The Cactus Lens: A Clearer View

Until recently there have been 3 main lenses through which to view our overshoot predicament: debt, energy, and ecology.

Each lens exposes a different aspect of the picture, but not the complete picture.

Each lens focusses on different threats, with different time frames, and different consequences, and each lens suggests a different optimal response.

Overshoot awareness varies by lens and group within society. Awareness of leaders is generally higher than citizens, and in some cases this is deliberate and warranted because broad citizen awareness of the debt and energy threats would increase the probability of short term collapse.

For leaders and citizens that see through any of the lenses, their understanding tends to be incomplete, which has resulted in plans of action that will not help, or that make the situation worse.

This incomplete understanding is caused in part because the issues are very complex, and in part because some aspects of human overshoot have no acceptable or feasible solution, and in part because of the human tendency to deny unpleasant realities, as explained by Dr. Ajit Varki’s MORT theory.

Hideaway, a frequent contributor at un-Denial, Peak Oil Barrel, Our Finite World and other sites, recently introduced a new lens we have named cactus, which focusses on all non-renewable resources and the complexity required to extract them.

I think the cactus lens provides the clearest view of what is going on, what we should expect in the short to medium term, and what we should do.

The cactus lens changes what is in the best interests of citizens to understand.

The debt and energy lenses suggest citizens should remain in the dark.

The ecology lens suggests it does not matter what citizens understand because the ecology threats are longer term than debt, energy, and cactus, and because awareness of ecology issues have not and will not improve anything of substance due to the nature of modernity.

With the introduction of the cactus lens, it is now in the best short term interests of all groups: countries, leaders, and citizens, for awareness to be as widespread as possible.

Achieving broad cactus awareness will be difficult because it is very unpleasant, and therefore will be blocked by our genetic denial behavior, however I propose one idea to start the discussion on how we might spread cactus awareness.

Awareness Lens: Debt

Theory:

  • Modernity requires abundant credit;
  • Because most of our mines, machines, technology, and structures require significant up front capital to build;
  • Which requires a fractional reserve debt backed monetary system;
  • Which is now used by every country in the world;
  • Which by design requires economic growth to not collapse;
  • Because money is loaned into existence and growth is needed to pay interest;
  • Which means our economic system requires infinite growth on a finite planet;
  • Which of course is impossible and means we should expect growth to slow and prosperity to decline, as they are;
  • Culminating in a dramatic and harmful economic reset;
  • However modernity will survive and will rebuild until the next bubble pops.

Status :

  • Quite a few citizens see through the debt lens, maybe a significant minority.
  • Most aware citizens assume the reset is a ways off in the future.
  • Some people prepare to weather a storm with cash, gold, bitcoin, or sardines.
  • Others trust or hope that central banks will print enough money to kick the can past their expiry.
  • Leaders understand and acknowledge the debt problem but are careful to not cause panic because herd emotions could trigger a reset.
  • Leaders are also careful to not explain the driver of the debt problem, energy depletion, as will be discussed in the next section on the energy lens.
  • The debt threat is closer and more severe than our leaders let on as demonstrated by:
  1. Social unrest everywhere is rising because living standards are falling and the wealth gap is widening.
  2. Geopolitical tensions are rising.
  3. Democracies are oscillating between wider extremes.
  4. Most countries have historically high levels of growing debt.
  5. Growth has slowed, and the only growth possible now comes at the expense of adding more debt than the growth it buys, which is unsustainable.
  6. No political party in power anywhere reduces their deficit or balances their budget because it’s now impossible without crashing their system. The US DOGE effort lasted 5 months before leaders gave up and juiced the deficit to new record highs.
  7. Central banks work hard behind the curtain to keep our everything bubble inflated, and to prevent any significant correction of stock or asset prices. When I was young it was normal for the economy and stock market to experience cycles. We don’t permit cycles anymore. Today there is so much debt and so little growth that a significant correction will result in a reset (aka crash).
  8. Printing bazookas are used to blast any threat before it builds momentum, like the banking system repo problem that covid provided cover for unprecedented money printing.
  9. Our leaders tried but failed to use covid as an excuse to implement the tools needed to manage an economic reset like digital ids/currencies for rationing scarce necessities, and for enabling negative interest rates, and tried via “The Great Reset” propaganda campaign to get us ready to accept nationalization of assets (aka “you will own nothing and be happy”). They will try again.

Implications:

  • The debt lens implies a zero-sum game: In a no growth world, one country’s gain is another country’s loss.
  • Our leaders believe that a country that succeeds in harming its competitors will experience less damage from an economic reset. The goal is to ensure opponents reset before you do, on the assumption that this will prevent or delay your own reset by gaining control of more growth generating assets and markets.
  • Hence we see the weaponization of tariffs and trade, regime change operations, and proxy wars intended to weaken or capture opponents.

Conclusions:

  • A debt reset is mathematically inevitable and will reduce the standard of living for the majority via deflation and/or inflation.
  • Debt resets are hard to predict and control because herd emotions drive the process.
  • Leaders have good reasons to not want citizens to be aware of the seriousness of the debt problem.
  • Leaders are operating on the assumption of a zero-sum game.
  • In the cactus lens section we’ll see that the zero-sum game assumption is wrong, which means the current strategy will make things worse for all countries.

Awareness Lens: Energy

Theory:

  • Modernity requires abundant net energy;
  • Which is the energy that remains after using energy to extract and refine energy;
  • Because all of our food, water, minerals, technology, products, and services are produced and delivered by machines powered by energy.
  • Diesel is the keystone energy that powers our vital mining machines, tractors, combines, trucks, trains, and ships.
  • Renewable energy is not a solution to non-renewable depletion because renewables require abundant non-renewable energy t0 build, install, maintain, and augment for 24/7 supply.
  • Discovery of new fossil energy reserves is much slower than depletion of existing reserves, and the gap is growing.
  • The quality of non-renewable energy reserves decline as they deplete;
  • Which means net energy is falling;
  • Which explains why growth is slowing, and prosperity is declining, and debt is growing faster than GDP everywhere.
  • We should expect the trend to continue and accelerate.
  • Leaders believe modernity will continue for those countries that have access to energy.

Status:

  • Few citizens see through the energy lens.
  • There are many false energy beliefs in wide circulation including net zero, peak oil demand, abiotic oil, green energy, renewables outpacing fossils, hydrogen economy, nuclear renaissance, space mining, circular economy, etc., etc..
  • These beliefs are nonsense not grounded in sound science or economics, but the issues are complex, and it is difficult for a citizen to determine the truth, especially with deliberate misdirection from leaders, and with MORT driven hope and denial driving behavior.
  • Denial is a strong force that fogs the energy lens because, short of a near zero probability miracle, there is no solution, and the outlook is steadily worsening living standards.
  • Most leaders, with help from their energy aware militaries, understand what is going on, and know the energy threat is imminent. Evidence for this includes:
  1. Inflation of energy intensive products, like food, is high; energy intensive infrastructure is not being properly maintained; energy intensive manufacturing, like weapons, is struggling to keep up with demand despite plentiful printed money available; war is shifting to lower energy methods like drones; and as also seen through the debt lens, debt is accelerating, living standards are falling, the wealth gap is widening, geopolitical tensions are rising, and democracies are at risk.
  2. The EIA this year announced that fracked oil is peaking. Fracked oil is the unexpected savior that bought us an extra decade after conventional oil peaked.
  3. Leaders do not want their citizens to panic, or to spook the stock market bubble which depends on growth, so they do not discuss the energy problem, and work hard to distract citizens with nonsense like optimism for a renewable transition, or by stoking emotions over socially divisive issues.
  4. Trump reversed his no more regime change promises after being sworn in and briefed about US debt and oil forecasts.
  5. Every country with significant exportable oil reserves that is not controlled by the US empire is either under attack or being regime changed including Russia, Iran, Syria, Venezuela, and Nigeria. Even friends with oil, or close to oil, like Canada and Greenland, have been threatened with annexation.
  6. Propaganda is successfully being used to convince citizens that regime change operations are to prevent terrorism or drug trafficking, not to control oil.
  7. China is stockpiling strategic oil reserves.
  8. A few countries, like Germany, made an honest attempt to run their economies with renewable energy, but it’s now obvious to leaders everywhere that the renewable dream has failed. German leaders now want war with energy rich Russia.
  9. The UK, having drained its own oil reserves, now wants war with energy rich Russia.
  10. Hail Mary investments praying for a miracle are being made in AI and nuclear energy.

Implications:

  • The energy lens implies a zero-sum game: In an energy scarce world, one country’s gain is another country’s loss.
  • Our leaders understand their country’s prosperity requires non-renewable energy, and that it must be secured by any means necessary, including taking it by force from others.
  • Countries are preparing for war by increasing military expenditures, even at the expense of social services demanded by citizens.
  • Nuclear arms treaties are being abandoned, and the arms race is restarting.
  • Lessons learned during the cold war about the dangers of nuclear war are being ignored, and red lines are increasingly flirted with.
  • It’s hard to imagine how nuclear war can be avoided given that everyone’s survival depends on oil, and the zero-sum game assumption of our leaders.

Conclusions:

  • Modernity requires growth, and there is not enough oil left for everyone to grow.
  • Leaders have good reasons to not want citizens to be aware of the seriousness of the energy problem.
  • Leaders are operating on the assumption of a zero-sum game.
  • In the cactus lens section we’ll see that the zero-sum game assumption is wrong, which means the current strategy will make things worse for all countries.

Awareness Lens: Ecology

Theory:

  • The resources consumed, and the wastes generated, and the habitats occupied, by the large and growing population of humans, is displacing other species, and causing damage to ecosystems faster than can be repaired by the planet’s recycling systems.

Status:

  • The 8,230,000,000 humans, plus their 35,000,000,000 livestock, plus their billions of pets and other freeloaders like rats, now weighs 80 times more than all wild land mammals combined.
  • Humans use 30-40% of the net primary productivity of all sunlight hitting the planet, plus 16,000,000,000 liters per day of ancient sunlight stored as oil, plus 11,000,000,000 cubic meters per day of ancient sunlight stored as natural gas, plus 24,000,000,000 kilograms per day of ancient sunlight store as coal.
  • The sixth mass extinction is underway.
  • Six of nine planetary boundaries critical for survival have already been crossed including climate change, biodiversity, deforestation, fresh water, nitrogen cycle, and pollution.
  • We have already passed the 1.5C safe limit and are on a path to a 3+C temperature increase that is incompatible with civilization and agriculture by the end of this century.
  • Biodiverse forests are being replaced with mono-crop agriculture.
  • Fisheries are in decline.
  • Sea level rise will damage many cities over the next century.
  • Glacier loss threatens the survival of several countries.
  • Chemical toxins and microplastics are harming the health of all life including humans.
  • Awareness of leaders and citizens about the ecological problems varies widely.
  • Most people are aware of some of the problems, but also tend to superficially simplify them down to one issue, CO2, that can be fixed with solar panels and electric vehicles.
  • Few are aware of the breadth and depth of the problems.
  • Many people deny the severity of the problems and/or that humans have caused the problems.
  • Almost everyone denies the implications of the ecological problems, and the fact there is almost nothing that can be done to address them while maintaining modernity and our population.
  • Every effort, by every country, and every organization, and every citizen, to address the above problems, has failed, and will continue to fail, at least until something forces an involuntary change to population and lifestyles.

Implications:

  • The view through the ecology lens is dire.
  • The long term implications are worse than those seen through the debt and energy lenses because we are damaging the ability for any human lifestyle to thrive, and are also harming many other species.

Conclusions:

  • Life threatening ecological problems, for the majority of people, are further in the future than the imminent problems seen through the debt, energy, and soon to be explained, cactus lenses.
  • All of the ecological problems are caused by the human species footprint which is the product of lifestyle and population.
  • None of the ecological problems can be addressed without reducing per capita consumption or population, and the debt and cactus lenses show that modernity requires growth, which means the ecological problems are a classic predicament, a problem without an acceptable solution.
  • The energy and cactus lenses show that growth will not continue, and the human footprint will soon shrink, which means there may be an improvement to future ecology trends.
  • Many of the ecological problems we have created will repair quickly when the scale of the human enterprise shrinks.
  • Some ecological problems will take a very long time to repair, and adaptation of surviving species will be required.
  • As will be discussed in more detail in the next section, if we somehow became aware that the scale of humanity was going to decrease in the not too distant future, no matter what we do, then we might be able to motivate ourselves to address several ecological issues that would improve the quality of life for the survivors, such as burying nuclear waste, and protecting biodiverse forests and marine ecosystems.

Awareness Lens: Cactus

CACTUS = Complexity Accelerated Collapse of a Thermodynamically Unsustainable System

The phrase “we’re cactus” is Australian slang meaning something is ruined, broken, or finished, often used to describe a situation where progress has stopped, such as a vehicle that won’t start.

The expression likely originated from the infamous prickly pear cactus, which once infested large parts of Australia before being controlled by the introduced Cactoblastis cactorum moth.

This slang is part of a broader set of Australian expressions for something being in disrepair or useless, including terms like “boonted,” “clapped-out,” “had the chad,” “had the bomb,” and “kaput”.

While “cactus” as a metaphor for being broken or ruined is well-established in Australian English, it is not commonly used in other English-speaking regions.

Theory:

  • Modernity requires abundant minerals and energy.
  • The majority of minerals and energy we use are non-renewable and finite.
  • Recycling is economically and/or technically impossible for most minerals.
  • For those minerals that can be recycled, there are losses in the recycling process that still result in long term depletion.
  • The quality of mineral and energy reserves decline as they deplete, because we always harvest the best quality reserves first.
  • Mineral and energy extraction technologies must increase in complexity to compensate for falling reserve quality to maintain flows of resources. For example, compare modern directional drilling now required for fracking with early oil rigs. Or the giant trucks and other machines now required to haul and process low grade copper ore.
  • Rising complexity increases the materials, processes, skills, locations, and number of people needed to design and manufacture the technologies.
  • Rising complexity requires a growing market to support the increasing cost of designing and manufacturing technologies. For example, a smaller population would not buy enough phones to make a TSMC factory in Taiwan viable, and therefore the advanced chips needed for oil exploration and extraction would not exist.
  • A growing market requires a growing economy and population.
  • A growing economy and population increases the consumption of all minerals and energy.
  • Wastes generated by the growing economy and population create increasing frictions to further growth.
  • This self-reinforcing complexity growth system drives an increase in mineral and energy flows until technology, markets, and population can no longer keep up with growing waste frictions and declining reserve qualities, and a critical mineral or energy becomes unavailable in the quantities required.
  • Scarcity of the critical mineral or energy triggers a system wide technology breakdown cascade because many technologies depend on it, and many other technologies depend on those technologies, via an ultra-complex network of dependencies.
  • The unavailability of many technologies then causes many more mineral and energy flows to become unavailable in the quantities required because the quality of remaining reserves makes extraction difficult or impossible without the latest technologies.
  • This self-reinforcing collapse of complexity, technology, and resource flows is certain at some point in the not too distant future and will result in a supernova end to modernity and civilization.
  • Nothing can be done to prevent this outcome, just as nothing can be done to prevent the collapse of a star.
  • It’s not possible to have modernity without infinite growth on a finite planet which means modernity will be short lived everywhere in the universe.

Hideaway responds:

  • Hence the logical solution to the Fermi Paradox. Species that reach modernity anywhere do not last long enough to detect others, that have also reached modernity, spread through time.
  • Given the age of our galaxy of around 13.6B years, and if it took 3.6B years for the first species to reach modernity, then if each lasted from 100 years to say 400 years at best, there could have been 1 every million years giving a total of 10,000 for our galaxy and none would ever detect another.
  • Even if 10 or 20 had popped up at the one time, just through chance, and were more than 400-500 light years apart, they would never know of the other’s existence.
  • Just by shear chance, some might detect others, but the odds of any one civilization detecting another is extremely small.
  • Say we did detect another civilization somewhere in the close area within say 1000 light years. So what? By the time we tried to communicate back to them, the odds of their collapse is high.

Status:

  • A tiny minority of people see through the cactus lens.
  • The cactus view of modernity has not been widely discussed.
  • The closest work that I can recall reading is that by David Korowizc where he discusses the extreme complexity and fragility of modern supply chains, and the risk of their breakdown with energy shortages. Korowizc advocates building more resiliency into our system, but I don’t think he stated clearly that modernity will soon end no matter what we do, as Hideaway’s cactus lens does.
  • The ground breaking Limits to Growth work of Dennis Meadows et. al. assumed collapse could be avoided by adopting a steady state population and economy. Cactus shows this assumption is incorrect. Any dependence on any resource that is not naturally recycled by ecological systems will eventually result in a collapse back to a state that is not dependent on the resource.
  • Other important overshoot aware people like Jay Hanson and Jack Alpert discuss the certainty of modernity’s demise, but do not focus on the non-renewable resource extraction complexity growth system to conclude that modernity will end in a supernova.

Implications:

The cactus lens provides several profound insights that create a clearer view than the debt, energy, or ecology lenses.

List every non-renewable resource that civilization depends on.

ChatGPT:

Fossil Fuels: Oil, gas, coal, oil sands, shale oil/gas, peat.

Nuclear Fuels: Uranium-235/238, thorium, plutonium (derived).

Metals: Iron, aluminum, copper, nickel, cobalt, lithium, zinc, lead, tin, silver, gold, platinum group metals, titanium, molybdenum, tungsten, vanadium, niobium, tantalum, chromium, manganese, rare-earth elements (all 17 REEs), and many others.

Industrial Minerals: Phosphate rock, potash, sulfur, borates, fluorspar, gypsum, halite, graphite, silica sand, feldspar, kaolin, etc.

Construction Materials: Limestone, aggregates (sand & gravel), clay, granite, marble, slate, stone.

Geologic Water: Fossil groundwater aquifers.

Biological/Ecological Resources (functionally non-renewable): Topsoil, old-growth forests, biodiversity, coral reefs, major fish stocks.

  1. The first key insight is that modernity depends on many non-renewable materials, not just energy, and they are all critical for the technologies that enable modernity. Cactus is thus a much wider lens than the peak oil view.
  2. The second key insight is that modernity requires growth, not only because of the widely understood need for abundant credit as explained by the debt lens, but also because extraction technologies must increase in complexity to compensate for falling reserve qualities. This growth requirement is physical and non-negotiable, and unlike debt, is not digits in a computer that can be reset.
  3. The third key insight is that the requirement for growth, coupled with the inevitable decline in reserve qualities, creates a self-amplifying feedback loop for every one of the many non-renewable resources we depend on, which creates many possible failure points, and the extreme complexity and interdependencies of the technologies we use to extract minerals and energy guarantees a catastrophic failure of the entire system at some point.
  4. The fourth key insight is that this growth and collapse process is certain for any system that is dependent on non-renewable resources. This means there is no possible sustainable solution for advanced civilization anywhere in the universe, because advanced civilization is not possible without non-renewable resources.
  5. The fifth key insight is that there will be no recovery of modernity after the collapse. The quality of many of the remaining non-renewable resource reserves will be so low after the collapse that many resources will be unavailable without advanced technologies and abundant diesel, and there will be no way of rebuilding those technologies because their development required higher quality resource reserves. Surviving humans will return to their hunter gatherer origins.
  6. The sixth key insight is that the zero-sum game strategy that the debt and energy lenses inform our leaders to use, will reduce the time to collapse, and will not optimize the quality of life for the time that remains. War, for the last 10,000 years, was a good response to scarcity. War, today, will create scarcity for the entire planet.

Conclusions:

Given that our leaders see the world through debt and energy lenses, they are operating on the assumption of a zero-sum game:

  • My country will do better if I damage the economy of my competitors.
  • My country will survive or grow if I take energy from my competitors.

The cactus lens shows us that a zero-sum game strategy will not achieve the desired outcomes.

Instead, zero-sum game strategies will reduce the time to collapse, or reduce the quality of the time that remains. Examples include:

  • Wasting resources, fragmenting the market, and decreasing efficiencies by trying to duplicate and reshore manufacturing.
  • Making it more difficult to maintain complexity by fragmenting the global trade system through the encouragement of BRICS and by imposing trade sanctions.
  • Wasting resources on bigger militaries that won’t help.
  • Wasting resources on climate change policies that won’t help.
  • Wasting resources by subsidizing renewable energy that won’t help.
  • Increasing the chance of violent harms to many by blaming other countries and/or immigrants for hardship caused by resource depletion.
  • Ignoring international law when it conflicts with a zero-sum goal.
  • Sanctioning Russian energy.
  • Blowing up the Nord Stream pipeline.
  • Restarting a nuclear arms race.
  • Risking disruptions to middle east oil flows, and destroying respect for leaders, by supporting the genocide of Palestinians.
  • Funding a proxy war against Russia in Ukraine.
  • Provoking China to withhold rare earth minerals.
  • Provoking China to stockpile oil.
  • Regime changing Syria.
  • Regime changing Iran.
  • Regime changing Venezuela.
  • Threatening to invade Nigeria.
  • Pissing off Canadians so not a one will buy a US product. 🙂

The cactus lens points us to a positive-sum game strategy.

Modernity is a global system of unimaginable complexity dependent on resources, technologies, processes, and skills sourced from 6 continents. A complex component will often travel back and forth between continents many times in the process of converting its constituent minerals into a finished product. Almost every country plays a roll in the complex web that sustains us.

Modernity depends on millions of interdependent components, each with a uniquely complex supply chain, and modernity’s aggregate supply chain is far too complex for any leader, or even a computer, to predict the consequences of disrupting the matrix to achieve a zero-sum game goal.

The risk of unintended consequences is high given that zero-sum game strategies will tend to focus on depriving energy and thus damaging the entire economy of an opponent country.

Plans to reshore manufacturing will make things worse. We don’t have the surplus capital or debt headroom needed to achieve this without damaging something else, and it will be very wasteful of non-renewable resources by creating capacity greater than the market can absorb, thus reducing the time to collapse.

The cactus lens shows us modernity will eventually collapse permanently, taking down every country in the process. There is nowhere to hide, and there is nothing we can do to prevent this. No country will be immune.

With cactus awareness and a positive-sum game strategy we could:

  • Make wise decisions that delay the collapse so we can enjoy more of modernity’s benefits, or at least avoid doing stupid things that accelerate the collapse.
  • Do some things to optimize quality of life until the end, or at least avoid doing stupid things that worsen quality of life.
  • Consider doing some things that might improve the quality of life for the post collapse survivors.

Actions that might delay the collapse and optimize quality of life until the end include:

  • Avoid conflicts and wars that harm citizens, damage supply chains, and waste non-renewable energy and minerals.
  • Stop the subsidy of renewable energy that wastes non-renewable resources and reduces the time to collapse.
  • Stop wasting money on climate change policies that will not change the outcome.
  • Put the Sulphur back into ship fuel.
  • Strengthen global governance and conflict resolution via UN like organizations.
  • Renew and improve treaties to reduce the risk of nuclear war.
  • Remove barriers to trade.
  • Encourage well regulated immigration to optimize global labor.
  • Allow market forces to optimize the global economy for maximum efficiency.
  • Adopt digital currencies to enable fairer and more efficient money printing, and to manage the fair rationing of scarcities.
  • Provide sound lifestyle and dietary advice with encouragements to help citizens improve their health and quality of life, and to reduce the healthcare drag on economies.
  • Fairly enforce laws to encourage law & order and good behavior.
  • Provide open and honest communication to citizens so they know what is going on and why, and no longer feel like they are being gaslit by wizards behind a curtain.
  • Provide meaningful and rewarding goals to citizens, like asking them to volunteer to rehabilitate habitats and soils to help post-collapse survivors.
  • When signs of the final collapse become visible, provide a painless end of life kit to any citizen that wants one to reduce their anxiety.

Notice that nothing on the above list requires a change in lifestyle for the majority, or the overriding of evolved behaviors like the Maximum Power Principle, or singing kumbaya, or sharing everything equally, or eating bugs.

Limits to growth are breaking our democracies. Citizens know their standard of living is falling, but do not understand why, so they vote for the politician that most credibly promises a better life, but leaders are powerless to improve living standards, which breeds politicians that are superb at lying, but not well suited to optimizing a complex problem. Then when the leader does not deliver, the citizen is pissed off, and next time votes for someone more extreme that blames the immigrants or the Chinese, and so on, which accelerates us in the wrong direction. The only way to break this path to despots is awareness.

With cactus awareness we will understand the comforts we enjoy are rare in the universe, are very fragile, and will soon be gone forever on this planet. This could lead to gratitude and care to not cause a premature collapse.

Cactus awareness will create strong pressure between countries, and by citizens on leaders, to not break things.

If we understand modernity will soon be gone for everyone no matter what we do, there will be less need to dominate and win, and more need to enjoy and cooperate to extend the good times.

Humans are an innovative species. With cactus awareness there would be many people thinking about what could be done to buy more time. Maybe we should use this resource for this rather than that? Opposition to change from people who have to give something up might be muted if they understood the change will buy a few more good years.

Some ideas to improve the quality of life for the post collapse survivors will be difficult to decide and implement because many of these will conflict with the goal of delaying collapse as long as possible. On the other hand, if we collectively understand collapse is inevitable, it might be easier to say set aside some forest or wildlife habitat, or bury nuclear waste, knowing that your children or grandchildren might benefit.

Imagine the effect of cactus awareness on philanthropy. What might billionaires with children do with their wealth if they understood modernity will soon be gone? Perhaps they might buy up biodiverse rainforests to protect them.

Shifting from the current zero-sum game strategy to a positive-sum game strategy will be very difficult.

Cactus is very unpleasant. Genetic denial, as explained by MORT, will be in full force resisting cactus awareness.

On the other hand, almost everything going on in the world today is also very unpleasant, and many people are losing their minds because nothing makes sense.

In a strange way, cactus may be less unpleasant than what we are currently asked to believe, because the cactus story at least agrees with what our eyes see, and provides reasons for gratitude when times are tough, so maybe there’s a chance for cactus awareness.

We evolved in small tribes that in times of scarcity had to fight other tribes to survive. There are no attacking aliens to unite us.

The cactus lens does point to a common threat that will kill almost everyone, but most people won’t believe it.

When times get tougher, as they surely will, leaders will have zero chance of adopting a positive-sum game strategy unless a majority of citizens see the world through the cactus lens.

Those of us that are cactus aware should start brainstorming how to spread cactus awareness.

Here’s one idea:

We could recruit the powerful institutions that were created by MORT: religions.

Cactus awareness will be fantastic for the life after death businesses. All religions will boom with growing memberships, donations, and tithes.

Religions therefore could be self-interested and enthusiastic allies for spreading the cactus gospel.

Religions also have the perfect infrastructure and skills needed to spread an idea like cactus and its positive-sum game belief system.

A likely roadblock to our leaders embracing the cactus lens is the big money behind financial institutions that depend on good news for their pump the bubble business model.

I’m thinking that it shouldn’t be too hard to get them on board. The cactus lens doesn’t say everyone has to live like poor monks in a cave.

Cactus tells us the end will be painful but mercifully quick, so those so inclined can party on like it’s 19991 in a glorious bubble until the last day…

1The highest net energy we ever enjoyed was in 1999 when about 4% of energy was needed to extract energy. Today it takes about 10-15% of energy to extract energy, and the ratio is continuing to rise.

307 thoughts on “The Cactus Lens: A Clearer View”

    1. This is a pretty clear-eyed description of our predicament–but “renewables” are perhaps too quickly dismissed. True, solar and wind are obvious failures. But geothermal energy–which relies on the inexhaustible and nonpolluting heat of the Earth’s core–is different. While geothermal energy requires technology and mining in the form of subsurface mapping, drilling deep wells, and systems of power conductivity to access and distribute it, there is still a tiny amount of good news: the technologies and infrastructure for geothermal already exist! Technologies and infrastructure that were developed for the filthy fossil fuel industry can be converted–with some adjustments–to access and distribute geothermal energy. Even fracking–the devil incarnate to environmentalists everywhere–can be re-purposed. Iceland is an example: “Geothermal energy is the largest single source of primary energy in Iceland, providing approximately 70.38% of the total in 2020, while hydropower, oil, and other sources make up the remainder.” ~Dr. Google

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      1. Rats, your geothermal rebuttal to Cactus is a little depressing. I tried really hard to be clear and logical and unimpeachable, however I failed because it seems you either did not understand or you disagree with everything I wrote.

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          1. Hi Steven,

            You are very productive with 18 essays published since your blog opened a month ago.

            I find writing on overshoot topics very draining and could never match your output.

            I see you may have some assembly language experience. If true we share a common path.

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            1. The reason for the insane level of output is I’ve been bottling these essays up ever since I stopped posting on peakoil.com. Commenting on YouTube left me convinced nobody could even see most of what I was writing. I tried writing a couple of books in the last few years, but found this difficult due to scope creep, but it has resulted in having a lot of material to hand. Writing on Substack gives me a little more discipline to keep focussed on topic. I did have to unpublish one essay because it never really arrived at the destination I intended, though! It’s probably not difficult to guess what the topics of the books were, but I say it anyway: “Anthropogenic Entropy” (shock!) and microcomputer history, with a particular focus on ARM. What’s surprising, perhaps, is that they tell a coherent story.

              What acted as the catalyst was when I had the epiphany which led to the SETE model. I’ve had this mental framework, through which I’ve interpreted “collapse” ever since my Peak Oil days. From that, I coined; the “Resource Entropy Singularity”; then earlier this year it occurred to me this framework may actually be coherent and mathematically grounded, not just a metaphor. So, I worked out the variables, and the relationships and formalised it. I suddenly had a strong incentive to present this framework so I could get the right people to look at the model.

              This is where I introduce the model, and how I came to it:
              https://theuaob.substack.com/p/the-gravity-of-the-situation

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              1. Your essay is very good Steven.

                I see similarities and differences between your SETE model and Hideaway’s Cactus.

                SETE says our economy cannot slow down. Cactus agrees but also says our economy must speed up.

                SETE says the forces that require growth are infrastructure accumulation, decay, and complexity growth. Cactus says the main force for growth is the increasing extraction complexity and efficiency needed to offset the declining quality of non-renewable resource reserves.

                SETE says the collapse will be caused by falling ERoEI. Cactus agrees but adds additional risks from our dependence on many interdependent non-renewable resources, each with a requirement for growing extraction complexity.

                SETE thinks change to a more sustainable path is theoretically possible but will not happen because of the inertia of vested interests. Cactus says change to a more sustainable path is physically impossible regardless of beliefs or interests.

                Cactus says there will be no recovery of modernity after the collapse. SETE is silent on this issue.

                Cactus says the collapse will be a supernova. SETE is silent on the shape of the collapse.

                Cactus says modernity will be short lived everywhere in the universe. SETE is silent on this issue.

                Cactus says the beliefs and actions of our leaders are reducing the time to collapse. SETE is silent on this issue.

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          2. Let’s be honest about what this is: Demand Destruction.
            British industry is shutting down because it cannot hedge the volatility. British households are turning off the heating because the standing charges alone are punitive. The grid remains stable not because supply is robust, but because the poor have been priced out of the market. The “margin” exists only because we have forced the most vulnerable off the grid.

            How would this dovetail with AMOC collapse? If the AMOC collapses in the near term, it will be the nail in the coffin for Industry in Western Europe, because all remaining energy would be directed to heating.

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        2. >>> however I failed because it seems you either did not understand or you disagree with everything I wrote.

          The former is my guess. The post was very clear to me Rob, thanks.

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      2. Geothermal energy relies upon mining of ores that we stick down into the ground as highly complex piping using pumps with exotic materials that can withstand great temperature, pressure and often corrosive elements.

        In Iceland the country that is held as the for example of the geothermal potential, most of the Aluminium production in the country uses hydro power as it’s the real source of cheap electricity. The geothermal is a minor player and used mostly for home and building heating.

        If geothermal, like so much else, was a real candidate for cheap electricity with a better EROEI, then stand alone plants would already be built all over the world as it would be more competitive than other sources. It simply isn’t happening as it’s not a high EROEI energy source.

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        1. I just helped a friend fix his geothermal home heating system.

          It has 3 computer control systems, plus a computer in every room thermostat, 5 electric pumps, 20 motorized valves, a heat pump compressor, two heat exchangers, a backup hot water boiler, a pressure tank, auxiliary solar hot water heating on the roof, two 60 gallon insulated hot water holding tanks, 2 air relief vales, a pressure reducing valve, a back flow preventer, filters that must be regularly replaced, many relays and solenoids, plus I’m sure some more things I forgot.

          Many items on that list have broken and needed to be replaced including expensive bits like compressors, pumps, motorized valves, and thermostats, all made in China.

          If you offered me a system like that for free I would not accept it.

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      3. Art Berman today on geothermal, plus a nice view through the energy lens.

        https://www.artberman.com/blog/the-false-promise-of-enhanced-geothermal/

        Enhanced Geothermal Systems (EGS) are advertised as a breakthrough: clean, firm power anywhere, unlocked by drilling and fracking technologies borrowed from shale. The story sounds great. The economics are disastrous.

        EGS is probably the most expensive form of electricity ever attempted at industrial scale but it has generated huge excitement among investors, and made its promoters rich.

        EGS involves drilling into hard granite, metamorphic or igneous rocks that are deep enough to be around 200°C because of earth’s geothermal gradient. The rock is “hot” but is also “hard,” meaning that it’s not a reservoir capable of flowing fluids, and it’s relatively “dry” meaning that it doesn’t contain much naturally occurring water.

        So EGS projects involve drilling deep vertical wells into this tight rock, and then going horizontal for 3,000 to 6,000 feet. High-pressure stimulation—fracking—is used to crack the rock open to create an artificial reservoir. Water is pumped into the rock, left to absorb heat, then cycled back to the surface.

        Conventional geothermal, by contrast, taps naturally occurring hot water or steam in permeable reservoirs near faults or volcanically active zones. Even there, relatively few projects have actually delivered what was promised on cost, timing, output, or long-term performance. There are exceptions like in Iceland but they are rare.

        EGS proposes to do something far more technically demanding than conventional geothermal, in worse rock, for more money and at larger scale—despite the fact that the “easy” version of geothermal has struggled to meet expectations.

        Why is EGS so expensive? The answer is simple: It has all the cost of shale drilling with none of the payback. A single 20-megawatt EGS project — tiny by grid standards — requires three to five very deep wells, each costing $12–25 million. Unlike oil and gas wells, these wells don’t produce a high-value liquid or gas. They just circulate water down into hot rock and back up again, hoping to pick up enough heat to spin a small turbine. Much of the electricity generated is used to run the pumps.

        When something fails the economic test this badly, there’s only one conclusion: it’s not the right application of technology. Just because we can do something doesn’t mean that we should. EGS is a waste of capital and its promoters are being dishonest when they say it’s working, and is competitive with other forms of energy. It’s not.

        Enhanced Geothermal Systems is a scam, but its appeal says a lot about who we are. When reality scares us, we reach for “solutions.” We seem either unwilling or unable to see that most of our problems are the direct consequences of growth. Rather than accept limits, we chase stories that let us believe we can keep everything we like and solve the rest with innovation. We’ll try almost anything before we’ll be honest with ourselves.

        Technology always comes at a cost. Every technological “solution” rests on higher energy use somewhere in the system. The shale revolution is a textbook case. In the early 2000s, global oil supply was essentially flat while demand—driven especially by China and other developing countries—was surging. New fields were being found, but they took longer and longer to bring onstream because they were offshore, often in deep water, or tied up in difficult political and fiscal regimes where progress was slow. By the time these projects finally came online, older fields had depleted, so there was little or no net increase in supply.

        Tight supply pushed oil prices to very high levels, which in turn spurred the innovations we now call the shale revolution. Within about a decade, new shale production flooded the market and prices collapsed in late 2014. This was celebrated as a triumph of technology that had “made oil cheap again” and supposedly killed off the peak oil concerns that were so prominent when supply was tight a decade earlier. But the reality wasn’t that simple.

        As Figure 2 shows, even after the price collapse, oil never returned to its pre-shale level in real terms. The real WTI price is about 1.5 times higher—$75 versus $48 before shale. Over the same period, drilling costs roughly tripled and have risen 28% just since Covid. The average WTI price since 2021 is $85, and even today’s supposedly “cheap” $59 oil is still about 25% higher than the pre-2006 average.

        These higher energy costs have made everything more expensive. U.S. consumer prices have risen for 45 years, with the steepest increases since 2000 and a sharp acceleration after 2020 (Figure 3). That goes a long way toward explaining why so many people feel desperate and angry, and why they are drawn to populist movements that promise to fix things. But those movements can’t change the underlying energy reality with different positions on immigration, taxes, tariffs or interest rates. They are offering policy answers to a biophysical problem.

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        1. I’m not pessimistic about the future, but we need to stop pretending it will look like the past. We’re an ingenious and adaptable species. We will endure—and possibly thrive—but not by denying change.

          thrive!!!???

          A commenter (Tim) was thinking the same thing as me: I’m curious why you aren’t pessimistic about the future… where is the optimism coming from?

          We’ve adapted to ice ages and warm periods, plagues and wars. Why don’t you think we can adapt to whatever is coming next? History argues against your negative perspective. I believe that many doomers find a weird kind of security in fatalism. Think about it.

          Ok Art, I thought about it… and I believe that many doomers find a weird kind of security in denialism. Think about it.

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    2. It’s a brilliant essay, thanks Rob. I’d only add a bit more about how the complexity has given us fantastic efficiency gains in certain areas, like how the dump trucks in mining operations have gone from around 30 tonnes in the early 1960’s to 300-400 tonne dump trucks today, which saves the number of people required, fuel etc. Plus a 300 tonne dump trucks are coupled with giant excavators and shovels enabling much larger quantities of material to be moved in a short period of time.

      Plus the extra complexity is expensive unless it can reach economies of scale, which is what we’ve seen as we now move huge extra quantities of ores and wastes to get to the lower grade materials and a wider range of materials. The extra markets for the highly complex machines give the economies of scale allowing them to operate cheaply. Also the cheap suppliers of all the parts can only stay in business because they have wide ranging businesses that encompass many aspects outside the area of just parts for the giant machines. They are also likely to be producing many parts for every other industry, including what people often call ‘discretionary uses, like boats, planes, cars, go carts, jet skis, snow blowers, lawn mowers, (a nearly endless list).

      To be able to produce cheap parts for the large efficient machines, they require the total range of their business to exist. Without most of the business, the discretionary bits, they could not buy in bulk, could not retain the expert staff or afford to buy the latest machines, so would go bust, instead of being able to fall back on just the ‘important’ parts manufacturing.

      …..

      Also later where you have the bits about how to keep modernity and stave off collapse until later, this also has an extra cost on the natural world causing more extinctions, greater climate damage and probably greater release of radionuclides.

      Then again maybe all this extra damage just allows different mutated species to develop anyway and is part of the overall natural progression of entropy on Earth..

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      1. Thanks Hideaway.

        You’ve explained those important efficiency and economy of scale points before but I forgot them. I’ll try to edit them in and then reply here again when I’m done so you can check my work.

        You are right about the extra damage to the planet the survivors will inherit if we extend modernity. On the other hand, awareness that modernity will soon be gone, might cause some of the billionaires with children, for example, to restore habitat or to buy up old growth forest to protect it.

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        1. >>> billionaires with children

          You mean like Elon “mars needs people” Musk? Kids to fill out the extra bedrooms in the survival bunker?

          Do you guys have those “Drive Like Your Kids Live Here” signs around? Mrs. Flippr and I were driving recently and saw one. She said “I’m not sure that means what it used to as so many parents have lost all connection to their kids.” Meh, maybe it’s just a USA thing.

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        2. Hideaway, plain and simple, thanks for your work on Cactus. I just read the previous post “AI on Collapse” and it’s changed my point of view completely. Great stuff.

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    1. Actually I think you are wrong Perran.

      To extend modernity as long as possible we’ll need lots of clever engineers innovating new technologies to keep the resource flows going. We’ll also need musicians and artists to entertain the engineers and to buy shiny new phones so we can keep the Taiwan chip factories making enough money to innovate faster chips so smaller more remote reserves of oil can be discovered.

      Cactus says we’ll need more of the same right up until the very end.

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      1. “Cactus says we’ll need more of the same right up until the very end.”

        And that’s the $64 million dollar question. When? If it’s not for another 100 years….carry on. If it’s in 10 years or now…..

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        1. It might be 10 years if we continue on our zero-sum game strategy to war. Could be many more years if we get cactus awareness to go viral.

          But even with 10 years, that could be 4 years of wonderful experiences at university getting an engineer’s degree, followed by 6 years of rewarding work on a beautiful planet, maybe the only planet in our galaxy with hot showers, followed by a quick painless exit using your government supplied kit.

          That doesn’t sound so bad.

          P.S. If I was young with a do-over, I’d pick a trade like being a plumber or electrician.

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          1. >>> It might be 10 years

            I was recently diagnosed with prostate cancer and they all like to talk about 5 and 10 year survival rates. Ha, lol, if I tried to explain my worldview to them they’d send me from oncology straight over to the psychiatry ward! Meh, get your PSA checked guys.

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            1. What’s PSA? I haven’t been to a doctor for 35 years.

              Having watched doctors transfect children with mRNA, and not admit their mistake, and not apologize, I will be terminal and near dead before I visit one of those incompetent, unethical, grifters.

              We hung 6 doctors for the same crime at Nuremberg.

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  4. Great essay Rob. Your magnum opus! You’ve said a few times over the years that you have nothing left to say… well, now I’ll actually believe you the next time you say it.😊

    Will be interesting to see how this is received. I think people like B the honest sorcerer are finally going to have to acknowledge un-Denial because of this paper.

    The only thing that stood out to me was this line:

    Avoid conflicts and wars that harm citizens, damage supply chains, and waste non-renewable energy and minerals.

    And of course you’re right, but this image from Eric Lee’s site tells me we’re cactus.
    (battles/M = the number of battles per million humans on the planet)

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    1. Thanks Chris.

      Cactus is Hideaway’s idea but it was too good to leave buried in hundreds of comments.

      Let what I said cook for a bit.

      Cactus is strangely liberating and less depressing than all the other overshoot models. It provides clarity on what’s going on, with clear inspiration for what we should do, and how we should live and think during our short privileged existence.

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  5. Amen Rob. Excellent summation of Cactus Theory. Let’s see how many acknowledge it (sadly probably few because MORT denial genes predominate in people at large).

    AJ

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  6. Hi Rob.

    I’ve been reading un-denial for a long time and have been following Hideaway for ages, because I think it’s the only one in the entire internet universe that has a global vision similar to mine.

    You’re not alone. I’ve been preaching in the desert from my blog for years.

    Excellent post, summarizing a theory-thesis that everyone should know about.

    I’m quark, from Spain.

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    1. Well done Rob and Hideaway. Been reading Quark’s blog (in translation) for quite a while and he’s extremely good and very sound-not ever mealy mouthed. Should have realised he’s an un-denialist.

      Mick N

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      1. I’m sure Quark will reply with a link but by coincidence there is a link in on of the comments on Climate and Economy.

        Mick N.

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  7. Thanks Rob,

    Tremendously clear presentation. Thanks to all the referenced contributors too. It gives me hope that there are many who are not blind to the reality I perceive.

    Let me suggest a slight variation on the path to a civilization that runs mostly on renewables and scavengings.

    The one I imagine has a designed contraction process during the next 80 years.

    It is small — 50 million people global. It covers less than 5% of the earth. It lasts for only 300 years. The 2100 living conditions while constrained by a new social contract (enforced by system design) are middle class European.

    How could I even imagine the existence of the necessary 80 year transition given the momentum of existing civilization (population/operational structure)?

    I imagine the creation and release of a sterility virus capable of reaching every person on earth. Each will have no infants. Each will exit by or near 2100.

    The virus is created by a single individual (or AI) with access to unavailable science labs. The individual’s decision to release is not encumbered by any political or social constraints.

    My current tasks are to design the:
    1. The peaceful and productive exit activities of the departing population.
    2. The development activities of a replacement population which is untainted by current social constructs.
    3. The design buildout and provisioning of lifeboat communities including new operating rules that can ferry humankind through Catton’s bottleneck.

    Between 2100 and 2300 I envision the completion of two additional tasks. Failure of either will confirm cactus.
    1. Upgrading human cognition so it dominates the choice of behavior produced by existing thinking capacities.
    2. Upgrading tech to use essentially inexhaustible supplies of energy and material resources.

    I am making a new movie introducing the activities that would have to be implemented (after the sterilization virus release) to achieve a non injury producing civilization.

    I feel there is a high probability that a sterility virus will be released in the near future.

    I need to take no action to get it developed or released.

    We should be applying our talents to designing and engineering the implementation of the activities on the right half of this figure.

    Civilization's Paths Forward

    Want to help?

    Jack Alpert
    Alpert@skil.org
    Stanford Knowledge Integration Laboratory
    work completed

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    1. I do have a question Jack.

      If it all comes down to a sterility virus to buy the survivors another few generations or a couple of hundred years at best, before they lose any complexity to make test tube babies, then what’s the point of anything after the virus introduction??

      Isn’t the natural world better off without humans earlier??

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      1. Hideaway, thanks for your amazing insights. I don’t think they are wrong but I have few work arounds that buys a few hundred years to give science a chance to buy some more. 

        My transition to viability plan uses sterility to get rid of civilization’s momentum. It keeps much of the technology but at 1/100 to 1/200 scale. Run on scavenged resources (no mining or drilling.) and uses only hydroelectric power. And the test tube babies are not sterile. And the lifeboats have a custom made social contract with no bad cultural bias of present civilization. 

        In 80 years we are not universally changing cognition. But in 300 maybe. 

        This text communication path makes for slow progress. Anyone want a face to face zoom meeting with whiteboard?

        Jack

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        1. What’s to stop the test tube babies from catching the highly virulent, highly effective virus from the adults they come in contact with? Then the next batch likewise and so on..

          It’s the difficulty of every plan, unintended consequences. Humans like to think we are in charge, but we miss aspects of interactions within systems, it’s why just about every intervention of humans into natural worlds to try and solve a problem, generally makes the situation worse because of unintended consequences from feedback loops..

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  8. Thanks a great read, presumably you’ve watched “Hard Sun”. I always knew those autopoietic paradox related feedback loops would catch us in the end.

    Having said that; not sure I agree your 5th Key (Cactus) Insight. I am sure some living things will get through quite nicely – don’t know which ones!

    Not sure I’m up to logging-in mid-comment. For the record my name is Charles Hett. I’ll keep reading ‘til I can’t.

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    1. Hi Charles,

      I re-read the 5th key insight and do not see what you see. I didn’t say no living things will survive. I said modernity will collapse and will not recover. Humans that make it through the collapse will return to their hunter-gatherer origins.

      Please re-read and let me know if I need to fix the wording.

      ChatGPT:

      Autopoietic (from Greek auto = self, poiesis = creation/production) describes a system that is self-producing and self-maintaining. It continually regenerates the components that make it up, keeping its identity intact over time.

      Coined by biologists Humberto Maturana and Francisco Varela, it describes living organisms as systems that produce the components that, in turn, produce the system itself.

      Example: a cell continuously rebuilds its membrane, proteins, and internal chemistry in a closed loop of self-maintenance.

      Thanks for the tip on Hard Sun. I’ve never heard of it but it looks promising and I will watch it. I observe that it was cancelled after one season and is very poorly seeded everywhere which may foreshadow what we should expect from trying to spread cactus awareness.

      https://www.imdb.com/title/tt6402362/

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      1. There are some interesting concepts in that short series and I particularly like the end where the main MI5 leader who was prepared to lie and kill to keep ‘the secret’ was surprised she had been lied to as well.

        It does ask interesting questions like are the current powers of the world already deliberately keeping our predicament as quiet as possible??

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  9. This is not a comment on the topic but a request to whoever manages the comment section to amend the programming of the text box so that it does not erase all previous text if you happen to hit the delete (backspace) button after typing a period and leaving a space. Not sure if it is just an issue when typing on a phone but I am sure that it is really annoying. Thanks.

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    1. I wish I could do something about that but I’m a cheap bastard and subscribe to the least expensive WordPress package which means I have zero influence over them. You could consider using your favorite note taking application (I use OneNote) to write and edit the draft, then copy paste into the un-Denial comment. That way you’d have a copy in your note app.

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  11. Glad you mentioned the late great Jay Hanson in this. He covered all this in his various lists back in the early 2000s. Those of us who were there got a really good education.

    I wonder what the planet will look like in 100 years when the dust settles. Modern humans are not equipped to go back to our hunter-gatherer roots. And even if we were the rich biodiversity they would need is mostly gone already and what’s left will likely be gone when the food runs out.

    What a shame. It was a nice planet while it lasted. At least I was able to short circuit my reproductive drive and have left no descendants. That’s all you can do.

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  15. Thanks Rob. I think it is a brilliant summary, that departs significantly from previous posts as, beyond encouraging acceptance, it offers a direction to focus whatever inner energy we have left in a life path which makes sense.

    Mario, from Spain.

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    1. Thanks Mario, nice to meet you.

      Hideaway’s cactus has had a big impact on my thinking.

      Cactus forces clarity by closing all good paths except one.

      The biggest change to my beliefs is that rapid population reduction policies won’t help.

      That’s because I used to believe the only impediment to degrowth was the monetary system. Push through a bad economic depression and we could continue at a lower level. Except that’s not how the system works.

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  16. It is hard to know what goes on behind closed doors with global leadership and military planners, but the world in general, and the USA and China in particular, are clearly committed to the “high technology path” to the future.  In the past I have read public documents from governments that leave no doubt that “they” are aware of resource constraints and the potential global civilizational collapse.   But they have either “drunk the cool aid” of rational optimism and abundance, or with a clear eye are ignoring those issues and attempting a “hail mary” pass into the technology and compute heavy future.     I am not saying they will succeed, just that they are trying.

    A.I. is here, and exponentially improving.  If you are not following daily developments in A.I., it might be interesting to take a closer look.   There are mathematicians saying their work of solving mathematical problems is going to be over soon.   There is a company being set up to “solve” physics.    Materials sciences are being advanced.  Fusion energy developments are (claimed) being made.  Etc. Etc.  And then there are robots…

    Of course, the promoters of these sciences and companies and this world view are giddy and breathless in their excitement.  The USA stock market is probably the biggest bubble of all time,  but if the rational optimists are right, it might be an accurate bet on this future of abundance.    (I doubt it.)

    It will be interesting to see how far the compute “revolution” can go and what discoveries can be made, before the USA and global debt bubble bursts via deflation or more likely hyper-inflation.  (Which seems soon.  2026?)    And then after that whether the USA and China can continue to drive the compute revolution in some kind of command economy and financial structure that does not depend on real material growth, and can work in a world of resource shortages and rapidly depleting fossil fuels.

    Timing wise, in the next 3-5 years, we might achieve an understanding of consciousness, a full understanding of the laws of physics (or A.I. will at least be able to understand), a workable blueprint for fusion energy, or zero-point energy or some such fantastical development unavailable to 3lb human brain, knowledge of non-human intelligences, etc. etc.  

    And then, just as we and our A.I. servants have made these discoveries, the non-renewable resources to maintain this knowledge will begin to rapidly deplete.

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    1. Thanks for the interesting comment.

      I do follow AI quite a bit. Just finished this interesting interview on how the AI math plumbing works.

      I’m observing AI getting better at finding and repackaging information it has been taught. However when I ask it hard questions requiring new insights I’ve so far been disappointed. I’m also not paying for the best models.

      I’m sure AI can dream up some new image or video but that does not impress me. Have you seen any evidence that AI can innovate on the hard sciences?

      If AI does prove able to push our technologies forward, then that might buy modernity some more time, provided of course it helps us extract more energy than it consumes.

      On the other hand, if AI is used to help us be more effective at killing our enemies, or harming their economies, then AI will shorten the time remaining for modernity.

      Our leaders are clearly executing a zero-sum game strategy so it’s hard to imagine AI will not be used to harm competitors.

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  17. In case anyone is interested, I incorporated Korowitz into my cascading collapse analysis right after he published it in 2010:

    The Case for a Disorderly Energy Descent

    and addressed the question of fast vs slow collapse again in a comparison with Greer’s The Long Descent in this 2018 essay:

    The Pace of Descent: A Long Emergency vs. Sudden Collapse

    So your cactus theory of cascading collapse is hardly new.

    In order to understand the causal loop diagrams in my work, you will need to take holistic methods like system dynamics modeling seriously enough to study the subject.

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      1. Rob, My essays express a holistic approach that incorporates the cascading collapse that I read as the basis, referencing Korowitz as you do, for cactus. I do not address your Cactus insights because for me they all follow logically and inevitably from cascading collapse. It’s nice that you list them, but to me they are obvious.

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        1. Must be wonderful to have such an intuitive audience that they can infer big ideas without even a hint.

          Just to recap the 6 cactus insights in case we are talking about different things:

          1) Modernity depends on many non-renewable minerals AND non-renewable fossil energy.
          2) Modernity requires growth BOTH because of decreasing quality of mineral and energy reserves AND because of the need for abundant credit.
          3) Complexity AND population AND every non-renewable mineral and energy flow MUST grow forever to sustain modernity which creates many interdependent failure points and makes likely a supernova end to modernity.
          4) Advanced civilizations are unsustainable everywhere in the universe.
          5) Recovery of modernity is impossible after modernity collapses.
          6) The strategy of our leaders is reducing the time to collapse.

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    2. Karl, I’ve read your really good blog in the past and just went back to refresh my thinking.

      What is misses is complexity, where it comes from, which is not just human ingenuity, or we would have come across past isolated groups that had solar panels and nuclear reactors. They didn’t, yet had just as much human ingenuity as the rest of us. The complexity comes from a combination of factors, yet can’t be unwound gently.

      Your blog and the diagrams of flows also miss the role of complexity in all civilizations and how the unravelling of this complexity becomes an accelerant to the downside within the civilization at it’s end.

      Even if we go back to Roman civilization, over 90% of all people lived and worked outside urban areas, with Rome itself only having a few percent of the total population of the Roman Empire. Most people were still in contact with family and had close contact with some type of food production. In our modern western world countries where 80% of the population lives in urban areas with almost zero connection to food growth, because of the complexity of our civilization, the scenario is vastly different on the downslope..

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      1. un-Denial missed complexity until recently.

        For me the awakening came when I stopped fixating on fossil energy depletion and started to think about declining mineral reserve quality, and what’s going on behind the scenes to cope with this.

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        1. I also missed complexity until a couple of years ago and I thank in particular the work of Prof G West et al on this in regard to urban centres, which is part of the overall picture on complexity.

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  18. Great essay, I think you point out the key insight that increasing complexity is needed just to maintain the status quo when the underlying system is dependent on the extraction of unrenewable resources.

    One thing I’d like to get your take on- why would widespread cactus awareness be a good thing? I would assume that if people understood that civilization was not going to extend forever, the social order would probably break down. Social orders are and always have been (to my knowledge at least) predicated on the belief that the current system will last forever (or at least until some indeterminate time in the future when the rapture or technological singularity or something will happen). If people understand the jig is up in like 10 or 20 years, capitalism would pretty quickly break down because there’d be no point in building capital goods or infrastructure meant to last that far into the future. Also- who would want to have a kid if they realized that the child’s standard of living would be worse than Fred Flintstone’s by the time they’re 20?

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    1. It’s a good question Felix.

      If a competent leader told me that we’re blessed to be alive on a rare planet at the peak of what is possible in the universe, and that if we behave normally we’ve got 10 more years to enjoy, but if we all work together in peace we might stretch it to 30 years, I’d try hard to help, and the little MORT voice in my head would be saying maybe if we work really hard we can stretch it to 50…

      What would you do? What would your friends and family do?

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      1. I realize I never really answered this. What would I do? Probably just continue plugging away like the guy in that movie Children of Men. But then again that’s kind of what I’m doing now in a way. I think though that if you could definitively prove to the entire society that CACTUS was valid in a way that could convince everyone, I think people would stop having kids pretty quickly and I’d imagine enough people would stop showing up to work to bring the system down.

        What good is career progression, working hard, or designing a building that won’t fall down if you know everything’s going to fall apart in 10-20 years anyway.

        I think part of me still is in denial which is why I’m able to function day to day. Outside of this website I rarely talk about collapse, not even with friends or family.

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    2. Hi Felix, this is also my thinking, that I wrestle with internally. What’s the actual point of people knowing, if nothing can be done.

      The only real explanation I can give is that we all have an element of denial and despite all the knowledge still hold out for an element of hope that somehow we can make our part a little better, for ourselves and/or family friends during the collapse. Perhaps it’s just survival instinct kicking in.

      Afterall a few of us do have extra cans of sardines tucked away, usually to pay a debt to Rob if we lose a bet…

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      1. Something can be done.

        I listed more than 10 things we could do to delay the collapse, and pointed out that none require citizens to change their behavior or lifestyles.

        None of those things will happen unless the majority understand that collapse will be delayed if we cooperate with rather than harm the countries we trade with.

        With a little more thought I’m sure that list could be expanded.

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        1. I read your list, and with a couple of exceptions such as using bunker fuel it seems like there’s a lot of overlap with the platform of the Democratic party here in the US. Do you think that informing people of Cactus would be the best way to convince them to support these positions, or do you think that just encouraging them to be, in the US at least, Democrats covers most of the bases?

          I guess it’s the difference between logical argument and persuasion. It’s a lot easier to persuade people if you make your points more palatable (e.g. support an existing political party) rather than being jarring (the world as you know it will end soon, do your part to extend the ride a few more years), even if the more jarring point is closer to the truth.

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          1. Who is elected in the US has almost no substantive influence on geopolitical strategies.

            Changes to extend the time to collapse can only happen if citizens understand what their leaders are actually doing, what they should be doing, and most important, why. The why piece is needed for the sustained pressure that will be required to change the direction of a large ship.

            Democracy does not work with uniformed citizens.

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          2. Here’s another related point that I added to the essay:

            Limits to growth are breaking our democracies. Citizens know their standard of living is falling, but do not understand why, so they vote for the politician that most credibly promises a better life, but leaders are powerless to improve living standards, which breeds politicians that are superb at lying, but not well suited to optimizing a complex problem. Then when the leader does not deliver, the citizen is pissed off, and next time votes for someone more extreme that blames the immigrants or the Chinese, and so on, which accelerates us in the wrong direction. The only way to break this path to despots is awareness.

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            1. Just this paragraph Rob has aspects I very strongly agree with, and other bits I’m not so sure about..

              We can take Climate change as a simple example. People are aware, the science is far more advanced than anything on our overall predicament, there is information everywhere including outside the windows and doors of people’s homes, yet people will still vote in politicians that call it a hoax.

              In the climate change example, the politicians are still lying about the ‘solutions’, yet people who do not do the research for themselves will still accept the convenient opposite view, denial in it’s finest.

              Taking our CACTUS situation, then awareness without any solutions offered begs lots more denial than even climate change and there will be plenty of politicians offering solutions that might work for a few short years, like taking back our oil from those degenerates ‘over there’ or whatever and get voted in as the alternative offered is lower living standards and collapse anyway.

              I suspect that full awareness of our situation only comes with massive amounts of our own research over years, not just in quick sound bites. Most people only have time in their busy schedules of listening, reading the quick headlines and a few paragraphs or a 5-10 minute ‘story’ about something. They are not prepared to do full in depth research on a range of issues, they need to watch the next episode of “Friends” or whatever.

              If full awareness did start to spread, there would be huge pushbacks, like there already is. People pay to go and listen to the Tony Seba’s of the world, where it’s all about the bright green future with tech beyond current imagination solving every issues.

              Reality cannot compete with the belief system in the unknown and unknowable, which is what every religion is based upon. All the green future unlimited tech, space etc is in exactly the same category as all religions, tapping deep belief systems and mere facts can’t change this as history has shown.

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              1. All important and valid points.

                Why is it that we seem to have free will to make things worse, but no free will to make things better?

                Interesting times coming.

                For the last 10,000 years war was a good response to scarcity.

                Now war will create scarcity for the entire planet.

                I think Jack Alpert calls this the scarcity death spiral.

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                1. Prof. John P A Ioannidis public health professor from Stanford has written about society caught up in a Death Spiral. He has a good analogy with an ant mil . Prof John Ioannidis is also well know for the paper “Why Most Published Research Findings Are False”. Ioannidis was also extremly sceptical with covid interventions. I know Ioannidis thinks modern healthcare is hubris. “In many places, medicine and health care are wasting societal resources and becoming a threat to human well-being.”

                  From The Death spiral article: “Just like an army of ants caught in an ant mill, individuals, groups and even whole societies are sometimes caught up in a Death Spiral, a vicious cycle of self-reinforcing dysfunctional behavior characterized by continuous flawed decision making, myopic single-minded focus on one (set of) solution(s), denial, distrust, micromanagement, dogmatic thinking and learned helplessness. We propose the term Death Spiral Effect to describe this difficult-to-break downward spiral of societal decline. Ants rely on each other for survival and often hunt for prey together. They use pheromones to locate each other and they follow the ones in front of them. This usually works quite well, although sometimes the ants get locked in what is called an “ant mill” or “Death Spiral.” This can happen when a subset of ants gets separated from the main foraging group and begin following each other. They start forming a continuously rotating circle, and the ants caught up in this Death Spiral often die from exhaustion. It has even been observed that dead ants are being pushed out of the circle, while the ants maintain their rounds. This “ant mill” or “circular milling paradox” seems to be the evolutionary price that army ants pay for an otherwise successful strategy of collective foraging.”

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            2. I agree with your overall sentiment, and please don’t take my original comment to mean that I think the Democrats in the US will do anything of substance to actually solve the problems we face. That said, if your original contention is that people should continue to maintain some semblance of the status quo until things fall apart, and that the best way to do that for the longest time is to support some mixture of policies that at least at face value at least overlap with the stated goals of the Democratic party, then I’m merely pointing out that as a means to an ends it would be much easier to convince people to support a platform with “Hope” in it rather than trying to get them to level with the reality we face. If the global population came to support the policy platforms of these center-left political parties which roughly align with what your suggesting then there would be increased pressure to actually implement some of those policies.

              The core of my point is centered around the idea that people won’t accept a future of “less” if they have a choice, or at least an illusion of choice. We saw this in the 1980s when Carter tried to get everyone to wear a sweater and put solar panels on the white house. Reagan swept him in the elections by offering a more hopeful message that supported a more wasteful lifestyle, even though it didn’t address the long term issue of oil scarcity/environmental problems caused by high consumption.

              To put it another way, if you acknowledge most people are in denial, it would be easier and better to appeal to their denial genes and have them support the “right” policies for the “wrong” reasons than to offer them an unpopular truth that they’re just going to deny the first chance they get, so the necessary measures will never be put into practice. I’m being very US-centric in this post, but I mean just look at Florida. Insurance companies are pulling out of the state because climate change has made it uninsurable, but people are still clamoring to move there. I doubt many of these people are going to embrace Cactus, but they might become Democrats after their house floods.

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              1. I respect your opinion but disagree because I see no daylight between left and right on any of the substantive issues, and I simply don’t care about divisive lifestyle issues.

                The left NDP and Green parties here in Canada support transfecting people with mRNA, and support the war against Russia.

                In Europe the Greens are pro war.

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                1. That’s fair. And ya don’t get me wrong, it pains me to suggest that people should support the same Democratic party that tried to mandate poisoning everyone 3 short years ago.

                  Every time I get angry about something Trump does, I have to remind myself that at least he’s not pushing to mandate an experimental medical intervention on the entire population by threatening to take away people’s jobs if they don’t agree with him. Although Trump did initiate the vaccine program and openly supported its adoption, which i guess only further buttresses the point you’re making

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                2. The Green Party originated in Germany and had plenty of members and committees who wanted to get rid of age-of-consent.

                  The Green Party continues to support policies that harm children, such as sterilization by puberty blockers. The Greens support Queer Theory which was founded by PDF-files and is full of PDF-file academics.

                  The Green Party is loyal to a set of international ideas popular among university graduates. They are not loyal to local ecosystems and local places.

                  The Green Party are always lying on behalf of the Bright Green industry (eg wind, solar). They lie about what future is possible, either out of ignorance or to line their own pockets.

                  When I first found out about our predicament, I thought voting Green was a good first step. I even joined the Green Party for a while.

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      2. I’m on the same page, I think denial is inevitable, we all have it even if we’re aware of it. I guess it’s a good thing I enjoy canned sardines…

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  19. I can’t remember exactly what led my to the link about this little book on nuclear power, but the book itself is a real eye opener. I went and did some fact checking on it as I read about aspects of early nuclear power developments I’d never heard of before, and sure enough they seemed to check out.

    The book is available online and called “We Almost Lost Detroit” by John Fuller

    https://avalonlibrary.net/ebooks/John%20G.%20Fuller%20-%20We%20Almost%20Lost%20Detroit.pdf

    What occurs to me is how important the early pioneers of nuclear power understood the necessity of replacing fossil fuels, so were keen to overlook problems with this is mind. It was written in 1975 but refers back to instances and happenings back in the 1950’s.

    Even though the main story seems to be about what nearly happened to Detroit, all the important information is in the lead up. It’s clear to me that TPTB everywhere are well aware of our collective predicament and have been for generations. Don’t skip the early stuff to get to what nearly happened to Detroit as the build up is the important story as it sets the context and to me was the full story in itself.

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    1. This book deals primarily with the accident at the Fermi No. 1 liquid-metal fast-breeder reactor and the safety problems the accident posed.

      The developers of the Fermi breeder reactor were very sincere, diligent, and highly qualified individuals to whom the safety of the reactor was paramount. Extreme care was taken to insure against the possibility of a serious accident occurring. The scientists involved were most confident that they had covered all possible problem areas. They had built safeguards on top of safeguards. Yet in spite of the precautions in the design and construction of the Fermi reactor, and in spite of the reassurances by the scientists that a serious accident could not happen, one did occur. The results far exceeded the expectations of anyone involved with the project. Fortunately, at the time of the accident, the reactor was operating at a very low power level or the consequences could have been much worse.

      The Fermi accident and the others described in this book demonstrate the fact that no matter how much diligence is exercised in the design, construction, and operation of a nuclear reactor things can and do go wrong. Design errors occur, the unexpected happens, human error is a very real possibility.

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      1. The book mostly deals with the lead up to the Fermi reactor accident, it only gets into the Fermi accident in detail by around pg 200 IIRC.

        Always beware the synopsis given…

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    2. Dear Hideaway,

      I hope this message finds thee well.

      Coal is mentioned in the document. 

      • Likelihood of production increasing in the future as a substitute for oil?

      Bona fide,

      ABC

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      1. Hi ABC, I once did the EROEI math on coal to liquids and despite being used in both Germany during the war and in South Africa during apartheid and currently a bit in China as well, it has a very low EROEI, too low to sustain modern civilization, at around 1.6 assuming the coal is free to mine and not purchased.

        The 1.6 EROEI was assuming a 50,000bbl/d plant that had an operating life of 25 years, used around 12 million tonnes of coal per year, had a capital cost of $US6B and operating costs of around $US30/bbl with the numbers from various research papers on the subject.

        The coal tonnage depends upon the coal type etc, likewise for costs, so really an EROEI range of 1.3-2 at best.

        Notice the ratio of coal to bbls of oil, to replace 50m bbls/d would take 1000, 50,000bbl plants and use around 12B tonnes of coal/yr. Say goodbye to climate, very rapidly, to just get 50% of today’s oil use. Realistically it can’t be done…

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          1. Rob …. “Just for reference, what do you think EROEI is today for oil?“

            It’s not that simple, which is why I have often stated it requires a large book or series of books to fully explain the totality of our situation and why the general public will never grasp all of cactus..

            Just leaving fossil fuels EROEI for a couple of minutes and concentrating on all the man made energy sources.

            For solar, wind, geothermal and nuclear to start with, we make all the parts in factories, from mined components that have had processing and refining along the way. We then transport all the parts and assemble them on site, then connect them to the grid.

            We can work out all the costs of doing this in advance and have a very good knowledge of the expected energy return from that site over time. So we can do the sums mathematically based on the cheapest reliable source of the bits with quoted firm prices and contingencies for some extra unexpected expenses. Money being ‘score’ of all the energy inputs along the entire chain.

            Before someone chimes in, yes we do the same for drill rigs, pipelines and refineries as well..

            At any location, we have a very good idea of the amount of energy return, over a given period, for the total expenditure of money that represents the energy spent.

            The EROEI is fairly consistent for any one site, with the actual EROEI always falling as soon as storage is added, for renewables, which is the wild card of how much, but no matter what, it’s always falling as the equipment ages and costs to maintain increase.

            With fossil fuels, using oil as the example, the EROEI is vastly different on every deposit. A hundred and fifty years ago we could drill a 500 ft deep well close to civilization in areas of known oil seeps and get huge returns with simple equipment. Yes we still required the drill rigs, pipes and refineries, but simple cheap machinery could extract oil, under it’s own pressure for decades. The EROEI was probably in the hundreds, if not thousands.

            Fast forward to today, we have a range of different EROEIs for oil as there are still plenty of conventional oil wells all over the world producing huge quantities of cheap oil. The Saudi’s still have some oil in the range of an EROEI of 50+. Other countries likewise.

            However the percentage of this high EROEI oil, of overall oil is falling as more fracked oil with around an EROEI of 3-7, and deep sea oil (no idea of actual EROEI as I couldn’t find actual numbers on these platforms for capital and operating costs with any reliability), and more remote oil from smaller fields increase in proportion of the whole.

            Every recession of oil prices, means the really high EROEI oil, which by definition is the cheapest to produce oil, gains as a percentage of total oil produced, simply because the expensive stuff starts running at a loss and is turned off or down wherever possible. It also means we deplete the high EROEI oil during these periods.

            At any time, because of the huge range in actual EROEI of different types of oil the overall EROEI will vary, with the lowest EROEI being when the price of oil is sustained at it’s highest for a period of time and the EROEI of oil being at it’s highest when prices are at the lowest for a period of time.

            I don’t think many people understand this dynamic at all…

            All the time though, we are using up a greater proportion of the highest EROEI oil, depleting what remains fastest during periods of relatively low oil prices like at present.

            Exactly the same is happening to both gas and coal.

            Overall the EROEI of oil is obviously falling and a full Phd level study would be required, with access to the costs from all over the world to give an accurate EROEI of oil at any one time. Even in Saudi Arabia, it’s only ‘some’ of their oil is the low cost high EROEI oil, with them also increasing production of off shore deep sour oil as part of their mix. It’s the same everywhere else as well, as only full knowledge of the mix of different oil and the costs of each gives the full picture.

            The fact that oil production for many countries is still very, very profitable does tell us that their oil overall still has a relatively high EROEI and my guess would be in the 10-20 range still, with some up to 30 odd.

            One of the biggest reasons we are in so much trouble near the ‘top’ of civilization is because we keep secrets about oil reserves and prices of extraction around the world. The only real way to tell the overall EROEI for civilization as a whole is getting precarious is the huge and growing debt, especially every time there is an oil price spike which brings recessions and govts/CBs create huge sums of money to make more low EROEI energy available, but it never conserves the high EROEI oil.

            Once oil production starts to decline, even with relatively high oil prices, it will show that the high EROEI oil has depleted to such a level that the decline in overall oil production leads to an increase in the fall of EROEI and the end of civilization is close, very close.

            The EROEI of oil is very dynamic for all the above reasons, but the decline in EROEI will be an exponential one, which will catch all authorities around the world totally unaware as the exponential function always does.

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            1. Thanks, was expecting “10ish and falling” but instead got an essay on interesting dynamics I have not seen before.

              You’ve long explained that when the price goes up and supply continues to fall it’s a sign the end is near, because it means the quality of the remaining reserves is so low they cannot be produced at a profit, even with a high price.

              But now you’ve introduced a new idea that when the price is low, mostly high EROEI oil is extracted.

              So if the price is low because we’re in a depression and cannot afford higher priced oil, and the end is near because the high EROEI oil is mostly gone, wouldn’t we also expect to see supply fall?

              In other words, maybe the cactus signal is simply continuously falling supply/consumption at any price?

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              1. Hi Rob …”But now you’ve introduced a new idea that when the price is low, mostly high EROEI oil is extracted.“

                I have talked about this before in a comment somewhere, maybe another site, but realistically when we step back and look at the big picture it’s obvious.

                Take a company, any oil company that has oil wells flowing at various costs, some $10/bbl and some $50/bbl and some at $80/bbl.

                When the price is at $90/bbl all wells are profitable, so the company makes a lot of profit. Prices fall for a long period of time to the current $65/bbl, then it’s not really worthwhile keeping the $80/bbl wells flowing, as profits are reduced by keeping those expensive to produce wells going.

                It’s far more profitable to have just the $10/bbl and $50/bbl wells flowing and saving the other oil for later, if possible..

                Prices plunge in major recession, to $30/bbl. The company can still make money by just pumping the $10/bbl wells and closing the rest. They also have more reserves for later, if possible to shut them down cheaply.. No sane company will keep all wells flowing as they are losing both cash and reserves by doing so.

                Rob “In other words, maybe the cactus signal is simply continuously falling supply/consumption at any price?“

                Not quite, as all the national and ordinary oil companies will have ‘some’ expensive oil up their sleeves to drill or turn back on when prices rise enough, meanwhile they are depleting their ‘cheap’ to produce oil as prices are currently relatively low.

                The problem lies in when the cheap oil is in such decline, that opening all the expensive oil up, still doesn’t increase overall oil production, the cheap stuff is declining too fast. The high oil prices will cause general inflation, with market crashes businesses going bust as consumers reign in spending everywhere, especially discretionary spending where possible, as in a standard looking recession.

                Oil prices will also crash temporarily along with everything else, but that also stops a lot of the expensive oil from getting to market, all while background cheap oil continues to fall in production. Up goes oil prices again, very quickly with producers unable to keep up with the wild volatility in oil prices, and not knowing if producing is going to be profitable or not, so act conservatively, in spending on production, sending oil prices higher again during what seemed a ‘normal’ recession.

                All the while feedback loops of higher costs and companies going bust, increase costs to producers, and make some parts and equipment unavailable because of discretionary businesses going bust and some of their essential products not being made any longer. Downward spiral accelerates, you know the rest.

                Not sure if that answered the question..

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                1. Thanks Hideaway. That all makes sense.

                  I was thinking about something different, but maybe it’s nonsense.

                  What if we got into a depression so serious that it put a cap on the price of oil that can be afforded?

                  Oil companies then produce their highest EROEI oil until its gone but cannot switch to their lower EROEI oil because the price does not go up.

                  So what we observe is steadily falling supply and consumption, and then falling price because people become even poorer.

                  Maybe this is nonsense because the value of oil is so high that the price will always go up if supply drops.

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  20. Preston Howard here (because I cannot agree the Terms & Conditions to join; a different discussion), so I announce myself. Thanx to all who contribute to Un-Denial. Your broad perspectives are a priceless bounty I treasure every visit.

    Rob, I found your CACTUS essay amazing. Time after time, you hit the nail on the head, leading your reader through our modern complex existence and the problems we have presented ourselves. I was with you all the way… until the Conclusion of your CACTUS Awareness Lens.

    Here are quotes [with details extracted] to set the stage where I see differently (although I agree you may be more correct in your conclusion):

    Conclusions:

    “The cactus lens shows us that a zero-sum game strategy will not achieve the desired outcomes. . . . The cactus lens points us to a positive-sum game strategy. . . . The cactus lens shows us modernity will eventually collapse permanently, taking down every country in the process. There is nowhere to hide, and there is nothing we can do to prevent this. . . . With cactus awareness and a positive-sum game strategy we could:” [Rob lists 15 potentially positive actions a society could embrace that “might delay the collapse and optimize quality of life until the end.”]

    * * * * * * * * *

    I conclude differently. As I noted in my presentation about the Maximum Power Principle (MPP), Humanity has broken the Earth, and we cannot fix it. Over time, the Earth will repair itself, but Humanity will not appreciate the remedy, as it (almost certainly) involves our extinction. Rather than trying to delay collapse, I believe we could instead facilitate the Earth’s healing. As poet Wm Merwin said, “On the last day of the world I would want to plant a tree.”

    However, Humanity won’t do that. If there is plenty, people will take only what they need. However, if there is barely enough, MPP suggests someone will grab it all. And the guy who wakes up hungry and finds nothing to eat except his Smith & Wesson handgun will assure someone among us will have a bad day before Mr Handgun finds food. So, what to do?

    Do as you please, Rob. Bandages on broken bones will only extend the suffering, if that is what you suggest with your 15 actions. And, many want to minimize suffering, because… grandkids, for example.

    MPP suggests we will continue our complex, consumptive society until we use it all up and suddenly — very suddenly — crash big time. With Humanity’s abrupt absence, the Earth will begin to heal itself. But, until then, the party continues… For example:

    “Din’nit ya hear? The 4th season of Waste My Time starts next Tuesday. Sarah and Biff are hosting a party all weekend long. We’re gonna binge watch the first three seasons so everyone is up to speed as the new season starts, after that gripping cliff-hanger at the end of season 3.”

    Apologies to anyone who ever hosted a binge-watch weekend, but MPP suggests we grab all the gusto until it is all gone. And, if we have “gusto” now, we let the future take care of itself. IMHO, that assures a rapid, complete collapse whenever it finally happens.

    Ummm… you probably heard that the latest IPCC final report removed all references to “1.5C” that were discussed in draft versions of the report. Yup, Humanity autopilot is pedal to the metal until collapse. My 2 cents. Your mileage may vary, don’cher know?

    As for myself, I stand witness to a world where so many see no farther than the small screen on their smartphone. I believe someone should stand witness.

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    1. Howard, I agree, it’s pedal to the metal, but I also think I understand where Rob is coming from in all those points.

      They make the world a slightly better place for humans (not the natural world) and you have to have some type of ‘better outcomes’ to even engage people at all, that are not fully aware of our situation.

      Rob??

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    2. Hi Preston, great to hear from you and thanks for the most interesting thoughts.

      Cactus is a new idea that has changed a lot of my thinking. For over ten years I believed the only good and wise path was rapid population reduction, but I also understood this would never happen due to MPP and genetic denial.

      Then cactus showed that:

      1. It’s not possible to shrink the scale of civilization and retain modernity;
      2. We’re going to crash no matter what we do;
      3. It is impossible to rebuild modernity after the crash and survivors will return to a hunter-gatherer state.

      So given all this, what should be done, and what is possible to do?

      I was forming an opinion as I wrote the essay, and am still forming an opinion, but it goes something like this:

      1. The world today is a very unpleasant place, is getting worse, and what we are told to believe by our leaders makes no sense, which is making people crazy.
      2. In a strange way, cactus is a less unpleasant story that aligns with what our eyes see, and provides an inspiring message for how fortunate we are to be alive on this rare planet at its peak of complexity.
      3. In addition, there is a vacuum of purpose in modernity that I suspect is at the core of a lot of social disfunction. Cactus could provide some meaningful purpose, like for example, motivating people to volunteer in their communities to restore ecosystems that might help their grandchildren.
      4. Does this open an opportunity to bypass MORT by replacing an unpleasant story with a less unpleasant and meaningful story?
      5. And if somehow cactus awareness was possible in the majority then some positive things might result to reduce suffering and delay the crash, like not breaking or impeding global trade, avoiding nuclear war, being kinder people, and maybe even doing a few things to help the survivors (and other species) like burying our nuclear waste while we still have some diesel to do it.

      Anyway, the intent of the essay was to start discussions like this.

      It seems there are 2 possible paths:

      1. Our current default path which seems destined to minimize time to crash, maximize suffering, and leave a giant mess for any survivors.
      2. Spread cactus awareness (assuming MORT can be overcome) to create some happiness in tough times via gratitude, reduce some suffering, provide more time to enjoy modernity, and maybe even help the survivors and other species.

      Love to hear other ideas.

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    3. But, there is phase 2 in MPP. So behavior changes, once conditions of availability change. Anyway, I am not sure about any of these theories. Only theories. (See Olivier Hamant for counter-arguments, we mentioned before) Part of human arrogance and foolishness to believe reality can be reduced to a few equations.
      It is what it is and will be what it will be and it is incredible 🙂

      Still, I am with you. I’d rather hasten collapse. And then, get on with the healing. Even if it means the end of humanity (which I don’t really believe in, but why not?)

      To Rob: If I read correctly, I note, there is no mention of stopping all deforestation (in particular of primary forests) in the 15 actions. So, to me, they, somehow can’t be entirely valid.
      Just, the way I feel.

      Best.

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      1. Charles, preserving forests is mentioned twice including this new paragraph I recently added:

        Imagine the effect of cactus awareness on philanthropy. What might billionaires with children do with their wealth if they understood modernity will soon be gone? Perhaps they might buy up biodiverse rainforests to protect them.

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  21. The green tech, AI, robot future with unlimited energy…

    Thinking about the Tony Seba types with their futuristic approach for a minute and where it eventually leads us.

    Assuming all the EROEI reports about green energy were real and it keeps improving to 50-1 to 100-1 returns and offer unlimited energy, which allows humans to start colonising the solar system over the next hundred years, always finding and gathering more resources from the other rocky planets, moons and asteroids.

    Given Tom Murphy’s calculations of us using the equivalent of all the sun’s energy hitting Earth in 400 years, with a lot being used elsewhere in the solar system, not overheating Earth, by the year 2525 we would have colonised the entire solar system and sent probes to other solar systems, plus by then we would have robots and A.I. able to set up camp on places without atmospheres and build structures for human habitation, doing so in other near by solar systems as well.

    It might take them 100 years to get their travelling at only a fraction of the speed of light, but they are robots so don’t age and in oxygen free environments wont rust either. (Of course we’ve solved cosmic radiation problems, and have unlimited fusion fuel from the water on Ganymede, Titan and Callisto.

    Human colonisation follows to these other planets in close solar systems one to 200 years behind the robotic setups, which then get sent further into the galaxy. Of course even the local area of the galaxy takes a few tens of thousands of years to colonise, and over 1 million years to spread out throughout the galaxy, without breaking the laws of physics (OK the other laws of physics).

    If humans could manage just 10% the speed of light at best in this futuristic scenario, we can reach all places in the galaxy in less than 1 million years, being only around 100,000 light years across.

    If this was close to possible, then just robots could be sent to other galaxies to set up shop as well, just imagine the tech from human ingenuity over the next million years considering what we’ve reached in the last 10,000 years alone, or perhaps at the accelerated rate of the last 300 years??

    Human inspired robots, built by other robots all with their own internal A.I. could spent the next 100 million years spreading across countless galaxies. (estimated to be over 25,000 galaxies containing multiple trillions of stars).

    OK enough, everyone here gets the picture. 100 million years is less than 1% of the age of the universe, yet if this was slightly possible then life that developed elsewhere and eventually became able to build civilizations in some form would be already doing this.

    If life can develop on Earth, then given similar conditions elsewhere, life is likely around planets/moons on thousands if not millions of stars in our galaxy alone. So why wouldn’t other life extend outwards at such a rate using up the resources as it spread, just like we know all life does here on Earth if conditions allow it?

    The Fermi paradox, where are they, is easily explained by it not being possible for civilizations to exist for more than short periods of time. In fact it’s pretty much the only plausible explanation for why we don’t here any radio signals from ‘out there’.

    Other civilizations were born, grew, ran into limits and totally collapsed, just like all the prior ones here on Earth and we are no different..

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    1. Nice one. For a minute there I thought you were pulling a Sabine Hossenfelder on us.😂

      Understanding that there is not supposed to be any intelligence higher than pre fire (in the universe), will mess with your modern (human centered) brain. If you’re not careful you could end up in a very nihilistic state of mind.

      That’s from 18 months ago. Well, I guess didn’t heed my own advice cuz I ended up in a very nihilistic state of mind. LOL

      I clipped that quote because it pairs up well with your comment. I think this shit is harder for people to accept than humans going extinct.

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    2. I’m sort of a sci/fi nerd, which is ironic given we post on this blog a lot about how techno-utopias aren’t really possible. But if you’ll indulge me, this sort of reminds me of one of my favorite tv shows. It’s a late-90s anime called “Cowboy Bebop”. Kind of a funny name for a show that I’m sure turns a lot of people off, it might sound cooler in the original Japanese.

      The interesting thing about the show is that it takes place a couple hundred years in the future, when humans have basically set up a sci/fi “astral gate” network that transports them around the solar system at high-speed, but not FTL. It’s never openly acknowledged in the dialogue of the show, but the background makes it clear that humanity is still in some form of decline and most people live in abject poverty. The assumption is that despite living in a future in which humanity has “figured out” things like terraforming and hyperspace (although not faster than light) travel, civilization still ends up flaming out because it’s not able to grow the petri dish beyond our solar system.

      I guess my point is that even if you give the techno-utopians a ton of leeway in their futuristic predictions, there’s no guaranteeing that humanity won’t hit some sort of technological wall at some point that imposes limits. I highly doubt we’ll ever get the the “astral gate” stage, but even if we do, how much time does that buy us?

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    3. Well done.

      Everything I’ve ever owned with a motor does not last more than about 20 years, and 10 years is common. This includes devices that are designed to be highly reliable like the water pump in a home heating system, or a hard drive motor.

      How many motors are typical in a humanoid robot?

      ChatGPT: Cutting-edge, high-dexterity humanoids have 45–60+ motors.

      If a device contains 60 components and each component fails about once every 10 years, how long will it take for the device to fail?

      ChatGPT: The device will fail on average after about 2 months.

      100 years of travel will require about 600 spare motors per robot.

      Gonna need a big MF rocket.

      Good thing energy is now free for the rocket fuel, and we’ve got plenty of copper for the windings and rare earths for the magnets in those motors.

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    4. I forgot to add in the above. All the guff about A.I. gaining conscious and becoming a singularity that can replicate itself and take over the world, is also nonsense for the same reasons.

      If it were possible, then it would have happened elsewhere in the galaxy and nearby galaxies, most likely billions of years ago, and spread like a cancer everywhere using up all resources, in which case we wouldn’t have any of the resources we have had over the last thousands of years, as in metals and minerals.

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      1. Ya we’re a long way off from any sort of real artificial intelligence if that’s even really possible. They’ve rebranded what normal people think of as “Artificial Intelligence” to “Artificial General Intelligence”. I’ve watched how in the last 3 years basically any algorithm at all has been rebranded as “AI”, which in a way is sort of true I guess, but it’s misleading.

        The biggest sign it’s not going to happen and is mostly just a grift is that Elon Musk talks about it all the time. He’s the best contrarian indicator as to whether something is actually possible in a reasonable time span that I know of.

        Not to dismiss the very real and interesting things that LLMs can and are doing, it’s a very impressive technology that I’m sure will develop in new and interesting ways, but I’ve heard many “real” AI experts dispute that LLM’s are a path to “true” artificial intelligence like the tech industry guys are saying in their investor meetings.

        Also take any studies you read that come out in the MSM about AI having any sort of agency with a huge grain of salt. A lot of them use highly contrived situations to give the appearance of some sort of free will.

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  22. Any Charles Bukowski fans out there? I’ve been telling myself to check out his writings for twenty years now. Watched this movie again last night Factotum (2005) – IMDb. Most I’ve laughed in a while.

    A nomadic writer (Matt Dillon) drifts from one dead-end job to another in an attempt to fuel his passions for alcohol and women. Unable to maintain steady employment or sell his stories to the one publisher he respects, Henry Chinaski does what he can to earn enough cash.

    Trailer below. And this might have been my favorite scene. Factotum — A poem is a city

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    1. Big Bukowski fan. Lived in LA for a while and read several of his books during that time while I was working at a job I hated and was consequently drinking more than I probably should have as a result. He really captured the overall mood I was in during that time in my life. Highly recommend reading Factotum, I didn’t even know they made a movie of it but I’ll be sure to check that out.

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  23. Which religions believe that an apocalypse will cause their deity to return?

    ChatGPT:

    Several religions and religious movements include a belief that a catastrophic end-time event (war, disaster, moral collapse, divine judgment, etc.) will precede or trigger the return, arrival, or revelation of a deity or savior figure.

    Religions with a concept like “apocalypse → return of deity/savior” include:

    • Christianity (Second Coming)
    • Islam (Return of Isa; Mahdi)
    • Judaism (Messianic arrival after tribulation)
    • Zoroastrianism (Saoshyant)
    • Some Hindu traditions (Kalki at the end of Kali Yuga)
    • Some Sikh interpretations
    • Rastafarianism
    • Jehovah’s Witnesses, LDS, and other new religious movements

    Approximately how many people belong to those religions?

    ChatGPT:

    If you add up all the large-religion groups above (Christianity + Islam + Hinduism + Judaism + the smaller ones), you get roughly ~ 5–6 billion people worldwide who belong to at least one of those religions.

    That suggests that a majority of the world’s religiously affiliated people belong to traditions that — at least in some forms — include beliefs about a world-ending crisis or a return of a divine/savior figure.

    Bingo.

    There’s our target for achieving cactus awareness in the majority of 8 billion people.

    I suggest we start with Evangelical Christians in the US who are aggressively stirring up shit in Israel to cause a nuclear war so Jesus returns.

    Unfortunately I’m an atheist that thinks religions exist because of a genetic mutation that enabled an extended theory of mind about 100,000 years ago, so they won’t talk to me.

    Are there any Evangelical Christians in the audience here that could give a presentation on cactus to your congregation?

    I could prepare a nice PowerPoint presentation for you. How scary should I make it? I promise not to mention MORT.

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    1. Not even the real god botherers turn up to my place anymore. I use to invite them in for a cuppa then waited until they started to talk the usual nonsense and started to bring out facts about how evolution had been proven, etc.

      Usually they had to leave quickly around then, when the older one of the 2 found the younger one asking me too many questions of which I had answers. Seems I’ve scared religion away, so you can’t count on me…

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      2. To ‘me’ the ‘default position’ should be ‘nothingness’ {no universe}.
        Yet, ‘I’ am ‘here’ {Cogito, ergo sum ?} as is ‘the universe’.
        I don’t know about ‘you lot’ 😊 {‘you’ may be the product of my ‘imagination’ 😊?}.
        ‘Anything’ is possible?

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  24. Pingback: The Bulletin: November 26-December 2, 2025 – Olduvai.ca

  25. I think a lot of rapture adherents are very happy with their view of the world. If they’re going to be in paradise forever post-rapture why bother trying to change anything now? If anything they want to accelerate collapse, right?

    This is a great post Rob, very thought provoking. I sent it to the few overshoot aware guys I talk to and the feedback on the debt, energy and ecology predicaments has been great. I think they’re still trying to get their heads around cactus, we’ll see, maybe you’ll get a few more readers anyway.

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    1. Thanks for spreading the word Flippr.

      I’ve never understood this rapture thing. On the one hand, they want nuclear war in the middle east to cause Jesus to return. On the other hand, I’m sure they don’t want nuclear war in Milwaukee. I was thinking they must be predisposed to believing the world will end and so might easily embrace cactus.

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  26. Hi Rob,

    Excellent article. I like the “lens” metaphor. It’s difficult to be capable of handling and changing lenses. It’s a good analogy to reunite people who do not speak the same language and can’t understand each other.

    I am taking issue with this paragraph though:

    The ecology lens suggests it does not matter what citizens understand because the ecology threats are longer term than debt, energy, and cactus, and because awareness of ecology issues have not and will not improve anything of substance due to the nature of modernity.

    I’d argue, ecology issues have been hitting humanity hard for a long time (self-induced suffering). And so are not long term, but rather in plain sight, today, everywhere. And not recognizing them is another factor which prevents getting out of the vicious cycles. Just open Google map at the widest scale and notice the gray areas. Almost all human-made deserts. Deforestation, overgrazing…
    Also, consider the focus on CO2 in climate change debate, when conserving primary forests might even be a greater priority than reducing emissions (https://bioticregulation.substack.com/p/ecosystem-collapse-and-extreme-weather). Yes, changing the trajectory of CO2 concentration is really hard and long-term. However, preventing ecosystem simplification is much more attainable and has immediate effects.
    In a way, this is another example, how the lens used modifies behavior (beliefs impacting reality).

    Keep up the good work!

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    1. Hi Charles, I agree restoring some ecosystems is possible. I suggested in the essay that with cactus awareness calls for volunteers to help in communities would succeed, and would provide badly needed meaningful purpose for people by doing something useful for their descendants and other species.

      Other problems like microplastics, chemical toxins, nitrogen imbalance, climate change, species extinction, fisheries collapse, and deforestation are difficult to impossible to address without reducing the human scale.

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  27. This is a great example of what I talked about in the essay.

    People are losing their minds because nothing makes sense. The most experienced and knowledgeable geopolitical minds have no idea what is going on, or why, and are making up explanations.

    You see it everywhere if you look.

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  28. How will “Cactus” theory and climate change interact? A rapid implosion of modernity may actually be able to limit some of the worst effects of climate change, but this is contingent on us not cutting down the remaining forests and hunting the remaining wildlife to extinction. However if we don’t avoid such actions, the outcome maybe human extinction. The environment that our ancestors inhabited in the Pleistocene is gone. Most of the large animals we would go back to hunting are gone, and even if the human population were to suddenly fall by 99% tomorrow, it would take centuries for wildlife populations to recover. Due to extensive deforestation, soil degradation and climate instability, I suspect that agriculture will be impossible in many regions.

    The late Michael Dowd mentioned the possibility and likelihood of near-term human extinction, I am now starting to think this is increasingly likely, but for reasons slightly different from those mentioned by Dowd. We’ve basically kicked out all of the rungs below us which means we cannot return to the semi-sustainable niche we occupied during the Pleistocene.

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  29. Nate interviews Nate on the risk of extincting ourselves with AI.

    It’s super interesting that it’s ok to discuss the threat of extinction by AI, but not ok to discuss the same threat by cactus.

    I think this means the AI threat is bullshit, because you can unplug it or regulate it, and our subconscious knows it.

    Cactus cuts the population reduction, innovation, and crash then rebuild plugs.

    Cactus has no plug to pull.

    Technological development has always been a double-edged sword for humanity: the printing press increased the spread of misinformation, cars disrupted the fabric of our cities, and social media has made us increasingly polarized and lonely. But it has not been since the invention of the nuclear bomb that technology has presented such a severe existential risk to humanity – until now, with the possibility of Artificial Super Intelligence (ASI) on the horizon. Were ASI to come to fruition, it would be so powerful that it would outcompete human beings in everything – from scientific discovery to strategic warfare. What might happen to our species if we reach this point of singularity, and how can we steer away from the worst outcomes?

    In this episode, Nate is joined by Nate Soares, an AI safety researcher and co-author of the book “If Anyone Builds It, Everyone Dies: Why Superhuman AI Would Kill Us All.” Together, they discuss many aspects of AI and ASI, including the dangerous unpredictability of continued ASI development, the “alignment problem,” and the newest safety studies uncovering increasingly deceptive AI behavior. Soares also explores the need for global cooperation and oversight in AI development and the importance of public awareness and political action in addressing these existential risks.

    How does ASI present an entirely different level of risk than the conventional artificial intelligence models that the public has already become accustomed to? Why do the leaders of the AI industry persist in their pursuits, despite acknowledging the extinction-level risks presented by continued ASI development? And will we be able to join together to create global guardrails against this shared threat, taking one small step toward a better future for humanity?

    About Nate Soares:

    Nate Soares is the President of the Machine Intelligence Research Institute (MIRI), and plays a central role in setting MIRI’s vision and strategy. Soares has been working in the field for over a decade, and is the author of a large body of technical and semi-technical writing on AI alignment, including foundational work on value learning, decision theory, and power-seeking incentives in smarter-than-human AIs. Prior to MIRI, Soares worked as an engineer at Google and Microsoft, as a research associate at the National Institute of Standards and Technology, and as a contractor for the US Department of Defense.

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    1. In relation to A.I. and I know we only get the cheap, simple versions, asking it to come up with a new idea to improve something you know most about is to me eye opening.

      If you ask it about stuff you know not much about, it seems really smart, but asking about things your most knowledgeable about and it comes up short. Despite asking it to invent new ways to do something, say grow strawberries, or raise cattle etc or teach kids, whatever you’re an expert in, you find all it does is regurgitate information from various research papers, it doesn’t invent something new from outside the known knowledge base.

      From my perspective, A.I. helps find info on the web much faster than google searches, or might help spread new great ideas and tech invented by a human much faster, but invent new stuff?, no I’ve seen no evidence of this…

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      1. Also I’ve not watched the above video of Nate’s yet and tend to watch them less and less as the guests get further away from having expertise in the totality of our situation, like the Bill Rees or Joseph Tainter’s of the world.

        There are several people like Alice Freidemann and Gail Tverberg that know we’ve Cactus, that Nate will never interview, and some like Tom Murphy not again as his views change to more Cactus . (He would have already if he was ever going to)..

        These days Nate tends to have more guests that are about the topic of ….We need to do this…. instead of this is the reality of where we are heading.

        It keeps the audience higher…

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        1. So few people can connect the dots. This expert, in one breath, says big power consumption, big server facilities, few chip factories, single lithography machine company, etc. make it easy to regulate AI to keep it safe, and then in the next breath, says it’s near certain AIs will escape our control and kill us.

          Me thinks he makes a living selling books on gee whiz technology that needs someone like him to regulate it.

          Hard to make a living selling cactus.

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        2. In Addition, I’d like Nate to interview people like Max Wilbert, Derrick Jensen or Lierre Kieth (authors of the book Bright Green Lies). Frankly, an interview with you on Cactus theory would be quite fascinating, but I won’t hold my breath on that.

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  30. Hey Rob,

    A great summation. Very nicely put together but I disagree on trying to do anything about it.

    I feel it is very clear that no one will do anything about it when you discuss it as a topic.

    People will do things you might want when we present it as separate issues such as food security, skill learning or sticking it to the man.

    With regards to religious people, don’t bother they mostly think that the world will end next week and they will be saved from death. No work required, Jesus will do the heavy lifting.

    Anyway do whatever keeps you sane.

    NikoB

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    1. Thanks nikoB,

      What you say rings true with history. People never do anything that conflicts with their evolved behavior.

      I’m thinking cactus is different than the other overshoot issues like over population, climate change, pollution, etc.

      To extend modernity, and to maximize the quality of life until the end, does not require people to do anything, or to change their lifestyles.

      All people have to do is understand what is going on so they don’t permit their leaders to go to war over resources.

      Because, unlike the last 10,000 years, war this time will result in less resources for everyone, including the victor.

      Cactus is unpleasant, so we do have the MORT hurdle to cross, but I am wondering if because the current world is so unpleasant, maybe our denial circuit would permit us to swap in a less unpleasant belief?

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      1. Hey Rob

        it would be nice to avoid war but again history and current trends suggest otherwise. Your position comes from logic and reason. unfortunately they tend to be the first pushed over board rather than being safely ushered into the lifeboats of a sinking ship. I constantly hear from people about how we are all waking up and will become one big understanding family. I ask “even trump supporters?’. Don’t be stupid Niko.

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  31. If you find the cactus view depressing and want a hopeful vision that life can continue at a lower level of complexity, then this presentation by Andril Zvorygin is good.

    He forecasts what will happen over the next 25 years and shows how we should respond to survive and thrive.

    Andril provides many detailed ideas on what we should do, unlike my vague recommendation for cactus awareness that I think is required to avoid nuclear war.

    Feeding a Town in a World of Less Oil: Practical Resilience from 2025 to 2050

    Think of the oil age as a high hill leading into a long valley.
    The valley — a world of less energy per person — is unavoidable.
    What is not fixed is how we walk into it, live in it, and climb out on the far side.
    One path: fear, hoarding, and exclusion.
    Another path: forgiveness, love, kindness and compassion, recognising the divine in everyone.
    The same resource curve can feel like collapse or like a kinder ruralization.

    Physical layer (not optional):
    – Less oil -> more expensive transport, inputs, and long supply chains.
    – Tighter energy -> higher baseline costs for food and heat.
    Social and spiritual layer (our choice):
    – Hoarding, blame and exclusion -> violent, chaotic descent.
    – Sharing, land access, and mercy -> stable, modest, humane lives.
    – Recognising the divine in one another makes land and calories a shared responsibility, not a zero-sum fight.
    The valley is set by physics; the quality of life in that valley is set by how much we raise love and kindness.

    Distributism starts from a different axiom: every person is worthy of enough land, tools and local enterprise to meet basic needs with dignity.
    Land, tools and small businesses are spread widely rather than concentrated in a few hands, public or private.
    In descent this means:
    – more households can grow at least part of their food,
    – more homes can secure modest heat from local wood, biogas or district systems,
    – neighbours are positioned to support one another rather than compete for crumbs.
    The idea is not fantasy abundance, but a modest, stable life where power and property are shared enough that compassion has room to act.

    Distributism starts with a simple idea: people thrive when they have secure access to land, tools and local work.
    “Property widely held” means practical pathways:
    – community land trusts,
    – homesteads and small farms,
    – stable long-term leases.
    “Local production” means rebuilding everyday capacity:
    – mills, cold rooms, workshops and makerspaces,
    – greenhouses, nurseries and seed networks,
    – community colleges teaching food and trades.
    “Decisions close to home” is subsidiarity:
    – households, hamlets, villages, neighbourhoods, towns.
    Under energy descent, resilience grows fastest when land, tools and decisions stay local.

    https://lyis.ca/pfet/peakoil/2025-12-04-transition.pdf

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  32. In today’s peak oil chat Roger Bentley presents an interesting update on oil forecasts and differences between various sources. My take-away was that most sources agree supply has peaked but opinions differ on whether the decline will be gentle or fast.

    Also a presentation by Andril Zvorygin on his descent plan discussed in the comment above.

    Zero discussion on cactus insights about complexity and mineral flows. Lots of discussion on solutions like geothermal that require high complexity and plentiful minerals.

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  33. Presentation by John Peach in October 2025 on oil reserves.

    https://www.wildpeaches.xyz/blog/2025-10-03-energy-review-2025

    World Fossil Fuels Discoveries and Production: An analysis of current reserves

    Abstract

    This study reassesses the size and reliability of global fossil fuel reserves by analyzing discovery, production, and backdated resource data for oil, natural gas, and coal. Using imputed field-level data from Global Energy Monitor, historical production records, and reserve benchmarks from the Energy Institute, we construct a bottom-up estimate of cumulative discoveries and remaining reserves. A generalized Richards growth model is applied to reconstructed discovery series for each fuel, enabling comparison between official proved reserves and geologically inferred ultimately recoverable resources (URR).

    Results indicate that global discoveries of oil, gas, and coal all peaked between 1950 and 1970, while consumption has continued to accelerate, especially in the past 30 years. For both oil and gas, remaining reserves appear smaller than cumulative production to date, and discovery flows since 2015 have replaced only 10–20% of annual extraction. These findings support earlier work by Laherrère, Smil, Odum, and Garrett, and suggest that fossil fuel availability may constrain future economic activity far earlier than is implied by official reserve statistics. The analysis underscores the need for greater transparency in reserve reporting, improved discovery datasets, and a more integrated energy–economy modeling framework to understand the implications of a resource-constrained future.

    Executive Summary

    The global energy system remains overwhelmingly dependent on fossil fuels, yet the geological basis for this dependence is eroding. This report re-evaluates the remaining global endowment of oil, natural gas, and coal using backdated discoveries, historical production records, and generalized Richards curve modeling. Discovery data estimated by geoscientists on-site, rather than industry reports, shows that all three fossil fuels peaked in discovery between 1950–1970.

    Key findings:

    • Oil, gas, and coal discovery rates have declined for 50–70 years.
    • Since the early 1980s, oil and gas production has consistently exceeded discovery.
    • Half of all oil consumed in human history was burned in the last ~3030 years.
    • Oil’s geologically inferred remaining reserves is ≈765≈765 Gb (1 Gb = 1 billion barrels) — far below official estimates.
    • Estimated reserves provide only 25 years of continued consumption at current rates.
    • Gas shows a similar trajectory; coal is abundant in mass but constrained by grade and geography.
    • Energy consumption continues rising, consistent with Odum’s Maximum Power Principle and Garrett’s thermodynamic economic model: economic growth tightly tracks energy throughput.

    Fossil fuels remain essential for heavy transport, fertilizers, industrial heat, shipping, and aviation—domains where renewable electricity offers no substitute. Given the accelerating decline in field quality and discovery, society must prepare for a post-growth, resource-constrained future. While production and consumption data are relatively transparent, estimates of remaining reserves vary widely and are often proprietary, politicized, or economically constrained.

    In this article, we ask: How robust are the world’s fossil fuel reserves when inferred from geological discoveries rather than reported by states or firms? Using historical production records, field-level discovery data, and imputation of missing values, we compare backdated discovery trends with officially reported proved reserves to assess the reliability of current estimates and identify possible shortfalls.

    The results challenge common assumptions about energy abundance and suggest that the margin for continued growth may be far narrower than expected.

    Conclusions

    For both oil and gas, remaining reserves are less than cumulative production to date [38]. Oil is considered the “master resource” since every aspect of modern society depends on petroleum including mining, production and transport. Oil consumption during the last 30 years is equal to all consumption prior to that time, and continues to increase in accordance with Odum’s Maximum Power Principle, while discoveries peaked in the 1960s. Our analysis shows that remaining reserves will soon become severely constrained which is in agreement with the International Energy Agency (IEA), as reported in Reuters:

    The decline in output from mature global oil and gas fields is accelerating amid greater reliance on shale and deep offshore resources, the International Energy Agency said on Tuesday, meaning companies need to invest more just to keep output flat.

    IEA Executive Director Fatih Birol said in an IEA statement, “Decline rates are the elephant in the room for any discussion of investment needs in oil and gas, and our new analysis shows that they have accelerated in recent years.”

    As we have previously argued, there are no viable alternatives to fossil fuels for maintaining the levels of energy consumption currently enjoyed by modern society, there is no evidence that a transition to alternate energy sources will be made, and any attempt will only exacerbate the human condition of ecological overshoot. Given the physical limits of the quantities of remaining fossil fuels, it would be wise to consider society in a post-energy world.

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  34. Some months ago the UNC history professor Bret Devereaux published a lengthy explanation of the working hours of subsistence peasants (numerically the majority of all humans that have ever lived) and how it varied by family size and time of year on his blog:

    https://acoup.blog/category/collections/the-peasant/

    It is a long read even to skim, but that is only because of his exacting attention to detail. It has stuck in my mind, and seeing the claim at the end of Cactus that the descendants will be only hunter-gatherers without elaboration has reminded me of it. It doesn’t matter to most of those who will die in this century, but how can we be sure that the future of the Earth’s thin surface layer doesn’t include many millennia of peasants and extractive iron-age monarchies, possessing sustenance but not much more.

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      1. I recall reading that in an RCP8.5 scenario, the Southern Cone, Pennsylvania and Manchuria/North Japan will eventually become something like the climate of Central America today, with the insolation of the Gulf Coast. That can support cotton, cowpeas, peanuts, sweet potatoes, soybeans, some kinds of rice and a couple kinds of maize.

        If the prediction is true, Dark Ages lifestyles could keep going there as long as the super-hurricanes mostly hit elsewhere.

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  35. Great work Rob and Hideaway. This is a really good summary essay for people new to the idea.

    I would add that Alice Friedemann and journalist, Katie Singer, are very much across complexity CACTUS theory as well. It was Alice’s blog that got me there, years ago. Especially when she explained to me why there will never be another civilization in Earth’s future that could read USBs or CDs. I have read Alice’s work in detail for years and had many conversations with her in comments and in messages. She definitely gets it and she taught this way of thinking to me.

    Katie Singer has developed educational activities that help people (especially kids) understand complexity, such as tracing the full supply chain of just one item or element in your computer.

    Both ladies have also gone into detail on microchips and the end game of complexity for technology.

    Pencil I and the “toaster project” are two excellent examples of CATUS in action, that are easy introductions for people.

    https://energyskeptic.com/2021/even-a-pencil-will-be-hard-to-make-in-the-future/

    https://energyskeptic.com/2021/we-wont-even-be-able-to-build-toasters/

    https://www.thomasthwaites.com/the-toaster-project/

    https://www.econlib.org/library/Essays/rdPncl.html?chapter_num=2#book-reader

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  36. Yesterday evening, in a conversation on Discord, I got to see MORT in action. The person I was speaking with is quite intelligent, and has an advanced understanding of scientific and geopolitical subjects. But, when I tried to explain why renewables, fusion, space colonization and AI will not save us from ecological overshoot, he basically said, that we don’t know where technology will be in say 20 or 50 years.

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  38. Must watch.

    Very interesting video just posted by Gail Tverberg.

    Fresh take on geopolitics I’ve not heard elsewhere, and I follow a lot of people.

    Smells true to me. Explains a lot.

    summary: US has too big a deficit and not enough diesel.

    700K views, 18K subscribers, might be an AI video by a (BRICS?) enemy.

    edit: Did some searching, same script with different video and voice is all over YouTube. Welcome to our new world. 😦

    The United States is currently waging an economic war against the two countries it needs the most. For the first time in history, Washington is being forced to beg its “enemies” for the very resources that keep the American Empire alive: Oil and Money.

    In this video, we expose the two “unthinkable” deals happening behind closed doors that prove the US economy is in a death spiral. From the sudden reversal on Venezuelan sanctions to the desperate plea for China to buy US Treasury bonds, we break down why the era of American “Exorbitant Privilege” is officially over.

    In this video, we uncover:

    • The Oil Surrender: Why the US is quietly lifting sanctions on Maduro to save its refineries.
    • The Debt Trap: Why the new Treasury Secretary is forced to beg China for a $3 Trillion lifeline.
    • The End of the Petrodollar: How sanctions accidentally taught the world to live without the dollar.
    • The “Twin Collapse”: Why the US can no longer afford to be both an Empire and a Debtor.

    The headlines call it “diplomacy.” The reality is “liquidation.” Watch to understand what comes next for your money.

    Liked by 3 people

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    1. Another good one from the same channel a week ago.

      Discusses the US through the debt lens.

      Provides an explanation for the US generated global chaos: Uncertainty causes money to run to the US dollar for safety.

      Trump will be remembered for destroying the US empire.

      The (BRICS?) AI uses a different accent.

      Liked by 1 person

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    2. Watched the first one 4 times. You can almost feel the exuberant joy that will burst out all over the world when the US crashes because it has been such an evil force for so long. Imagine the party in Palestine by the genocide survivors!

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      1. Death to america!! I’m trying to restrain myself from the huge dopeamine hit you gave me.

        Watched it 3x’s so far. I keep waiting for that AI guy to take off his mask and reveal himself as Indrajit Samarajiva.

        And of course AJ’s correct that BRICS is not gonna stop collapse. This is about “righting the wrongs” before civilization goes extinct.

        Might have to watch my go-to movie tonight to get me in the mood for the karma that’s coming.

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        1. LOL, it might be BRICS propaganda, but it is intelligent, and articulate, and almost every word is true.

          Compare western propaganda: “China bad, Putin bad”, repeated over and over and over, with zero intelligent content.

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    3. >>> might be an AI video

      “Sound or visuals were significantly edited or digitally generated” but that doesn’t mean the message isn’t accurate.

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    4. Good one Rob. Do you think Trump even knows this? Does Scott Bessent have Trump’s ear? Where do I sell my dollars for yuan (RMB)???

      My criticism is that BRICS is not going to save the world from collapse due to Cactus. What does Hideaway think?

      AJ

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      1. Trump before and after being sworn in and briefed is a completely different person.

        He broke all of his promises in a frenzy of irrational flailing panic.

        Yes I think he understands what’s going on, through the fog of his dementia.

        He murdered 4 more people yesterday in a small boat off Venezuela. 400 Palestinians have been murdered since the start of his ceasefire.

        The world watches and waits.

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      2. AJ I certainly agree. Right now China gets Oil from the middle east, Iron ore from Australia, Coal from Australia and Indonesia, copper from Chile, the DRC, Lithium from Australia and Chile, Nickel from Indonesia, Food stuffs from everywhere etc, etc.. plus cash to spend around the world by selling manufactured good around the entire world.

        Neither of the 2 halves of the world, should there be such a divide, would cope without the other. Each would have to build a huge number of new mines from really lower grade ores, build lots of factories to make up for what they are missing which use to be imported from the other side.

        All while wondering why it’s not economical to do so, while using up more of the last remaining resources to do the build out.

        I would expect blame games to start happening internally withing each of the sides, blaming others internally for the lack of progress, shortage of goods required which leads to trade sanctions and supply line failures withing each side.

        Going form a more efficient single world to a less efficient dual world just hastens the use of easy cheap energy and brings forward collapse to both sides as the average is less complexity for each side.

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  39. Interesting energy lens view of why US is panicking about Venezuela.

    Instead of crashing Venezuela, US sanctions caused strong relationship between Venezuela and China.

    China now gets 700k barrels per day from Venezuela and US get only 130k per day.

    Last month China strengthened trade with Venezuela on all products with long term zero tariff agreement.

    US now panicking because its heavy oil refineries need Venezuela’s oil. Too late, China now gets it.

    May go down in history as one the US’s biggest blunders.

    Liked by 4 people

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  41. That 1958 pencil essay that monk posted is really good. And even though the author was trying to sell appreciation/awe of humanity and god (I think) … he somehow managed to make me even more disgusted with the blob and its never-ending quest for profit and growth.😂

    Somehow that got me thinking about the Olduvai Theory that Stellar had mentioned a couple days ago. I don’t know anything about it, but I like the 100-year timeframe. Most people’s peak timeline is 200-300 years. But 100 is way more accurate. And I’d change the start date of 1930 to coincide with the Great Acceleration (1950). 

    My entitled definition of the ‘peak of civilization’ is the masses having 24/7 access to electricity & hot showers. Per AI:  

    The 1940s to 1960s saw electricity become mainstream for the majority of households in developed countries. The 1950s to 1970s saw a rapid increase in homes with showers and access to hot water.

    In summary, electricity was mainstream in developed nations by the mid-20th century, and hot showers with reliable indoor plumbing achieved widespread popularity and became a household staple by the 1970’s. Today, the percentage of global population with 24/7 reliable access to both is likely around 60-70%.

    10,000 years of destruction & mayhem (aka progress) so that 4 or 5 generations could enjoy the peak. LOL

    I’m gonna turn on every light in the house and go take a hot shower now… before the High Times end.

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  43. Need a break from the doom and gloom? This is a fun one I promise.

    Deep Rising (1998) – IMDb 

    A square-jawed man of the sea and his wise-cracking sidekick give a group of mercenaries a ride in their PT boat to an undisclosed location somewhere out over the murky ocean. Little does the boatman know that the soldiers-for-hire are planning to knock off a massive luxury cruise liner with an assortment of assault rifles and deadly torpedo warheads. When they reach the ship though, they find it derelict and encounter a nightmarish tentacle beast.

    Cheesy, B monster movie. Horrible CGI. The bad guys are ridiculously one dimensional and they never run out of bullets. Yet somehow it all works.

    Free on youtube Deep Rising (1998)

    ps. For all the Firefly browncoat nerds out there, definitely give this a watch. I’ve been convinced for years that Whedon was inspired by it. The main character (John Finnegan) is a great poor man’s version of Malcolm Reynolds.

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  44. https://thehonestsorcerer.substack.com/p/running-on-empty-copper

    Today there is very little—if any—copper left in the world, which could be mined using artisan techniques. As we ran out of those easy-to-find, easy-to-get ores with a high metal content, we increasingly had to rely on machines to haul away the mountains of rock overburden and to bring up copper ores with an ever lower metal content. And thus we face a predicament: what shall we do when there is no more easy-to-get copper resources to be found? See, what little is discovered today, lies beneath miles of rock or in the middle of a jungle, and takes more and more money, energy and resources to get.

    …

    “The trend of declining copper head grades is well established and unlikely to be reversed,” says consultancy firm McKinsey in its research. Referring to the metal content of mined ore going into a mill for processing, researchers at McKinsey pointed out the crux of the predicament. As we dug out all the high grade ores, what’s left requires increasingly energy intensive and complex methods to get. BHP, a world-leading Australian multinational mining company, found that the average grade of copper ore has declined by 40% since 1991.

    Maybe B is partially Cactus-aware.

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    1. ‘B’, has the slow collapse thinking as he doesn’t understand or has not yet worked out all the feedback loops.

      Also in that article, it shows a lack of deep understanding about the mining industry, particularly copper mining.

      There are not 1 billion tonnes of reserves, it’s just the USGS states that number, then has a little asterisk showing that Australia’s 100Mt of that number is based upon JORC compliant resources, not reserves at all. Many if not most will never be mined. For example BHP’s Olympic Dam deposit contains 11B tonnes of ore at something like 0.58% copper (plus tiny amounts of gold, silver and uranium). What they mine is in the 2% – 2.2% grade range, and in the last 15 years, they have not made a profit from this after accounting for ongoing capital expenditure.

      All mines also tend to high grade what they are mining. At Escondida in Chile the BHP/RIO copper mine, the largest in the world, current ore feed grade is 1.02% copper, yet the reserve grade is 0.55% and resources are 0.55% (from 2025 Annual report!!). When they are finished mining the high grade proportions the odds of the mine being closed down are high and the so called ‘reserves’ will not be mined.

      The premise of all mining is that we grab the high grade stuff now, while it’s profitable, and in the future hope the price rises high enough to make the rest, or some of the rest, profitable. of course the assumption of the future is that copper prices go up relative to everything else, as in it’s all that rises, not costs as well.

      Of course this will end disastrously as the cost of energy, especially if they rely more on ‘green solutions’ that use huge amounts of copper will also go up in cost. Their assumptions are that green energy always goes down in price, even though they expect the cost of a key aspect of ‘green tech’ to go up a lot. Like so much of our world it doesn’t pass the logic test.

      ‘B’ also doesn’t get that zero copper gets mined as we start to lose complexity as they all rely upon the most modern type of complex operations at present. It wont fall slowly if many of the parts that keep these mines operating stop being produced. That goes for the chemical reagents they use as well. There has to be a constant flow of all the parts and consumables to every mine to keep them going.

      The entire system of mining, just like the entire system of modern agriculture, or modern trucking, shipping, manufacturing all operates on a JIT (just in time) scheduling of all aspects of their operations. There is no large supply backups held on site as this is capital tied up. It’s more efficient to operate on JIT.

      ‘B’ like so many others that want a nice slow degrowth don’t fully understand how the world actually works, but given enough time may work it out.

      If/when asset markets crash and burn due to high inflation brought about by high oil prices (again), with govt/CB printing presses of cash just causing high inflation, while businesses go bust, countries not trusting others ‘banks’ and lines of credit etc, then supply lines all over the world quickly start to break down, which means supply to keep mines (including oil and gas ‘mines’), also quickly start to break down their production and supply, leaving the world quickly worse off, with unemployment exploding in every industry that stands down workers as they have no business to do, because of lack of supplies. All while govts try to keep all their rules and regulations operating, with politicians everywhere in panic mode making dumb decisions…

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  45. The White House recently updated the US National Security Strategy.

    I searched and extracted here anything to do with energy.

    I see no hint that Trump and the authors are worried about energy scarcity. They see the US as a self-sufficient energy exporter and US domestic production will grow.

    https://www.whitehouse.gov/wp-content/uploads/2025/12/2025-National-Security-Strategy.pdf

    Industry and energy:

    We want the world’s most robust industrial base. American national power depends on a strong industrial sector capable of meeting both peacetime and wartime production demands. That requires not only direct defense industrial production capacity but also defense-related production capacity. Cultivating American industrial strength must become the highest priority of national economic policy.

    We want the world’s most robust, productive, and innovative energy sector—one capable not just of fueling American economic growth but of being one of America’s leading export industries in its own right.

    … the US is unleashing our enormous energy production capacity as a strategic priority to fuel growth and innovation, and to bolster and rebuild the middle class;

    Energy Dominance – Restoring American energy dominance (in oil, gas, coal, and nuclear) and reshoring the necessary key energy components is a top strategic priority. Cheap and abundant energy will produce well-paying jobs in the United States, reduce costs for American consumers and businesses, fuel reindustrialization, and help maintain our advantage in cutting-edge technologies such as AI. Expanding our net energy exports will also deepen relationships with allies while curtailing the influence of adversaries, protect our ability to defend our shores, and—when a nd where necessary—enables us to project power. We reject the disastrous “climate change” and “Net Zero” ideologies that have so greatly harmed Europe, threaten the United States, and subsidize our adversaries.

    Western Hemisphere:

    Venezuela is not mentioned by name in the document.

    We will deny non-Hemispheric competitors the ability to position forces or other threatening capabilities, or to own or control strategically vital assets, in our Hemisphere.

    Non-Hemispheric competitors have made major inroads into our Hemisphere, both to disadvantage us economically in the present, and in ways that may harm us strategically in the future. Allowing these incursions without serious pushback is another great American strategic mistake of recent decades.

    Some foreign influence will be hard to reverse, given the political alignments between certain Latin American governments and certain foreign actors.

    Middle East:

    For half a century at least, American foreign policy has prioritized the Middle East above all other regions. The reasons are obvious: the Middle East was for decades the world’s most important supplier of energy, was a prime theater of superpower competition, and was rife with conflict that threatened to spill into the wider world and even to our own shores.

    Today, at least two of those dynamics no longer hold. Energy supplies have diversified greatly, with the United States once again a net energy exporter.

    As this administration rescinds or eases restrictive energy policies and American energy production ramps up, America’s historic reason for focusing on the Middle East will recede. Instead, the region will increasingly become a source and destination of international investment, and in industries well beyond oil and gas—including nuclear energy, AI, and defense technologies.

    America will always have core interests in ensuring that Gulf energy supplies do not fall into the hands of an outright enemy, that the Strait of Hormuz remain open, that the Red Sea remain navigable, that the region not be an incubator or exporter of terror against American interests or the American homeland, and that Israel remain secure. We can and must address this threat ideologically and militarily without decades of fruitless “nation-building” wars.

    Africa:

    The United States should transition from an aid-focused relationship with Africa to a trade- and investment-focused relationship, favoring partnerships with capable, reliable states committed to opening their markets to U.S. goods and services. An immediate area for U.S. investment in Africa, with prospects for a good return on investment, include the energy sector and critical mineral development. Development of U.S.-backed nuclear energy, liquid petroleum gas, and liquified natural gas technologies can generate profits for U.S. businesses and help us in the competition for critical minerals and other resources.

    Brian Berletic reviews the document in detail to show non-energy foreign policy is business as usual, despite contrary claims.

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  47. Today George is trying to figure out the madness by overcomplicating the hell out of things. His essay is probably 10,000 words. LOL

    The Tragic Limitations of Human Intelligence

    But where did it all go wrong with our thinking process? This essay is about our actual brain. And the quick answer to the question “why are we stupid” is two-fold: it’s part stupid, part asleep.

    Our brain has a dangerous affinity for stability: it desperately wants to believe in an unchanging world, even as the world changes. This make-believe stability evolved as a survival mechanism that was fundamental to our feelings of safety, allowing us to “keep calm and carry on” even as our world went through mayhem. Our brain has the tremendous power to normalize reality itself and make it fit into the convenient delusion that, while change may be taking place, it is not substantial enough to threaten our existence. This self-protective mechanism of delusion is so robust that it can override critical thinking and logic, as evidenced by our historical response to crises. We always wake up too late, even when there has been ample time to prepare.

    Our fear of the unknown is so overpowering that the search for new and exciting ways to deny reality is something we do easily, and naturally.

    I left this comment:

    It’s very simple. A million plus years ago we started cooking our food. This slowly led to bigger brains which eventually gave us the nightmare of full consciousness. Game over.

    I despise humans but there’s nothing stupid about em. It’s life that’s stupid. With this MPP dog eat dog world. Anywhere in the universe where life has attained a homo sapien level of ‘intelligence’ is gonna look identical to what has happened on earth in the last 100,000 years.

    “If only it was the right type of intelligence, but it isn’t.”

    There is no ‘right type’ of intelligence. The only type is what you’ve already described: “1) exploit the local area to death 2) pack up and leave for a fresh area 3) if there is another tribe there, kill them.”

    The next time you hear someone talking about an invasive species, go ahead and laugh in their face. And tell them to stop using that silly term because that’s the goal of every life form. But you can’t become the ultimate invasive species until you accumulate a million plus years of fire evolution.

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    2. First episode was great, but the second and third sort of lost me so I turned it off. I have a couple friends who tried to watch it and they said the same thing. There’s a pretty stark tonal shift from the first episode which is more of a suspense/drama to the next couple episodes which try to be more of a comedy that didn’t really work for me.

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    1. Thanks, very good.

      The Lie We Tell Ourselves

      Human exceptionalism cannot accept that there is no grand reconciliation between civilization and the biosphere it devours. Control is how collapse tries to make sense of itself.

      While corals do not have time to evolve to the pace of change, denial is evolving at warp speed. @grok brings new sophistication to an old dishonesty, holding up a mirror to the most dangerous myth of all: the belief that what humans define as intelligence guarantees survival.

      We don’t need better management. We need to relearn how to belong.

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    2. You are not debating a person. You are debating the architecture of techno-optimism itself.

      Great article. And the author had another good line in the comments:

      Jan: Simulated inaccurate unreliable intelligence with no heart, soul, agency or motivation. Just code doing its thing… running amok.

      Lyle: Simulated inaccurate unreliable intelligence with no heart, soul, agency or motivation… seems to describe Homo sapiens. AI is a mirror.

      I posted this a while back but it’s worth mentioning again because it was such a great observation by me😊

      We are all chastising it, but we can’t stop using it. Can’t wait to see how these AI consequences add to our already insanely high idiocracy.

      The whole thing reminds me of this film. But instead of AI, its magic.
      Cast a Deadly Spell (TV Movie 1991) – IMDb

      In 1948 Los Angeles, everyone uses magic- everyone except hard-boiled private detective Harry P. Lovecraft, who refuses for “personal reasons.” Lovecraft is hired by a mysterious rich man to recover a stolen book, the Necronomicon. While investigating, he finds that the book holds the key to taking over the world by magical means, releasing the “Old Ones”.

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  50. Here’s a jaw dropping example of AI complexity ramping up to optimize energy use at an obscene scale, that investors pray will create wealth via novel complexity and optimization of other technologies, as we approach a cactus supernova that few see.

    The presenter has no clue about the overshoot implications.

    Farmland is giving way to data centers. Corn fields are becoming computer fields. Land once measured in harvests, now measured in gigawatts and exaflops.

    10,000 years ago, the first great revolution taught us humans how to feed ourselves. This one is teaching us how to feed machines. And everything that follows will depend on that choice.

    Liked by 3 people

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    1. Slight correction:

      10,000 years ago, the first great revolution taught us humans how to feed ourselves.

      We already knew how to feed ourselves before agriculture.

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    2. Mother Earth is starting to look like a motherboard.

      Cool quote at the beginning and made me think this is a person who understands the lunacy. But then I watched the rest. And you’re right, no clue whatsoever about overshoot. And ya, what an insane complexity shitshow this is gonna turn into.

      And that 10kya quote is hilarious. Something I would’ve said prior to my human history education.  

      I’m usually a sucker for a good-looking girl with a foreign accent. But man, my ears don’t like her voice. And she’s creepy as hell. A cold-blooded lizard just like Diane from V.  

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      1. She is creepy. Claims to have worked in technical roles in the semiconductor industry. I worked with many female engineers but none put that emphasis on style. Intelligence and competence was sufficient to impress. I’m suspicious.

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    3. https://www.theguardian.com/us-news/2025/dec/08/us-data-centers

      More than 200 environmental groups demand halt to new US datacenters

      A coalition of more than 230 environmental groups has demanded a national moratorium on new datacenters in the US, the latest salvo in a growing backlash to a booming artificial intelligence industry that has been blamed for escalating electricity bills and worsening the climate crisis.

      The green groups, including Greenpeace, Friends of the Earth, Food & Water Watch and dozens of local organizations, have urged members of Congress to halt the proliferation of energy-hungry datacenters, accusing them of causing planet-heating emissions, sucking up vast amounts of water and exacerbating electricity bill increases that have hit Americans this year.

      Finally, Environmental groups are doing something helpful rather than pushing ineffective technofixes.

      Here is the letter itself.

      https://www.foodandwaterwatch.org/wp-content/uploads/2025/12/National-Data-Center-Moratorium.pdf

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