Category: History

By Karl North: After Collapse, What Next?

Cahokia

This essay was written last year by Karl North and published on his site here. Karl offers a hopeful vision for how we might organize ourselves and live a pleasant life after the collapse of industrial civilization, by building on the research of Graeber and Wengrow in their book “The Dawn of Everything: A New History of Humanity“.

Here is a summary of the book:

“A dramatically new understanding of human history, challenging our most fundamental assumptions about social evolution—from the development of agriculture and cities to the origins of the state, democracy, and inequality—and revealing new possibilities for human emancipation.”

Many of us, I’m sure, would like to find reasons for optimism.

Karl kindly agreed to write the following introduction to his essay, summarizing the reasons he holds an optimistic view of our future.

Introduction

In this essay I drew extensively on a book by Graeber and Wengrow because it overturns the “small egalitarian bands” conventional wisdom of stone age society to reveal the variety of forms of socio-political and cultural organization that humanity is capable of, despite severe energy and resource constraints. This evidence of the human potential to adapt to a diversity of physical and social environments suggests that human society at some sharply reduced demographics could weather the end of the oil age.

My most persuasive model of the social forms this could take comes from living in a Europe dotted with villages whose centuries-old architecture indicates specific social forms. To survive, these socially dense nodal clusters required a tight social, political and cultural organization that, in turn enabled a Commons managed without tragedy that mitigated the inevitable inequality, family scale agrarian enterprises enhanced with regular inputs from neighbors, for example at harvest time or pig slaughter day, and defense against invaders, all of which maximized the possibilities of community well-being. The village I inhabited with my family for a number of years was typical of the genre, and although partially deserted, still offered constant evidence of how things worked when fully inhabited. 

Typically, these agrarian communities are small enough for the population to be within the Dunbar Number of 150 effective relationships. Even the larger “market towns”, often walled towns like this one, were organized to survive by relying on outlying villages for food and fighters in times of trouble.

All in all, my reading of European history combined with the enduring physical evidence suggests that life in such communities was laborious but provided a satisfying level of material comfort. David and Marcia Pimental’s pioneering work of food and energy cost accounting reveals that while the net energy of industrial agriculture is negative – 10 units of energy expended for one unit gained – the most efficient subsistence agriculture generates a positive net energy ratio of around 3/1. That seems small, but the historical evidence I have exemplified above suggests that with time-tested forms of simple technology and social organization, post-petroleum communities can use that small surplus to go beyond minimal survival to recreate a rewarding and durable life. 

Here is Karl’s original essay.

After Collapse, What Next?

When global empires start to fall apart, the structure of interdependent elements accumulated over the years imparts an inertia that appears to sustain them for a while past their normal collapse date. In the case of the US empire, this illusory momentum, combined with a shocking degree of mendacity and deception in the mass media, is gravely misleading the US public. This is the proverbial Wile E. Coyote effect, where Wile E. has sped off the cliff but is apparently not yet in free fall. But bit by bit what US citizens are actually observing in their daily lives begins to contradict the official narrative from government leaders and media. This creates a foreboding –an inexplicable anxiety, and people cast about for explanations, making the general public an easy prey to the series of fear campaigns we have seen in recent years. However, eventually the contradictions become so sharp as to discredit official narratives, and revolts begin. States are expensive to maintain, and depend on cheap energy sources. As energy and other resource depletion weakens states, and authorities resort to palliatives that only aggravate the crisis, chaos reigns and opportunities arise for breakaway communities to form. What are their possibilities of social organization? What kinds of freedom should they embrace or preclude? This essay draws on a new view of human history to briefly frame discussion of these questions.

The dominant view of the long stretch of human history has humanity progressing stepwise inevitably from unconsciously derived egalitarian bands to statehood as the end of its history of social evolution. Graeber and Wengrow’s massive revisionist work, The Dawn of Everything: A New History of Humanity, uses the latest archeology and anthropology to paint a less rigid progression where populations consciously experimented with different forms of social organization, often in sharp contrast to their neighbors. Societies found many ways of gaining freedom from subjugation, either by moving away from oppressive regimes, or at least from their urban centers toward peripheries where they could practice civil disobedience and “consciously shape new social realities”[1]. Framing this trio – escape, revolt and creative social construction – as categories of freedom or liberation, the authors discover many patterns of their expression across history.

According to conventional history, the world has been populated with states of various sorts for several thousand years. Graeber and Wengrow’s investigation reveals that this is only partly true. State structures are impressive, so they receive undue attention in historical narratives. However, states/civilizations have risen and fallen many times in their history of over five millennia. In the intervals after collapse, peoples have experimented with less oppressive forms. Also, even during the most totalitarian regimes, as one moves from centers to peripheries, state power ebbs somewhat. Rulers in many regimes have exercised diminishing power beyond their capital cities. An example is the 30% of the food economy in the latter years of the USSR that developed informally from popular initiative outside the state-run farms. All through history, a focus on fringes or outbacks reveals peasant social structures that present an often-fractious contrast to the more obedient lives of citizens nearer urban centers of power. Geopolitical analyst Rolo Slavskiy observes:

For pretty much all of human history, the elites and specialized classes of warriors have made war on one another for one reason or another while the peasants simply stuck together and did their best to make it through the war in one way or another.

So, as the US imperial juggernaut moves farther into degrowth, the chains of command and supply essential to the ravenous consumption of cities will weaken and finally disintegrate, and chaos and civil unrest will plague metropoles and their suburbs most severely[2]. Populations in rural areas potentially can be the first to profit from failing dominant structures, distance themselves politically from central control and construct the degree of political and economic autarchy that will be necessary to survive.

We can draw insights about the disintegration of Western civilization and its US center in particular from the history of the many civilizations that rose and fell in the last five thousand years. Conventional thinking depicts any emergence of an urban center as the culmination of an evolutionary process in ‘statehood’, which Graeber and Wengrow described as including three essentials – a monopoly on violence, a charismatic leadership, and an administrative bureaucracy.

As a historical model for the collapse of US industrial society, it would be intriguing to use the only large pre-Columbian city that existed in the area that became the United States – Cahokia in the Mississippi valley – which attained a population of forty thousand by the end of the first century AD. Cahokia ruled a large area mainly by violence (warfare and human sacrifice) and great ritual spectacles that drew participants from throughout its empire to enhance the status of elites and create cohesion. States disintegrate at different rates: compared to the Roman empire, Cahokia fell apart relatively rapidly, perhaps partly because it lacked the third essential element of statehood – an administrative bureaucracy.

What is interesting for purposes of comparison is how it fell apart – people just left the region, which, despite its highly fertile alluvial soil, became a kind of no man’s land for generations. As Graeber and Wengrow describe it,

Whatever the precise combination of factors at play, by about AD 1350 mass defection had depopulated the region. Just as the metropolis of Cahokia was founded through its rulers’ ability to bring diverse populations together, often from across long distances, in the end the descendants of those people simply walked away. The Vacant Quarter implies a self-conscious rejection of everything the city of Cahokia stood for.

Among the descendants of Cahokian subjects, migration is often framed as implying the restructuring of an entire social order, merging our three elementary freedoms into a simple project of emancipation: to move away, to disobey and to build new social worlds.[3]

Later in the post-Cahokian Mississippi valley, European explorers found people experimenting with petty chiefdoms and mini-republics governed by village councils that engaged in lengthy political and philosophical debate. Farther north, European invaders found larger scale diplomatic institutions like the League of Five Nations, also known as the Iroquois Confederacy, which was preserving a kind of Pax Iroquoiana over a wide territory without anything that could be defined as a state.

Elsewhere in the world, Graeber and Wengrow also find “great hospitality zones” that have existed at various times in history without any administrative or authoritarian hierarchies, held together only by common culture or far-flung trading networks.[4] They describe many regimes throughout history as city-states, in which, as the term suggests, power diminished with distance from the city center. In many city states for instance, outlying satellite communities paid tribute to the central authority but otherwise went their own way and created their own social reality.

Hence, as the US declines as a state, we might consider the loss of administrative control, like the lack of it in Cahokia, as a harbinger of collapse. At the same time, the diversity of social arrangements that replaced Cahokia widens the scope of possibilities and helps frame the question of how to reshape the social space liberated during the US collapse as the opportunity arises.

What Kind of Freedom?

The trio of freedoms concept that Graeber and Wengrow propose initially sounds simple, but the devil is in the rights and duties spelled out or implied in the third freedom – to create a new social reality, as we shall see.

In the polarized US, the advocates of a variety of viewpoints have tossed around the concept of freedom like a political football until it is deflated of any clear meaning. Although most everyone can agree that a social contract should curtail some sorts of freedom, ranging from running stop signs all the way to premeditated murder; beyond that, the question becomes murkier, or at least more complex.

Highly visible at one pole are advocates of “free market capitalism”, which for some self-described conservatives appears to mean that in the domain of the economy just about anything goes, and furthermore, everything that occurs springs from the natural “invisible hand” of anonymous “market forces”. Hence, their logic goes, everyone will enjoy freedom so long as the public (as in government) does not interfere in the “free market”. One might object that the US capitalist system has evolved to the point where monopoly control reigns in every sector of the economy. In other words, most economic decision making, which pretty much shapes our lives, is in the hands of an elite minority that acts mainly in their own private interest, and thus undermines the imagined freedom of the majority. The trouble is, conservatives tend to focus on individual freedoms and overlook over-arching system-level power structures.

An instance of falling into that trap is the libertarian conservative who complained that an oil company’s hostile takeover muscled him out of a small business based on his invention of a more efficient electric battery, and buried the invention so that it would never compete with energy from oil. Had he an elementary knowledge of political economy – the study of power relations in a social system – he might have understood how the unfettered economic freedom he supported was his downfall. Conservatives’ advocacy of an economic system free of government interference also conflicts with their support for government-subsidized industries, expensive foreign wars that underwrite a lucrative weapons industry, protective tariffs, etc.

At another prominent political pole are those, often self-described as liberals, who traditionally champion freedoms defined in the constitutional Bill of Rights, such as speech and assembly, justice by fair trial and control of one’s person and private life. Liberals acknowledge imperfections in the free market system, but count on government regulatory agencies to fix the flaws. However, equally as ignorant as conservatives of power structures at the whole system level, they fail to understand that every such agency long ago fell victim to ‘regulatory capture’ by the very industry it was mandated to regulate. What is worse, liberals are especially prey to the illusion of government as elected servants of the people, whereas, due to the nature of the US structure of power relations, it is more like a stage show, where politicians promise to serve us, but then mostly serve the power elite who fund them. In the succinct synopsis of an early Supreme Court Justice, one can have most of the wealth in the hands of the few, or one can have democracy, but not both.[5]

Complicating the question of freedom these days is that in some ways conservatives and liberals seem to have switched roles, or at least ideals. Driven emotionally by a mass media so politicized against the Trump administration that it dropped all pretense of journalism, liberals have flouted all the civil liberties they used to champion in a frantic attempt to fraudulently remove an elected president whose administration in the end did no more damage to the nation than most others. Both major political parties have practiced electoral fraud for a long time, but once elected, US administrations have rarely experienced such an illegal attempt at removal. Meanwhile, because the media morphed into a weapon as the attack dog of the Democratic Party, it lost all credibility among conservatives. Consequently, when the media all in lockstep obediently trotted out a highly questionable pandemic narrative, conservatives had acquired some immunity against its scare campaign, and thus became the new champions of all the civil liberties that were violated by the pandemic lockdown policies.

In sum, it appears that groups at both poles of the polity are being snookered in different ways. In both cases it stems from the ability of ruling elites to keep the public in the dark regarding the many ways that they exercise their power, or at least deflect our attention from it. It seems to be human nature to easily fall for elaborate hoaxes, false flags, and other fictitious official narratives about how the world works, narratives that elites relentlessly fabricate to deceive us.

It is now an open question who will fall for the next campaign of fear. During another time of tumult, appalled at the frenzied mood of the industrial revolution, a 19th century French poet expressed his revulsion, writing, “Cité, fourmillant de rêves” (the metropole, an anthill swarming with dreams) where “alles ist gleichnis” (all is illusion).[6] Today we live in a similar time of outlandish moods, often indoctrinated, where the most preposterous and fantastical things can happen. Yesterday, no doubt spurred by the anti-Russian hatred spewing from German media and even its leadership, a crowd paraded in front of the German Reichstag in Berlin waving the swastika flag and calling for the genocide of the Russian people. Russians must be thinking: Did 27 million of us die in vain? Meanwhile it is said that here and there on the walls of Ukrainian villages is mysteriously appearing a mural of this babushka of legend; her red flag for most Russians now memorializing their victory over the scorched earth terror of the Nazi Operation Barbarossa.

Is it perhaps true that history moves in cycles, and that we must relive it again and again, “first as tragedy, then as farce”?[7] The present is another time of tumult where elites, desperate to preserve power, subject us to repeated psyops – well planned schemes of psychological conditioning either to fear or to hate – such that whole populations are swept up in episodes of mass psychosis.

Under these circumstances, maybe the question of what freedoms are likely to contribute to building a new form of civilization (and which ones are not) is a discussion better left to await calmer times. Perhaps this essay is only an attempt to set the stage for that conversation by 1) exploring the wreckage of current uses of freedom and 2) raising awareness of advances in the understanding of human history that display a much greater variety in the forms of society that the species has chosen, and thus suggest possibilities for the future. In the course of constructing a new social reality amid the disintegration of the old, I think we will need to take a holistic approach to what freedoms to incorporate, asking how particular freedoms might impact all sectors of society. A critical question will be an old one: how to strike the right balance between private and public rights, between individual liberty and the common good.

[1] Graeber, David and David Wengrow. 2021. The Dawn of Everything: A New History of Humanity.

[2] North, Karl. 2012. Cities and Suburbs in the Energy Descent: Thinking in Scenarios

[3] Graeber, Op Cit. p. 469.

[4] Ibid. p.516

[5] Louis Brandeis

[6] Baudelaire

[7] Karl Marx

By marromai: Energy, economy and the role of money

There was a nice surprise in my inbox this morning.

Marromai, a frequent visitor from Germany, having tired of seeing the same un-Denial post for 10 weeks, wrote an excellent essay to freshen things up. Thank you.

See also another essay by marromai here.

We all use and need money every day and would often like to have more of it. The vast majority of people don’t really understand what money actually is. Many think it is a medium of exchange that was invented at some point to facilitate commerce – which couldn’t be more wrong.

Readers of this and similar websites at least know that it must be more than that, and that money is connected to energy in some way. Naked Emperor summed this up the other day with a reference to Dr. Tim Morgan’s Surplus Energy Economics:

Dr. Morgan believes that there are two parallel economies. One is “the underlying ‘real’ or physical economy of products and services” and the other is a “financial economy of money and credit.” “Money has no intrinsic value, but possesses value only in relation to the material things for which it can be exchanged.”

https://nakedemperor.substack.com/p/the-everything-bubble-the-end-of

His article somehow anticipates the conclusion of this essay and describes very well why the divergence between ever-expanding, artificially inflated finance and shrinking real economy will soon lead to a pretty big bang. But an interesting point for me – and maybe for you too? – is how did our financial system emerge in the first place? What exactly is money and how did it become a proxy for energy?

I will try to describe that below, also to better understand it myself – feel free to ask questions or write your critique in the comments. My findings, which I try to summarize in my own words, come mainly from “Ein Buch für Keinen” (A Book for None) by Stefan Gruber which in turn is based on an economic theory called “Debitism” according to German economist Paul C. Martin.

In advance, we must be clear that all life forms known to us are dissipative systems. Every living being is condemned to accumulate energy to maintain itself, irreversibly increasing its complexity and thus entropy. If it cannot collect more energy than its body needs to sustain itself, it dies. A simple basic equation: life requires energy. This is the primordial debt that every living thing owes itself and that it must pay off if it does not want to perish. The crucial thing is that this debt must be paid in time (hunger) to escape the sanction (death). If food (energy) was always and everywhere available, this would be an insignificant automatic action. Only the pressure of a deadline in combination with scarcity and effort to procure measures a value to the debt. This definition will be important later.

Now let’s look at mankind, which for a long time lived in nomadic hunter-gatherer groups and more or less unconsciously paid off its primordial debt, like all other animals. At some point in history, due to external pressures such as depleted hunting grounds or changing climatic conditions, it transitioned to both nomadic pastoral tribes, which learned to raise animals and move with them when a region was grazed off, and permanently sedentary, arable land societies. Tribal societies don’t know or use money, since they produce everything they need on their own and share it among each other. This is called a subsistence economy.

An arable tribe has the great disadvantage of no longer being regionally flexible – its sedentariness was a weakness that made it vulnerable to raids by nomadic pastoral tribes who could rob its earned and stored supplies (stored energy to pay the primordial debt). However, the predatory pastoral tribes soon discovered that a peasant tribe could be raided and wiped out only once. But if it is “offered protection” from other nomads in return for a tribute in the form of the food it produces, this is to the advantage of both (more to the advantage of the herdsmen than the farmers, of course). The shepherd tribe arises as guardians and rulers over the peasants (“The Lord is my shepherd”), promising protection and demanding tributes in return to maintain and expand their power.

Only after the ruler specified the levy, which had to be paid on a date, this levy became a commodity in demand and thus money. And it became the yardstick for the valuation of all other goods. The levy, i.e. money, was a commodity and with this commodity the debt to the authorities was repaid.

The first taxes were paid in kind, e.g. grain (energy to service the original debt) – later, when empires and complexity grew, they were put in parity with silver for the sake of simplicity (e.g. 180 barley grains = 1 shekel of silver in Mesopotamia). After that, weapons metal, i.e. copper, tin and later iron were declared to be levies. Also gold counted at first as weapon metal, because it was easy to work. Whether money is in kind, or metal to produce weapons, or today’s colorfully printed paper slips, is completely irrelevant. Money is, what is defined as levy by the ruling power. It does not need to have an intrinsic value.

The decisive factor for the emergence of money was therefore the simultaneous emergence of a power cycle: the levy could be used to buy mercenaries to maintain power. The mercenaries exchanged the levy for goods and services from the population. The people in turn were able to pay tribute to the ruler, which further strengthened the ruler’s power. But the ruling power had the problem of having to make expenditures in advance. Naturally, it tries to recover this deficit with the demanded levies, whereby it has to expand and increase its power. Whereupon it needs more levies to maintain itself – maybe that looks familiar to you? (A dissipative system)

Since not everyone was always able to produce the required amount of levy goods by the deadline, the subjects were forced to trade among themselves – thus division of labor and specialization developed. While some focused on the cultivation of food, others produced tools for the peasants or weapons for the rulers, for which they received the coveted levy in return, in order to pay off their debt to the ruler. Those who had no other option had to offer their labor (debt bondage, day laborers,…). Individuals in an economy based on the division of labor are practically forced to conclude contracts with others or to fulfil these contracts in order to obtain the required levy and to survive.

By the way, the invention of writing is – not as some people think – due to the preservation of knowledge – but to bookkeeping, as Babylonian cuneiform writings prove. It was a system for documenting the taxes already paid by the subjects. On small clay tablets it was recorded who had paid what amount of tax, which then was used instead of the levy itself – an early form of money without intrinsic value.

The ruler is ultimately the owner of his realm, which is the area he can protect and demarcate from others by force of arms. But he can cede his property, i.e. share it, by granting the subjects the right to private property and defending it against opponents with his military power. The subject can manage the property guaranteed to him by the ruler and trade with it and its proceeds to be able to pay the tribute. And, very important, he can lend on his property to obtain credit. However, if he remains in debt, the subordinate is punished, or his property is foreclosed.

Those who submit and agree to the rules (forcibly set by the ruler) to maintain the status quo are part of that state(!). Those who do not want to belong are left to their own devices without any rights and were thus doomed to death in the past – today statelessness is no longer even conceivable.

The described processes of the emergence of states, money and economy were the initial sparks for today’s global trade economy, which is still based on the assurance of property by the central powers. We see that state, property, money and economy form an indissoluble mesh and a state is always based on the exercise of power and the compulsion to pay a levy. A state can therefore never be based on voluntariness of all participants. Today, more than ever, it is clearly visible that the state apparatus must inevitably become ever larger and more inefficient and, in the final analysis, serves only self-preservation and not its inhabitants. Like any dissipative system, it will vanish someday – this is by the way, the reason why there are so many collapsed civilizations in history and ours will be no exception.

But the trigger for the economic dynamics in a ruling system – from the destruction of a moneyless solidarity community to a highly specialized society based on the division of labor with compulsory trade and individual liability – is solely the pressure to pay the levy to the state on time. The means to pay off this tax debt is money. Money therefore always documents a debt. First, the tax debt to the rulers and, building on this, the contract debt between private individuals. So money is only a debt repayment vehicle. If money exists, a debt must exist at the same time, which can be erased with this money. Money receives its value only by the underlying debt contract, it cannot have an “intrinsic value” detached from a terminally fixed debt.

With this description, the definition of money is suddenly very clear:

Money (usually uncountable, plural monies or moneys): A legally or socially binding conceptual contract of entitlement to wealth, void of intrinsic value, payable for all debts and taxes, and regulated in supply.

Here we close our circle to the primordial debt mentioned above. Only the obligation to surrender a commodity earned by performance to the state at the deadline in order to escape a sanction defines money and gives it a value. Without a deadline there would be no reason to generate money, and without scarcity at the deadline, it would be worthless. It must always be earned first by doing work. Money is a debt, which has to be repaid at a certain point in the future by doing work before that time has come.

To do work means energy must flow. As power is a measure of energy per unit of time, money is therefore actually a measure of power and thus more directly linked to energy than most people can imagine. So, it is absolutely true that energy drives the economy. How fortunate that we discovered fossil fuels, developed combustion engines, etc., to accelerate economic activity, technological progress, and trade exponentially. Fossil energy made our economy grow fast and big.

Our credit-based finance system made it possible to create money which is solely based on the promise to perform work, in order to be able to take advantage of it immediately or to start new economic activity with it. When the modern world started to decouple the financial system from the real economy, the problems began. And this is where it gets ugly: In order to provide the promised future work, energy will be needed. But because far too much credit was granted without taking into account the energy that will actually be available, a Ponzi scheme was kicked off with nothing but empty promises on future energy. The worldwide fantasy amounts of money are no longer matched by any economic output that can be provided in realistic terms – financial collapse is pre-programmed and with it collapses any economic activity driven by energy. At present, attempts are being made to conceal and delay this by all means.

We have bought with lazy money a claim on future energy and have already squandered everything today. When the fossil energy is depleted we will be left with much worthless money.

Our dissipative system aka “modern civilization” will soon not be able to pay off its primordial debt.

I hope that when the world ends, I can breathe a sigh of relief because there will be so much to look forward to.1

P.S. Since we have seen that every state, economy and money are based on oppression and force, all possible future states will be no exception. I see a backfall to small tribal solidary communities as the most promising concept for humanity to survive the coming hardship.

1From “Ein Buch für Keinen” (A book for no one) by Stefan Gruber. The bible of nihilism: How economic, ideological, social, biological and physical systems emerge and why they are doomed to fail. I would recommend this as a must read, but unfortunately, this masterpiece is only available in German.

What would you do?

The writer Endurance from the Weathering the Storm substack wrote an excellent essay today taking a deep dive into the history of Ukraine showing, as with covid, that nothing our western leaders are telling us about the Ukraine conflict is true.

I have not followed Endurance long enough to vouch for him, and fair warning, he appears to think climate change is a scam. I do not know if that means he thinks the policies we are implementing to address climate change are a scam, which I agree with, or if he thinks there is no threat to civilization from human caused climate change, which I of course disagree with.

In addition, Endurance does not seem to be overshoot aware, and therefore does not integrate overshoot into his analysis of motivations, which I speculate on at the end.

Regardless, Endurance’s knowledge of the Ukraine situation is impressive.

https://endurancea71.substack.com/p/inconvenient-truths

Endurance begins by reminding us that our leaders do not deserve our trust because they got every single thing about covid exactly wrong:

You may still think that Putin is the Devil incarnate and that Zelensky walks on water, despite knowing that life is messy and rarely quite so black and white. You may also be of the opinion that we are the victims of incompetence, rather than malevolence; that government’s are peopled by dolts who continually mess things up. That seems to be a popular view in conservative media – popular and convenient, as professing it enables them to avoid the conflict that would be inevitable if they spoke the truth.

Before embarking on this read, I’d urge you to put as many preconceptions aside as you possibly can. I will set out the back story to the war in Ukraine and I’ll warn you in advance that none of the participants (and there are more of them than you might think) come out of it smelling of roses. But, just as the establishment plandemic narrative is almost completely untrue, so it is with the conflict in the east. In truth, this shouldn’t be much of a surprise, as it’s the same people trying to sell us yet another bill of goods and, if they’ve lied to us about one subject, why would we automatically believe them about another? And, yes, I do mean lie. The odds of them simply being incompetent are statistically microscopic. Look at their track record on Covid:

“Transmission of the disease—wrong • Asymptomatic spread—wrong • PCR testing—wrong • Fatality rate—wrong • Lockdowns—wrong • Community triggers—wrong • Business closures—wrong • School closures—wrong • Quarantining healthy people—wrong • Impact on youth—wrong • Hospital overload—wrong • Plexiglass barriers—wrong • Social distancing—wrong • Outdoor spread—wrong • Masks—wrong • Variant impact—wrong • Natural immunity—wrong • Vaccine efficacy—wrong • Vaccine injury—wrong.”(1)

Rob here adding to the list:

  • biased, opaque, and incompetent data
  • no reporting of critical data like all-cause mortality vaxed vs. un-vaxed
  • no independent testing without conflicts of interest
  • denying and not investigating possible policy harms
  • no post mortem analysis & data collection
  • no adjusting policies to align with new evidence
  • forcing risk on children with no benefit
  • ignoring obesity and age risk
  • discounting natural immunity
  • ignoring risk of variant proliferation
  • discarding all lessons learned from historic pandemics
  • no purging of officials with conflicts of interest
  • aggressive censoring of dissenting experts
  • funding and then denying gain of function research
  • covering up and not investigating the lab leak
  • no steps taken to prevent another lab leak
  • vitamin D silence
  • ignoring and blocking early treatment successes
  • blocking safe, effective, and inexpensive Ivermectin
  • misrepresenting mRNA longevity
  • misrepresenting mRNA injection locality
  • poor mRNA manufacturing quality control
  • downplaying novelty and risk of mRNA technologies
  • providing financial incentives for bad behavior
  • indemnifying pharma
  • insufficient support and gaslighting of vaccine injured

If they’d flipped a coin on every decision, they’d have at least got some right. And remember, despite the effort to make you think otherwise, most of the science existed prior to the discovery of Covid – they just ignored it because it didn’t fit their narrative arc. It is, therefore, surely incumbent upon us to, at minimum, review other claims they’ve made and treat them with a heavy dollop of skepticism. Being victimized due to incompetence is one thing; being punished with malice aforethought is something else.

Endurance then goes on to provide much detail backed by references on the history leading up to Ukraine conflict. Here are a few excerpts that do not do justice to the full essay which you should read at the link above.

The Russian concerns over NATO expansion have merit. Despite what apologists may say, the organisation has always been a a military organisation whose explicit mission has been to oppose Soviet expansion westwards. It has failed to recalibrate itself in the past thirty years. For decades, the communist Soviet Union posed a genuine threat and NATO had a role to play. But Russia isn’t the Soviet Union. Nor is she any longer communist. But the Americans, in particular, cannot let it go; perhaps, because it gives them dispensation to rule the roost over Western Europe militarily. In any event, expansion eastward is what happened whether Russia liked it or not.

From a base of sixteen member states in 1990, NATO now totals thirty – 28 in Europe – and every single one of the new additions is more than an inch eastwards. In fact, four of them were members of the Warsaw Pact and all were members of the Soviet Bloc.

So, whatever one thinks of Putin in any other respect, one could be forgiven for having some level of understanding as to his skepticism of the West and the Americans, in particular. They have been the driving force behind catastrophic economic policies which impoverished Putin’s homeland and which took perhaps twenty years to fully recover from. These are also the same people who did not keep their word on NATO expansion, not just the once, but a dozen or more times, effectively taking advantage of Russia’s diminished state, a state they had been instrumental in creating. Not only that, but they have resisted his peaceful overtures, his desire to be a member of the club, and continued to treat his country as a pariah. This is a version of history that may be unpalatable to you. Nonetheless, every part of this narrative is verifiably true and it adds a little more color to the backdrop.

Endurance then discusses the triggers that started the conflict 1 year ago:

…at this point, two months into his term, Biden hadn’t even spoken to Zelensky. Perhaps the Americans weren’t overly keen on talking to a politician who had been elected on a platform which rejected militaristic nationalism and espoused a desire to negotiate with the Russians, a policy supported by 73% of the voting public, comprised of both Russian and non-Russian speakers – until the Azov and other assorted neo Nazis threatened to hang him from the nearest lamppost if he so much as spoke to the Russians.(59) It’s not unreasonable to assume that the United States was the instigator of that particular threat; they were training and equipping those very formations at the time.

In any event, shortly thereafter, Biden’s attention turned to Ukraine, his old stomping ground from when he was Obama’s point man. He’d made six official visits during that tenure.(60) Now he involved himself once more. In June 2021 the US set out a roadmap for Ukraine to join NATO and in November signed a Charter on Strategic Partnership with Zelensky, which included the following statement:

“Ukraine’s right to decide its own future foreign policy course free from outside interference, including with respect to Ukraine’s aspirations to join NATO.”(61) Putin had had fair warning as to Biden’s direction of travel, as Biden had reiterated his commitment to Ukraine in a telephone call in April of that year.(62) This after calling Putin “a killer” the previous month and threatening repercussions for the Russiagate hoax.(63) Nonetheless, it wasn’t until November that Russian troops began massing on Ukraine’s border, not before.

Even then, Putin gave it one last shot, asking for guarantees that, among other things, there would be no more NATO expansion to the east, that the US should remove missile systems that it had supplied to Romania and Poland and that Ukraine and several other countries should remain neutral buffer states.(64) He received no such assurances and it’s my judgement that he was never going to.(65) Despite the clear wishes of the public, Zelensky was effectively under the control of the neo Nazi elements in his own country, many of whom had been appointed to government positions.(66) And they, in turn, were working hand-in-glove with the Americans. Zelensky was (and is) trapped.

The die was almost cast. All it required was one further bad-faith move on behalf of Biden or Zelensky and it wasn’t long in coming. On February 16th 2022, the Ukrainian Army began a heavy artillery bombardment of civilian areas in eastern Ukraine. In all, over 4,000 shells were fired, with a peak of 2,026 on the 19th. These numbers are not supplied by the combatants; they were observed by a mission of the OSCE, there in their professional capacity.(67)

To be clear, once again the Ukrainians were shelling their own Russian speaking citizenry, as well as the ethnic Ukrainians who form a narrow majority of the population. Therefore, even if we ignore all the provocations that had come before, are we still able to say that this act – the indiscriminate killing of civilians – wasn’t in itself a provocation? I think not. A week later, Putin launched his special military operation.

Endurance concludes by discussing the motivations of the west. He thinks the primary objective of the west is to prevent a rival economic power from emerging, and in this service, wants to overthrow Putin.

Biden himself, as is his wont, had already let the cat out of the bag, even if his aides later tried to walk it back. But it’s difficult to walk back “For God’s sake, this man cannot remain in power”.(85) Especially when it’s accompanied by “…and we have to show resolve so he knows what’s coming and so the people of Russia know what he’s brought on them. That’s what this is all about.”(86) Boris’ spokesperson was even more explicit; he said that the sanctions on Russia “…we are introducing, that large parts of the world are introducing, are to bring down the Putin regime.”(87) I don’t really think further clarification was needed, but we got some anyway, from James Heappey, minister for the armed forces:

“His failure must be complete; Ukrainian sovereignty must be restored, and the Russian people empowered to see how little he cares for them. In showing them that, Putin’s days as President will surely be numbered and so too will those of the kleptocratic elite that surround him. He’ll lose power and he won’t get to choose his successor.”(88)

I disagree. I suspect control of exportable natural resources, especially energy, is central to the conflict. If blocking a rival economic power rather than resource control is the primary motivation of the west, then we would have started a war with China before Russia.

Now let’s return to the theme of this blog post, “What would you do?”.

Our western leaders have lied about every aspect of the two biggest global events that have occurred in my 65 year lifetime: covid and the Ukraine war.

These two events occurred back to back and were simultaneous with what some of us that are overshoot aware think was the imminent onset of an overshoot driven economic collapse.

That can’t be a coincidence.

Here is a thought exercise I have been mulling for years.

Let’s imagine our leaders are reasonably intelligent and desire to do what is best for themselves, their children, and the citizens they represent.

Let’s also assume that our leaders understand:

  1. Economic growth has stalled due to the rising cost of energy and other non-renewable resources.
  2. Our ability to use debt to compensate for rising resource costs is ending due to our total debt having accumulated to an unsustainable level, combined with inflation driven higher interest rates.
  3. Rising demand from the non-western world combined with depletion of low-cost non-renewable resources means economic growth cannot be restarted unless demand is destroyed elsewhere and control over remaining resources is secured.
  4. If demand is not destroyed, and resources are not secured, the western economies will soon enter a prolonged (permanent?) period of contraction with severe consequences for our debt-backed fractional reserve monetary system (which by design requires growth to function) including wealth destruction from falling asset prices and debt defaults, credit scarcity making it harder to conduct business and to consume, high unemployment, and unaffordability and/or shortages of food, energy, other necessities.
  5. Falling tax revenues combined with already high public debt will make it impossible for governments to provide a safety net to prevent severe hardship and social unrest.
  6. Our leaders cannot discuss publicly any of the above because doing so would likely accelerate the collapse via herd panic.

If you were a leader with this knowledge, and a decent person, what would you do?

Might this explain their actions with covid and Ukraine?

By wis.dom project: Regress in Progress: My state of mind

Dire Evolutionary Timeline by Blu

This is an essay from reader wis.dom project who describes his painful personal journey of connecting dots to achieve awareness of our overshoot predicament.

I was born in 1969, at a time when everything still seemed possible. On July 20, two people walked on the moon, which is probably the greatest technological achievement of man to this day. In my youth, I devoured novels by Asimov, Clarke, Lem, Dick and Herbert. The galaxy’s colonization seemed within reach.

45 years later, I realized that I was a victim of mass hypnosis, what I refer to today as techno-utopia – a belief in the limitless human development, genius and almost divine uniqueness of Homo Sapiens. I realized that industrial civilization, like any other dissipative structure, is doomed to inevitable collapse.

In 1972 – 3 years after my birth, a book titled The Limits to Growth was released by the Club of Rome. It was the first scientifically compiled report analyzing future scenarios for humanity. It indicated that unlimited development is not possible on a finite planet. The book was published in 30 million copies and was one of the most popular at the time. Surprisingly, despite the wide range of my readings, the book did not appear on my horizon for a long time. As if it was covered by another intellectual  “Säuberung”. In fact, it was the subject of an intellectual blitzkrieg and relatively quickly evaporated from the media circulation. I experienced this myself by talking to several university professors. Every one of them dismissed the LtG concept with a shrug and an unequivocal, non-debatable conclusion that the theory had long been discredited.

Since then, there have been many other events that have offered an opportunity to change consciousness and thus the trajectory of industrial civilization.

On June 15, 1979, during the ongoing second oil crisis, President Jimmy Carter gave a famous speech in which he announced: “The energy crisis is real. It is worldwide. It is a clear and present danger to our Nation. These are facts and we simply must face them”. Photovoltaic panels were installed on the roof of the White House to symbolize a new trend – energy conservation and an attempt to develop alternative sources.

American people responded by choosing Ronald Reagan as the 40th president of the United States, who had the panels dismantled. Before he did so, he announced: “There are no great limits to growth because there are no limits of human intelligence, imagination, and wonder.” As a result of the use of “intelligence, imagination, and wonder” American analysts probably came to the conclusion that if we do not have the resources ourselves, they should be organized from a different source. Therefore, on his first overseas trip, Reagan traveled to Saudi Arabia, where he probably proposed the following alternative: petrodollar, protection and weapons for cheap oil… or American aircraft carriers will stay anchored in the Persian Gulf for longer – as in the Al Capone quote: “You can get much further with a kind word and a gun than you can with a kind word alone”. Same logic. Following, we got post-colonial globalization with all the necessary tools like the IMF, World Bank, BIS, and Washington Consensus. Pax Americana in full release. A decade of crises had begun.

In 1980, a group of “loyal Americans” constructed Georgia Guidestones, “The American Stonehenge”. On 4 granite slabs, in 8 languages, the authors recommended 10 commandments of a healthy civilization, including limiting the global population to 500 million. This humanist monument was recently destroyed by fanatical terrorists and then demolished by the county authorities for “security reasons”.

In 1984, the publisher of George Orwell’s famous book, which regained popularity as a result of events at that time, advertised it with the slogan “maybe not 1984, but there is always 1985”. We solved the waves of hunger that engulfed African countries with “Live Aid”. The eastern block began to fall apart.

For the growth protagonists, their optimistic belief in progress was confirmed in the 1990’s, after the collapse of the Eastern bloc and another “gold rush”, this time in the oil fields of Western Siberia. Another wave of globalization had begun. The ceiling of the ecological capacity of mankind was raised again, and the extraction of natural resources accelerated to planet limits. China joined the WTO and “the sky was the limit” again.

The digital revolution restored belief in unlimited development, and Hollywood started showing “happy endings” again after years of dystopian themes. However, the honeymoon of unipolar globalization was short. In 2001, cracks started to appear. US president, George W. Bush, announced that the prosperity of the Americans was not negotiable. Invasions of Iraq and Afghanistan clearly showed the intentions of Zbigniew Brzezinski’s  “The Grand Chessboard” strategy. After all, the 9/11 organization required remarkable synchronization, and its presentation to the public was another masterpiece of the hypnotic power of mass communication. Undoubtedly, its organizers were aware of the challenges ahead. In 1998, Colin J. Campbell, a highly respected geologist dealing with oil field analysis for companies such as BP, Texaco, Amoco, together with Jean Laherrère published an article titled The End of Cheap Oil. Shortly after, he recalled, gentlemen from the Pentagon / CIA visited him with a proposal to cooperate. They wanted to know more about the impending peak-oil. They knew the matter was serious. Campbell’s relatively precise predictions materialized in 2006, when we reached the peak of conventional oil production.

However, also this time the convulsions of civilization were prolonged. For optimists, the shale revolution, fracking, deep and arctic oil were another confirmation of human genius and the possibility of unlimited expansion of the species. Changing the definition of oil production to ‘all liquids’ and the inclusion of bizarre products such as biofuels once again gave the impression of unlimited resources. For the more inquisitive observers, it was more like “last drops from the bottom of the barrel.” The IEA’s prediction of production scenarios, with a price of $300 per barrel, did not seem to scare the public. For some, they were another opportunity for tempting profits. The oil price reached $147 a barrel in 2007 and has yet to be beaten. However, it had far-reaching consequences in the form of a global financial and economic crisis. In November 2018, we probably achieved the final peak of production of all liquid hydrocarbons.  Peak oil has become a fact.

Germany’s Bundeswehr 2010 publication on the consequences of the peak extraction of critical resources has not reached a wider audience. Instead, we got another installment of mass hypnosis in the form of such oxymorons as “renewable energies” (which for semantic precision are not renewable) and “sustainable development” (whatever that means). The energy transformation, changed by all cases, was called a revolution by its followers. Apparently, none of them noticed that revolutions are by nature bottom-up. The current attempt at energy transformation, on the other hand, is a top-down, elite-bureaucratic decree forced into the economy with an enormous organizational, financial and propaganda effort, and has nothing to do with the revolution. Except perhaps the inevitable failure.

Further memes of the Holy Grails of energy appear in the widespread public perception. From nuclear fusion projects, new categories of nuclear reactors, SMRs, large-scale energy storage to the recently very popular multicolored forms of hydrogen. Already every moderately educated inhabitant of Western countries can cite further possibilities of increasing our chance for a vacation on Mars in the near future, a vision presented by Elon, the most popular techno-utopian messiah. The knowledge on this subject is usually so shallow that it only causes confusion. After all, if all these solutions are at hand, why are we living in times of a global energy crisis? Undoubtedly, if not terrorist inclinations, this can at least provoke rage against such inept politicians. Greta is disappointed, as are her millions of unsuspecting millennials. False hope is a source of frustration expressed by aggression. This generation will inspire a wave of radicalism and eco-terrorism in the near future.

So here we are. Pandemic, wars, revolutions, hunger, migrations, financial crisis, stagflation, new cold war, de-globalization – we got a jackpot in this draw.

In 2011, a public opinion research company surveyed Western countries’ populations on the threats to human civilization. 11% expressed the opinion that events that threaten civilization will occur during their lives. I wonder what the result would be today, but I have no doubt it would be significantly higher. Still, the wider population was not frightened by the fact that in 2018 Sweden mailed instructions to its citizens on how to prepare for war, which was also a pocket prepper plan. The city of New York is preparing for a nuclear attack right now. A day like any other, nothing to see here. Yet all over the world there are no reactions, no demonstrations, no prayers for peace. The masses are  hypnotized. Most of the younger generation of Western societies fear climate change. Nobody told them that the greatest threat to their welfare is, paradoxically, an end to environmental rape.

A breakthrough on the legendary World3 Model Standard Run is happening right before our eyes. Except the fall, like in Hemingway’s novel: How did you go bankrupt? Bill asked. “Two ways”, Mike said. “Gradually and then suddenly”. “Gradually” was already there, now “suddenly” begins. As if we were watching Seneca Cliff live. Yet most people believe this is just a temporary stumble on the way to permanent happiness and prosperity. Almost every statement of people in the media contains hidden optimism when they make plans for 10, 20 or 30 years, visions of smart-cities, hydrogen-economy, electric cars and universal happiness. Even the so-called pessimists that see the crisis and the forthcoming World War III, believe in the following reconstruction and further progress after the victory of the only right one, i.e. OUR SIDE. Spes decedit ultimo, amorem non moritur.

The pandemic, the genesis of which should be sought in biological weapons laboratories, was presented efficiently and with amazing media synchronization as a natural zoonotic epidemic. At the same time, the health service suffered global Münchhausen’s surrogate syndrome and concluded that injecting 5 billion people with experimental gene therapy is a good idea. And this despite the fact that for the vast majority of them the disease is relatively harmless, while gene therapy turns out to be ineffective and risky. I mean, safe and effective. How the “vaccine”, which should be injected in your body 4 times in 1.5 years is effective, no one explained and few asked.

Meanwhile, the frequency of meetings between political elites, presidents, prime ministers, ministers and a whole host of other notables in various configurations has drastically increased. This could hypothetically indicate greater international cooperation, but I am betting that the number of fires to be extinguished has increased instead. And I’m afraid this is just the beginning. Groups from WEF, G7, G20, BRICS, AUKUS, NATO, B&RI, QUAD, RCEP, ASEAN, to the Bilderberg Group meet to agree current positions, preferences, transactions, exchange information and confirm alliances. The chessboard is dynamically reconfigured. Global industrial civilization, like any dissipative structure, bifurcates. The world will divide. We go back in time. Another Cold War has arrived, and as one California senator noted, the truth is its first casualty. The level of propaganda is so advanced that, as in my youth, we will soon be seeing “TV is lying” graffiti. And this is justified. The elites are trying to prepare for the coming crisis, and this requires the right tools of indoctrination, surveillance and control. We can expect more riots, protests, strikes and demonstrations. More state control. More power of brute force. More epidemic passports, debt, digital currencies, vaccinations, bankruptcies, unemployment and migrations. Less money, food, travel, vacation, products, freedoms, and rights. The polarization of opinions is growing, and the spectrum of the narrative is intensifying the schizophrenia of paradigms. Social discontent will grow. As William Gibson stated, “the future is already here, it’s just not evenly distributed”.  Sri Lanka is the proverbial canary in the mine. It’s just a matter of time before it will also show up in my neighborhood. Klaus Schwab from the WEF is supposed to keep me happy, but I only see it in the scenario of Futurological Congress. I can handle “less meat” with pleasure, but a lack of property is a fresh implementation of techno-fascism based on the proven model of CCP. National Socialism has the same imperative regardless of the flag. Klaus’ pupils, the prime ministers of the Netherlands and Canada, are already eagerly implementing the plan heading straight towards Soylent Green. The new techno-utopian prophet Yuval Noah Harari (Noah is quite symbolic in this context) and at the same time faithful to the Great Reset sect defines the challenges facing humanity as, among other things, providing adequate entertainment for these billions of “useless people”. 4th industrial revolution – biotechnology, automation, geoengineering, brain-computer interface, remote control, complete elimination of privacy, artificial intelligence, virtual reality, transhumanism and singularity will save us. In which metaverse, Mr. Harari? Techno-fascism? It looks more like smart-depopulation than smart-dictatorship.

Meanwhile, the war in Europe became a breeding ground for hysterical psychosis, in which a billion people of the Western world decided that  preparations for WW3 should begin. Europe has been organizing Seppuku type economic crises on an unprecedented scale since 1929, followed by the depopulation scenario of the anonymous white intelligence agency deagel.com. These two events are another masterful operations on the open brain of global population. Simultaneously the UN forecasts the size of the human population by 2300, and the optimistic scenario predicts 36.4 billion inhabitants of the planet. Are they already implementing Stanislaw Lem’s scenario in their canteens? Is this a pilot?

The process of absorbing this knowledge was painful. The closest analogy is DABDA (denial, anger, bargaining, depression, acceptance) described by Elisabeth  Kübler-Ross in the book On Death and Dying (also published in 1969). In her description, the stages of dying may occur many times, and their sequences are individual for each person becoming aware of their own mortality. I saw it myself in my loved ones who passed away. This happened to me also in relation to the revelation that industrial civilization is dying. Such awareness is an extremely difficult experience. In addition to its own emotional consequences, it also brings deep alienation. It becomes a natural need to share your knowledge with others, including your loved ones. As much as I could, I tried to avoid it, knowing from the descriptions of others who had previously had such experiences. Sharing such information brings only isolation, mockery, and being labelled as a “depressive-manic supporter of conspiracy theories”. Despite my sincere desire, I did not avoid ostracism and contempt, like many others before me. Kassandra, the social nickname that had been given to me half-jokingly in my social circle, turned out to be only a sign of intellectual gaps of my friends. After all, Kassandra was right in predicting the fall of Troy. I was doomed, like her, to a consciousness that no one would accept. No wonder,  eschatology has a long history and the list of Armageddon prophets is long.

As part of my personal DABDA I am trying to decipher the history and its mechanisms. The question “how did this happen?” is lingering. How is it possible that we have brought our species and the planet to the brink of collapse? And there is the question of who was responsible.

The story leading to the LtG conclusions seems quite obvious from my current perspective. David Attenborough provides the simplest explanation:

We have a finite environment— the planet. Anyone who thinks that you can have infinite growth in a finite environment is either a madman or an economist.

After 30 years of studying economics, I came to a similar conclusion. Modern mainstream economics is a scholastic sect that created pseudo-science describing economic mechanisms without considering any environmental factors in their models. Economists rationalized that any limitations related to demographics, resources and pollution will be resolved by the market, and ultimately by another sect – academy of scientific progress in cooperation with mammon wizards, i.e. rulers of the financial system. I am writing this with great respect and admiration for thousands of great scientists. We are also a brilliant species after all. Without them, we would still be jogging through the Central African savannahs. And probably the debt-engineers also deserve gratitude, because as Lloyd Blenkfein, president of Goldman Sachs said at the height of the previous global GFC financial crisis, “I’m doing God’s Work”. In fact, I cannot disagree. Without sophisticated debt magic the pyramid of industrial civilization would have collapsed much sooner.

The population of the planet grew exponentially, and we just recently surpassed 8 billion people on the planet for a while. Paul R. Ehrlich published The Population Bomb in 1968. The book received similar intellectual reception to LtG and was recognized as a Malthusian propagation of fear and defeatism.

In 1959, Aldous Huxley published New World 30 years later: The divergence report. Even then he feared the consequences of overpopulation. His conclusions are being realized before our eyes. The mixture of Orwell’s 1984 and the original Brave New World is more and more obvious, only the proportions change. Orwell is increasingly dominating though, and “War is Peace, Freedom is Slavery, and Ignorance is Strength” is increasingly evident in current mass media hypnosis.

So who was responsible?

Politicians? People with sociopathic narcissistic disorders voted in to solve short-term problems? The Kissinger Report  was published in 1974 for the President Nixon administration reads:

23. The central question for world population policy in the year 1974, is whether mankind is to remain on a track toward an ultimate population of 12 to 15 billion – implying a five to seven-fold increase in almost all the underdeveloped world outside of China – or whether (despite the momentum of population growth) it can be switched over to the course of earliest feasible population stability – implying ultimate totals of 8 to 9 billions and not more than a three or four-fold increase in any major region.

24. What are the stakes? We do not know whether technological developments will make it possible to feed over 8 much less 12 billion people in the 21st century. We cannot be entirely certain that climatic changes in the coming decade will not create great difficulties in feeding a growing population, especially people in the LDCs who live under increasingly marginal and more vulnerable conditions. There exists at least the possibility that present developments point toward Malthusian conditions for many regions of the world.

The politicians knew perfectly well, at least the well-informed ones. As Deng Xiaoping, chairman of the Communist Party of China and architect of modern China, probably concluded that if China does not join the global economy relatively quickly, it will no longer have a chance to end the Age of Humiliation and “take a central position on the world stage”. In 1992, Fidel Castro delivered this speech at the Rio Environmental Conference.

Hunger and riots have been feared by politicians since ancient Egypt. Because who wants to end on the guillotine? Today, an eclipse is not enough to pacify riots. There are much better methods, as progress can be seen in every area. Alternatives to the horsemen of the apocalypse remain. Eugenics, euthanasia, and birth control were supposedly not humanistic enough.

Financial elites? These people were destined to make more money and power. They try their best playing in the sandbox of techno-utopia. The WEF Great Reset does not look promising either. Rather desperate, though logical. Likewise their contingency plans.

Scientists? In search of clues pointing to our destiny, we can also go back to the discoveries of Prigogin, Odum, Georgescu-Roegen and Lotka, great scientists who brought us closer to the knowledge of what life is. And modern authors describe with high precision our dependence on fossil energy to keep the population alive. Joseph Tainter, Matthieu Auzanneau, Craig Dilworth, Charles A.S. Hall, François Roddier, and many others, described how the world really works and the state it is in. They also failed. Apparently the printings were too small. Science has its own limits, regardless of the symptoms of progressive degeneration to which it is subject, like any large organization. Contemporary philosophers, however, dreamed of this future, but apparently they were not invited to breakfast TVs. Yet they were destined to rule Plato’s state.

Humanity? Each of us with internet access had the opportunity to find this knowledge. Some of us, however, preferred to watch cute cats or modern gladiators running on the trimmed lawn. Panem et circenses.

Philosophers? After all, philosophy, as a love of wisdom, was perhaps the most responsible for the awareness of human destiny. The philosophers were proto-scientists, only with progressing specialization migrated to the role of provincial humanists with an inclination to determine the number of angels dancing on the head of a pin. They also failed. As a result, most of humanity lives in Plato’s cave, waiting for the looming vengeance of Thomas Malthus, the first professor of political economy. What an irony.

Or maybe nobody is to blame, and humanity – as in the Greek tragedy – was destined to follow this last journey of Icarus from the beginning?

George Orwell in Shock

Hot Money

I watched the new documentary Hot Money by Susan Kucera tonight.

An intelligent world-wise father (General Wesley Clark) and his son discuss some of the problems we face with many smart participants. I don’t think they interviewed a single idiot, which was refreshing.

They know something is seriously wrong and make an honest attempt to connect the dots. They come tantalizingly close to a complete picture of reality, but miss the all important overshoot drivers of over population and declining returns from non-renewable energy.

Which of course means they understand everything, except what matters.

Nevertheless, Hot Money is excellent and worth watching because it has a lot of intelligent substance.

I also think it indicates a growing mainstream awareness of how close we are to collapsing, and I suspect herd awareness (coupled with denial of the real causes) may be the trigger.

Some of the important points made:

  • the financial system is a bomb waiting to explode, climate change may be the trigger
  • climate change is real and very serious
  • droughts, floods, and fires are a big problem now
  • it now takes more than 3 dollars of debt to create 1 dollar of growth, it used to take less than 1 dollar of debt to create 1 dollar of growth
  • farmers are struggling and failing due to climate change, debt, high input costs, and low crop prices
  • real incomes and living standards are falling despite lower taxes than the 50’s
  • some young couples are not having children because they see a terrible future
  • it was much easier to make a profit in the good old days, doubly so if you were early enough to steal land from the aboriginals
  • companies now invest more money in stock buy-backs than R&D
  • there is no such thing as trickle down economics
  • the financial system is now too complex for its players to understand – it’s like trying to understand quantum mechanics when you don’t have high school physics
  • the planet is a finite physical system and the financial system is unbounded – the two systems are incompatible
  • Venezuela is a preview of where the USA is headed
  • if the government isn’t competent enough to deal with homelessness in L.A., how can it possibly deal effectively with COVID?
  • Americans live under the illusion that they are different and could never descend into the savagery they’ve witnessed elsewhere in the world
  • the Kosovo genocide was committed by and against people with homes, refrigerators, cars, kids in college, and who spoke the same language
  • people are turning on each other because the capitalist system is breaking down and climate change is causing scarcity
  • there will be a billion displaced people within 30 years
  • it’s unlikely the Romans could give us advice on how to avoid collapse
  • the wealth gap increases as a civilization collapses
  • many nest eggs will be wiped out when insurance companies won’t insure homes because of sea level rise
  • much of the oil industry’s infrastructure is at risk from sea level rise
  • rich people are not investing enough in renewable energy because they can make better returns elsewhere
  • governments must step up to invest in what needs to be done
  • most authorities think we have 30 years to act before civilization collapses, some people think it’s already too late
  • the most valuable thing in the world is oil reserves in the ground, but the damage burning oil causes is even higher – we must tax carbon energy
  • we need a cultural change to accept less – but that’s hard
  • nothing comes for free, everything costs energy
  • renewable energy cannot replace fossil energy and satisfy our greed, but it can help us survive
  • the food system is a huge consumer of energy (lots of interesting detail here)
  • our energy system is highly dependent on water which is being disrupted by climate change
  • we need to democratize the electric grid to accelerate renewable energy, but that requires a long range plan which we don’t have
  • we should tax pollution and use the funds to improve the grid and to pay farmers to sequester carbon
  • we will not be able to re-order our system until it crashes, but if we wait until we crash we’ll be too poor to fight climate change – it’ll be like asking Somalia to fight climate change
  • the final scene has the son arguing that we’re not facing reality; and the father arguing that we can use our democracy to solve the problems, fade to “The End?”
  • there is no one driving the bus, our leaders don’t have a plan
  • no mention of population reduction or peak oil, not even a whisper

P.S. Ugo Bardi is featured in a couple clips discussing the collapse of the Roman empire, how we may be starting down a Seneca cliff, and the viability of renewable energy.

P.P.S. My favorite central banker, Canadian Mark Carney, has a clip in which he says the main role of central banks is to pull wealth from the future into the present.

P.P.P.S The cost of insurance for the small farm I assist more than doubled this year to over $6,000, I suspect due to climate change. We have to sell a lot of lettuce to earn $6,000. 😦

You can download Hot Money here: https://yts.mx/movies/hot-money-2021

https://www.imdb.com/title/tt13837022/

With wit, satire, and historical context, Former NATO Supreme Allied Commander, General Wesley Clark and his son Wes Clark Jr. take us on a journey through the financial circulatory system connecting farmers, homeowners, bankers, academics, and business professionals in a tale that explains the knot of economic forces that can lead to collapse and how to untie it.

https://www.hotmoneyfilm.com/

SYNOPSIS
Former NATO Supreme Allied Commander, General Wesley Clark and his son Wes Clark Jr. take us on a journey through the complicated realities of our financial system and its profound exposure to climate change. Hot Money outs the whole game, the whole charade, the whole crapshoot of the money system with all the humor and intelligence of a New Yorker cartoon. Combined with the wisdom of international business experts and academics, Hot Money is rich with historical context. It severs the knot of economic and political forces that may lead to societal collapse.

DIRECTOR’S STATEMENT
I met General Clark and his son Wes Jr. while filming Living In the Future’s Past, then met the General again at a speaking engagement two years later and the kernel of a film planted itself in my mind – a conversation between a father and son on how climate change will affect our financial system. It seemed logical to follow up to the introspective Living In The Future’s Past with a nuts and bolts view of how the machinery of our money system contributes and reacts to climate change. We lined up a broad and diverse cast of experts who’ve spent their lives doing the work. What we could see emerging was an easy to understand story whose depth is masked by its light-hearted breeziness. The Covid 19 pandemic cut short our filming and I turned to a New Yorker cartoonist to visualize concepts so somebody like me, who doesn’t have an MBA or ever worked in finance, can be simultaneously entertained and enlightened about one of the prime forces driving our world – debt.

Hot Money is an important film for right now as America stands on the brink of conflict. Many people lack context interpreting the world and this documentary delivers it. Conversations taped more than a year ago about wildfires making homes impossible to insure and the ripple effect that will roar through the financial system seem as startlingly prescient as the scenes describing populist breakdown in a country like Venezuela and how it can happen here. Hot Money offers a glimpse into our future and a chance to avoid the dangerous course we are on. To solve a problem we have to understand it.

On Fabric (aka Fossil Energy is Indistinguishable from Magic)

I recently purchased a 6 piece queen sheet set for my bed and marveled at how something so useful, and so difficult to make myself, could be so inexpensive, costing only $30, or about 2 hours of my labor at minimum wage.

I did a little digging and found this video on how fabric was made before fossil energy:

And this video on how fabric is made today with fossil energy:

A podcast I monitor serendipitously had an episode today on the history of fabric making.

https://www.econtalk.org/virginia-postrel-on-textiles-and-the-fabric-of-civilization/

Author and journalist Virginia Postrel talks about her book The Fabric of Civilization and How Textiles Made the World with EconTalk host Russ Roberts. Postrel tells the fascinating story behind the clothes we wear and everything that goes into producing them throughout history. The history of textiles, Postrel argues, is a good way of understanding the history of the world.

For those who prefer video:

For those who prefer audio:

Postrel described the process required to make fabric products:

  • get fiber
    • grow plants or breed sheep
    • harvest plants or sheer sheep
    • clean fiber
    • transport fiber to spinner
  • spin fiber into thread
    • align fibers
    • stretch and twist
    • transport thread to weaver
  • weave fiber into fabric
    • set up warp threads
    • pass weft thread through alternate warp threads
    • cut and hem edges
    • transport fabric to manufacturer
  • manufacture final product
    • dye fabric
    • cut fabric
    • sew fabric
  • transport product to consumer

Postrel also provided some interesting data:

  • A single pair of jeans requires 10 Km of thread.
    • The fastest pre-fossil energy manual spinners in the world could produce 100m of thread per hour taking 13 x 8 hour days to produce enough thread for one pair of jeans.
    • A modern fossil energy spinning plant can produce 10 Km of thread in a few seconds.
    • Postrel did not provide data on how long it took to manually weave thread into denim for a pair of jeans, but the video above gives a pretty good idea.
    • A pair of jeans today costs me $15 or about 1 hour of my labor at minimum wage.
  • A basic twin sheet requires 46 Km of thread or 59 x 8 hour days for a fast pre-fossil manual spinner.
    • Again, no data on the weaving time.
    • Linen was, until the industrial revolution, a valuable family asset.

I can’t write a post without drawing a connection to reality denial.

In this case, Russ Roberts, a relative rocket scientist as far as mainstream economists go, never once in the interview drew a connection with non-renewable rapidly depleting fossil energy.

There was a long discussion on the economics of applying “technology” to textile production. But zero awareness of the link between technology and non-renewable energy.

Roberts did draw a connection between food and textiles in that he observed only 2% of the population are now farmers. Again, no apparent awareness of the centrality of natural gas for fertilizer and diesel for tractors and combines.

I’ve added Russ Roberts to my list of famous polymaths in denial, although I probably should have added instead “all economists except Steve Keen”.

https://un-denial.com/2018/09/03/on-famous-polymaths/

By Ronald Wright: A Short History of Progress Revisited

Ronald Wright - A Short History of Progress

Ronald Wright presented his book “A Short History of Progress” in 2004 via the Massey Lectures that were broadcast by CBC Radio.

It’s my all time favorite lecture series and I’ve listened to it at least a dozen times. You can listen to it here.

Last month Wright launched the 15th anniversary edition of his book and was interviewed by CBC Radio which you can listen to here.

“I almost don’t want to say what I really think.”

Wright also wrote an essay last month updating our “progress” in the 15 years since his book was published.

Wright’s understanding of the gravity and historical precedents of our predicament is excellent. What to do about it, not so much, as he is an archeologist and not an engineer or physicist. Nevertheless, Wright is a brilliant writer with a superb command of history.

https://thetyee.ca/Analysis/2019/09/20/Ronald-Wright-Can-We-Dodge-Progress-Trap/

h/t Apneaman

Can We Still Dodge the Progress Trap?

In the 2004 Massey Lectures, A Short History of Progress, I wrote about the fall of past civilizations and what we might learn from them to avoid a similar fate. Societies that failed were seduced and undone by what I called a progress trap: a chain of successes which, upon reaching a certain scale, leads to disaster. The dangers are seldom seen before it’s too late. The jaws of a trap open slowly and invitingly, then snap closed fast.

The first trap was hunting, the main way of life for about two million years in Palaeolithic times. As Stone Age people perfected the art of hunting, they began to kill the game more quickly than it could breed. They lived high for a while, then starved.

Most survivors of that progress trap became farmers — a largely unconscious revolution during which all the staple foods we eat today were developed from wild roots and seeds (yes, all: no new staples have been produced from scratch since prehistoric times). Farming brought dense human populations and centralized control, the defining ingredients of full-blown civilization for the last five thousand years. Yet there were still many traps along the way. In what is now Iraq, the Sumerian civilization (one of the world’s first) withered and died as the irrigation systems it invented turned the fields into salty desert. Some two thousand years later, in the Mediterranean basin, chronic soil erosion steadily undermined the Classical World: first the Greeks, then the Romans at the height of their power. And a few centuries after Rome’s fall, the Classic Maya, one of only two high civilizations to thrive in tropical rainforest (the other being the Khmer), eventually wore out nature’s welcome at the heart of Central America.

In the deep past these setbacks were local. The overall experiment of civilization kept going, often by moving from an exhausted ecology to one with untapped potential. Human numbers were still quite small. At the height of the Roman Empire there are thought to have been only 200 million people on Earth. Compare that with the height of the British Empire a century ago, when there were two billion. And with today, when there are nearly eight. Clearly, things have moved very quickly since the Industrial Revolution took hold around the world. In A Short History of Progress, I suggested that worldwide civilization was our greatest experiment; and I asked whether this might also prove to be the greatest progress trap. That was 15 years ago.

What has happened — and not happened — since then to alarm or reassure us?

First, our numbers have risen by 1.4 billion, nearly a hundred million per year. In other words, we’ve added another China or 40 more Canadas to the world. The growth rate has fallen slightly, but consumption of resources — from fossil fuel to water, from rare earths to good earth — has risen twice as steeply, roughly doubling our impact on nature. This outrunning of population by economic growth has lifted perhaps a billion of the poorest into the outskirts of the working class, mainly in China and India. Yet those in extreme poverty and hunger still number at least a billion.

Meanwhile, the wealthiest billion — to which most North Americans and Europeans and many Asians now belong — devour an ever-growing share of natural capital. The commanding heights of this group, the billionaires’ club, has more than 2,200 members with a combined known worth nearing $10 trillion; this super-elite not only consumes at a rate never seen before but also deploys its wealth to influence government policy, media content, and key elections. Such, in a few words, is the shape of the human pyramid today.

The 2008 crash triggered by banking fraud was staved off by money-printing and record debt. This primed a short-run recovery, which has in turn revived illusions we can borrow from nature and the future indefinitely — illusions fed by corporate think-tanks, irresponsible politicians, and Panglossian cherrypickers such as Steven Pinker. But what about the long run? In 1923 the great economist John Maynard Keynes famously answered, “In the long run we are all dead.” By that he meant, let’s deal with the problems we see now and leave the unforeseeable to those who come later. Fair enough in the 1920s, when there was only one person on Earth for every four today and the future seemed to have room for endless outcomes, good or bad. Nearly a century later, Keynes’s quip sounds more like dire prophecy, as short-term thinking lures us ever deeper into very difficult problems that science can not only observe but foresee. Predicted consequences of global warming — blighted coral reefs, melting glaciers, spreading deserts, and extreme weather — are already upon us.

One of the sad ironies of our time is that we have become very good at studying nature just as it begins to sicken and die under our weight. “Weight” is no mere metaphor: of all land mammals and birds alive today, humans and their livestock make up 96 per cent of the biomass; wildlife has dwindled to four per cent. This has no precedent. Not so far back in history the proportions were the other way round. As recently as 1970, humans were only half and wildlife more than twice their present numbers. These closely linked figures are milestones along our rush towards a trashed and looted planet, stripped of diversity, wildness, and resilience; strewn with waste. Such is the measure of our success.

The archaeologists who dig us up will need to wear hazmat suits. Humankind will leave a telltale layer in the fossil record composed of everything we produce, from mounds of chicken bones, wet-wipes, tires, mattresses and other household waste, to metals, concrete, plastics, industrial chemicals, and the nuclear residue of power plants and weaponry. We are cheating our children, handing them tawdry luxuries and addictive gadgets while we take away what’s left of the wealth, wonder, and possibility of the pristine Earth.

Calculations of humanity’s footprint suggest we have been in “ecological deficit,” taking more than Earth’s biological systems can withstand, for at least 30 years. Topsoil is being lost far faster than nature can replenish it; 30 per cent of arable land has been exhausted since the mid-20th century.

We have financed this monstrous debt by colonizing both past and future, drawing energy, chemical fertilizer, and pesticides from the planet’s fossil carbon, and throwing the consequences onto coming generations of our species and all others. Some of those species have already been bankrupted: they are extinct.

Others will follow. Whether we are triggering an extinction as severe as that which killed the dinosaurs, when three-quarters of all species were wiped out, is still to be seen. By the time the answer is clear, there could be nobody left to know it. The lesson of fallen societies is that civilization is a vulnerable organism, especially when it seems almighty. We are the world’s top predator, and predators crash suddenly when they outgrow their prey. If the resulting chaos unleashes nuclear war, it could bring mass extinction in a heartbeat, with Homo sapiens among the noted dead.

Awareness of our predicament is spreading, if slowly and with mixed results. The warnings of science are growing more urgent and precise, gaining wider attention and sparking grassroots movements such as Extinction Rebellion and the schoolchildren’s strikes inspired by Greta Thunberg. People are beginning to see the world dying before their eyes. The dwindling of birdlife in their gardens and bugs on their windshields backs up the scientists’ alarm that falling insect numbers threaten a “catastrophic collapse” of natural systems.

Effective reform will take political will at world level. Yet the very idea of international cooperation is under attack — just when it is needed most. As the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change says in its October 2018 report, keeping global warming below 1.5 C “is possible within the laws of chemistry and physics” but will require “unprecedented changes” before 2030.

Conservation and environmentalism have had some success, a few species have been pulled back from the brink, a few Green politicians have been elected, a few promising fixes (renewable energy, electric cars, etc.) are being developed. Yet at this writing, the momentum of extraction, consumption, and destruction is still gathering speed, driven by the delusion of endless growth, and the willingness of corporations to set financial profit above life itself. Even if fossil energy were replaced at once by clean sources, our other problems — overpopulation, overconsumption, erosion, deforestation, and accumulating waste — would still persist.

The failure of democratic governments to stand up for the greater good over the long run is fuelling disillusionment with democracy itself. There is something badly wrong with an economic regime in which 26 individuals own as much as half the world’s population. Such extreme disparity has never been seen before. Inequality is the main driver behind rising population and consumption. The highest birthrates are in the poorest places, mainly Africa and the Indian subcontinent. At the other end of the seesaw, obscene wealth — the kind which owns mansions around the world and gigantic yachts with helicopter pads — has a colossal footprint, while its undue influence amounts to a dark tyranny.

Back in Classical Greece, Plato suggested that in a just society there should be no more than a 5:1 spread in income between richest and poorest. That was a hard sell then, and still would be. But what might be reasonable today? Where should the balance be struck to help the weakest while still rewarding effort and achievement? Given the seriousness of what we face, this is a conversation we must have. The wealth already wrenched from nature might just be enough to buy us a lasting future if it were shared, managed, and ploughed into solutions.

Of one thing we can be sure: if we fail to act, nature will do so with the rough justice she has always served on those who are too many and who take too much.

 

Ronald Wright Quote (Studious Fox)

One Strange Rock: A Must Watch

One Strange Rock 2018

One Strange Rock is a 10 part, 8 hour documentary produced in 2018 by Darren Aronofsky and hosted by Will Smith and 8 space station astronauts.

I’ve watched a lot of nature/science documentaries in my life, and I’ve probably seen most of the good ones, but I say without hesitation that One Strange Rock is the best.

The producers and writers found a magical blend of spectacular settings on and off the planet, fabulous photography, inspirational multi-cultural stories, solid yet easy to understand science, and an important ecological message that is neither depressing nor ignorant of our peril.

With regard to the history and science of Earth’s life, they hit most of the important points everyone should know, got none of them wrong, and missed only a few key points (not least of which the significance of reality denial 🙂 ).

The only segment I did not like was the bit on why we must and will colonize other planets. That’s wishful thinking (aka denial) and is not going to happen, but understandable because that’s their gig. Otherwise very well done!

With regard to beauty and inspiration, they hit a home run, without being sickly sweet. If you don’t feel some joyous emotion watching this, you’re not alive.

This should be mandatory viewing for every student on the planet.

If I ever meet someone in the future who doesn’t understand why they should care, I will point them to One Strange Rock.

If anyone would like to view this documentary but can’t find it, send me a message on Facebook and I will help you.

 

From award-winning filmmaker Darren Aronofsky comes a mind-bending, thrilling journey that explores the fragility and wonder of planet Earth—one of the most peculiar, unique places in the universe.

One Strange Rock is the extraordinary story of Earth – our curiously calibrated, interconnected planet – and why it is special and uniquely brimming with life among a largely unknown but harsh cosmic arena. Anchoring the series is an elite group of astronauts who see Earth’s bigger picture; they provide unique perspectives and relate personal memoirs of our planet seen from space.

Hosted by Will Smith, One Strange Rock reveals the twists of fate that allow life to thrive on Earth.

Part 1: Gasp

For those privileged few who have seen Earth from space, the very first thing they notice is the thin blue line of atmosphere that clings to our planet and sustains life. How our planet creates and regulates that oxygen is a mind-blowing story involving a flying river, a global dust storm, collapsing glaciers and the most important creature you’ve never heard of. It’s an incredible chain of connections that reveal just how truly wondrous our home is. Everything connects, so life and planet breathe together. Astronaut host – Chris Hadfield

Part 2: Storm

Ever wonder how our planet got here? It was born in a cosmic storm and shaped by violence. Earth is a very lucky planet. We’re only here because of random collisions in a dangerous cosmos. They could have destroyed us, but instead, that violence constructed a planet from the rubble of the early solar system; gave us oceans in a bombardment from the heavens; and brought order to our world. Astronaut host – Nicole Stott.

Part 3: Shield

It’s a David and Goliath story — Earth’s relationship with its greatest threat: our seemingly benign sun. Hurling devastating particles and deadly radiation at us, the sun is the big violent boss of the solar system. Without several shields, one generated by our unique planetary core, another by our atmosphere, and a third by our interconnected weather systems, life on Earth never would have survived. Astronaut host – Jeff Hoffman.

Part 4: Genesis

Our rock is special; it’s alive. Though the building blocks of life are common across the universe, life is rare. What is it about Earth that sets it apart? This is the story of dynamic forces and crazy coincidences that took a bunch of dead ingredients and transformed them into something as wondrously intricate as life. And if it happened here, could it happen elsewhere? Astronaut host – Mae Jemison.

Part 5: Survival

Without the cycle of death and sacrifice, from cellular to planetary, life would not be here. From the deaths of stars to planetary scale mass extinctions and the sacrifice of individuals for a greater genetic good, this is the story of how life evolved hand in hand with death. Death drives evolution. It’s hardwired; from our cells to our landscapes, our colorful living planet is only possible thanks to it. Death leads to opportunity and biodiversity, which ironically ensures life on the planet is never wiped out. It’s not enough for our planet to be habitable; it also has to be lethal. Astronaut host – Jerry Linenger.

Part 6: Escape

Is it possible for intelligent life to escape destruction either from the planet or ourselves? Or are we destined for extinction like 99.9 percent of all species before us? Our best chance of survival may be to escape Earth and build another colony somewhere else. But there are real barriers: space radiation, microgravity and the bacteria inside us. And our DNA is coded for the conditions here on Earth, so if we ever manage to colonize another planet, those who are born there might evolve into another species. Astronaut host – Chris Hadfield.

Part 7: Terraform

Ever since life emerged, microbes, plants and animals have all sculpted the planet’s surface and atmosphere in the strangest of ways: fish poop creates islands; dead animals create mountains; and plants help create continents. From rocks to rivers, life has crafted everything that makes our planet so special. But this power of change brings with it profound dangers. Life doesn’t just create. It can also destroy. Astronaut host – Mike Massimino.

Part 8: Alien

All life on Earth started as single-cell bacteria and stayed like that for two billion years. So even if we do find alien life out there, what are the chances of that life being complex like us? On our strange rock, it’s all down to a freak event, which accidentally happened when one cell ate another to create a kind of power pack for life. This almost miraculous event transforms Earth into a complex interconnected web based on a competition for food. And at the top of the pyramid sit we humans. Astronaut host – Mae Jemison.

Part 9: Awakening

Of all life on Earth, how come we’re the only ones with the smarts to leave our planet? For three billion years, nothing had a brain. Even today, over 90 percent of life doesn’t need a brain to survive. So, what happened? How did our planet set in motion the chain of nearly impossible events that gave us our unique intelligence? The greatest mystery of all may be right between your ears. Astronaut host – Leland Melvin.

Part 10: Home

After 665 weightless days in space, NASA’s most experienced astronaut, Peggy Whitson, smashes through the atmosphere on her last journey home to planet Earth. With unprecedented filming on board the ISS during Peggy’s final mission and with the support of our other featured astronauts, we reveal how their time in space transforms their understanding of our planet’s wonders, insights that will change our perspective, too. There is no place like home. Or is there? Just how strange is our rock, and is it really unique in the universe? Astronaut host – Peggy Whitson.

 

By Tad Patzek: On Human Overshoot

Tad Patzek

Tad Patzek, a professor of petroleum engineering and physicist, gave a talk on January 16, 2019 at the King Abdullah University of Science and Technology (KAUST) in Saudi Arabia.

His talk is titled “How Can We Salvage Our Global Civilization?” however Patzek does not answer his own question. Instead he reviews the brief history of humans and shows that we are in a severe state of overshoot with a population that exceeds the carrying capacity of the planet by about 30 times thanks to fossil energy, which he predicts will soon rapidly decline due to depletion. In the Q&A that follows the talk, Patzek advocates for population reduction policies. Also in the Q&A, Patzek gets quite aggressive with audience members who argue that technology will save us. He concludes that we will probably use nuclear war to correct overshoot. I wonder if he’ll be invited back next year? 🙂

You can find other work I’ve posted by Patzek here.

Thanks to Nate Hagens for bringing this talk to my attention.

 

 

Here are some notes I took while viewing the talk:

  • Continued exponential growth of human population is suicidal and will stop one way or another.
  • Humans have only one chance of survival by drastically limiting population and consumption.
  • Patzek quotes from Ronald Wright’s A Short History of Progress, my all-time favorite lecture series, to make the point that humans, the fire apes, have been setting fires continuously from our origin until today when many of the world’s tropical forests are being burned to make way for agriculture and plantations.
  • Patzek does a nice job of explaining that humans have existed for an extremely short period in the context of geologic time. For example, if we call January 1 the start of the Silurian period 444 million years ago when multicellular life first appeared on land, then behaviorally modern humans emerged 70 minutes before midnight on December 31, our first civilization began 9 minutes before midnight, and the industrial civilization we currently enjoy began 20 seconds before midnight. The explosion of human population to 8 billion began 7 seconds before midnight on December 31, and was enabled by the Haber Bosch industrial process that converts natural gas into nitrogen fertilizer.
  • At 3 seconds before midnight on December 31, half of the US’s top soil had been washed into the sea, having taken only 9 seconds to accomplish this feat.
  • For an example of what 10,000 years of agriculture does to the earth, look at Iraq with its complete environmental devastation.
  • We only have one shot at the global civilization, and it shall never be repeated again.
  • Sending colonies to Mars is complete nonsense because there are not enough resources to send them.
  • None of our overshoot issues are captured by our economic models.
  • Our planet can support a maximum of 8 million humans making a living as hunter gatherers.
  • The earth might support 2.5 billion people assuming an 1800’s equivalent life expectancy (32 years) , lifestyle, slavery, and conflict. If we assume today’s life expectancy (71 years) the maximum drops to 1.1 billion people. Adjusting for our increased standard of living decreases the maximum to 500 million people. If we assume a peaceful life without wars the maximum sustainable population drops to 250 million people. This means we have overshot by the 30 times the carrying capacity of the planet by using fossil fuel subsidies.
  • Later in the Q&A, Patzek clarifies that if we assume an American or German lifestyle, the maximum sustainable population is 90 million without fossil energy.
  • I note that Patzek’s estimate of the maximum sustainable population aligns nicely with Jack Alpert’s plan to preserve our modern civilization with rapid population reduction.
  • Patzek shows that population is proportional to power production. Recall that Tim Garrett has also shown that wealth is proportional to power production. Energy is therefore central to our predicament as Nate Hagens elaborates in his video course.