far superior force (both in numbers and hardware) to the U.S. – we are a hollowed out, out of weapons, no coherant strategy declining former super-power.
That aside, I think China will slowly strangle Taiwan and really would prefer not to have a war, but I may be naive.
Different perspectives that don’t seem to have a grasp of the facts don’t impress me. But maybe I’m just stupid this morning?
AJ
You might be right. I’m worried I’m in a bubble of bias. I’m looking for smart contrary views. Let me know if you find a better alternate source.
The people I follow also think Iran won the recent 12 day war. Yet Iran agreed to a ceasefire when they should have destroyed Israel for trying to decapitate its leaders, and now have let the nuclear inspectors back in after they provided targeting data for the B2 bombers.
Something doesn’t add up.
I think Iran was blindsided by Trump’s perfidity in attacking them. In addition they were unprepared for the Israeli sleeper cells inside Iran that launched missiles AND the duplicity of the Azerbaini’s in allowing Israel to use their airspace to launch multiple weapons at them.
At the same time the Iranians had to worry about Israel using their Nukes on them. By standing down they bought themselves more time.
Now, I think they have better commitments from Russia and China to come to their aid (in addition they have upgraded their air defenses). They have also had the time to secretly assemble a bomb (maybe for a underground test?) in the event they are attacked again. Some analysts have said they now have nuclear ambiguity on their side (do they have a bomb or not) and that alone would disuade Israel from using Nukes?
Would Iran obliterate Israel this time? Who knows.
AJ
I’ll start by saying I haven’t watched Maxojir’s presentation, so I don’t want to mischaracterize him or sound like I’m dismissing him out of hand. That said I would caution against taking armchair analysts of geo-politics too seriously. In my experience they’re typically wrong, even the highly respected ones that go on national television (maybe especially those ones). What I like to do is go back 3-6 months and watch their content. See how many of their predictions they got right. If you can do this for Maxojir and he’s nailing it every time, the let me know and I’ll start watching his stuff.
Fair enough, I’m still forming an opinion. He also does not appear to be fully overshoot aware which means you have to translate everything.
Do you have any favorite geopolitical analysts?
https://michael-hudson.com/
Here’s a guy I listen to relatively often. More of a left-leaning economist than a dedicated geopolitical analyst. That said he generally tends to be right more often than wrong, but he also doesn’t make a lot of granular predictions. The stuff he does discuss he tends to nail.
I’m pretty sure he’s convinced the US and western countries will fall apart in the next 10-20 years, but for more economic reasons or warfare than resource/complexity issues. He thinks east asian countries are on the ascent for a wide variety of reasons, again, many of them having to do with their industrial and banking policies. I don’t think he’s peak oil/resource depletion aware, or if he is he doesn’t mention it very often.
Thanks. I don’t subscribe to Hudson but he’s often interviewed on the podcasts I follow and I usually appreciate his perspective.
Rob (and anyone else here), curious who else you read or listen to? Collapse aware or otherwise, I’m always looking around for new stuff.
Some that I look at (with my own take on them)
-Surplus Energy Economics- I like the idea, but I don’t know enough about this SEEDS model Tim Morgan has to actually take his prognostications seriously, and a lot of his blog beyond that seems sort of repetitive. I agree broadly with his conclusions though that EROEI is decaying and will hit some critical point in the future, and until then governments will debase their currencies
-Energy Skeptic- Sort of like a really good book review website, good stuff. Probably my favorite collapse aware writer. Seems to really have a firm grasp that there are certain critical points that will fail first and basically end modern society completely. Highly collapse aware, however sometimes (like most recently) she comments on modern politics from a very Bay Area Liberal perspective, which is understandable I guess, it just seems sort of out of place to care that much about popular politics when you think the world is ending. I get it though, when I talk to normies i probably come across as a pretty similar california liberal, so all good. https://energyskeptic.com/
-Ecosophia- Updated Archdruid report from John Michael Greer, used to be better when he focused on collapse in my opinion, but he’s moved on to focus on his own fictional stories (read one, pretty decent book actually) and spends the rest of his time mostly doing reviews of con-artists woo people from the 19th and 20th centuries. I dated a new age girl in college so I’m somewhat familiar with a few of the people he discusses. They’re all complete frauds and charlatans, which never quite seems to make it into his discussion of these loony toons and sort of discredits my opinion of the other stuff he says. He also seems to think humans will be living a life of medieval peasants in the shadows of defunct nuclear reactors, which in my opinion seems to be kind of romantic and naive. If you really think it through I doubt sedentary agricultural civilization will be possible in the wonderful future we’re creating
-Kunstler- I don’t know about this guy, I agree with his take on suburbia sucking, but he sort of became a pro-trump culture warrior guy and sort of got lost in the crowd of red-faced boomers yelling about how much they hate craft beer and tattoos or whatever. Shame, his stuff used to be good
-Honest Sorcerer- Seems pretty solid, I think he sort of takes a similar view to Greer that collapse will be gradual and will end in some sort of medieval peasant world, although I might be wrong, feel free to correct me if I am
-Michael Hudson- mentioned above, an avowed socialist economic critic. his criticisms are dead on, and his predictions seem pretty good. I don’t agree with some of his modern monetary theory stuff, but I think he’s got some interesting things to say
-Dimitri Orlov- basically comes across as a putin shill now, and to be honest if you asked him he’d probably agree. Oddly enough, his stuff is paywalled, which sort of surprises me because he doesn’t seem like he’d have a big following. I don’t know man, it’s one thing to say Russia does some things better than the West, but if you listen to him you might forget that Russia has one of the highest rates of alcoholism and HIV per capita in the world. Clearly something is going wrong and he’s not acknowledging it. I don’t know maybe he was bullied or something and just hates America now.
Morris Berman-I’m convinced this guy reads this blog, or if he doesn’t he’d agree with everything we’re saying. Criticism is mostly focused on the US, but I think if you pressed him he’d agree the rest of civilization is going down the drain. Haven’t read him in a few years but this reminds me to go have a look. More focused on cultural decay than resource decline, but he for sure has defective denial genes. Blog’s here: https://morrisberman.blogspot.com/
As you can tell, I don’t read a lot of these often or I’ve sort of changed to have a critical outlook on a few of the authors. If you have any suggestions I’m all ears!
Almost forgot Tim Watkins – https://consciousnessofsheep.co.uk/
Really good UK focused blog, but he’s for sure collapse aware. I don’t think his takes will be anything new to readers here, but if you want to read a like-minded blogger here you go
Watkins is superb when he’s focused on energy and not UK politics which I’m sure is interesting for his domestic audience but for the rest of us who cares about a grubby little failing island with no resources that still thinks it’s an empire and that’s at the center with Israel of most mischief in the world.
Thanks Felix. I’m familiar with and follow all the people you mentioned except Greer who I quit a long time ago because he takes 1000 words to express a 10 word idea and most of those ideas are woo. Also Morris Berman who I’ve never heard of.
Something definitely changed Orlov. Maybe a child? Maybe having to make friends when he moved back to Russia? Maybe being discredited like the rest of us by the fracking “miracle”? I don’t know. I do know I’m slowly becoming as disgusted with western leaders as he is. Maybe the east’s leaders are equally stupid and I just don’t see it because I’m not close enough. I don’t know.
In the East there’s typically less of an effort to hide who really pulls the strings. Putin and Xi are a lot more similar to “strongman” type leaders who have basically been greenlit to be dictators for life. Their ruling coalitions tend to be more beholden to them than they to their coalitions. I don’t think either of them are purely evil or anything, and I’m sure they’re both much smarter and politically savvy than the average politician in the West, but they aren’t “the good guys” either.
That said both countries are horribly corrupt. One could argue that western countries are corrupt as well, but corruption works differently in western countries. I can’t imagine a scenario where the US gets into a war with Mexico and then a private army fighting that war gets upset with military leadership and tries to invade Arizona.
paqnation, in case you missed them, someone new here has posted a couple comments on an old thread directed at you.
https://un-denial.com/2024/03/19/by-steve-carrow-what-would-a-wise-community-do/comment-page-1/#comment-113738
Hey, my Pulitzer Prize winning porn essay got some love.
Thanks for the heads up Rob.
I finally watched that movie Circle (2015) – IMDb. It’s a good one. You definitely have to be in a certain mood for these science fiction psychological thrillers. Low budget, no name actors, everything happening in one room.
Afterwards I was wanting more of this type of entertainment. I found one I hadn’t seen in a while.
Coherence (2013) – IMDb. Fun flick. I strongly recommend.
“Coherence is not just smart science fiction: it’s a triumph of crafty independent filmmaking, made with few resources and big ambition. The film’s creator stripped his vision down to the barest of bones to achieve a mind-shifting, metaphysical freakout about a dinner party gone cosmically awry. This film explodes with ideas, and it has that thing we always hope for at the movies: the element of surprise.”
If you are looking for some more movie ideas Chris, head to this address:
https://movie-reviews.com.au/
My partner’s website where he has been writing reviews for the last 16 years, ordered by year, genre, or stars awarded!
If you don’t want to read them, you can just get an idea of the good ones by filtering on rating for 8, 9 or 10 stars. (10 stars is pretty rare)
https://movie-reviews.com.au/category/rating/10-stars
Actually there’s a few more on the 10 list since I last looked 🙂
I used to work in web dev and built this site for him in Drupal then we switched it to Backdrop CMS more recently.
That’s a very impressive movie review site. There are lots of highly rated movies I’ve not heard of to explore.
Glad you think so Rob 🙂 I do think movies as popular culture, more than anything else, shows how collapse awareness is alive and well on a superficial level at least, but does not stop denial operating one bit.
As the great unravelling approaches some overshoot aware people become depressed, others go woo, and some become revolutionaries.
Chris Martenson’s loving the recent revolution in Nepal where citizens burned the homes of and beat government officials.
Notice that mainstream media has been silent on this. Also note that Martenson only published it on Odysee.
Preview video version:
https://peakprosperity.com/nepals-stunning-revolution/
Full audio version:
Me? I’m going to double down as a gray-man hermit with plenty of hobbies and a farm gig to stay reasonably happy as the world burns.
sage advice Rob.
I found people don’t get it when you ask them which form of collapse are they fighting for. /sarc
Best not get involved.
This is an excellent example of how hard it is to understand what’s going on in the world today.
Chris Martenson above celebrates the revolution in Nepal as a win for citizens overthrowing a bad government.
The Duran, on the other hand, is certain that the Nepal regime change was orchestrated by western governments.
Nobody does a better job than Brian Berletic of explaining how the US overthrows governments it does not like.
Today he does a deep dive on the recent Nepal “revolution”.
I stay away from geopolitical experts. I use the much more accurate tool of intuition.😂
But I got sucked into this because of Brian’s demeanor. I love the way he gets frustrated and almost starts yelling at the audience. LOL. Back when I was practicing for my pipedream youtube channel, I had the same issue going on. (but mine was much more annoying than Brian).
Glad I watched the video though. He convinced the hell out of me. Heck, by the end I was even thinking that the US might be using/manipulating un-Denial to push its nefarious agenda.😊
I don’t know what’s easier to grasp; overshoot/collapse… or that USA is the most evil nation to ever exist. Both are simple to understand once you put in some research time, but MORT does a great job of preventing people from looking into it.
Brian’s analysis also reminded me of this peak insanity moment sapiens are in the middle of right now. Probably best for my sanity to continue ignoring geopolitics.
Steve St. Angelo explains that peak net energy is here now and therefore you should exchange energy-free paper assets like US treasuries for energy-expensive hard assets like silver.
Eliot Jacobsen says that the Wit’s End web site of the late Gail Zawacki may soon disappear.
That would be a shame. She was one of the best, maybe the best, writer in the overshoot world.
Does anyone here know how to make a backup of a complete website?
https://climatecasino.net/2025/09/in-praise-of-themis-by-gail-zawacki/
https://web.archive.org/web/20250818144059/http://witsendnj.blogspot.com/
Is this all of her posts? Weogo
Thanks, the Way Back Machine looks promising but a quick scan suggests many photos are missing and it is unusably slow.
ChatGPT suggested I try the open source application HTTrack to make a copy of the web site so I installed it and it’s been running for about 12 hours and has capture 12GB so far.
When It finishes I’ll do some tests and let you know how it works.
HTTrack seems to have mostly worked. Some images and content linked from a different sites is missing but I seem to have most of the content that Gail Zawacki wrote. Browsing is nice and fast and it only used 10GB of my disk space.
And now for something completely different from the leader of the best and only YouTube channel that regularly assembles the world’s leading experts on peak oil.
It’s not hard to understand why the majority of citizens dismiss peak oil as crazy talk.
What I learned this week….
Nate, and every other even slightly aware person, including myself are a huge part of the predicament. Two aspects from the above video. Firstly Nate is spending energy and materials on refurbishing his studio, second he will be in NY in a couple of weeks time for an environment conference, which means, plane, train or car travel, all which use the declining grades of energy and materials through maintenance and eventual replacement from use..
Next in complexity it’s all about the sublinear and superlinear scaling of growing systems that brings on the eventual death or collapse of the system. I’ve been reading many papers, from totally different fields, with the assistance of AI to find resources, not rely upon AI answers, on all this and have gone over a range of often older videos to confirm where I think some well known professors are missing important details…
To cut the entire complexity issue short, in case a bus hits me tomorrow, the sublinear scaling of systems allows for efficiency gains as the system grows, as in for cities a doubling of population (which means internal participants/markets) comes with an 85% growth in material and energy use. Different systems seem to have different subscaling ‘rules’.
The superscaling means effects that are above a 100% improvement with a doubling in size. In social systems it means a doubling of urban centre size comes with a 115% increase in aspects like human interactions, patents, social structures (football teams, chess clubs, investment groups etc), but also comes with a 115% increase in bad/poor outcomes, as in crime, drug use, disobedience, policing, paying interest etc, which uses an increasing proportion of resources.
Complex systems have to grow to overcome the growth of the negative effects created by the growing complex system. When growth stops, the feedback loops of the superscaling bad/poor outcomes, take a disproportionate share of new energy and materials, which leads to collapse or death. Think of age related diseases, malfunctions within a human body that eventually lead to death even if we call it natural causes in a 110 year old, which is why no animal or plant can live forever, even with more than adequate resources after growth ceases..
All complex systems seem to have the same laws of physics applying to them, which makes sense as they are all just an increase in entropy created by a sudden increase in energy gradient that has resulted as a consequence of localised order created out of the overall universal path of entropy. The large energy gradients we see—stars, planets, storms, volcanic activity and even life, ecosystems, civilizations—are essentially pockets of order that are powered by highly dissipative, entropy-increasing processes.
That’s the short version, in case of bus….
That’s a complicated enough, and new enough, and interesting enough, idea in the overshoot space to warrant an essay which I hope you write before a bus or old age takes you out.
You’ve been refining this scaling law idea for a long time. It will make a great essay, or chapter in your book.
I was beginning to wonder if you were ok since you’ve been quiet here and elsewhere. Seems you’ve been deep in the complexity/entropy weeds.
Just finished a big 2 week barn painting project at the farm. I learned how to use an airless sprayer. I much prefer the lower complexity, lower energy consuming, lower paint wasting, and lower time efficiency brush.
This is my thoughts as well. I went from climate change, peak oil to the economic system as a physiological system. Individual consumption in cities scales as Kleiber laws from comparative physiology, but the total consumption scales supra linear. Individual gains its because of efficiency gains. In comparative physiology there is less of the big animals but humans with abundant surplus breaks the laws. Big animals needs big areas.It is the same with human systems. Ecofootprint increases supra linear with size. Animals and human systems.
My aha moment was when I could se the economic system like a physiological system. Withers book on Comparative Physiology is very good.
Hello, are you who we used to refer to as Anesthesiologist?
Would you like to keep that nickname or pick a different one?
I’ll go back and edit all your comments with the correct name so we can follow your conversations.
Just a reminder that friend Panopticon compiles the best bi-weekly economic news roundup.
https://climateandeconomy.com/2025/09/12/12th-september-2025-todays-round-up-of-economic-news/
I liked this comment on AI by zip:
I am starting to suspect that AI is a massive bubble.
Nate’s recent interview with Russian scientist Anastassia Makarieva on how forests affect climate was very interesting.
I really like Makarieva.
A few take-aways that stuck with me:
I am planning on watching this podcast soon.
But the modern people think you can save forrest by living in cities. This drives even more forestry. Urban growth causes more biodiversity loss outside of cities | iDiv
You’ve made quite a few interesting comments here. Would you like to pick a nickname so we can follow you? How about Norwegian Doc?
I can go back add the nickname to your old comments.
Nickname: Huldulækni
I changed the name on all 19 of your comments.
From chatGPT:
Movie recommendations. Lately, I’ve been struggling to watch fiction. My collapse addicted brain won’t shut down as easy as it used to. But here are a few I was able to enjoy.
Wonder Boys (2000) – IMDb
Michael Douglas’s best role. Even though it’s the tired old cliche of a novelist with writer’s block, this story is less about writing than it is about the tortured souls that produce it.
Off the Map (2003) – IMDb
This one might have the most appeal to doomers because of the “off grid” aspect. They don’t make films like this anymore. This is one of those where you can really lose yourself in. When the film ends, like waking up after a beautiful dream, you’ll long to keep that magical feeling for as long as possible.
A Perfect Day (2015) – IMDb
M*A*S*H in the Balkans. Great story and great casting. Benicio del Toro and Tim Robbins should’ve made more films together.
Better Off Dead (1985) – IMDb
High Fidelity and Gross Pointe Blank are my favorite John Cusack movies. But this hilarious dark comedy gem from the 80’s is up there. After his girlfriend dumps him for a boorish ski jock, a depressed high-school student begins to ineptly attempt suicide, which brings him nothing but embarrassment. A French exchange student starts to change his outlook on life.
Thanks. Loved Grosse Ponte Blank. I’ve got Better Off Dead queued.
Andrii Zvorygin stretches out beyond Peak Oil and The Confederation of Planets Law of One religion.
By Lars Larsen – weird!
“I can now say with certainty after 15 years of study that the great tribulation is upon us.”
Saludos
el mar
https://skogslars.blogg.se/2025/september/the-rapture-is-upon-us.html
Saludos
el mar
I reviewed the work of Lars Larsen here.
After concluding we will be screwed by 2027 due to diesel shortages he shut down his blog to focus on the return of Jesus.
In a few months I’ll probably also join some charismatic group that promises life after death in utopia.
Funny what we see (and don’t see) in the moment.
I was not amused at the links shared by el mar. Sounds like Lars had a dream and then ran with it. I think I shouted out “Goddamn Lars, you crazy fuck!! Are you telling me I went all in with somebody who thinks God, Jesus, and the Rapture are real?”
And then I went to check out your review again… and yep, the warning is right there in broad daylight. LOL, I must have been too excited about the 2027 stuff to notice.
Still crossing my fingers that Lars turns out to be correct about diesel… but his credibility is in the toilet.
I’m way more forgiving than I used to be. It’s difficult to stay sane when you understand reality. I see the struggle in everyone that works in this space.
Good point about the people here. Makes me want to start taking bets on who will make it to the end without falling for the oh so very alluring afterlife story. I’d say the heavy favorites in order are:
James (1 to 1)
J.Doe (1 to 1)
Hideaway (2 to 1)
paqnation (2 to 1)
el mar (3 to 1)
Rob (4 to 1)
AJ (4 to 1)
nikoB (4 to 1)
The oddsmakers have set everyone else at 10 to 1.
Alright, let’s go. Place your bets. Winner! Winner!
What does 4 to 1 mean?
Am I 4 times more likely or less likely to go woo?
That was just for the payout. If I bet $100 on you not going woo, I win $400 profit if you pull it off.
Ya, I probably should’ve just gone with the probability of never going woo. I’d say:
James, JDoe 100%. Hideaway, me 95%. el mar 90%. Rob, AJ, nikoB 85%.
Rest of the audience is gonna be somewhere between 50-75%
I’d take the other side of the bet of me going ‘woo’, if I could collect in a time frame.
Even at high odds-on. Nothing like free money, but would only take the bet in terms of good steaks, or lamb or perhaps in cans of sardines at a point of my choosing, ie when food becomes in short supply…
Preptip:
Canned sardines, salmon, tuna, etc. are a priority prep item because:
– very healthy
– very delicious
– ready-to-eat, no stove energy required to cook
– no electricity required for storage
– super long shelf-life (i.e. ignore the best-by date)
– great for trading for other necessities because will be in high demand with rationing of protein and fat
LOL. No cheating. Not allowed to bet on yourself.
How do you think the Rapture will manifest itself? What should be expected? I am not sure I understand Lars’s claim.
I really think we should keep a page with the list of claims collected in comments.
Most claims turn out to be unclear in some way or another.
Sometimes there is no clear date. For instance, “next year at the soonest, but for sure in a couple of years”. What does a “couple of years” mean? Would 10 years work?
At least, Lars Larsen prediction is precise in this account: on the 23-24th of september 2025. And pretty soon, so we can check. 🙂
Although, he did write:
In any case, like you Rob, I try to be the most forgiving I can. When personal worldviews shatter, insanity can fill the void. There are no easy answers. And who really knows?
🙂
I have no idea. I don’t even know what a rapture is.
I’m guessing Larsen believes Jesus will return to planet earth as a man made of meat, and will lead us to override MPP and MORT, and will bring a magic wand that recharges the quality of non-renewable resource reserves so we can ignore Complexity Theory until the next rapture.
OK, thank you.
I thought there was some interpretation. For instance, something like the failure of the global logistic system or the banking system. Which would then lead to many people having to flee the cities (hence a pre-tribulation rapture). Or something like that.
But, I see now that I should read him more literally. Which does not necessarily mean he is wrong. Who am I to say?
Best 🙂
20+ million killed is not a small thing. That’s about the same number killed as WWI and a quarter of WWII.
It’s hard to fight the ruskies when you’ve hit limits to growth and you’re broke but maybe citizens will pitch in to fight WWIII, or more likely they’ll be coerced to pitch in via money printing inflation.
The last couple days I’ve been panning for gold in the buried files of un-Denial. Found this ten year old nugget from Apneaman. I don’t think I’ve seen a better description of the MPP.
ps. After reading a bunch of Apneaman’s excellent comments, I’m 100% convinced he’s J. Doe
C’mon J, don’t deny it. I already know I’m right.😊
Cool. I never go back and look at the old stuff but I suspect there’s some good content because we’ve had some excellent contributors over the years.
I sent an apology to Apneaman and asked him to come back but he didn’t reply.
I kind of doubt J. Doe and he are the same person. Both are excellent thinkers and writers but the tone feels like they are different people.
Dang it. Now I’m doubting myself. You’re definitely right about the tone being slightly different. I chalked it up to he has gotten less political and more nihilistic over the years.
Hey J, even if it’s not you, lie to us and take the credit. Apneaman was one of the best in the doomasphere. For anyone who thinks I might be overhyping him, check out this high praise from Rob in 2020:
Btw, I want that engraved on my tombstone.😊
Have you seen Apneaman recently at Megacancer? That’s the only other site I’ve seen him at.
I’ve been a regular there for over a year and have never seen his name. Just the older comments.
I think he pulled a Markinson… “Apneaman’s gone. There is no Apneaman”
Whenever I made an insightful (IMO) comment on the reality of our situation it seemed he was trying to dissemble or change the subject so I accused him of being a government agent. I didn’t hear from him after that.
That’s odd. I remember him staring into reality with the same ferocity as Jay Hanson and Jack Alpert. He could be very harsh on people who refused or were unable to see reality.
An example might be, after composing a long and thoughtful comment, having someone respond with a kitty cat video as if they’re trying to distract or dissemble.
Hmmm… Something changed.
I do remember he HATED left/right politics. If someone introduced even a hint of politics into their argument he would attack the whole thing.
J Doe here. And no, I’m not Apneaman. I don’t even know who that is – I don’t consider myself a doomer, the term feels too anthropocentric (humanity’s demise is someone else’s next big feast; even all-out global nuclear war: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Candidatus_Desulforudis_audaxviator – these little fuckers EAT radiation). I prefer the term nihilist. If you’re familiar with Dr. Ward’s Medea hypothesis ( https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Medea_hypothesis ), then you know that planet earth almost periodically purges itself of complex life, roughly every 100 million years. This happens through biotic, terrestrial events, abiotic-extraterrestrial events are only a fluke. I’ve come to see humans as a Medea-Class organism similar to hydrogen-sulfide-producing micro-organisms that usually initiate mass extinction events on this rock drifting through space. For a time I hypothesized that species with enough cognition could not be Medea-Class organisms, as they would observe themselves undermining their own existence and change course. That is until I realized that homo sapiens is also a Varki-Class organism.
Personally, I look at collapse as just another manifestation of the indifferent, entropic nature of the universe – it’s just a bunch of matter and energy interacting with other bunches of matter and energy, all doing their thing. As per the second law of thermodynamics, the universe approaches a state where everything is perfect darkness, perfect cold and perfect silence. In a way, you could argue that humans should be grateful that they can die – if they were somehow immortal, in the end, they would be floating, frozen chunks of meat (of course, MORT prevents them from thinking about that). I personally have no interest in convincing myself that you can punch a whole into physics, and I also am not very interested in participating in societal structures, so I’m not the kind of person who muses about solutions or tries to build communities. My motivations are more about knowledge, truth and understanding how the universe I got thrown into works, not saving humans from themselves or buying this planet a bit more time before the sun expands and melts it all down into sludge. ;D
That’s a great way to view what’s going on.
Do you have any thoughts on why Varki’s theory gets so little attention from overshoot aware people trying to understand why an intelligent species does what it does?
The people trying to make the future less bad have a 100% failure rate and almost none are curious why.
My best guess is that MORT operates in a very broad and complex way – I don’t see how we could design a specific death-denial module through biological mechanisms; but we could design an amygdala that suppresses fear-responses or simply reacts more intensely to positive stimuli rather than negative ones. Such an imbalance would likely already generate a profound optimism bias, and that’s just one conceivable mechanism on top of many others. Effectively, we end up with a very general capacity to deny/disregard anything that feels bad, especially when there is an alternative something that feels good. If it’s not just one gene, but a lot, then MORT would effectively be a spectrum, not a simple on/off switch, so maybe overshoot-aware people have a few less MORT-genes, but not few enough to push all the way through.
I also find it fascinating that Dr. Varki has an h-index of ~150 (that’s the top ~0.01% of all scientists ever). His most-cited paper has over 7 000 references across the scientific literature. But his MORT-related publications are among his least-cited ones (https://scholar.google.com/citations?user=NVzs9GoAAAAJ&hl=en), so even his own colleagues are ignoring it. My best guess is that it’s a lot like studying a disease – a physician might be the world’s finest expert on a very deadly, very contagious, very incurable disease, but this awareness does not immunize the physician, they can still contract the disease and die from it (another manifestation of MORT, really, when medical experts consider themselves invulnerable what they study). Just because you understand denial does not mean you are immune to it yourself. Overshoot-aware people might tell themselves that they are not in denial, because they clearly understand overshoot – but their sub-conscious wish for an outcome perceived as positive blocks a serious analysis of their obvious failures; so they could even use their much-less-than-average denial to deny (it’s fascinating how MORT is so self-referential on the meta-level).
I like to look at it from the other side and ask: what would have to be different so they would see it clearly? Now, I don’t have an answer to this question, but it’s on my mind a lot. I just fear that getting an answer won’t come without a very deep delve into neuro-genetics.
Nice.
I used to think “What would have to be different so they would see it clearly?” was the key question, and is essentially the reason I started un-Denial because I believed any positive change first required an acknowledgement of MORT.
Now I’m not so sure. Especially given our new insights from Hideaway’s complexity theory. It’s not clear what we could do now even if we had widespread awareness. As you so nicely explained in your last post, the universe is doing what it does and we’re just along for the ride.
I believe Dr. Varki agrees with your speculation that MORT most likely resulted from a modification to the amygdala. On the MORT optimism bias resulting from changes to many genes I’m not sure. That MORT emerged quickly and spread rapidly, and had to occur simultaneously with the mutations for an extended theory of mind, suggests MORT resulted from a relatively simple change to an existing mechanism, which provides hope for us to figure it out some day, if science was curious about denial, but it’s not.
I’ve had some recent exchanges with Dr. Varki about RFK and mRNA that suggests understanding of denial does not result in immunity.
Very cool comment. Well, you might not be Apneaman, but surely you’re Thomas Ligotti. LOL
You know who the most annoying personality on the planet is? The overshoot, energy, thermodynamics, etc aware hardcore nihilist. There’s not even a close 2nd place. And it’s not because he or she knows they’re right. It’s because their subconscious certainty factor is pegged at 100%.
When I was religious with the NDE and all, I was still a cocky prick about having it all figured out, but I doubt my subconscious confidence level ever got up to 25%. Yes, I was incredibly annoying, but I didn’t ooze it. That was the only reason I was able to tough it out with un-Denial and eventually be converted to the dark side. No website could drastically change my beliefs like that nowadays. And that’s because my subconscious certainty factor is pegged at 100.
Easiest way to gauge this is by asking the people in my life… every one of em will tell you that I’ve never been this annoyingly certain and hard to live with at any other point in my life. LOL
back again 😉
A few questions…:
How would you define ‘subconscious certainty’, how does it differ to conscious certainty? And I assume you mean that you are 100% certain of overshoot playing out and collapse following – or something more?
What does NDE refer to in this context?
What is this ‘dark side’ of which you speak. Jokes aside – serious question.
What did toughing it out entail, what had to go, to arrive here?
Oh, didn’t you know? Un-Denial is a satanic worshipping cult. That’s what I mean about the dark side. LOL, just kidding.
That subconsciousness stuff is mainly just me trying to sell my point.
Yes 100% certain about overshoot/collapse… but I was already there before I found this website. When I got here I was still filled to the brim with other hopium. Daniel Quinn and his nonsense. The noble savage stuff. Mother Earth and her children. Heck even aliens and galactic wars. (I mean c’mon the universe is way too big to not have some really cool shit going on)
But this site is where hopium goes to die. I wanted to quit many times and run back to Mr safe & comfortable Nate Hagens, but I knew the denial focus here outweighed the kicking and screaming about my precious hopium. So I toughed it out and eventually I was cured. LOL. And now I’m at point where I’m certain about a helluva lot more than collapse.
Here’s a couple links. This one explains the context of my NDE.
https://un-denial.com/2025/06/06/what-should-can-could-will-we-do/comment-page-1/#comment-112519
This will give you an idea of where I’m at now.
https://un-denial.com/2025/07/12/by-hideaway-eroei/comment-page-4/#comment-113523
This entire thread is worth reading.
https://un-denial.com/2025/07/12/by-hideaway-eroei/comment-page-2/#comment-113140
And this explains my understanding of MORT.
https://un-denial.com/2025/07/12/by-hideaway-eroei/comment-page-4/#comment-113648
Great! Thanks for generously providing a breadcrumb trail. Understanding someone else’s path is always interesting to me, and helps me reflect on the twists and turns I have taken along the way too. But I am also still orientating myself around Rob’s foundation writing, slowly slowly.
FYI – i have done some of what you refer to here as well. See my essay on Medium that inclueds:
So you can see I am quite primed to take in Rob’s ideas baded on all of this.
You’re welcome. And yes, slowly slowly is the name of the game. I even debated on sending you those links four because I thought it might be a bit too much… but then I decided that you could handle it.😊
And nice Medium site you have. You just talked me into trying ‘The End We Start From’. You’re a very good writer. I really hope you stick it out here at un-Denial because I can’t wait till you start publishing articles with this tone:
LOL, that’s from Thomas Ligotti’s book The Conspiracy Against the Human Race. IMO, he’s the most reality aware person on the planet.
I’m almost ashamed to admit that I haven’t read ‘Racing to Extinction’ yet. Seems right up my alley. But books are very tough for me nowadays. I’ve got a bad case of idiocracy.😊
The human shoulder girdle reminds me of this comment from Gaia gardener that I think you’ll enjoy. (and like you, she’s in her mid 50’s and lives in Australia. She’s taking a break from the doom & gloom, but hopefully she’ll be back soon)
https://un-denial.com/2024/07/20/by-paqnation-aka-chris-humans-are-not-a-species/comment-page-1/#comment-103408
I really like that quote from Ligotti, though I might have left off the hunks of spoiling flesh bit! and I am very much enjoying this exchange we have got going on. Onwards, after I get through some more of these links you sent 😉 (and I hope you enjoy the movie, I have watched it a couple of times, i think it’s superb) thanks re the review, if you can call it that, it’s more of a synopsis i guess. i read Gaia Gardener’s summary of how to process coffee beans already, was great.
Normally, Nature would filter out things like this.
@Rob Mielcarski
One Really nice thing Canada did for the US, was that you handled civilian flights diverted from the US during 9/11. I am too young to personally remember 9/11, but I would like to say thanks for that.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Operation_Yellow_Ribbon
By the way, Did anyone hear about what happened to Charlie Kirk.
Yeah, sad that the U.S. has descended to that level of violence. But it starts at the top with Trump and those opposing him. Kind of reminds me of an ultra conservative next door neighbor who wants to go to Portland and shoot liberals. I try to steer clear of political discussions around him, but he knows I used to be liberal so I feel that if the shit ever really hit the fan he’d come over here with a gun. LOL isn’t collapse in the U.S. great?
AJ
Thankfully, not all conservatives are not bloodthirsty ghouls like your neighbor. I live in a pretty liberal area so I may have some safety in numbers.
Nice rant by Indrajit Samarajiva today. Got a feeling the majority of 8 billion agree with him.
https://indi.ca/none-of-this-had-to-happen/
LOL. Great line! (even though the problem has much less to do with the natives hospitality & gullibility, and much more to do with the MPP)
ps. Do you lurk here Indi? You should look into those old Native American visions and prophecies about collapse and how white man will be the most hated & oppressed on the way out. Your schadenfreude will have a field day with that shit.😊 And I bet it will give you some interesting ideas for future essays.
Dave Pollard’s newest post explains his theory of how we got into this mess.
How Did We Get Into This Mess Anyway? | how to save the world
Couple weeks ago I tried to convert Dave. (lol. I’ve given up on Tom Murphy, so I had to move on to someone else). I threw everything in my arsenal at him. It’s mostly a bunch of regurgitated stuff. And I stole a few comments from you guys. I don’t have time to be citing quotes in the middle of a big sales presentation. Don’t worry though, I gave a half ass acknowledgement at the end.
My pitch definitely needs work. And it’s missing an important section about how full consciousness makes us invent stories (god, religion, afterlife) in order to cope.
https://howtosavetheworld.ca/2025/08/24/our-species-unique-intolerance-of-difference/#comment-150730
ps. Haven’t heard this song in years. I’m sure most of us can relate to being a little psychotic over an ex-lover? Nothing worse than running into one (when you’re still hung up) at a bar or nightclub and then watching her leave with some random dude. LOL, “the horror! the horror!”
My all-time psycho moment happened after I woke up at 5am after a night of partying. Hungover with a helluva suspicion that my ex and my friend were up to some hanky panky (I had run into them at a bar that night and they were acting very weird). So I jumped in my car and drove an hour to my ex’s house to investigate. And sure enough, his car was in her driveway when I got there. My genius plan was to bang on the door and beat the shit out him when he came outside… but I chickened out, parked a few houses down, cried like a baby for a while, then drove home. LOL, what a creepy weirdo.
Most of my worst decisions in life revolved around sex in some way. Being asexual now (I’m going on 15 years) has its pros and cons, but at least those psycho moments are a thing of the past.
A nod to MORT and Varki in this article from an overshoot aware writer I follow on Medium.
Pie in the sky View at Medium.com
“Denying reality is what humans do best. Despite being an obvious flaw, it’s surely a trait that evolved in us because it benefited us in some way. Some speculate it evolved in concert with an awareness of our mortality — just the right combination to keep us taking risks (also evolutionarily advantageous) and yet allow us to make plans for the future. We will likely never know why we humans are so good at denying reality; we must accept that we are, that’s what we do, and work hard to minimize its impact.
One of the ways we deny reality is with language. Finding the ways we humans use language to deny reality is a hobby of mine, in part because I find denial of the reality of the predicament we’re in so fascinating (in a “wow, we humans sure are flawed” way).”
The article contained this link in the opening paragraph.
https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ajit_Varki#Mind_Over_Reality_Transition_(MORT)
Thanks Campbell.
Nice to see Varki’s theory acknowledged.