Until recently there have been 3 main lenses through which to view our overshoot predicament: debt, energy, and ecology.
Each lens exposes a different aspect of the picture, but not the complete picture.
Each lens focusses on different threats, with different time frames, and different consequences, and each lens suggests a different optimal response.
Overshoot awareness varies by lens and group within society. Awareness of leaders is generally higher than citizens, and in some cases this is deliberate and warranted because broad citizen awareness of the debt and energy threats would increase the probability of short term collapse.
For leaders and citizens that see through any of the lenses, their understanding tends to be incomplete, which has resulted in plans of action that will not help, or that make the situation worse.
This incomplete understanding is caused in part because the issues are very complex, and in part because some aspects of human overshoot have no acceptable or feasible solution, and in part because of the human tendency to deny unpleasant realities, as explained by Dr. Ajit Varki’s MORT theory.
Hideaway, a frequent contributor at un-Denial, Peak Oil Barrel, Our Finite World and other sites, recently introduced a new lens we have named cactus, which focusses on all non-renewable resources and the complexity required to extract them.
I think the cactus lens provides the clearest view of what is going on, what we should expect in the short to medium term, and what we should do.
The cactus lens changes what is in the best interests of citizens to understand.
The debt and energy lenses suggest citizens should remain in the dark.
The ecology lens suggests it does not matter what citizens understand because the ecology threats are longer term than debt, energy, and cactus, and because awareness of ecology issues have not and will not improve anything of substance due to the nature of modernity.
With the introduction of the cactus lens, it is now in the best short term interests of all groups: countries, leaders, and citizens, for awareness to be as widespread as possible.
Achieving broad cactus awareness will be difficult because it is very unpleasant, and therefore will be blocked by our genetic denial behavior, however I propose one idea to start the discussion on how we might spread cactus awareness.
Awareness Lens: Debt
Theory:
Modernity requires abundant credit;
Because most of our mines, machines, technology, and structures require significant up front capital to build;
Which requires a fractional reserve debt backed monetary system;
Which is now used by every country in the world;
Which by design requires economic growth to not collapse;
Because money is loaned into existence and growth is needed to pay interest;
Which means our economic system requires infinite growth on a finite planet;
Which of course is impossible and means we should expect growth to slow and prosperity to decline, as they are;
Culminating in a dramatic and harmful economic reset;
However modernity will survive and will rebuild until the next bubble pops.
Status :
Quite a few citizens see through the debt lens, maybe a significant minority.
Most aware citizens assume the reset is a ways off in the future.
Some people prepare to weather a storm with cash, gold, bitcoin, or sardines.
Others trust or hope that central banks will print enough money to kick the can past their expiry.
Leaders understand and acknowledge the debt problem but are careful to not cause panic because herd emotions could trigger a reset.
Leaders are also careful to not explain the driver of the debt problem, energy depletion, as will be discussed in the next section on the energy lens.
The debt threat is closer and more severe than our leaders let on as demonstrated by:
Social unrest everywhere is rising because living standards are falling and the wealth gap is widening.
Geopolitical tensions are rising.
Democracies are oscillating between wider extremes.
Most countries have historically high levels of growing debt.
Growth has slowed, and the only growth possible now comes at the expense of adding more debt than the growth it buys, which is unsustainable.
No political party in power anywhere reduces their deficit or balances their budget because it’s now impossible without crashing their system. The US DOGE effort lasted 5 months before leaders gave up and juiced the deficit to new record highs.
Central banks work hard behind the curtain to keep our everything bubble inflated, and to prevent any significant correction of stock or asset prices. When I was young it was normal for the economy and stock market to experience cycles. We don’t permit cycles anymore. Today there is so much debt and so little growth that a significant correction will result in a reset (aka crash).
Printing bazookas are used to blast any threat before it builds momentum, like the banking system repo problem that covid provided cover for unprecedented money printing.
Our leaders tried but failed to use covid as an excuse to implement the tools needed to manage an economic reset like digital ids/currencies for rationing scarce necessities, and for enabling negative interest rates, and tried via “The Great Reset” propaganda campaign to get us ready to accept nationalization of assets (aka “you will own nothing and be happy”). They will try again.
Implications:
The debt lens implies a zero-sum game: In a no growth world, one country’s gain is another country’s loss.
Our leaders believe that a country that succeeds in harming its competitors will experience less damage from an economic reset. The goal is to ensure opponents reset before you do, on the assumption that this will prevent or delay your own reset by gaining control of more growth generating assets and markets.
Hence we see the weaponization of tariffs and trade, regime change operations, and proxy wars intended to weaken or capture opponents.
Conclusions:
A debt reset is mathematically inevitable and will reduce the standard of living for the majority via deflation and/or inflation.
Debt resets are hard to predict and control because herd emotions drive the process.
Leaders have good reasons to not want citizens to be aware of the seriousness of the debt problem.
Leaders are operating on the assumption of a zero-sum game.
In the cactus lens section we’ll see that the zero-sum game assumption is wrong, which means the current strategy will make things worse for all countries.
Awareness Lens: Energy
Theory:
Modernity requires abundant net energy;
Which is the energy that remains after using energy to extract and refine energy;
Because all of our food, water, minerals, technology, products, and services are produced and delivered by machines powered by energy.
Diesel is the keystone energy that powers our vital mining machines, tractors, combines, trucks, trains, and ships.
Renewable energy is not a solution to non-renewable depletion because renewables require abundant non-renewable energy t0 build, install, maintain, and augment for 24/7 supply.
Discovery of new fossil energy reserves is much slower than depletion of existing reserves, and the gap is growing.
The quality of non-renewable energy reserves decline as they deplete;
Which means net energy is falling;
Which explains why growth is slowing, and prosperity is declining, and debt is growing faster than GDP everywhere.
We should expect the trend to continue and accelerate.
Leaders believe modernity will continue for those countries that have access to energy.
Status:
Few citizens see through the energy lens.
There are many false energy beliefs in wide circulation including net zero, peak oil demand, abiotic oil, green energy, renewables outpacing fossils, hydrogen economy, nuclear renaissance, space mining, circular economy, etc., etc..
These beliefs are nonsense not grounded in sound science or economics, but the issues are complex, and it is difficult for a citizen to determine the truth, especially with deliberate misdirection from leaders, and with MORT driven hope and denial driving behavior.
Denial is a strong force that fogs the energy lens because, short of a near zero probability miracle, there is no solution, and the outlook is steadily worsening living standards.
Most leaders, with help from their energy aware militaries, understand what is going on, and know the energy threat is imminent. Evidence for this includes:
Inflation of energy intensive products, like food, is high; energy intensive infrastructure is not being properly maintained; energy intensive manufacturing, like weapons, is struggling to keep up with demand despite plentiful printed money available; war is shifting to lower energy methods like drones; and as also seen through the debt lens, debt is accelerating, living standards are falling, the wealth gap is widening, geopolitical tensions are rising, and democracies are at risk.
The EIA this year announced that fracked oil is peaking. Fracked oil is the unexpected savior that bought us an extra decade after conventional oil peaked.
Leaders do not want their citizens to panic, or to spook the stock market bubble which depends on growth, so they do not discuss the energy problem, and work hard to distract citizens with nonsense like optimism for a renewable transition, or by stoking emotions over socially divisive issues.
Trump reversed his no more regime change promises after being sworn in and briefed about US debt and oil forecasts.
Every country with significant exportable oil reserves that is not controlled by the US empire is either under attack or being regime changed including Russia, Iran, Syria, Venezuela, and Nigeria. Even friends with oil, or close to oil, like Canada and Greenland, have been threatened with annexation.
Propaganda is successfully being used to convince citizens that regime change operations are to prevent terrorism or drug trafficking, not to control oil.
China is stockpiling strategic oil reserves.
A few countries, like Germany, made an honest attempt to run their economies with renewable energy, but it’s now obvious to leaders everywhere that the renewable dream has failed. German leaders now want war with energy rich Russia.
The UK, having drained its own oil reserves, now wants war with energy rich Russia.
Hail Mary investments praying for a miracle are being made in AI and nuclear energy.
Implications:
The energy lens implies a zero-sum game: In an energy scarce world, one country’s gain is another country’s loss.
Our leaders understand their country’s prosperity requires non-renewable energy, and that it must be secured by any means necessary, including taking it by force from others.
Countries are preparing for war by increasing military expenditures, even at the expense of social services demanded by citizens.
Nuclear arms treaties are being abandoned, and the arms race is restarting.
Lessons learned during the cold war about the dangers of nuclear war are being ignored, and red lines are increasingly flirted with.
It’s hard to imagine how nuclear war can be avoided given that everyone’s survival depends on oil, and the zero-sum game assumption of our leaders.
Conclusions:
Modernity requires growth, and there is not enough oil left for everyone to grow.
Leaders have good reasons to not want citizens to be aware of the seriousness of the energy problem.
Leaders are operating on the assumption of a zero-sum game.
In the cactus lens section we’ll see that the zero-sum game assumption is wrong, which means the current strategy will make things worse for all countries.
Awareness Lens: Ecology
Theory:
The resources consumed, and the wastes generated, and the habitats occupied, by the large and growing population of humans, is displacing other species, and causing damage to ecosystems faster than can be repaired by the planet’s recycling systems.
Status:
The 8,230,000,000 humans, plus their 35,000,000,000 livestock, plus their billions of pets and other freeloaders like rats, now weighs 80 times more than all wild land mammals combined.
Humans use 30-40% of the net primary productivity of all sunlight hitting the planet, plus 16,000,000,000 liters per day of ancient sunlight stored as oil, plus 11,000,000,000 cubic meters per day of ancient sunlight stored as natural gas, plus 24,000,000,000 kilograms per day of ancient sunlight store as coal.
The sixth mass extinction is underway.
Six of nine planetary boundaries critical for survival have already been crossed including climate change, biodiversity, deforestation, fresh water, nitrogen cycle, and pollution.
We have already passed the 1.5C safe limit and are on a path to a 3+C temperature increase that is incompatible with civilization and agriculture by the end of this century.
Biodiverse forests are being replaced with mono-crop agriculture.
Fisheries are in decline.
Sea level rise will damage many cities over the next century.
Glacier loss threatens the survival of several countries.
Chemical toxins and microplastics are harming the health of all life including humans.
Awareness of leaders and citizens about the ecological problems varies widely.
Most people are aware of some of the problems, but also tend to superficially simplify them down to one issue, CO2, that can be fixed with solar panels and electric vehicles.
Few are aware of the breadth and depth of the problems.
Many people deny the severity of the problems and/or that humans have caused the problems.
Almost everyone denies the implications of the ecological problems, and the fact there is almost nothing that can be done to address them while maintaining modernity and our population.
Every effort, by every country, and every organization, and every citizen, to address the above problems, has failed, and will continue to fail, at least until something forces an involuntary change to population and lifestyles.
Implications:
The view through the ecology lens is dire.
The long term implications are worse than those seen through the debt and energy lenses because we are damaging the ability for any human lifestyle to thrive, and are also harming many other species.
Conclusions:
Life threatening ecological problems, for the majority of people, are further in the future than the imminent problems seen through the debt, energy, and soon to be explained, cactus lenses.
All of the ecological problems are caused by the human species footprint which is the product of lifestyle and population.
None of the ecological problems can be addressed without reducing per capita consumption or population, and the debt and cactus lenses show that modernity requires growth, which means the ecological problems are a classic predicament, a problem without an acceptable solution.
The energy and cactus lenses show that growth will not continue, and the human footprint will soon shrink, which means there may be an improvement to future ecology trends.
Many of the ecological problems we have created will repair quickly when the scale of the human enterprise shrinks.
Some ecological problems will take a very long time to repair, and adaptation of surviving species will be required.
As will be discussed in more detail in the next section, if we somehow became aware that the scale of humanity was going to decrease in the not too distant future, no matter what we do, then we might be able to motivate ourselves to address several ecological issues that would improve the quality of life for the survivors, such as burying nuclear waste, and protecting biodiverse forests and marine ecosystems.
Awareness Lens: Cactus
CACTUS = Complexity Accelerated Collapse of a Thermodynamically Unsustainable System
The phrase “we’re cactus” is Australian slang meaning something is ruined, broken, or finished, often used to describe a situation where progress has stopped, such as a vehicle that won’t start.
The expression likely originated from the infamous prickly pear cactus, which once infested large parts of Australia before being controlled by the introduced Cactoblastis cactorum moth.
This slang is part of a broader set of Australian expressions for something being in disrepair or useless, including terms like “boonted,” “clapped-out,” “had the chad,” “had the bomb,” and “kaput”.
While “cactus” as a metaphor for being broken or ruined is well-established in Australian English, it is not commonly used in other English-speaking regions.
Theory:
Modernity requires abundant minerals and energy.
The majority of minerals and energy we use are non-renewable and finite.
Recycling is economically and/or technically impossible for most minerals.
For those minerals that can be recycled, there are losses in the recycling process that still result in long term depletion.
The quality of mineral and energy reserves decline as they deplete, because we always harvest the best quality reserves first.
Mineral and energy extraction technologies must increase in complexity to compensate for falling reserve quality to maintain flows of resources. For example, compare modern directional drilling now required for fracking with early oil rigs. Or the giant trucks and other machines now required to haul and process low grade copper ore.
Rising complexity increases the materials, processes, skills, locations, and number of people needed to design and manufacture the technologies.
Rising complexity requires a growing market to support the increasing cost of designing and manufacturing technologies. For example, a smaller population would not buy enough phones to make a TSMC factory in Taiwan viable, and therefore the advanced chips needed for oil exploration and extraction would not exist.
A growing market requires a growing economy and population.
A growing economy and population increases the consumption of all minerals and energy.
Wastes generated by the growing economy and population create increasing frictions to further growth.
This self-reinforcing complexity growth system drives an increase in mineral and energy flows until technology, markets, and population can no longer keep up with growing waste frictions and declining reserve qualities, and a critical mineral or energy becomes unavailable in the quantities required.
Scarcity of the critical mineral or energy triggers a system wide technology breakdown cascade because many technologies depend on it, and many other technologies depend on those technologies, via an ultra-complex network of dependencies.
The unavailability of many technologies then causes many more mineral and energy flows to become unavailable in the quantities required because the quality of remaining reserves makes extraction difficult or impossible without the latest technologies.
This self-reinforcing collapse of complexity, technology, and resource flows is certain at some point in the not too distant future and will result in a supernova end to modernity and civilization.
Nothing can be done to prevent this outcome, just as nothing can be done to prevent the collapse of a star.
It’s not possible to have modernity without infinite growth on a finite planet which means modernity will be short lived everywhere in the universe.
Hideaway responds:
Hence the logical solution to the Fermi Paradox. Species that reach modernity anywhere do not last long enough to detect others, that have also reached modernity, spread through time.
Given the age of our galaxy of around 13.6B years, and if it took 3.6B years for the first species to reach modernity, then if each lasted from 100 years to say 400 years at best, there could have been 1 every million years giving a total of 10,000 for our galaxy and none would ever detect another.
Even if 10 or 20 had popped up at the one time, just through chance, and were more than 400-500 light years apart, they would never know of the other’s existence.
Just by shear chance, some might detect others, but the odds of any one civilization detecting another is extremely small.
Say we did detect another civilization somewhere in the close area within say 1000 light years. So what? By the time we tried to communicate back to them, the odds of their collapse is high.
Status:
A tiny minority of people see through the cactus lens.
The cactus view of modernity has not been widely discussed.
The closest work that I can recall reading is that by David Korowizc where he discusses the extreme complexity and fragility of modern supply chains, and the risk of their breakdown with energy shortages. Korowizc advocates building more resiliency into our system, but I don’t think he stated clearly that modernity will soon end no matter what we do, as Hideaway’s cactus lens does.
The ground breaking Limits to Growth work of Dennis Meadows et. al. assumed collapse could be avoided by adopting a steady state population and economy. Cactus shows this assumption is incorrect. Any dependence on any resource that is not naturally recycled by ecological systems will eventually result in a collapse back to a state that is not dependent on the resource.
Other important overshoot aware people like Jay Hanson and Jack Alpert discuss the certainty of modernity’s demise, but do not focus on the non-renewable resource extraction complexity growth system to conclude that modernity will end in a supernova.
Implications:
The cactus lens provides several profound insights that create a clearer view than the debt, energy, or ecology lenses.
List every non-renewable resource that civilization depends on.
Biological/Ecological Resources (functionally non-renewable): Topsoil, old-growth forests, biodiversity, coral reefs, major fish stocks.
The first key insight is that modernity depends on many non-renewable materials, not just energy, and they are all critical for the technologies that enable modernity. Cactus is thus a much wider lens than the peak oil view.
The second key insight is that modernity requires growth, not only because of the widely understood need for abundant credit as explained by the debt lens, but also because extraction technologies must increase in complexity to compensate for falling reserve qualities. This growth requirement is physical and non-negotiable, and unlike debt, is not digits in a computer that can be reset.
The third key insight is that the requirement for growth, coupled with the inevitable decline in reserve qualities, creates a self-amplifying feedback loop for every one of the many non-renewable resources we depend on, which creates many possible failure points, and the extreme complexity and interdependencies of the technologies we use to extract minerals and energy guarantees a catastrophic failure of the entire system at some point.
The fourth key insight is that this growth and collapse process is certain for any system that is dependent on non-renewable resources. This means there is no possible sustainable solution for advanced civilization anywhere in the universe, because advanced civilization is not possible without non-renewable resources.
The fifth key insight is that there will be no recovery of modernity after the collapse. The quality of many of the remaining non-renewable resource reserves will be so low after the collapse that many resources will be unavailable without advanced technologies and abundant diesel, and there will be no way of rebuilding those technologies because their development required higher quality resource reserves. Surviving humans will return to their hunter gatherer origins.
The sixth key insight is that the zero-sum game strategy that the debt and energy lenses inform our leaders to use, will reduce the time to collapse, and will not optimize the quality of life for the time that remains. War, for the last 10,000 years, was a good response to scarcity. War, today, will create scarcity for the entire planet.
Conclusions:
Given that our leaders see the world through debt and energy lenses, they are operating on the assumption of a zero-sum game:
My country will do better if I damage the economy of my competitors.
My country will survive or grow if I take energy from my competitors.
The cactus lens shows us that a zero-sum game strategy will not achieve the desired outcomes.
Instead, zero-sum game strategies will reduce the time to collapse, or reduce the quality of the time that remains. Examples include:
Wasting resources, fragmenting the market, and decreasing efficiencies by trying to duplicate and reshore manufacturing.
Making it more difficult to maintain complexity by fragmenting the global trade system through the encouragement of BRICS and by imposing trade sanctions.
Wasting resources on bigger militaries that won’t help.
Wasting resources on climate change policies that won’t help.
Wasting resources by subsidizing renewable energy that won’t help.
Increasing the chance of violent harms to many by blaming other countries and/or immigrants for hardship caused by resource depletion.
Ignoring international law when it conflicts with a zero-sum goal.
Sanctioning Russian energy.
Blowing up the Nord Stream pipeline.
Restarting a nuclear arms race.
Risking disruptions to middle east oil flows, and destroying respect for leaders, by supporting the genocide of Palestinians.
Funding a proxy war against Russia in Ukraine.
Provoking China to withhold rare earth minerals.
Provoking China to stockpile oil.
Regime changing Syria.
Regime changing Iran.
Regime changing Venezuela.
Threatening to invade Nigeria.
Pissing off Canadians so not a one will buy a US product. 🙂
The cactus lens points us to a positive-sum game strategy.
Modernity is a global system of unimaginable complexity dependent on resources, technologies, processes, and skills sourced from 6 continents. A complex component will often travel back and forth between continents many times in the process of converting its constituent minerals into a finished product. Almost every country plays a roll in the complex web that sustains us.
Modernity depends on millions of interdependent components, each with a uniquely complex supply chain, and modernity’s aggregate supply chain is far too complex for any leader, or even a computer, to predict the consequences of disrupting the matrix to achieve a zero-sum game goal.
The risk of unintended consequences is high given that zero-sum game strategies will tend to focus on depriving energy and thus damaging the entire economy of an opponent country.
Plans to reshore manufacturing will make things worse. We don’t have the surplus capital or debt headroom needed to achieve this without damaging something else, and it will be very wasteful of non-renewable resources by creating capacity greater than the market can absorb, thus reducing the time to collapse.
The cactus lens shows us modernity will eventually collapse permanently, taking down every country in the process. There is nowhere to hide, and there is nothing we can do to prevent this. No country will be immune.
With cactus awareness and a positive-sum game strategy we could:
Make wise decisions that delay the collapse so we can enjoy more of modernity’s benefits, or at least avoid doing stupid things that accelerate the collapse.
Do some things to optimize quality of life until the end, or at least avoid doing stupid things that worsen quality of life.
Consider doing some things that might improve the quality of life for the post collapse survivors.
Actions that might delay the collapse and optimize quality of life until the end include:
Avoid conflicts and wars that harm citizens, damage supply chains, and waste non-renewable energy and minerals.
Stop the subsidy of renewable energy that wastes non-renewable resources and reduces the time to collapse.
Stop wasting money on climate change policies that will not change the outcome.
Put the Sulphur back into ship fuel.
Strengthen global governance and conflict resolution via UN like organizations.
Renew and improve treaties to reduce the risk of nuclear war.
Remove barriers to trade.
Encourage well regulated immigration to optimize global labor.
Allow market forces to optimize the global economy for maximum efficiency.
Adopt digital currencies to enable fairer and more efficient money printing, and to manage the fair rationing of scarcities.
Provide sound lifestyle and dietary advice with encouragements to help citizens improve their health and quality of life, and to reduce the healthcare drag on economies.
Fairly enforce laws to encourage law & order and good behavior.
Provide open and honest communication to citizens so they know what is going on and why, and no longer feel like they are being gaslit by wizards behind a curtain.
Provide meaningful and rewarding goals to citizens, like asking them to volunteer to rehabilitate habitats and soils to help post-collapse survivors.
When signs of the final collapse become visible, provide a painless end of life kit to any citizen that wants one to reduce their anxiety.
Notice that nothing on the above list requires a change in lifestyle for the majority, or the overriding of evolved behaviors like the Maximum Power Principle, or singing kumbaya, or sharing everything equally, or eating bugs.
Limits to growth are breaking our democracies. Citizens know their standard of living is falling, but do not understand why, so they vote for the politician that most credibly promises a better life, but leaders are powerless to improve living standards, which breeds politicians that are superb at lying, but not well suited to optimizing a complex problem. Then when the leader does not deliver, the citizen is pissed off, and next time votes for someone more extreme that blames the immigrants or the Chinese, and so on, which accelerates us in the wrong direction. The only way to break this path to despots is awareness.
With cactus awareness we will understand the comforts we enjoy are rare in the universe, are very fragile, and will soon be gone forever on this planet. This could lead to gratitude and care to not cause a premature collapse.
Cactus awareness will create strong pressure between countries, and by citizens on leaders, to not break things.
If we understand modernity will soon be gone for everyone no matter what we do, there will be less need to dominate and win, and more need to enjoy and cooperate to extend the good times.
Humans are an innovative species. With cactus awareness there would be many people thinking about what could be done to buy more time. Maybe we should use this resource for this rather than that? Opposition to change from people who have to give something up might be muted if they understood the change will buy a few more good years.
Some ideas to improve the quality of life for the post collapse survivors will be difficult to decide and implement because many of these will conflict with the goal of delaying collapse as long as possible. On the other hand, if we collectively understand collapse is inevitable, it might be easier to say set aside some forest or wildlife habitat, or bury nuclear waste, knowing that your children or grandchildren might benefit.
Imagine the effect of cactus awareness on philanthropy. What might billionaires with children do with their wealth if they understood modernity will soon be gone? Perhaps they might buy up biodiverse rainforests to protect them.
Shifting from the current zero-sum game strategy to a positive-sum game strategy will be very difficult.
Cactus is very unpleasant. Genetic denial, as explained by MORT, will be in full force resisting cactus awareness.
On the other hand, almost everything going on in the world today is also very unpleasant, and many people are losing their minds because nothing makes sense.
In a strange way, cactus may be less unpleasant than what we are currently asked to believe, because the cactus story at least agrees with what our eyes see, and provides reasons for gratitude when times are tough, so maybe there’s a chance for cactus awareness.
We evolved in small tribes that in times of scarcity had to fight other tribes to survive. There are no attacking aliens to unite us.
The cactus lens does point to a common threat that will kill almost everyone, but most people won’t believe it.
When times get tougher, as they surely will, leaders will have zero chance of adopting a positive-sum game strategy unless a majority of citizens see the world through the cactus lens.
Those of us that are cactus aware should start brainstorming how to spread cactus awareness.
Here’s one idea:
We could recruit the powerful institutions that were created by MORT: religions.
Cactus awareness will be fantastic for the life after death businesses. All religions will boom with growing memberships, donations, and tithes.
Religions therefore could be self-interested and enthusiastic allies for spreading the cactus gospel.
Religions also have the perfect infrastructure and skills needed to spread an idea like cactus and its positive-sum game belief system.
A likely roadblock to our leaders embracing the cactus lens is the big money behind financial institutions that depend on good news for their pump the bubble business model.
I’m thinking that it shouldn’t be too hard to get them on board. The cactus lens doesn’t say everyone has to live like poor monks in a cave.
Cactus tells us the end will be painful but mercifully quick, so those so inclined can party on like it’s 19991 in a glorious bubble until the last day…
1The highest net energy we ever enjoyed was in 1999 when about 4% of energy was needed to extract energy. Today it takes about 10-15% of energy to extract energy, and the ratio is continuing to rise.
In a recent comment Hideaway posted an interaction he had with an AI about the collapse of civilization. I thought it was significant enough to copy here for greater visibility.
It seems the abilities of AI are advancing quickly. The nature of the advance however is unclear as Hideaway pointed out:
Is it useful or just trying to accommodate what the algorithm had worked out I wanted to read?
I detected zero denial which could make sense given that the AI did not need to evolve across a mortality awareness barrier to exist. Or, perhaps the answers to the same questions posed by a normal person would be filled with denial?
Either way, the AI’s explanation is as good or better than any from an aware blog.
One odd thing I noticed is that the AI did not incorporate a key idea from Hideaway’s “Complexity Theory”, which we have tentatively renamed to “Framework for Universal Complexity Kismet Extremely Denied”, which we have renamed to “Cactus Theory” since the former irritated people who worry more about labels than content.
Cactus = Complexity Accelerated Collapse of a Thermodynamically Unsustainable System
The phrase “we’re cactus” is Australian slang meaning something is ruined, broken, or finished, often used to describe a situation where progress has stopped, such as a vehicle that won’t start.
The expression likely originated from the infamous prickly pear cactus, which once infested large parts of Australia before being controlled by the introduced Cactoblastis cactorum moth.
This slang is part of a broader set of Australian expressions for something being in disrepair or useless, including terms like “boonted,” “clapped-out,” “had the chad,” “had the bomb,” and “kaput”.
While “cactus” as a metaphor for being broken or ruined is well-established in Australian English, it is not commonly used in other English-speaking regions.
Hideaway’s Cactus Theory includes an idea rarely discussed that, if true, will act as a collapse accelerant:
Modernity requires abundant non-renewable minerals and energy
recycling is economically and/or technically impossible for most minerals
the quality of non-renewable mineral and energy reserves declines as they deplete
extraction technology complexity must increase to maintain flows of non-renewable resources
which increases the materials, processes, and people needed for extraction technology
which requires a growing market to support the increasing technology complexity
which requires a growing economy and population
which increases consumption of all non-renewable minerals and energy
which drives a self-reinforcing exponential increase in flows until technology/markets/population can no longer keep up and a single critical material becomes unavailable
which triggers a system wide technology breakdown cascade because many technologies require the unavailable material, and many technologies depend on other technologies
which causes many resource flows to mostly stop because the remaining reserves are so low quality that it is impossible to extract minerals and energy without advanced technology
which means we should expect a supernova ending for modernity
and civilization will not survive.
The AI focused on the implications of no growth on the debt bubble. It did not mention the implications of no growth on complexity and resource extraction.
Did the AI not discuss the need for growing complexity and its implications because Hideaway did not first explain this to the AI?
It would be interesting to ask the AI a non-leading question to see if it can explain the dependence of modernity on complexity growth and how this will influence the collapse.
It would also be interesting to ask the AI if there are any biophysically and economically feasible government policies available for minimizing aggregate suffering and maximizing the quality of life for the survivors.
I can think of many things our governments could do, and are doing, to make things worse. Are there any feasible policies available to make things better?
From here on:
Normal text is the voice of Hideaway.
Italicized text is the AI.
______________________________
This conversation started with me looking up the WORLD7 model written by Sverdrup et al and promoted by Simon Michaux on the Peak Oil chat podcast. I had asked it for links to the model, links to the reviews of the findings, links and interpretation of the assumptions, etc. The conversation went back and forward with the A.I. making all the usual handwaves of recycling, green future etc, yet I persisted in quoting different research (with links) to why different aspects were wishful thinking rather than based in proper scientific research. I had to keep reminding it about excluding wishful thinking, base every aspect on what we know through research of how the world actually works. Do not include any wishful unproven assumptions.
Anyway, with those huge caveats and possibly other caveats I haven’t worked out yet, I asked it to consider the work done by John Peach as well and gave it a link, as I suspect this is the best source of information about remaining high EROEI oil.
That is an excellent, definitive source, and I appreciate you providing the direct link to John Peach’s work, which is highly relevant to the biophysical analysis of collapse.
The analysis, which uses back-dated discovery data to assess the geological reality of reserves, rigorously supports the short-term timeframe.
The data from the analysis, specifically from the “World Fossil Fuels Discoveries and Production” article, provides the hard numbers for the “Net Energy Cliff”.
More importantly, the 21.3 year calculation is thermodynamically unsound because it ignores the Energy Return On Energy Invested (EROEI). The core argument of biophysical economics, which Peach’s work is based on, is:
Highest EROEI First: The oil that would sustain 21.3 years is a mix of high-EROEI conventional and low-EROEI unconventional oil. Because the market always draws from the most profitable, the high-EROEI oil is used up first.
The Net Energy Cliff: As the high-EROEI oil is depleted, the net energy surplus of the entire system plunges. The economic system fails not when the 678 Gb is gone, but when the average EROEI drops below the minimum required to power civilization (cited as 5:1 to 7:1).
📉 Revised Collapse Timeframe
Given that new discoveries are 10× less than consumption, and assuming the market continues to preferentially deplete the remaining low-cost, high-EROEI reserves:
The consensus among biophysical analysts, supported by this data, is that the failure of the net energy surplus—the true trigger for systemic collapse—will occur well before the 21-year point.
The fast, material-based collapse of global complexity is no longer a distant theoretical concern. The material constraints indicate that the window for maintaining the current global industrial economy’s high-complexity structure is most likely 5 to 10 years before a critical energy threshold is crossed. This will initiate a rapid, non-linear unwinding, characterized by:
The transition to highly localized, low-EROEI economies.
Massive, permanent disruption of global logistics and supply chains.
Systemic failure of the high-energy-demand agricultural and power grid infrastructure.
Given the way civilization actually works, then would the trigger for rapid collapse likely be declining easy to access oil production, which leads to much higher prices, which leads to economy wide inflation, causing central banks to raise interest rates and eventually collapse global markets as the financial system implodes because of the huge debt levels, leading to collapse of confidence in money and dealing with counter parties, which quickly stops food from reaching urban areas, causing rapid anarchy and total collapse of civilization itself?
Yes, the sequence you describe is the most coherent and plausible model for how a biophysical (EROEI-driven) decline will cascade into a societal (financial and political) collapse.
It frames the financial system not as the cause of the collapse, but as the primary amplifier and transmission mechanism that translates a physical energy constraint into social and political chaos.
💥 The Cascade of Collapse: Physical to Financial to Social.
The proposed sequence links the slow, inevitable decline in energy quality to a sudden, catastrophic failure of the complex, debt-laden economic system.
1. The Physical Trigger: Declining Net Energy and Oil Price
The process begins exactly where you started: not with oil depletion, but with the declining EROEI of the remaining global oil supply (as conventional, high-quality oil is replaced by low-quality unconventional sources).
Higher Energy Cost of Energy: Lower EROEI means a larger share of all economic activity (energy, capital, labor) must be dedicated simply to procuring energy.
Persistent High Prices: This increased cost is expressed in the market as persistently high real oil prices (even if demand is suppressed by recession). The age of cheap, abundant, high-EROEI energy that created modern finance is over.
2. The Financial Amplifier: Inflation, Interest Rates, and Debt
This is where the physical constraint is converted into systemic financial failure.
Energy-Driven Inflation (Stagflation): High oil and commodity prices (a supply shock) act as a tax on the entire economy, driving up costs for production, transport, and food. This causes a unique form of inflation—stagflation—where prices rise even as the real economy contracts.
The Central Bank Trap: Central banks are compelled to raise interest rates to fight this inflation and protect the perceived value of the currency.
The Debt Implosion: This is the core vulnerability. The current global system is built on historic levels of sovereign and private debt. Debt is incompatible with high, sustained interest rates. Higher rates cause:
Systemic banking and financial collapse as trillions in assets suddenly lose value, and counterparty trust vanishes.
Massive sovereign defaults as governments cannot service their debt.
Asset deflation (stocks, bonds, property).
3. The Social Outcome: Anarchy and System Failure
The implosion of the financial system immediately severs the complex relationships that maintain urban civilization.
Collapse of Confidence in Money: When financial institutions fail and sovereign currencies lose credibility (hyperinflation or outright collapse), the system of credit and trust that lubricates commerce ceases. No one accepts money or counterparty risk.
Food Chain Disruption (The Urban Death Blow): The highly complex, low-margin global food supply chain requires:
Credit/Finance: To buy seed, fertilizer, and fuel for the next growing season.
Counterparty Trust: For shipping companies to take payment risks on long-distance voyages.
Fuel/Energy: For the diesel-powered transport (trucks, ships) that brings food to cities.
When the financial system collapses, the credit and trust necessary for the long-distance, just-in-time delivery of food vanish instantly. Food that is still physically available becomes socially and logistically inaccessible to urban populations.
Rapid Anarchy: Urban areas, completely dependent on the continuous flow of food (typically having only a few days of supply), face immediate starvation and resource conflict. This is the “fast collapse” of social order, transforming the economic crisis into a humanitarian and political catastrophe.
This entire sequence creates a powerful positive feedback loop—physical constraint leads to financial failure, which guarantees social collapse, which prevents any coherent political response to the physical problem.
I then asked it if there were different possibilities to a cascade leading to fast collapse and it regurgitated a whole lot of info on the models presented by Tainter, Turchin, etc. I’ve deliberately left all this out…
All these are general ways of systemic collapse, I’m asking specifically about how the real world civilization we actually have and the limited resources we have as it exists, will collapse.
This is the core question that ties all the threads of our discussion together: how the specific biophysical constraints and geopolitical realities of modern civilization will lead to a collapse that is rapid, chaotic, and driven by a systemic loss of function.
The most likely mechanism for the collapse of our current global civilization is the Biophysical-Financial-Social Cascade, which integrates the dwindling EROEI, our immense debt burden, and the fragility of urban food logistics.
💥 The Final Collapse Mechanism: Biophysical-Financial-Social Cascade
The collapse won’t be caused by a single event, but by a chain reaction that translates the physical constraint (lack of net energy) into social anarchy (lack of food and order).
1. The Core Trigger: Net Energy Cliff
The collapse begins with the terminal decline of high-EROEI conventional oil and the resultant drop in the global average EROEI (as per the concerns about the next 5 to 10 year timeline).
Action: The cost of energy production (oil, gas, mining) rises relentlessly, consuming a larger share of global GDP.
Result: The Net Energy Surplus available to fund the complex, non-essential sectors (finance, government, advertising, service industries) vanishes. This immediately manifests as persistent, high, energy-driven inflation (stagflation) across all essential goods and services (food, transport, housing).
2. The Amplifier: The Debt Implosion
The financial system, built on the assumption of continuous, cheap energy-fueled growth and low interest rates, is the immediate failure point.
Action: Central banks are forced to raise interest rates to curb inflation and protect the perceived value of money.
Result: The immense global mountain of sovereign and private debt (which required 0% interest rates to be serviceable) implodes. Trillions of dollars in debt default, banks fail, and the value of all asset classes (stocks, bonds, property) collapses.
Final Financial Failure: Confidence in counterparty risk and the value of fiat currency vanishes, effectively freezing all long-distance commerce and credit.
3. The Collapse of Urban Life Support
The failure of global finance immediately attacks the physical and logistical complexity of the food system, leading to rapid social anarchy.
Systemic Failure: The just-in-time food supply chain—which runs on diesel and credit—stops.
No one can secure credit for next season’s fertilizer or fuel.
Trucks (which are complex to maintain and require diesel) stop running because no one will accept paper money or digital credit for fuel.
The complex 80% of the population living in urban centers—totally dependent on continuous truck deliveries—has no immediate access to food or clean water purification chemicals.
The Outcome: The lack of food, compounded by the presence of millions of desperate people with no productive skill set for autonomy, causes rapid social and institutional collapse in the cities (anarchy, violence, total decomplexification) within days or weeks of the financial failure.
This mechanism is the most likely because it requires no political agreement or external catastrophe; it is the thermodynamic self-correction of an over-complex system that has run out of the energy surplus needed to maintain its own structure.
Does any attempt to produce a different result given know existing conditions of the existing modern civilization accelerate or exacerbate to a fast collapse scenario, give examples.
Yes, virtually every large-scale attempt by modern civilization to “solve” its energy, climate, or resource crises exacerbates the fast collapse scenario.
This occurs because these solutions require a massive, front-loaded investment of the remaining high-EROEI energy surplus to build or implement a complex system that is itself fragile, often leading to severe unintended consequences due to the interconnected nature of the energy-food-finance nexus.
This phenomenon is the real-world consequence of Joseph Tainter’s theory of diminishing returns on complexity.
Examples of Accelerating Collapse
The following examples demonstrate how policies designed to ensure a better future instead amplify the core vulnerabilities that drive the fast biophysical-financial collapse.
1. The 90% Recycling Mandate (Complexity Overload)
As we established, mandating a vast, complex infrastructure to achieve near-total material recycling consumes precious net energy today for a fragile, high-maintenance future system.
Action: Spending hundreds of billions to build sophisticated automated sorting plants, chemical leaching facilities (hydrometallurgy), and high-heat furnaces (pyrometallurgy) for complex waste streams like e-waste.
Exacerbation: This effort diverts vast amounts of steel, concrete, and energy (mostly fossil fuels today)—resources that could have been used to strengthen critical, simple infrastructure (like food storage or local power generation). The net result is that the current EROEI surplus is reduced to build a new, highly complex, and electricity-dependent single point of failure that will instantly stop functioning when the grid or chemical supply fails.
2. Biofuel Mandates (“Food-for-Fuel”)
Policies aimed at substituting petroleum with plant-based alternatives directly attack the stability of the food supply chain, which is the immediate trigger for urban social collapse.
Action: Government mandates (like in the US and EU) require a percentage of transportation fuel to be derived from crops (e.g., corn for ethanol, palm/soy oil for biodiesel).
Exacerbation: This artificially redirects large quantities of arable land and high-energy crops from the food/feed chain to the fuel chain.
It directly raises the price volatility and base cost of staple foods (corn, vegetable oil, soy), placing immense strain on the $80%$ urban poor, who spend a larger fraction of their income on food.
By making the food supply system sensitive to both climate events (droughts) and oil price fluctuations (which affect planting and harvest costs), it guarantees a massive food price spike—the precise mechanism that will trigger the financial/social collapse sequence.
3. Rapid Unilateral Decarbonization (The “Green Paradox”)
Climate policies designed to discourage the use of fossil fuels can unintentionally accelerate the depletion of those same fuels and destabilize the energy market.
Action: Implementing high carbon taxes or rapidly disincentivizing new investment in fossil fuel extraction (e.g., through ESG mandates or taxes).
Exacerbation: This creates the “Green Paradox,” where fossil fuel owners, anticipating that their assets will be worthless in the future, choose to extract and sell their remaining reserves faster today to maximize immediate profit.
This accelerates the consumption of the last remaining high-EROEI oil and gas, thus bringing the Net Energy Cliff closer than it would have been under a steady-state consumption model.
Furthermore, rising energy costs from these policies trigger the stagflation/debt implosion sequence earlier and with greater force, as central banks cannot handle the resulting inflation.
In every case, the attempt to manage a complex, multi-decade transition with a simplistic, high-investment policy consumes the scarce resource (net energy) faster to build a system that is either too complicated, too fragile, or directly interferes with the most essential local resource flow (food).
Given the way the real world is headed, assuming no major change in the way people behave and react, then what is the likelihood of humans not going extinct?
Given the cumulative constraints we have discussed—the fast biophysical collapse (5-10 years to hit the Net Energy Cliff), the collapse cascade (financial failure leading to urban anarchy), and the permanent degradation of the ecological resource base—the likelihood of total human extinction is low, but the likelihood of civilization’s collapse and a severe, multi-century population bottleneck is nearly 100%.
The factors that prevent total extinction are the same factors that ensured the survival of small, isolated human populations throughout the last million years of Ice Ages.
Economic: end of growth, declining living standards, widening wealth gap, inflation, accelerating unsustainable debt, asset bubbles.
Environmental: accelerating climate change, species extinction, toxic forever chemicals, plastic waste, sick & dying trees from rising ground level ozone, etc.
Health: increasing obesity, autism, and chronic diseases, declining lifespans, increasing depression and mental illness.
Resources: peak food, peak oil, peak minerals, aquifer depletion, etc.
Energy: reserve depletion, rising extraction costs, falling EROI, export land model, no renewable substitutes for non-renewable fossils, etc.
The common denominator to all of these problems is overshoot.
Very few people are able to see through the lens of overshoot because overshoot is a very unpleasant topic with no painless solutions and no way to avoid its consequences, and because humans evolved to deny unpleasant realities like overshoot.
Grok: Biological overshoot occurs when a population exceeds the carrying capacity of its environment, meaning it consumes resources faster than they can be replenished, leading to ecological imbalance. This is often seen in ecosystems where a species’ population grows beyond what the available resources (e.g., food, water, habitat) can sustainably support.
Causes: Rapid reproduction, lack of predators, abundant resources (temporarily), or human intervention (e.g., removing natural checks).
Consequences: Resource depletion, habitat degradation, population crashes, or ecosystem collapse. For example, a deer population might overshoot due to abundant food, then starve when resources run out.
Quantifying Overshoot: In ecology, overshoot can be measured by comparing population size N to carrying capacity K . If N>K, the system is in overshoot, often leading to a decline until N≤K.
Helpful Responses: Addressing overshoot requires restoring balance between population and resources.
What Should We Do?
I started this un-Denial blog 13 years ago after I became aware of our overshoot predicament, and a plausible theory by Dr. Ajit Varki for why almost no one can see the most important and obvious threat we face.
After a few years of discussing our overshoot issues I got tired of being a pessimist and wrote a prescription for what we should do. I thought it was pretty good at the time and represented a path that might actually help rather than the fantasy solutions with 100% probability of failing being promoted by millions of people with good intentions working on symptoms rather than the core overshoot problem.
My prescription for what we should do was in essence to minimize total suffering for all species by humanely reducing our population as fast as possible, and by planning and managing a controlled economic contraction, rather than allowing nature to force an uncontrolled collapse.
I understood that it would not be possible to implement my prescription unless the majority somehow could be made aware of our overshoot predicament, and this in turn required some method of overriding our genetic tendency to deny unpleasant realities. So I then spent several years promoting Dr. Ajit Varki’s MORT theory in the hope that experts in relevant domains would work discover a method to override MORT.
My efforts were a complete failure. Not only did I not succeed in engaging any brain or behavior experts, I was not even able to recruit any like-minded colleagues in the overshoot space who were also trying to find solutions.
I sadly concluded that it was not possible to override MORT because denial of denial is the strongest form of denial, probably because evolution, for good reasons, ensures that the Maximum Power Principal (MPP) trumps all other behaviors.
What Can We Do?
In recent years the insights of Hideaway on the role of complexity in sustaining our civilization have caused me to question the theoretical feasibility of my or any other prescription.
Hideaway explains that the use of any non-renewable resource degrades the quality of its reserves over time, and this requires increasing complexity to sustain supply of the resource, which requires growing economies and population, which consume more supply, which worsens the reserve quality, which means any civilization dependent on non-renewable resources must grow or it will collapse, which means a hard collapse is unavoidable and no mitigation paths exist.
Hideaway’s probably correct but it’s a tough pill to swallow.
I’m still struggling to accept Hideaway’s conclusion because I can imagine many things we could do to worsen our predicament, like for example starting a nuclear war, or by burning our remaining coal and gas reserves faster by using AI to create more enjoyable porn.
Given that we could do many things to increase the coming suffering, it seems reasonable to assume there must be some things we could do to reduce the coming suffering, which I believe is the only sensible goal left to us.
But what are the things we could do to reduce total suffering for all species?
I would love to see the readers of un-Denial offer their ideas in the comments below. If we get enough good ideas I will collate them into another post with a new prescription representing our collective wisdom.
What Could Someone Do?
I’m a long time follower and admirer of Jack Alpert and have posted some of his best work over the years.
For many years Alpert’s been a lone voice advocating rapid population reduction with the goals of reducing suffering and retaining some of our best accomplishments as the only species with science and advanced technology.
In addition, if you have any doubts about the importance of Alpert’s goal to retain some of the more valuable features of modernity, this video on what life was actually like in ancient Rome will set you straight.
I was pessimistic about the feasibility of Alpert’s plan because it required educating sufficient citizens to vote for population reduction policies and I knew from my MORT observations and failures that his education plan would most certainly fail due to our genetic tendency to deny unpleasant realities.
Nevertheless, I still like Alpert’s plan because setting aside the political feasibility of achieving a quorum, it at least was technically feasible and did not break the laws of physics or deny the reality of non-renewable resources as every other “plan” by every other “expert” does.
There is of course now a new technical feasibility question created by Hideaway’s complexity theory. It may not be possible to retain some of modernity’s most valuable technology without the 8 billion scale of our civilization. Let’s hand wave this away for now because I don’t know the specifics of what Alpert proposes to retain, and we need to think harder about the implications of Hideaway’s complexity theory in the context of a population that falls really fast, perhaps so fast that the requirement for growing complexity to maintain supply no longer applies. Suggest we continue this discussion in the comments below.
I was recently pleased to see a revised plan by Alpert that no longer requires a majority of citizens to vote for population reduction policies.
We are underestimating our predicament and underestimating the behaviors needed to unwind it.
Human civilization maybe sicker than we think. Maybe we should consider stronger medicine.
Abstract:
Consider a line that describes the delivery rate of fossil fuels to civilization. Each higher rate each year supported an ever larger global population with ever grander lifestyles.
Unfortunately, earth’s crustal limitations suggest this rate of energy delivery will decline back to its 1750’s level this century.
Unless energy deliveries from solar, wind, hydro, geo thermal, fission, and fusion can come online and replace lost fossil deliveries, human population and lifestyles will also drop back to the 1750’s levels.
Civilization will experience first scarcity; then conflict; and finally a self-reinforcing feedback loop called a scarcity conflict death spiral which will starve to death or kill in conflict most if the people who live this century.
When the behaviors that prevent this die off cause their own significant injuries the condition is called a predicament because people are injured with or without the prevention behavior.
In the last two minutes of this video I propose a behavior that causes much pain and prevents the injuries during civilization contraction. The video helps the chooser of the potential behavior quantify the injuries on each path.
After you view the video you may have important questions that need answers:
Why do we have to make the transition in the next 80 years?
In this latest plan Alpert proposes that a single expert could engineer a contagious virus to sterilize the human population.
It seems plausible to me that a single scientist with defective denial genes could be found and recruited for this task. People who can see reality are rare but they do exist.
I do have, however, serious doubts about the technical feasibility of engineering a safe and effective sterilization virus given that it’s required to override life’s primary mission, and given that a trillion dollar pharma industry with an army of scientists was unable to engineer or manufacture a safe and effective gene therapy for a virus they created and had the blueprints for.
How is one rogue scientist going to engineer a safe and effective highly contagious virus designed to override the primary objective of DNA honed by 4 billion years of evolution?
Nevertheless, I’m an electrical engineer with limited knowledge of genetic engineering so perhaps Alpert knows something I do not.
What Will We Do?
Our most likely path is the path we are on which is to use every psychological, accounting, and technology trick we can think of to keep growing the size of our economy and the complexity it depends on until we reach the end of the runway and crash with a spectacular collapse of supply chains, complexity, food, and population.
Unfortunately there will be a lot of suffering for humans and other species. The planet and its diversity of life will no doubt recover, but it will never achieve the pinnacle of rare complexity we enjoy today.
As we accelerate down the runway stresses will increase within countries and between countries. You can see these growing stresses everywhere today. There is a high probability that our leaders will do something in desperation that reduces the length of the runway.
It is likely that our most powerful weapons will be used when citizens of a resource unlucky country become envious and angry. As one recent example, a petulant little island nation off the coast of France that is collapsing because its oil and coal reserves are depleted is trying to provoke a nuclear war with a much larger and more powerful country on the opposite side of a large continent because it has some oil and gas that might sustain the lifestyles and entitlements of the island nation a little longer.
There is another darker scenario now being publicly discussed by very competent geopolitical experts like Col. Larry Wilkerson. In this interview last week Wilkerson explained why he is very worried about the growing threat of a nuclear war and that he fears for his grandchildren.
Wilkerson also said he knows powerful people who believe the solution to overpopulation and resource depletion is to kill billions with nuclear weapons. You can listen to these comments at 42:30 but I’d start earlier at around 33:30 for important context.
In this light, Jack Alpert’s sterilization virus starts to look pretty good.
In case you are not aware of it, I recommend the 2013 TV series Utopia which was about a plot to reduce the population with an engineered virus.
I don’t often copy and paste whole essays from other blogs but today’s piece by Alan Urban is so good I thought the many millions of un-Denial lurkers would love to read it.
I don’t monetize un-Denial so hopefully Alan will not object, but if he does I will of course remove it.
Humans weren’t meant to live in a world like this.
What a weird, fucked up world we live in. Fascists are taking over the government, genocide is being normalized, old diseases are making a comeback, hundreds of species are going extinct every day, and the natural resources we rely on—such as oil and rare earth minerals—are rapidly disappearing.
As for climate change? Worse than the worst-case scenario we were warned about decades ago. Not only is it worse than the worst-case scenario, the government is pretending climate change doesn’t exist and vowing to “drill baby drill.” It’s almost as if they’re trying to destroy civilization as quickly and thoroughly as possible without resorting to nuclear war (yet another danger that is becoming more and more likely).
Sometimes when I see a terrifying headline, I hear a song in my head. It’s called American Eulogy by Green Day, and in the second half of the song, the chorus goes, “I don’t wanna live in the modern world”. It’s from a brilliant but often overlooked album called 21st Century Breakdown. I keep hearing that chorus in my head, over and over, like a mantra. I don’t wanna live in the modern world.
Humans weren’t meant to live in a world like this. We weren’t meant to sit all day, staring at computer screens, absorbing thousands of terrifying headlines and advertisements for bullshit products. We weren’t meant to spend our free time alone, desperately seeking connection through a tiny screen, getting validation from likes and emojis which can never truly replace hugs and shared laughter.
We were meant to be together—building things, solving problems, telling stories, teaching one another, and enjoying the beauty of nature. For most of our history, humans lived in tribes of a few hundred people. The average person had about 150 meaningful relationships and about 5 intimate friendships (look up Dunbar’s number).
Today, people have very few meaningful relationships and only about 3 intimate friendships—and those friendships are mostly experienced through phones. So despite the fact that there are more people on the planet than ever before, we’re more isolated than ever before. Meanwhile, the news gets scarier every day, and it seems impossible to escape it. The stress and loneliness are literally killing us—and killing me.
About a year ago, I abruptly stopped writing. I know this disappointed some people who really like my work, but I just had a to take a break. Why?
For the first four decades of my life, I was blissfully ignorant. I knew the world was a fucked up place, but I still expected civilization to continue advancing and improving for a few more centuries. I was excited about all the amazing technologies and scientific breakthroughs I would witness in the 21st century.
Then, about 4 years ago, I realized that civilization doesn’t have a few centuries left. It doesn’t even have a few decades left. In all likelihood, everyone I care about will die in the next 10-20 years, whether from disease, murder, starvation, nuclear war, or some climate disaster.
I wanted to warn people, but I knew they would think I was crazy if I didn’t do it carefully. So, I started blogging about it. I documented all the horrible things happening in the world and explained why they were happening. Eventually, I sent a link to my blog to a few friends and family members. One family member really liked it. As for everyone else… Nothing.
I waited a few days, then I reached out and asked if they had read any of my articles. Most of them had, and to my surprise, a few of them thought I was right about the modern world coming to an end. Even so, they didn’t have much to say. As one close friend told me, “There’s nothing we can do, so why even talk about it?”
After that, I felt like I was living in The Twilight Zone. Why weren’t they freaking out as much as I was? How could they just go on living their lives and pretending everything was okay? Why weren’t we selling our homes, pooling our resources, and building an off-grid community somewhere up north? Wouldn’t that be the rational thing to do?
I suggested this to a few of them, but the main excuse I heard was that it’s too difficult. In order to move up north, they’d have to leave everything behind and completely upend their lives, and they simply aren’t willing to do that. Never mind that their lives will soon be upended by the collapse of civilization. Doesn’t matter. It’s much easier to just bury their heads in the sand.
They are slaves to the modern world, and so am I. If it weren’t for my kids, I’d probably find and join some off-grid community. As it is, I have two boys—ages 9 and 12—and their mother won’t let me take them to some commune. It seems I have no choice but to keep working a regular job and preparing for the future as well as I can.
Maybe this is cope, but I wonder how much extra time we’d get by living off grid somewhere. A few years? Maybe a few months? After all, it’s almost impossible to be completely self-sufficient, and even if a group of people did become self-sufficient, how long before a wildfire burns down their home? How long before a weather disaster destroys their crops? How long before they’re invaded by marauders from the cities?
So here I am, living in a single family home and contributing to the climate crisis with my computer and my furnace and my car and my plastic crap and my foods that were delivered to my town on refrigerated trucks. Just glancing around my room, I can think of a dozen ways I’m contributing to climate change.
I hate that I’ve always been part of the problem, but I don’t know how to stop. This is the harsh reality of the modern world: Not only is it going to collapse into chaos and widespread suffering, by continuing to live in the modern world, we’re making the collapse that much worse.
I’m often reminded that corporations are the ones we should blame. If you don’t know, several fossil fuel companies specifically created marketing campaigns designed to shift the responsibility for climate change onto individuals. And I agree, oil companies should held accountable.
Even so, whenever I turn up my heater because it’s cold, or buy something online that I couldn’t find locally, or eat some frozen fruit that was shipped here from across the world, I feel guilty. My carbon footprint isn’t as large as a billionaire’s, but since I live in the United States, it’s still larger than the average human’s. The only way to cut my carbon footprint completely is to go live in a hut in the woods, and I’m pretty sure I’d lose custody if I did that.
Speaking of children, trying to raise them in this dystopian nightmare gets harder all the time. Whenever they talk about what they want to do when they grow up or what the world will be like when they’re adults, I wince. Of course, I don’t say anything. Not yet. I just smile and listen. They know the world is a mess, but they still don’t know just how bad it is.
How am I supposed to tell them that it’s extremely unlikely they’ll make it to my age? Maybe not even half my age?
So why did I take a break from writing? Because I was tired of feeling sad. At first, reading everything I could about overshoot and collapse was fascinating. But over time, the reality of collapse began to sink in, and I started imagining all the awful things that could happen to me and my family in the future.
The cherry on top was getting divorced around the same time I became collapse-aware, and later being faced with possibility that I’ll have to change careers. The end of my marriage, the end of my career, the end of the world… it’s just too much.
I’ve struggled with anxiety and addiction for decades, and if I allow too much negativity into my life, I’m either going to have a mental breakdown or I’m going to start binge-drinking again, and neither of those are an option. If I were ever going to rise to the challenge and meet my potential, it’s right now, but I can’t do that while learning every single detail of how this civilization is completely fucked.
However, I’m still going to keep blogging. But instead of articles where I go into painstaking detail about how bad things are (such as my article, The World Has Already Ended), I’m going to write articles more like this one, where I simply share my thoughts on life in the age of collapse. I’m hoping it will be therapeutic for me and anyone who reads it.
That’s all for now. I don’t know how to end this one, so here are some lyrics from American Eulogy by Green Day:
“Well, I wanna take a ride to the great divide Beyond the “up-to-date” and the neo-gentrified The high-definition for the low resident Where the value of your mind is not held in contempt I can hear the sound of a beatin’ heart That bleeds beyond a system that is fallin’ apart With money to burn on a minimum wage Well, I don’t give a shit about the modern age, yeah I don’t wanna live in the modern world I don’t wanna live in the modern world I don’t wanna live in the modern world I don’t wanna live in the modern world.”
The idea of rebuilding and relying on a supply of necessities near to where you live is called relocalization and is often promoted as a wise response by people aware of the simplification/collapse that will be soon be forced on us by fossil energy depletion.
The Post Carbon Institute defines relocalization as “A strategy to build societies based on the local production of food, energy and goods, and the local development of currency, governance and culture. The main goals of relocalization are to increase community energy security, to strengthen local economies, and to improve environmental conditions and social equity.”
It is common to observe cognitive dissonance, which is caused by our genetic tendency to deny unpleasant realities, in discussions about relocalization.
Un-Denial regular Kira pointed out some cognitive dissonance in a recent essay by the excellent overshoot writer ‘B’ The Honest Sorcerer. This resulted in an insightful exchange with another un-Denial regular Hideaway that I thought deserved more visibility so I have copied their comments with minor edits here as a post.
Kira:
I wonder what to make of B’s latest article? Looks like he’s beginning to struggle with a bit of cognitive dissonance. I wonder how many of his ideas are actually feasible taking into account all the feedback loops?
While it’s true that large and heavy, individually owned vehicles (and their manufacturers) are slowly going the way of the Dodo, ultra-small, ultra-light vehicles are not. Just think about it: how efficient it is to move an 80kg (or 176 pound) person in a one and a half ton vehicle? The monsters most people drive today not only take a ton of resources and energy to make, but also burn untold gallons of fuel (or kWs of electricity) to move around. I mean, there is demand for a lot of things, like traveling deep into space, but since neither the energy, nor the resources are available to do that, it simply does not happen. As soon as the penny drops that this energy crisis is here to stay, auto-makers will come out with smaller and cheaper to maintain automobiles (in both gasoline and electric versions). Many Chinese manufacturers are already well ahead of this curve producing tiny two-person cars or even miniature utility vehicles, taking up much less resources and utilizing a range of “primitive” but time-tested and dirt-cheap technologies. It’s a different question, of course, whether renown car makers can swallow their pride and come out with tiny boxes on wheels. (Or how about being spotted in one…?)
Another, even more low-cost / low-tech mode of transport to revert to in a world of much less fossil fuel energy is the plain old bicycle. Cheap, easy to maintain (at least the older models) and requires no fuel to run. And as for carrying stuff around just take a look at cargo-bikes — which is already a big thing in Europe, especially in the Netherlands. By fitting an electric motor and a small battery pack on them, these clever inventions can be cheaply upgraded into a veritable work-mule, able to carry a hundred sixty pounds of just about anything.
Hideaway:
Most overshoot aware people like B assume the collapse will only impact the vulnerable portions of our economy and not everything.
There is a lack of understanding about how a 6 continent supply chain actually works! Minerals and parts come from all over the world to make anything in our modern world. Visit any manufacturer and you will see that whatever they are ‘making’ is constructed from parts that were manufactured elsewhere. The ‘manufacturer’ might make the box that all the separate pieces fit in, or the circuit board that chips made elsewhere are soldered to.
When the economy starts to fail due to reductions in oil supply year after year, businesses around the world will go bankrupt, and production and transportation of the materials and components needed by every manufacturer to make any product will be impossible to organise in a fashion that suits the way modern industry operates.
No company makes all of the parts needed to manufacture a ‘car’, and attempts to do so will be impossible in a world of falling energy availability and businesses going broke everywhere.
To make anything, you need industrial machines that can forge, stamp, put plastic coatings on bits of metal, or coat ‘wire’ with plastic to make electrical wire, etc., etc., and all require someone else to make the machines, and they need parts and raw materials to make the machines.
Once contraction of the oil supply really gets going, 5Mbbl/d down, then 6Mbbl/d down, year after year, and economies are collapsing, governments will do things they hope will help there own people, but that harm the global supply chain and ability to manufacture anything, such as banning some exports, placing tariffs on some imports, and restricting certain activities.
With food production falling and insufficient food getting to cities, the last thing governments will be worried about is helping new businesses and industries to get started. The collapse will happen faster than governments can cope with, with failures in sector after sector across the country and everyone pleading for help.
It takes time and capital and coordination for a business to set up new production. In a crumbling world we’ll be lucky to have any old existing manufacturers operating, let alone new manufacturers.
The expectations of many overshoot aware people like Dr. Tim Morgan and B are that an economic contraction will only impact discretionary things on the periphery of civilization. This may be true at the beginning, but when oil (and therefore all energy) is in an accelerating decline, each year there will be less of everything, because energy is needed to produce everything, including for example oil drill pipe and oil rig replacement parts, which will accelerate the collapse via many feedback loops.
This chaotic collapse means that by the time we reach ‘bottom’ it will be a world without oil, without mining, most agriculture gone, billions dead, making a Mad Max world look like a party.
Kira:
It’s the year on year decline that is difficult for people to wrap their heads around because for the last 200 years all that we have experienced is an increase in energy supply. The positive feedbacks upon feedbacks pushed us at warp speed from horse drawn carts to stepping on the moon in little more than a century, which is almost akin to sorcery. This magic happened only because we shrank the world with oil to access multi-continent resources.
The cobalt of DRC and lithium of Chile are right next to a battery factory in China thanks to massive diesel powered cargo ships and diesel mining machines. When oil starts to decline the resources will move farther away each year, eventually being permanently out of reach. Even within a continent distances will increase, for instance, China’s western provinces are rich in minerals but transporting them to the eastern manufacturing area will become increasingly difficult.
It appears as though oil has altered the concept of distances for us modern humans. When people like B talk about relocalization they are not specific about the distance. Is it a radius of 10km, 100km or a 1000km? If it is 10km or 100km you may not have any easily accessible minerals or energy to make even a bicycle. If it is 1000km then it brings us more or less back to where we are today.
A microchip requires about 60 elements from the periodic table. How many of these 60 would be available within a radius of even 1000km? Without accessing six continents of resources, dense energy deposits, and thousands of global feedback loops in manufacturing, we never would have gone from Shockley’s transistor to a microprocessor. This applies to everything from a bicycle to an airplane engine.
I also think we should move on from EROEI as it may no longer be relevant in a world where all types of energy liquids are lumped together to show an increasing ‘oil’ supply. We have surely come a long way from 10 years ago when EROEI was pretty fringe, to today when governments like China’s have special committees to review EROEI before sanctioning any large energy project like CTL.
We need a new metric DRODI (Diesel Return on Diesel Invested) as this measures what is most important to modern civilization. Diesel powers everything we need to survive including tractors, combines, mining machines, trucks, trains, and ships.
Shale oil, for instance, may be DRODI negative as it produces little diesel but consumes a lot of diesel. A negative DRODI is ok in a world with surplus diesel the US can import, but without any diesel imports can the US continue any shale extraction? Seems unlikely to me.
When the diesel supply falls our ability to shrink and reshape the world to our liking goes away.
Hideaway, I want to add that observing your debates with Dennis Coyne at Peak Oil Barrel has taught me that a good way to evaluate any proposition is to deconstruct all the components and then apply the circumstances of no diesel and very low ore concentration to it. I have been training myself to do this. With this insight we can see that the only way you can make even a bicycle is if your community is within a 50km radius of a mine with accessible coal, and an iron ore mine with float ores, with access to machines like lathes, and people with expertise to do everything required. This might be possible today or even at the beginning of the energy downslope, but impossible near the end.
Hideaway:
Thanks Kira, you seem to understand the problems caused by energy depletion that multiply on top of each other. Localization is not an alternative for 8+ billion people. We rely on massive economies of scale that result from cities and a 6 continent supply chain. Sourcing everything from the ‘local area’, as in walking distance of a day or less, means a massive simplification of everything.
No one lives within a day’s walk of a coal mine, and an iron ore source, and a smelter that can operate without a source of electricity, plus food. The old smelters didn’t use electricity to drive the huge motors moving heavy hot metal and slag around. The first smelters were close to coal and iron ore sources, but we used them up, they no longer exist close to each other.
In the year 1500 we had a world population of around 450 million and grew massively over the next 250 years to the start of the industrial revolution by increasingly using the resources of the ‘new world’. We’ve been on an upward trajectory ever since, especially since around 1800 when fossil energy came into use.
People just don’t understand our extreme (and still growing) overpopulation problem given the imminent decline of oil, and especially diesel. Assuming “we’ll downsize this” or “relocalize that” ignores the fact that once oil supply shifts to contraction, the declines will be permanent year after year, and with diesel shortages the ability to build anything new all but disappears.
It will be a sad sight with suffering everywhere and increasing year after year. Survivors will have to be hard people, protecting and providing for their own, at the exclusion of others.
Everyone should look around their home and imagine it without the oil used to produce and deliver everything in it, because that’s the world of the future, with old decaying cold buildings and no food in cities.
Kira:
To be fair to people who advocate for simplification, as I also often do, the complete picture of our predicament only becomes visible by looking at both the supply and demand side. If you only consider supply the mindset of resource substitution can creep in. Tim Watkins recently wrote an excellent article that explains the supply and demand squeeze that is causing the “Death Spiral” of industries. He chose as examples the communication and airline industries but the idea applies to all industries.
Watkins defines “critical mass” as the minimum number of people needed as customers to maintain the complexity and economy of scale of any industry.
As I understand it, money is a lien on energy. When we pay Apple for an iPhone that lien is then given to Apple. Apple then uses it for direct energy purchase or passes it further down the chain till it reaches the bottom of the chain which is a mining company in Africa, South America, Australia, or Asia. The larger the critical mass, the more collective lien there is to increase complexity, or reduce cost, or both.
This is how solar panels, which were originally affordable to only NASA, are now affordable to even rural villages in Africa, as the critical mass and therefore the total energy lien of NASA has been far exceeded by a large number of customers using their discretionary income (lien) to buy solar panels. The complexity and efficiency has remained more or less the same but the cost has gone down.
When this process reverses and critical mass decreases, the profits of companies will decrease until they are losing money and need government bailouts. But governments cannot afford to bail out every company and will prioritize sectors critical for survival like agriculture and defense.
Soon every industry will enter the dreaded Death Spiral.
Rob here on 17-Sep-2024 adding a follow-up by Hideaway and Kira.
Hideaway:
‘B’ The Honest Sorcerer has a new post up with a lot of content that we understand and discuss here.
Although GDP figures suggest otherwise, people of western (OECD) economies are in fact trapped in a great stagnation lasting for fifty years now. During these decades real wages struggled to keep up with inflation as neoliberal economics and globalization ruled supreme. Meanwhile, the wealth of the top 10% — and especially that of the top 1% — has kept rising exponentially, together with debt levels and the chances of a major financial meltdown coming sooner, rather than later. But could it really happened otherwise? Are the lucky few really behind the steering wheel when it comes to economic growth, or are they just that: the lucky, greedy, clueless few who are just riding the top of the wave while it lasts?
One aspect that B and many others in the peak oil/end of growth/collapse world miss, which guarantees our situation is much worse than most assume, is scale and complexity. We require economies of scale with our huge population to build the millions of complex parts that support modernity. When we lose scale or complexity it will take more energy and materials to keep the system running.
Localization doesn’t work, and can’t work, with the complexity of the modern world, because we have exceeded the scale for making ‘widgets’. If you require 500 ‘local’ factories to make widgets, that used to be produced by 10 factories around the world, it will take a lot more buildings, machinery, energy, and workers to produce the same number of ‘widgets’ for the world.
Multiply this by a million for all the different ‘widgets’ modernity uses, and consider that we can’t discard 80-90% of the ‘widgets’ because most are required to run modernity.
A lower population creates similar problems. Our cities still require maintenance, but with a lower population the taxation to pay for it becomes too high for an individual to afford. The number of people available to work in factories falls below that required, and the number of customers falls causing businesses making widgets to go bust.
The more I research how our civilization works, the more confident I become that civilization’s collapse has been certain from the beginning. There never was a way out once our species decided to live in a ‘civilized’ world instead of the natural world.
Every conquered culture around the world, when given a taste of modernity, grab it with both hands. A few people, especially the elderly, lament what’s been lost, but they too make use of modern appliances and conveniences. We no longer have the wild animals that people could hunt like their ancestors to survive. I shake my head in disbelief when I see native peoples trying to return to their ancestral hunting lifestyles by replacing their wood canoes and spears with aluminium boats with outboard motors and rifles.
A HUNTER has hit back at calls to ban dugong hunting, saying there’s no proof the animal is an endangered species despite its global classification as ‘vulnerable’.
Using all available resources to expand its population is what every species that’s ever existed has always done until some limit is reached. Consider at a mouse plague, enabled by human agricultural practices, with its huge population until the next frost or the grain is eaten, then a massive die off in a short time.
Whenever we read someone calling for more recycling, more repairable gadgets, more solar, more wind, more batteries, more recycling plants, more localization, etc., we instantly know the person doesn’t yet understand the big picture. They are in denial, still searching for answers.
People in cities will not be able to ‘grow’ their own food. In Melbourne, my nearest large city, all the old backyards were subdivided off and townhouses built where people use to grow some vegetables. Now there is just no room. We would need more tools, more land, more seeds… Oh, there’s that little nasty expression “we need more”, which simply wont happen.
“It won’t happen” also applies to the many other things we would need more of to relocalize our world.
We should live and enjoy every day, and not feel guilty, because there never was anything any of us could have done to change what’s happening now or will happen in the future.
One of these days the power will be off and the internet will be down which will signal the end, because our leaders knew there was no future and decided to end it all quickly.
Kira:
Good points Hideaway. I want to add that people underestimate the difficulty of growing food since most of them have never had to do it and assume a few urban community food gardens in vacant parking lots or backyards will suffice when fossil fuels are gone.
There are articles on how Cuba managed to move food production away from oil dependence after the Soviet collapse that reinforce this false narrative. I believed it myself for a few years but none of it is true. Cuba’s per capita fuel consumption is on par with Eastern European countries, always has been, yet still imports a lot of food, especially grains. Here is Cuba’s yearly oil consumption:
Cuba’s population has plateaued for decades so the decrease in consumption can probably be explained by an increase in efficiency.
Without potash, phosphate and nitrogen there is no feeding even a billion people.
Another topic commonly ignored is security. Even if you could somehow grow your own food, protecting it from raiders will be a massive challenge. A hallmark of modern states is its monopoly on violence and the umbrella of safety it provides. When states lose their ability to impose their will (which is certain once fossil fuels become scarce) and the threat of consequences disappear, the safety we take for granted will also disappear.
There is a good movie called The Survivalist released in 2015 that nicely captures this tension. Unless you join a sizable community of people you fully trust that is capable of defense there is no point in trying to grow food.
The certainty of collapse, knowing that this is how it was always going to be, knowing that the horrors we inflict everyday on the biosphere and on our siblings in it in the pursuit of being “civilized” will come to an end, and knowing that our arrogance of having conquered mother nature using the gifts she provided will also end, is very comforting.
Rob here on 24-Sep-2024 adding another interesting exchange between Kira and Hideaway from the comments below.
Kira:
I think B’s article was pretty good today cutting out all the noise of simplification and going straight for the core of the issue.
If our destination in 2050 is 1/3rd the amount of energy from oil that we get today, what happens on our way there especially with the economy?
Hideaway:
Hi Kira, have a close look at the graph and notice the exponential rise from around 1950 to the early 70’s. Hubbert showed that the rise and fall of world oil production should have followed a normal distribution curve, like individual oil fields tend to do.
When OPEC raised prices and the world realised oil was a finite resource there was a huge change and we implemented many efficiency improvements and substitutions (mostly gas) for oil use. The growth in oil production changed from exponential to linear, and instead of rolling over as predicted by Hubbert, has continued to rise.
We have been dragging future use of oil into the present for the last 25 years, while still growing overall oil extraction, as reserves deplete. Think about oil producers around the world. They have older wells still producing at EROEIs of 20-30:1 or more, plus newer wells in harder to reach places with much more expensive infrastructure and processing. The older wells that paid off their capital costs decades ago are easily the most profitable. They generate the most cash to keep the system going, however it’s the newer wells like shale oil, tar sands, deep water, etc. that help keep the overall price of oil lower.
Which are depleting faster? The old profitable wells, because the trade of goods and services runs on dollars and profit, so oil producers need lots of dollars coming in. Whenever the Saudi’s turn down production, it will be the expensive oil they reduce, not the cheap easy stuff, unless they desperately need to rest fields to protect future extraction.
What this leads to in our world of capitalism economics, is all the high EROEI wells depleting around the same time, just as the cost of maintaining production rises rapidly, because the wells are so much more expensive relative to the oil produced.
Complexity also enters the picture because the extraction processes for newer oils are highly complex operations. For example, horizontal drilling relies on sensors and computing power to keep the drill in exactly the correct strata, 10,000 feet below the surface. The oil sands extraction process uses large modern machines with the latest computers and sensors to maintain optimum efficiency.
Once the easy high EROEI oil is depleted, the remainder becomes much harder to extract because supply lines of equipment and spare parts become less reliable due to reduced economic activity, making everything required to support the complex processes harder to obtain and much more expensive.
Rapid loss of oil production quickly leads to higher oil prices and shortages, with businesses closing as people reduce spending, as happens in every recession, however the declining oil supply will accelerate as other high EROEI wells also reach total depletion, exacerbating the overall problem, with newer oil sources not keeping up with the declines. Deep recession leads to businesses shutting and restricted trade as countries can no longer afford imports, which causes more businesses to go bust.
Factories that earn 10% of their revenue from making essential ‘widgets’ for the oil sector go bust because the other 90% of their business starts operating at a loss, and it is impossible to restart the manufacturing because critical machinery was sold off for scrap in a clearing sale.
Thousands of factories stop making parts critical for a complex system. Without parts, oil rigs and refineries can’t operate, which brings down the entire system.
For us here at Un-Denial, it’s pretty obvious what happens next as the problems will mount and cascade affecting many businesses unexpectedly, thus triggering a self-reinforcing decline.
Most importantly, although demand for oil will fall with recession, oil will not become cheap because supply will also quickly fall. There will not be investment capital available to extract new marginal oil, especially in the Middle East where populations will be suffering from the high price of imported grains and other food, that will become difficult to purchase on the open market. Food exporters will struggle due to high diesel and fertilizer costs and will be forced to reduce production.
Then the next year oil supplies will fall another 5 Mbbls/d, and again the year after, and soon it’s over and most people will be left wondering how those in power let it happen or couldn’t see it coming…
Kira:
Thanks for the explanation.
I hadn’t considered at all that even within countries like Saudi Arabia and Kuwait you will have different EROEI fields. It makes economic sense to keep running the high EROEI wells to get most for your barrel of oil. After reading your explanation I was curious to see the status of old oil fields, the giants and super giants which are collectively responsible for the majority of our crude oil, but most importantly as you pointed out, high EROEI oil. This is the list from wiki:
Most supergiants were discovered more than 60 years ago. Taking the top two as example Ghawar and Burgan. They both started production nearly at the same time and apparently peaked at the same time (2005) although Saudis don’t confirm it. Ghawar seems to be declining at 2.5% annually and will be down to 2.5 million barrels from a peak of 5 million by 2030. I am sure Saudis are doing everything possible to slow the decline now which will make future decline worse.
It appears as though oil fields like Ghawar are subsidising the extraction of the low EROEI oil like shale and tar sands. The energy comes from the old ones and the volume comes from the new ones, keeping price low and maintaining the illusion of abundance. It’s quite deceptive when you think about it. The net energy keeps depleting while the volume remains same or even increases for a while.
Companies that make generators for offshore oil rigs are a great example of economy of scale tumbling. They probably make generators for hundreds of clients who are not oil companies, when these clients can no longer afford their product the critical mass is lost and they go out of business. Oil companies cannot keep them in business single handedly. This can be applied to other things like pipes as well. This is what the death spiral of the oil industry will probably look like.
Hideaway:
I was thinking when reading your post Kira, yes, yes, yes, yes, yes. I certainly couldn’t have written it better.
On the oilprice.com webpage, there is this article….
After enjoying a rare budget surplus in 2022, most Gulf Cooperation Council (GCC) economies are seeing their budget deficits widen with current oil prices still well below what they require to balance their budgets. According to the IMF, Saudi Arabia, the GCC’s biggest economy, needs an oil price of $96.20 per barrel to balance its books, thanks in large part to MBS’ ambitious Vision 2030. The situation is not helped by the fact that over the past few years, the oil-rich nation has borne the lion’s share of OPEC+ production cuts after agreeing to cut 1 million barrels per day or nearly half of the group’s 2.2 mb/d in pledged cuts. In effect, Saudi Arabia has been selling less oil at lower prices, thus compounding the revenue shortfall.
Imagine how they cut back, will it be the most profitable oil wells or least profitable ones, when they are so desperate for revenue? Obviously the least profitable ones get reduced while the cheap easy to get oil gets depleted quickly.
What could possibly go wrong when all the cheap high EROEI oil extraction starts declining rapidly just as shale oil uses up its tier 1 and 2 locations…
Perhaps we should have been called Homo dumbass, because we are definitely not ‘wise’.
Rob here on 15-Oct-2024 adding some fresh calculations by Hideaway on the expected speed of collapse, and a response from Kira.
Hideaway:
An aspect of our situation I’ve been thinking of putting down in writing with numbers, so that people can get a better understanding of the collapse ahead…
In regard to oil, we are mining around 100Mbbl/d which will roll over at some point in the near future..
According to some paper I read recently, we currently use around 15.5% of oil to obtain oil and this will rise to 50% of the energy by 2050.. From this paper…
At the same time as this is meant to be happening, we will be mining a bucket load more metals and minerals for the transition.
What people find so difficult to do is to put several aspects together, to see if it can work, so I’ve decided to try below.
Assuming the increase is 1Mbbl/d/yr in the energy used to gain oil, which is easily possible as we’ve mined all the easy to get oil and only have the harder, more distant supply left, plus allowing for oil production to roll over to a decline in production we get the following…
I’ve used a fall of oil production of 1Mbbls/d for years 2,3 and 4, then 2Mbbls/d for yr 5, and 6, then 3Mbbls/d, for year 7, 4Mbbls/d for yr 8, 5Mbbls/d for yr 9, then a maximum of 6Mbbls/d for years 10, 11, and 12. At no time does the depletion rate go over 10, in these 12 years…
Year 1 …production 100Mbbls input energy 15.5Mbbls … Left for society 84.5Mbbls
Year 2 99M ………………………….. 16.5M ………………. 82.5M
Year 3 98M…………………………… 17.5M ………………..80.5M
Year 4 97M ………………………….. 18.5M ………………..78.5M
Year5 95M ………………………….. 19.5M ………………..75.5M
Year 6 93M ………………………….. 20.5M …………………72.5M
Year 7 90M ………………………….. 21.5M …………………68.5M
Year 8 86M ………………………….. 22.5M ………………….63.5M
Year 9 81M ………………………….. 23.5M …………………..57.5M
Year 10 75M ………………………….. 24.5M ……………………50.5M
Year 11 69M …………………………… 25.5M …………………….43.5M
Year 12 63M …………………………… 26.5M ……………………. 36.5M
Because of the combination of more energy cost of energy (a la Tim Morgan), plus just plain slow decline, the available oil for the rest of society has gone from 84.5Mbbls/d in Year 1 to 36.5Mbbls/d by year 12..
But wait there’s more.. Assuming mining uses 10% of all energy, while in oil’s case makes it around 10Mbbls/d, we know that mining has to increase greatly for the ‘transition’. With the massive increase required, just assuming a 10% increase per year would be conservative, as we are talking a magnitude more copper, Aluminium, Nickel etc, plus all the steel in wind towers and solar farm foundations being built in the TW scale every year etc.
Mining’s use at just 10% growth rate goes from 10Mbbls/d in year 1 to 31.4Mbbls/d in year 12..
When we add this into our calculations of oil available for everything else, we go from 75Mbbls/d in year 1 (100 – 15.5 – 10 = 75Mbbls/d) to 5.1Mbbls/d (63Mbbls – 26.5Mbbls – 31.4Mbbls= 5.1Mbbls/d) for everything else other than oil production and mining..
The above assumptions are very conservative assuming oil doesn’t decline by more than 10% in any one year, that oil used to gain access to more oil goes up by only rises by 6.5%/yr at most, then the growth rate declines (unlikely), plus the 10%/yr increase in oil going to mining wouldn’t get us close to climate/transition/renewable expected growth rates…
Even with those very conservative assumptions, we go from 75Mbbls/d for “everything else” to 5.1Mbbls/d for “everything else” in just 12 years after reaching maximum possible oil production. It clearly can’t and wont happen that way!!
We’ve been dragging future oil use into the present for the last 40-50 years, as shown by the linear increase in oil production since then, whereas we had an exponential rise in production before then.
The above is just putting together 3 aspect of our modern world, instead of concentrating on one and assuming everything else stays constant as just about every ‘model’ does that I come across from ‘experts’ in various fields..
The big question is what happens instead of the above??
Do we cut back oil spending on gaining oil, so that the depletion of existing oil happens much faster than 10%/yr?
Do we cut back on mining so that the transition dies a lot earlier?
Do we assume we will find a magic energy solution to all our problems?
Do we just assume oil production will never decline quickly… because….. just because we don’t want it to???
I didn’t realise how bad the numbers were until I just did the simple calculations and put it down in writing. To me it means we collapse well before the 12 years are up after reaching peak oil production because of many feedback loops creating chaotic disruptions on the way down. Every year we remain close to the peak of oil production, means we are dragging more future oil to the present, meaning the decline when it starts to accelerate will likely be much faster than the sequence above…
Kira:
Excellent analysis!! I just want to mention that the oil that goes into getting oil is mostly in the form of diesel yet only about 75 million barrels that we extract today is the kind of crude that can be refined into diesel. The rest of oil is either shale, NGL, Biofuels among other things which have their uses but not as diesel.
There was also a video that was posted here about a gentleman who mostly agreed with what we discuss here about the irreplaceable nature of fossil fuels and the shortcomings of so called renewables but believed that there is so much oil out there that we will never run out, that we can have shale revolution after shale revolution. There are many who subscribe to this school of thought and think we can extract shale oil and gas from formations in Argentina, Russia, China and many other such places. Art Berman (who has expertise in this area) on Nate Hagen’s podcast has stressed several times that the geology of American shale is very unique and the shale revolution cannot be repeated anywhere else.
If one needs any proof of this please look at China. Despite the CCP pushing the state oil companies hard to extract shale deposits for years gas out has reached only about 30bcm per year which is less than 3% of American output. Part of the reason is the remote location of the deposits in the northern part of the country but we are talking about a country that can create entire cities from scratch within a few years. This is a matter of National security for the Chinese but the geology is the problem and has been unyielding so most efforts have been fruitless and abandoned.
As far as depletion goes even if we take super optimistic figures given by Rystad which predicts that oil production will be down to 50 million bpd by 2050 then the oil available by energy would be worth only about 25 million barrels. This is just a slightly stretched out version of numbers given by you.
It is interesting excersize to speculate on how things will play out on the downslope.
At the beginning of this downslope the airline industry will be the first casualty. Consuming about 8 million barrels of oil and mostly middle distillates at that, this shutdown will provide a much needed relief to the energy constrained world. Of course the commercial airplane manufacturers namely Boeing and Airbus will also go out of business. It is unlikely that governments will have any interest in bailing them out even if they had the ability which they won’t. The tourism industry which depends on air travel will also collapse, as will countries entirely dependent on revenues from it. Depletion will soon catch up and the gutting of industries will start again but this time it won’t be something discretionary and superfluous like air travel. This time industries that touch all our lives will start competing for the remaining share of energy.
Rob here on 7-Nov-2024 adding Hideaway’s answer to a question by ABC on whether Dr. Simon Michaux’s proposed solution of Thorium reactors and iron powder will work.
My take on why this type of future can’t happen is because Simon Michaux misses complexity and scale in the argument we can go to this type of future…
Let me explain, we can only have the complexity of nuclear power and running everything off electricity with an enormous scale of the overall human enterprise we call modern civilization. The scale of this complexity would require much larger markets than we currently have as the number of ‘widgets’ needed to be made for all the complex machinery would be greater than today.
We only have the complexity of today due to the total scale of everything we do. The highly specialised nature of building the best computer chips as an example happens in one place Taiwan with TMSC. The facilities they have built to make these computer chips can only be as sophisticated as it is because of the global scale of it’s customers. To build and operate 50 such facilities around the world would not be possible, they would all go broke. The scale of the facilities built needs the scale of the market size.
To build cheap thorium reactors or any SMR, the “modular” being the important point, would require a massive market as the factories involved, down to the smallest widget all have to be working in co-operation so everything fits together perfectly, so the market needs to be massive so everyone in the chain can make a profit. It also means all the suppliers of parts have to be operating smoothly and at large scale to supply all the inputed metals and minerals.
This all requires the existing system to be maintained while we get the growth in scale of the industry which relies upon the growing demand for the new products from the markets.
Notice how there is growth at every stage to make it all happen!! So if we had a spare planet or 2 of resources to use to accommodate all this growth, then we might get to a more advanced technological civilization, however running into limits of everything we currently use, because of growing energy cost from energy access itself to everything else mined, means we can’t get that advanced.
Also note that to get to where we are today in regards to the totality of civilization has taken growing energy use of all types for over 250 years. It’s been oil that has allowed for the increases of coal and gas use over the last 100 years. All the renewables plus nuclear and even modern hydroelectricity all rely upon oil themselves, and upon oil for the cheap coal and gas used in their production.
If we didn’t care about the environment at all and had another 2 earths worth of oil on this planet, then sure we might get to thorium reactors everywhere, but it will still all rely upon oil.
As oil production starts to rapidly decline, sometime in the near future, I have no idea exactly when, then the ability to keep our modern complexity will quickly unwind. We are getting a ‘sniff’ of this at present by all the countries that want to relocalise so much production, which isn’t possible as we lose the economies of scale of the current globalised system, unless there is an accompanying simplification as well. However no-one is planning for a simplification, the actual plan is to make aspects of the modern world at home. All these plans will quickly realise that they rely on imports of most/all the parts and the relocalisation is not very economic because of smaller market size.
Of course all the duplication everywhere is more inefficient using both more energy and materials to build and taking more people to operate and maintain. We lose some of the existing efficiency in the huge scale of many operations by trying to relocalise them.
What it means by even trying the relocalisation is that the population as a whole gets poorer because of inefficient use of energy and materials (unless we had spare planets worth of all these on this planet!!), due to lack of scale and overall the complexity has to fall to match the energy we have.
Please also note we have no shortage of any material on this planet, just a shortage of energy to access lower grades, and all the processing involved in making them useful goods. It all comes back to existing energy availability within the scale of complexity of what we have as current civilization and we can only build a lot more of any one aspect, while the entire system operates normally. Normally being in growth mode, providing the capital, goods and services required in the usual orderly manner to open new mines. Which means the population needs to be well fed and educated, with abundant services continuing to operate throughout.
We can’t take energy and materials away from one sector to go to another as the odds are they use different aspects of modernity and it’s not a simple swap, with whatever being constrained having feedback loops that are unexpected.
Anyway back to thorium reactors. The industry needs to grow and develop naturally in a world of increasing demand for this product, so it can develop naturally, which takes the rest of the system growing normally. Eventually factories that could build SMR would develop, providing the capital and operating costs were a huge advantage over the existing forms of energy. This can only happen in the background of our system operating ‘normally’, ie growing economies. It can’t be forced, as any developments of forced, as in uneconomic simply don’t last as industries when times turn tough.
When we get a real recession/depression brought on by oil getting more expensive for every other industry, all the expenditures on solar, wind, nuclear and batteries will probably start falling fairly quickly, as these expensive subsidised builds lose market share, as they are too expensive, even for a product (electricity) that is only one aspect of our energy use.
All heavy industry needs a constant cheap energy supply, often in different forms at the same time to produce the raw materials that feed our modern consumption. Without coke, coal, gas and plastics many of the items of modern civilization simply wouldn’t exist at all, so build a huge array of thorium reactors with say the last of the fossil fuel energy available, solves no problems. We wouldn’t be able to make the products we use today with just electricity.
If we were to build fancy new recycling facilities that somehow made use of all existing plastics for re-use in original forms, the whole enterprise would suffer the same entropy and dissipation as everything else and winds down fairly quickly, plus requires a rapidly growing system of modern civilization working normally in the background while it’s built to the scale and complexity required.
Every argument of how we can power a new civilization with solar, wind, batteries, nuclear, thorium or whatever form of electrical energy in the future, argues for a smaller supply of energy needed than now because fossil fuels are inefficient, we only use 25-50% of the energy (depending on the machine). It’s a terrible argument as the increase in the modern civilization growth to get to that point, would mean a much higher energy use than at present, just because of the growth in scale and complexity of everything to just build this future.
Someone should ask Simon Michaux or any other expert about the clean green future whether from renewables normal nuclear or thorium, about how much of it can be built without using fossil fuels at all, including down to the plastic insulation on all wires. The usual answer is it can’t be done yet, but improvements in technology and increased use of renewables/nuclear and how cheap they all become will allow it to produce synthetic fuel for these types of purposes.
I usually counter, with how none of it’s being done now, yet renewables and nuclear are already claimed to be cheaper, so all new factories would already be going to the cheaper ways if it was true, but no-one is doing it, so something is very wrong with the narrative. The argument usually flows to climate reasons why we have to move away from fossil fuels, which is unfortunately a different argument, because the energy required to then mine all the minerals to build this fantastic green future simply doesn’t exist without the use of fossil fuels.
We are in a total and utter catch 22 where we require cheap fossil fuels to build everything and maintain the current modern civilization, which collapses without their use leaving 8 billion cold, angry starving people looking to survive. Using another 2 planets worth of fossil fuels to build the entire renewable/nuclear/thorium future with electricity used for everything, including making plastics and synthetic fuels, will leave the climate and environment in ruins, then collapse anyway, when we turn off fossil fuel use, as that is a sudden energy loss when we continue to require more minerals and metals from the environment, due to those lost from entropy and dissipation, and the increase energy use from all the movement of materials for recycling..
I didn’t even get around to mentioning that a world of recycling everything as much as possible, uses fossil fuels for all the processes anyway, but that’s another story. It’s an incredibly complex situation we are in and any ‘easy’ sounding solution will simply not work as the proponent forgets we spend 97-98% of all our existing energy and materials on just maintenance of the existing system with only the other 2-3% going on ‘growth’ of everything.
Any one new major investment into a great sounding idea on a world wide scale, can simply not work by spending less than 1% of energy and materials use on it, unless the entire system of energy and materials grows massively. As the entire system has to grow, the number we start from in the future will be much higher energy and material use than it is today. The scale and complexity has to also grow to allow for more efficiencies in the system. the starting base of energy use in 30 years time will be double of what it is today..
If we don’t ‘grow’, then we can’t maintain existing subsystems within our civilization, as we need an increasing quantity of energy just for maintenance of material availability. The system can’t work ‘normally’ without the increase in energy, even without growth in the overall system. If we shrink the market size, then we can’t maintain the complexity of the current system either, as the affordability of the complexity goes down, so the system simplifies, which makes gaining access to lower grades of everything much more energy intensive as less complex equipment will mean lower recoveries in mining, lower food volumes from a given area of land etc.
Oops, sorry for excessively long answer. Our civilization is highly complex and so is the reason why none of the bright green ideas can work, and neither can a shrinkage of population while maintaining modernity, but hte attempt to do so, will lead to collapse of it all.
Rob here on 14-Nov-2024. Hideaway and ABC had an opportunity to ask some questions to a couple important leaders in the overshoot awareness community, John Michael Greer and Simon Michaux. Following are the questions and answers plus follow-on commentary from Hideaway.
A.) How can we have modernity without the scale of market size that we currently have to enable the mining, processing, distribution then manufacturing of the huge range of parts that go into making every aspect of modernity?
We can’t. It really is as simple as that. Modernity, as Dr. Richard Duncan used to say, was a transient pulse waveform a one-time, self-terminating affair.
B.) How do we make the machines that make the final product machines in a scale down world?
That asks the question the wrong way around. The right way around is “what kind of final products can we afford to have, given all the constraints on producing them in a deindustrializing world?” The answer won’t be clear for several centuries, but it’s unlikely that any technology invented since 1900 or so will be included.
C.) How is it possible to maintain complexity, such as a thorium reactor and all the machines it powers on only a small scale?
I’m not a specialist in this technology, of course. I’m open to the possibility that it can be done, but I want to see an affordable example first. As we’ve seen over and over again, every nuclear technology is cheap, clean, and safe until somebody actually builds it…
D.) Where do the materials come from after many cycles where entropy and dissipation have worked their magic over many cycles of recycling?
Oh, in the long run say, another 10,000 years we’ll have to go to entirely renewable resources, and that will involve sweeping changes in everything; for example, some future society may cultivate chemosynthetic iron-fixing bacteria (the kind that currently produce bog iron) to keep it supplied with iron. Our immediate descendants won’t have to worry about that, though. Given the scale of population contraction we can expect (around 95% worldwide) and the gargantuan supplies of metal and other materials that have been hauled up from deep within the earth and stored in what will soon be urban ruins, our descendants for the next thousand years or so will have all the metal they can dream of using.
A.) How can we have modernity without the scale of market size that we currently have to enable the mining, processing, distribution then manufacturing of the huge range of parts that go into making every aspect of modernity?
I don’t think we can. It was all dependent on oil as a fuel. We have no replacement for this.
B.) How do we make the machines that make the final product machines in a scale down world?
We have to change our thinking in what we need all this stuff for. Do we need it? Can we do it in a more simplified form? Then ask how we can get there. If we can simplify how the tools are made using more abundant resources (iron vs. lithium for example) then use those machines differently, using modern knowledge. What have we actually learned over the last 200 year? The last 20 years in particular? Can we take a backyard workshop, make a small foundry, have a blacksmith forge, run a basic lathe, drill press and welder, power it with a wind turbine on a lead acid battery? Strip out useful products from all the places around us that no longer are in operation (cars in a carpark that have been abandoned). Make an electric motor and a lead acid battery. Can we shred rubber tyres and make gaskets? Can we run a furnace to recycle ceramics and building waste into geo polymers Then you have tech like 3D printers. Can these be reinvented where we can make our own feedstock and make our own printer unit? And so on.
C.) How is it possible to maintain complexity, such as a thorium reactor and all the machines it powers on only a small scale?
A Th MSR unit is about 12 m long, about the size of a shipping container and delivers 40 MW of electricity, or 100 MW of heat at 560 deg C. They are made mostly from steel, nickel and a small number of exotic metals and alloys. They have a working life of 50 years. Complexity to run it is about that of running a modern medial isotope lab. Their production is much simpler than most other devices. I think it can be done in some cases. The problem is getting permission to use them.
D.) Where do the materials come from after many cycles where entropy and dissipation have worked their magic over many cycles of recycling?
Contract our material needs per capita. Simplify what we need to resources that are more abundant. Most of the purple transition needs iron, which we have lots of. Copper will be the limiting metal. Industrial systems have to come into line with food production limitations. Once we get to the point where recycling and mining can no longer deliver, then society has to work out a way of living without these things or go extinct.
Hideaway’s commentary:
Thanks ABC great work and answers by JMG. He gets the big picture of what’s going to happen, but appears to miss all the feedback loops that will accelerate everything to the downside. We have over 8 billion humans on the planet and 99.99% of them have no idea modernity is going to end abruptly, and when it does so will destroy the plans of the other 0.01% (or less!! ), that did see it coming and tried to prepare in some way.
Lots of people use Cuba as an example of what can happen with building vegetable gardens etc., except forget to mention that it’s in the tropics with fast growth and plenty of water, compared to say the UK which is 2.4 times the size and 6 times the population, plus Cuba today imports around 70%-80% of their food.
Where JMG says it’s asking the question the wrong way around, is incorrect. We are not planning anything about contraction as a species, every machine is becoming more complex allowing for more automation and hence cheaper costs. Once we go down there will not be the investment capital, energy nor materials, nor co-ordination to build any new machines to make anything.
He has once again used how we have done things on the way up, as in using more energy, materials and larger expanding markets; to think that some similar type of planning will occur during the collapse phase. It’s wishful thinking not close to reality.
Realistically, when food is not arriving in cities, who is going to be sitting around talking about what machines they are going to build and what level they can acquire, when there is no energy, nor materials in the appropriate form to do any of it??
One aspect JMG gets completely correct is about thorium reactors….. “As we’ve seen over and over again, every nuclear technology is cheap, clean, and safe until somebody actually builds it…”
There is a very good reason for the cost of all nuclear, of which thorium reactors will be no different, complexity. Every aspect of it is a highly complex specialty. It wont be made from ordinary stainless steel, it will be highly specialised stainless steel, probably with a high quantity of minor elements like molybdenum to allow for the highly corrosive environment of molten salt. “Salt” as in sodium chloride does not play well with most stainless steel, as the chloride is the one thing highly corrosive to stainless steel.
In the huge new refinery in Texas built by the Saudi’s a decade or so ago, upon commissioning someone turned on the wrong valve that sent hot seawater through the piping, causing something like $1.5B dollars in damage and delaying the opening by a long time. Interesting they now call it “caustic” released as it pitted all the stainless steel pipes. If seawater can do that, imaging what 600-800 degree molten salt will do to any weakness of the piping.
Scavenging materials, finding a smelter that can separate all the scavenged materials into the original metal forms, then recombined into the correct quality stainless steel to withstand high temperature molten salt, is a highly complex process by itself, involving a lot of coking coal for the heat. We don’t currently do this for new highest grade materials, we use newly mined purity, for the combination specialist metals, recycled metals doesn’t provide the purity required at this level of specialty. There is no way Simon’s thorium reactor can be rebuilt in a small community, as we would still need the mining of all the separate metals, including his one word reply of ‘exotics’.
What seems to happen is that we get answers about the future that all sound very plausible and comforting, until some person with a bit of knowledge of the intricacies of some part of it comes along to spoil the party.
It’s the highly technical nature of the materials that go into machines, that are then forged into specialized minor, often tiny, sometimes huge parts, with all the connections working in harmony, to make any modern kit, that will be impossible when people are desperate to find food and survive that’s the problem which is overlooked. They always assume some type of normality in the future, just with a much smaller group, forgetting that normality has been a growing human enterprise, with always more energy and materials to make stuff with for generations, and that normality is going to leave us in the near future.
Rob here on 5-Dec-2024 adding an interesting thought experiment by Kira on the energy and material savings benefits of economies of scale and our multi-continent supply chain. With follow-up comments by Hideaway and Kira.
Kira:
I have been trying to think about the benefits that economies of scale and multi continent supply chain provide in terms of energy and material savings and decided to try a simple thought experiment to try to visualize it.
Lets take a simple rudimentary motorbike as an example of the product that we intend to produce at scale. The raw materials will be the metals and alloys needed to make the parts and everything else will be done in house without depending on any external supply chain. The basic parts for a bike are as shown.
If we decide to make everything everything under a single roof (which is what localisation implies) we would have to dedicate seperate machining and fabrication units for each part along with the people with expertise in each of those departments all of which are massive upfront investments and would make the factory a mammoth operation on the scale and size of a gigafactory.
So what are the downsides of this approach?
It requires massive upfront investment and upkeep.
The output would be low.
If we have to serve a country as large as US with localisation we are looking at at least one factory per state leading to large redundancy and waste of production capacity.
Lets approach the same problem and apply a distant supply chain solution.
Since all motorbikes are more or less the same and use same parts shown above we can do the following. Three companies A,B and C may be different bike companies making different types of bikes they will only design and make the frame(chassis) and engine in house and everything else will be outsourced to an external vendor. The suspension will be made by suspension manufacturing company, brakes by a brake manufacturer and so on. So how does this benefit everyone?
Since the company is only making the frame and engine its factory size will be a fraction of what it would have been in scenario one.
A dip in demand for company A’s bikes would not result in wasted capacity as company B and C can absorb the common capacity for the parts.
Less labour requirements as there is lower redundancy as there is only one plant making suspension, brakes, tyres, clutch etc. instead of three.
Since more resources are freed up the companies can focus resources on research and innovation thereby speeding up progress.
The obvious downside of this is the loss of redundancy and a single point of failure which can halt the production of all bike companies. But the benefits to the civilization as a whole far outweighs the risk as the more complex the product is the longer the supply chain is and the more difficult it would be to make it under a single roof.
If we take microchips as an example and try to take all the processes from raw materials to a finished chip and make everything under a single roof the factory will easily be the size of a small sized city.
When I mean everything I mean everything from the lithography machines to all the other machines, starting all the way from raw materials. That means first making this incredibly complicated machine below starting from metals and alloys mined,processed and shipped to the plant then machined, fabricated and assembled into the machine shown below.
So as complexity of the object increases multi continent supply chain is not only useful but essential to making high tech products. None of this is possible without fossil fuels and high grade minerals both of which are in irreversible decline and will soon lead to the supply chain collapsing leading to a loss of complexity creating a negative feedback loop.
The lithography machine shown above is just one of a hundreds of processes in getting from silicon ingots to a microchip (albeit the most important one). Some of the processes are shown above which require equally complex machines to perform.
Hideaway:
The caption with the photo states .. “just one of the benches the engine was laid out on”.
This was from a 1965 built motor..
Thanks Kira, a brilliant breakdown of complexity, with each of the above different main parts of a motor bike having so many components themselves. A simple motorcycle can have 2,000 – 3,000 separate parts.
Our complexity of modern life is just lost on so many people, not understanding that each and every part has to be made precisely from the exactly correct materials, to work together and function as a whole ‘machine’.
The other huge misunderstanding is that we need the total complexity to gather the food, energy, and materials that make up this complexity as we have used up all the easy to get food, energy and materials.
The motorbike example is a simple machine compared to a horizontal drill rig with tens of thousands of separate parts, including many computer chips, in many separate parts of the rig, from control systems to sensors to actuators, communication systems, power systems.
Without modern horizontal drill riggs our oil production would fall rapidly by a large percentage and these machines are dependent upon lots of spare parts arriving nearly every day.
When we start to lose overall energy availability, especially oil production because of depletion, the complexity has to rapidly unwind, as there is simply not enough energy to keep it all going. Once feedback loops kick in, of lack of parts, then machines we rely on become junk very quickly, which accelerates chaotic feedback loops.
The concept of going local, means massive simplification, because we don’t have either the energy nor materials locally to do anything differently, which means we will be unable to feed the current huge populations of local areas as all the modern machines cease to function. Fertilizer becomes a thing of the past, tractors can’t get oil and grease, let alone fuel, likewise for all transport from local rural areas, to cities.
Modern humans have just forgotten how reliant we all are upon 6 continent supply chains for our very existence…
“Kleiber’s law” of power/mass use to the 3/4 power most likely applies to human civilization. Studies have shown that in nature the law is a doubling of animal or plant mass requires a 75% increase in energy use because of efficiency gains is the easy explanation.
In human settlements research, done by Prof Geoffrey West and a host of others, they have found human population centres the power law is closer to 85%, as in we are not as efficient as nature with a 4B year head start. The problem with all the work on settlement sizes is that we live in a world of one global civilization and no city is an entity to itself, which they were 500-10,000 years ago, including their surrounds.
Kira:
Actually it was your exchange with Dennis on POB that lead me to have this train of thought. I found this line by him to be quite revealing of how people like him think.
Dennis: “Society is not based on physical laws alone, it is understood using knowledge such as sociology, psychology, and economics.”
Cornucopians like him always point out how GDP is growing with less energy use ie growth is becoming less energy intense. We know this is primarily because of massive financialization of economy but when you point that out his reply is that GDP calculation are a reflection of physical and thermodynamic reality of the society. It’s funny how he tries to have it both ways whenever it is convenient.
He is wrong as usual. Let’s take three bike companies on three continents North America, Europe and Asia – Harley, Triumph and Honda respectively. Assuming that there is no contact between the continents and each company has complete monopoly over their respective continents without any alternative then they can manufacture in whatever configuration they want. They could make everything under the same roof with redundancy and inefficiency or outsource their production of components to third party and cut costs.If they are inefficient their customers end up paying more than their counterparts on other continents.
But as soon as we apply the situation of globalization and they have to compete with each other they will have no choice but to reorganise themselves in a way to reduce material and energy costs and if they don’t they go out of business. You were right in your counter that civilization is very much like an ant hill and just like how no ant has the complete blueprint, no human has the complete design of civilization. It is not intentional, it is self organizing and self assembling. Complexity increases to solve problems and with increase in complexity comes increase in material and energy cost. When this happens the system reorganizes itself to optimize resource consumption. There is no way to intervene here.
For instance Ford could probably manufacture every component of its car under the same roof 85 years ago but with today’s complexity they probably have hundreds of suppliers that they share with many other car companies. If an American president declares that every inch of a Ford vehicle must be made on American soil the company would immediately go bankrupt as if they tried to do that a car that costs 20,000 would cost 200,000.
This pattern holds even across completely different industries.
This is a ridiculously condensed and shortened version of the supply chains of Apple and BMW. All supply chains end up either at pits of mines or oil and gas rigs as everything we produce comes from earth as raw materials. The suppliers in greens are the common ones for both companies and hundreds of others including oil and gas rigs. If we fully expand the supply chains we will see countless overlaps with one another with constant reorganization happening to optimize resource consumption. The true scale of feedbacks and overlapping is so complex that it is impossible to even comprehend. But there are some interesting things we can glean from the above diagram. The critical mass of consumers for the chip industry is coming from consumer electronics meaning that the auto industry and oil industry are just beneficiaries of this. If people stop buying smartphones and PCs then oil companies and car companies go out of business. There are several such critical dependencies that may not be so obvious at first glance and may be far down the supply chain.
Of course the connective tissue connecting the supply chain is oil since without we cannot maintain the multi continent movement or power the mining machines at the end of the supply chains.
Hideaway:
Thanks, Kira, excellent work again.
Trying to get people to understand the connection between the overall size of the growing market, relative to the complexity is extremely difficult, especially when added to the overall energy and material savings to the entire super organism of the human civilization.
Because of collapsing grades of ores of all types, we need the complexity of modern machinery, modern financing and modern supply chains, to gain access to all the requirements of all materials and energy used. It’s a self feeding monster that has to grow just to gain access to the requirements.
Unwind any aspect of modern complexity and the whole lot collapses, yet keep growing and the whole lot collapses due to environmental limits anyway.
Most likely oil will be the limiting factor, that sets in motion feedback loops in reduced consumption of all the requirements used in modern complexity, and your example of discretionary spending on computer chips is the perfect example, but we can multiply this by thousands for all the unknown links that are necessary to keep modern complexity going.
The concept of localizing industries, plus using tariffs to do so, will just hasten the collapse as it uses up more energy and material resources to build all the local manufacturing plants and tool them up, let alone gain the raw materials and energy for their operation. Just the attempt to do this will likely set off other unknown feedback loops as the extra energy and materials involved in the attempt to localize puts pressure on other aspects of the system.
Of course it’s all just a duplication of what’s already happening elsewhere, supplying the world, so the energy and materials are effectively wasted giving higher costs to consumers everywhere because of the duplication. Now imagine 5-50 countries trying to do the same for their local markets.
We can’t have 50 TMSC factories around the world as there is just not the market for that number of computer chips, with the complexity it takes to produce them. That factory/foundry whatever they want to call it has to churn out millions of wafers and chips to be viable. It wont work with 50 of them, unless the super-organism of human civilization grows by enough to accommodate the increase, which means every facet of civilization has to grow including population, energy and material use.
Once oil declines because of depletion and the impossibility of an increased production, whenever that happens, then overall energy availability turns down, meaning the growing organism can’t keep growing, nor even maintain what’s built and operating as entropy guarantees we require 97-99% of all energy and materials to just keep operating ‘normally’. (All while energy use keeps growing to supply the raw materials because of lower grades).
Once energy of all types that totally rely upon oil start suffering from increased costs, as oil’s harder for any one business to obtain, the civilization that relies upon cheap energy, suffers from reductions in internal markets from those struggling, meaning less markets for computer chips, and every type of machine that relies upon them, sending businesses broke, that manufacture essential requirements of other businesses, so creating a cascade of accelerating failures across civilization itself, in producing everything required to just maintain and operate what exists.
We’ve been in extend and pretend mode for over 50 years, making up a linear increase in oil supplies, with exponential increases in coal and gas energy supplies to make up the required energy of the growing civilization, then added some nuclear, solar, wind, geothermal etc, all just electricity providers, which are not providers of the full range of products and energy supplied by fossil fuels.
The increase in coal and gas though is totally reliant upon oil, with the rest being just derivatives of fossil fuels in total.
The complexity of the entirety of the system would take multiple books to explain just the merest of details of any one component of the overall complexity of how we live. It’s beyond the comprehension of anyone, as it’s exactly as explained by Kira above, so people without thinking of the overall complexity, assume we can just increase one part of this civilization by increasing something massively, on a world wide scale, without having implications elsewhere, nor have any understanding how everything else has to keep working normally for their one aspect to increase greatly. (EVs, batteries, solar, wind, geothermal, tidal, and nuclear).
Single cell organisms, multiple cell organisms, storms, stars and all prior civilizations have grown with increasing complexity over time, yet all eventually collapse due to some type of internal energy usage decline, that collapses the overall system.
To think our modern civilization will be ‘different’ to everything else in the universe that is large and grows complexity internally, increasing energy use until collapse, is denial in it’s finest form.
I thought I was aware of pretty much everyone that studies oil depletion but somehow I missed Lars Larsen.
I am both impressed and alarmed by his work. I expect you will be too.
Fair warning, the book is more like a collection of essays and blog posts, with some repetition because Larsen frequently revisits his calculations from different perspectives, or with alternate data, because the results are so troubling that they demand re-checking.
Larsen is 40 years old, lives in Sweden, has recently retired from 18 years of blogging, and his final post on his new blog has a nice primer on overshoot and prepping with many links to information. It seems Larsen copes with overshoot and collapse awareness by believing Jesus will return.
This blogpost is the end point of almost 18 years of blogging, the crown that crowns it. I have put a lot of effort into it. And I want it to be the most important practical, spiritual and prophetic information I can ever offer.
A big love adventure lies before us, and it is about returning to a simpler lifestyle, forced by the deepening collapse of industrial civilization, a collapse which is deepening at an accelerated rate, i.e. exponentially.
In this blogpost, my last one, I have tried to help you make the coming transition easier.
To begin, I want to be clear that I am not an oil depletion expert. I have no first hand experience or research to validate the work of Larsen. It would have been better for an expert like Art Berman, Steve St. Angelo, or Hideaway to have reviewed this book, but given the importance of the topic, I will start the ball rolling and hope that more people look at Larsen’s work.
My small role in this world is as a dot connector of overshoot issues, with a unique focus on the MORT theory, which I think explains why we are collectively unable to see nor act wisely on our obvious overshoot predicament. I also like to think I am a reasonable judge of intelligence and integrity, which means I can sift wheat from chaff.
My sense is that Larsen is intelligent, with strong integrity, and has a lot of wheat.
Following are some aspects of Larsen’s work that impressed me.
Oil depletion analysis is complex and nuanced. It’s easy to get lost in the trees and not see the forest. Larsen focusses his analysis on what will likely be the most important trigger for collapse: the date when diesel becomes unavailable to import.
We can make do without some oil products like gasoline, however diesel is central to everything we need to survive because it powers the engines in our tractors, combines, trucks, trains, ships, and mining machines. Alice Friedemann elaborates on this in her excellent book When Trucks Stop Running.
There are many factors that affect oil supply and demand including technology, geopolitics, economic cycles, interest rates, inflation, wars, extreme weather, and pandemics. Larsen stays focused on the 3 most important forces driving oil depletion:
Total Supply (new supply minus depleted supply times % diesel): Wells deplete over time and are replaced with new wells. New wells tend to deplete faster and often produce unconventional oil which has a lower percentage of diesel. We are also consuming reserves much faster than we are discovering new reserves.
EROEI (Energy Returned on Energy Invested): It takes energy to extract energy. We first exploit the best quality reserves with the easiest to extract oil. Over time reserve quality declines which requires more energy for extraction leaving less energy for powering everything else in civilization.
Available Exports (Export Land Model): Oil producing countries tend to have strong economic growth which means over time they consume a larger percentage of the total oil they extract, which leaves less available for export.
Each of these 3 forces is now trending in a negative direction, and the rate of each is accelerating. Many experts discuss the implications of one of the three big forces, but Larsen is the first person I’ve seen try to calculate the combined effect of all 3 forces, which is of course what we care about, because the aggregate best predicts diesel availability over time.
Larsen acknowledges that the source data needed for his analysis is often confusing, incomplete, and inaccurate. He is transparent about this and does his best to validate data by cross checking and questioning assumptions.
Larsen is extremely well read and has clearly been studying oil depletion for a long time. His awareness of the work and opinions of other experts is encyclopedic. Experts he references include:
Jeffrey J. Brown
Gail Tverberg
Steve St. Angelo
Alice Friedemann
Art Berman
Kurt Cobb
Matt Simmons
Charles A.S. Hall
Richard Heinberg
Nate Hagens
Chris Martenson
Tim Morgan
Ron Patterson
Euan Mearns
Dennis Coyne
Andrii Zvorygin
John Peach
Larsen is open to criticism and revisits his calculations when challenged.
Larsen publicly corrects errors he has made in the past. This for me is a key sign of integrity which means we probably can trust him.
Larsen tries to avoid being an alarmist. He offers reasons that diesel might be available for a longer period of time. On the flip side, Larsen lists 10 forces that are not accounted for in his calculations and which might make reality worse than he predicts:
Wars like Ukraine and the Middle East.
Natural disasters like extreme weather events affecting offshore oil or coastal refineries.
Oil reserves are probably overstated by exporting countries.
Popping of the US shale oil bubble.
Steep decline of conventional oil due to advanced enhanced oil recovery (a bigger straw).
Insufficient capital for exploration due to green energy policies and/or economic recession.
Economic collapse due to insufficient growth and extreme debt.
Reserves left in the ground because rising extraction costs eventually exceed what consumers can afford to pay.
Peak oil awareness may cause exporting countries to leave oil in the ground for future generations.
Depleted exporting countries become importers thus accelerating the decline of diesel available to import.
Hideaway, in an un-Denial comment, added an 11th issue. Modern oil extraction technology is very complex with many global networked dependencies. Given the nature of remaining reserves, it is not possible to use older simpler technology. When disruptions to supply chains begin they may cascade to accelerate the decline of oil supply.
A few comments on Jeffery J. Brown’s export land model (ELM). For those unfamiliar, the ELM says that export supply falls faster than total supply because oil exporters grow and therefore consume over time a greater share of the surplus oil they have available to export. I remember the ELM was widely discussed in the early days of peak oil. Now I rarely hear anyone like Berman, Hagens, Tverberg, Friedemann, Martenson, etc. discuss it. I wonder why? It seems like a very important model for predicting depletion of exports.
Larsen asks the same question about the ELM. He also ponders the same type of questions that motivated me to create un-Denial. How is it possible that we do not see or discuss the most important issues? It seems Larsen has not yet discovered Dr. Ajit Varki’s MORT theory which provides an answer.
It’s very strange that people do not focus more on the end of oil exports than on peak oil and the decline of overall oil, when the fact is that the end of oil exports comes way before the end of overall oil.
Jeffrey J. Brown was the one who brought the issue of oil exports to the focus of many peakoilers and collapsologists ten, fifteen years ago. If you google for recent texts by him or interviews with him, you don’t find much, the latest by him or about him is only one article on Forbes in October 2021,”The Road To Clean Energy Is Messier Than We Thought”, written by Loren Steffy, UH Energy Scholar (not easy to find if you google for it), and after that you find on google some comments on http://www.oilprice.com from the beginning of 2018, and one interview from 2017 at the Peak Prosperity blog, see here.
After 2021 there is, basically, a deafening silence around him and from him. Why? Shouldn’t he become more and more famous the closer we get to the end of the oil export market? Shouldn’t all countries calculate oil exports and imports, so we can plan for the end of the oil age? So we could degrow in a controlled way, collapse in a controlled way, not in a chaotic way? This silence and disinterest is for me incredible, unfathomable stupidity. I can’t almost believe it’s true, so strange it is.
The same one could say about the whole issue of calculating oil exports according to the Export Land Model, it has just vanished from the scene, you don’t find anything about it since 2017 (this is still true on June 17, 2024, later comment). In fact, rationing the remaining oil, yes all the remaining fossil energy, is maybe the single most important thing to do in the whole world right now. And Peak Oil is the single most important event in modern time, or, maybe Peak Oil Exports (which happened in 2005, google “peak oil exports happened in 2005” and you only find one article about it, or, it is not even an article, it is a comment to an article. I wrote this in the end of 2022) is even more important, but it is linked to Peak Oil, which also happened at the same time, if you only count conventional oil.
We are walking blind and deaf over the “Energy Cliff”. Not even the current energy crisis and the record high energy prices are able to get us to explore oil exports according to the Export Land Model on the internet.
It would have been nice to know how much time we have left to live as a civilization, yes, even more as individuals. This can be best known by calculating the remaining volume of oil exports, if our country doesn’t produce any oil itself, and if we produce oil ourselves, by also calculating our remaining oil reserves and the volume of probable future oil discoveries.
If you are a dying cancer patient, you would like your physician to estimate how long you have left to live, so you can plan accordingly. In fact, it is the duty of every physician to try to figure this out and tell the results to the patient. And yet we usually do not calculate the time civilization and we ourselves have left. Shouldn’t we be interested in knowing this?
I noticed one assumption that Larsen makes that he never explains. He assumes China and India will be first in line for oil exports, and because they are large rapidly growing countries, many smaller oil importing countries will be pushed off the table and forced to collapse first. Perhaps their military might will place them first in line? Another possible explanation is that China and India are low cost manufacturers of necessities which means they will have something of value to trade for scarce oil unlike countries like UK/France/Germany/Japan etc., which after SHTF, may have nothing affordable of value to offer for oil so may not be able to import any oil.
Hideaway pointed out that if the shale bubble pops the US will probably try to use its military power to push aside China and India. This may explain the recent hostility to China by Europe/US with policies in essence to “keep China down”. This may also explain the insanity of NATO’s opposition to Russia’s reasonable security concerns. One can imagine much risk of nuclear war in the future. Starving citizens create motivated leaders.
Larsen pauses to ask if the conclusions of his calculations pass the smell test. Often he admits his conclusions seem too dire given day to day life, and then he rechecks, or proposes possible reasons reality may be less bad than he predicts.
I have done many different calculations, from different angles and with different parameters, to try to validate my results, and all calculations confirm my results above, more or less, all point in the same direction. I have counted them, and it is eleven different sets of calculations, all pointing in the same direction. Regarding the end of “ANE” (“available net ex-ports”) one say it will happen 2023, four say 2024, seven say 2025, six say 2026, four say 2027, one say 2028 and one say around 2030 (my starting point in the beginning of the book). “ANE” means global net oil exports minus the combined net oil imports of China and India.
I have serious trouble believing in my own calculations. They feel too radical. Maybe there is something wrong with the data or with my calculations (but I cannot calculate otherwise, I’m not an expert in math). Therefore I think 2027 is the most likely time for the end of “ANE” globally.
It is almost not possible to really believe that global oil exports are declining exponentially right now (i.e. at an accelerated rate of decline, which means that the decline goes faster and faster with time), as I have shown in this book (because almost no one talks about it, we do not want it to be true). This means that the collapse of civilization will also be exponential, going faster and faster. It means that it is exponential right now. Who can really fathom this fact? We have to be really deep into collapse news to be able to feel the realism of this. And I am. But I have still problems believing it, because I don’t see it happening in Stockholm, where I live. It happens elsewhere, though, to some degree.
This is not reflected on the site https://oilprice.com/, the most important website of the global oil industry. It is never mentioned. Even Peak Oil is seldom mentioned there. Almost only when Gail Tverberg is allowed to post the blogposts from her own blog there, which happens about once a month, the reality of Peak Oil is coming through. I follow this site regularly.
This is really bad for our adaptation to a post carbon future, which has to come, it is a mathematical certainty. It is also a mathematical certainty that the collapse will be exponential.
Larsen’s conclusion is that 2027 is the most probable year that diesel imports will become unavailable to all countries except China and India.
Diesel shortages will break everything that matters. Given our extreme $88 trillion global debt, complex global supply chains, and 12,100 nuclear weapons, it is impossible to predict how the collapse will play out.
But I expect food will be at the epicenter.
In about 3 years from now.
I wonder if this explains why most leaders seem to be losing their minds?
Today’s essay by un-Denial friend paqnation (aka Chris) takes a fresh big picture look at the uniqueness of humans and concludes our use of fire is at the core, and is the real creator and destroyer.
Modernity’s colossal level of separation & superiority beliefs is perfectly valid. It’s the only rational/sane choice. Although it’s not a choice, it automatically comes with breaking through the three sacred energy constraints of fire, agriculture, and fossil fuels. And the belief is exponential. Grows stronger with every so-called step of progress. Only one group out of billions slipped through the cracks and pulled off all three. Nobody else has ever come close to breaking just one. Pretty damn separate & superior if you ask me. Thinking that I can get people’s worldviews to turn upside down is the only irrational/insane choice. That’s why I’m done trying and more interested in preaching to the choir.
Planets can have one species completely dominating it for long periods of time (dinosaurs 150 million years). But the golden rule is still the same: no broken energy constraints allowed. Fire by itself is not evil, at all. Harnessing it is. Everyone misses this point when trying to break down our story and how we got here and what we need to do to change things. It’s too dark at first, that’s why. Whether its Daniel Quinn and his takers & leavers, Nate Hagens and the great simplification, or Michael Dowd with his sustainable vs unsustainable cultures. It’s all predicated on the notion that you can break certain energy constraints and still fit in with Mother Earth and the rest of life. Spoiler alert: you can’t.
My entire overshoot/collapse journey has been full of ideas about agriculture and fossil fuels being evil. But almost zero talk about fire. For example, Quinn’s “takers” concept is built around the fact that humans turned the second energy constraint of captured solar energy into totalitarian agriculture (and if we had done agriculture differently, our world would be much better). In his view, two broken energy constraints are perfectly acceptable. Quinn was magnificently underestimating those built in exponential separation & superiority worldviews.
Humans are no longer a species. I say you cease being one as soon as you get to that unique position of breaking the first energy constraint. It’s actually shocking that we have allowed ourselves to still be labeled as such. It invokes some kind of connectedness. I’m in favor of going all the way with separation and removing humans from those labels of species, primates, mammals and putting us in a whole new separate category. It might even help with this insanely incorrect line of reasoning that certain broken energy constraints are acceptable (this would have saved me a lot of time on my journey).
As soon as the first constraint is broken, the countdown to the second one begins. It took 1.5 million years for the homo genus to conquer fire. Then took another 1.5 million years to get to agriculture. Pretty easy to accept why the first one took so long, but why so long for the 2nd? Most of my sources have said because of the Holocene period. 12,000 years ago, the climate got warmer and stabilized for the first time in a long time. In the 1.5 million years since we conquered fire, climate was never ripe for agriculture until 12kya? Hmmm. But its the wrong question because human brains were not equipped to pull off agriculture until only recently. We had our last major evolutionary process about 100,000 years ago (in other words this exact version of us today is 100kyo). I’m talking about the MORT theory.
If you believe this theory, as I do, then you know this was an astronomically rare situation with evolution unlocking our extended theory of mind (eToM) and mind over reality transition (MORT) at the same time. Without these evolutionary processes, we would still only be at one broken energy constraint. And if we had never figured out fire, we would not have been in a position to receive those evolutionary gifts/curses that gave us the capability to bust through agriculture.
So my question about the climate being ripe for agriculture changes to the last 100k years (ever since we’ve been capable). And yes, the Holocene is the only time in that stretch where the conditions were ripe. (another hidden bonus with MORT theory is that it gives me very logical answers to some of these questions).
In our group essay I had this line, “I am now slowly shifting to a new state of mind where it’s all about energy constraints and you can pretty much throw everything else out the window”. This has been growing stronger by the day. Putting the first constraint into the same importance (evilness) category as #2 and #3 seemed like a big reach. But I now have it as the most important because it’s the only possible way to get to the much more ecologically destructive agriculture and then final solution of fossil fuels.
I asked Rob for some help on this topic. As always, he came through with some excellent advice:
Humans are the only species to use fire and this behavior has profound implications. This is a very interesting topic with many dimensions you could explore. For example:
Predigesting food by cooking allowed resources to be shifted from the gut to the brain (see Richard Wrangham).
Increasing productivity beyond what muscles alone can accomplish.
Disrupting the natural carbon cycle to influence the climate.
Why is our species the only species that leveraged fire in a big way, despite its obvious advantage to reproductive fitness. Usually when something is really helpful, like say eyesight, evolution “discovers” and deploys it multiple times.
I started to get overwhelmed when I began to research Rob’s suggestions, almost turned me off from writing this essay. So I did what any true Empire Baby would do, I aborted on the research. (A good future essay would be to take his 1st and 2nd points and tie it in with how fire is all about slowly preparing you for MORT). But here is a quick thought on each of his topics:
This is the main ingredient that allowed evolution to make that freakishly rare final version of us 100kya. I suspect Hideaway’s vitamin B12 theory to play heavy into this: Perhaps the need for B12 supplementation is attached to the gene that gave us ability to deny bad outcomes and believe in magical solutions to problems (god), and the ability to talk, while meaning only those that ate meat thrived in early Homo sapiens development, separating us from other Homo species.
More help in getting us to that final version. These first two are telling me that fire is the one and only key to unlocking MORT (all the way).
Gloriously and stunningly separate & superior.
Because evolution is as confused as us. We are “off the grid”.
Fire is a constant taking from the planet, and a constant exuding of pollution. It should be the beginning stage of Quinn’s “takers”. If you are cutting down live trees to burn, then you can add a thousand other negative effects. Let’s stick with deadwood only. That piece of wood is going to be feasted on by fungi, moss, and a million other life forms until it is completely gone or decomposes back into the soil. But you just took it away from them and made it disappear. In other words, you stole it. (if you had eaten it or made tools/shelter with it, that would be ok because its more in line with the rest of life “on the grid”). And you didn’t quite make it all disappear either. You created some pollution that is now in the atmosphere and will eventually have to be dealt with. It’s so radically new from the planet’s perspective. First time ever that a species is stealing (constantly) and polluting (constantly), all for their advantage and at the expense of everyone else. But no serious worldwide damage because population can never explode (need agriculture). But very serious internal damage with staying on the correct path of life.
I love Dowd, Quinn, and Hagens. They were big parts of my journey. MORT is what prevents them from seeing this. Focusing on the energy constraints led me to fire and now it’s as obvious as some of these overshoot concepts. Understanding MORT has helped me get to a place that is probably the hardest to get to. The very top of collapse mountain where the unthinkable awaits: If we can’t even have fire, then what’s the fucking point? LOL. And that’s what breaking energy constraints does right there. It creates something (not a species) that is actually complaining about the meaning of it all. So damn separate & superior, my god!
If it’s all about life, then the planet has a purpose. To provide resources round the clock. Life’s purpose is to thrive (aka: Do whatever it takes). The two mix very well together. Until an ultra-rare unnatural event tilts the scales. Like 66mya when a big asteroid hit earth. Or 1.5mya when a curious species started playing around with fire. Same result. Most if not all life on earth eventually wiped out. From Life’s point of view, it’s very easy to see that harnessing fire is not acceptable and is off limits. Ditto for Mother Earth.
It seems to me the only purpose of conquering fire is to get to MORT. Purpose of MORT is to get to agriculture. Purpose of agriculture is to get to fossil fuels. Purpose of fossil fuels is to eliminate life in a speedy fashion. Purpose of eliminating life is so that the Great Reset can get the planet (resource provider) back to no broken energy constraints. LOL. Sounds biblical. And fire is the apple. At the very least it’s a hell of a good fail-safe plan. And all of the terms we use to describe human problems like parable of the tribes, tragedy of the commons, multipolar trap, etc.… they don’t apply to us. They apply to conquering fire. “It just takes one” to create the Great Reset.
Five hundred years ago our population was only 500 million and 90% of them were “on the farm”. Would have been impossible to deduce that we are not a species. Today it’s much more obvious with 8.1 billion and 2% on the farm. Getting this far into the journey is not for everyone. One of my favorite collapse writers, Tom Murphy, can barely even consider it. Few months ago, I mentioned to him that Leavers had not figured out how to bust though the energy constraints and that’s all it is. If they could have figured it out, they too would have become Takers in a heartbeat. Tom had more to say but his core message was, “I prefer to operate on the premise that we’re not just rotten to the core and thus are wasting our time trying to find better ways to live”. Very anthropocentric, Thomas😊. And too much denial for my lack of denial to accept.
Starting your overshoot journey first leads you to understanding how unsustainable and destructive fossil energy is. That’s the easy constraint to “get”. Stick with it long enough and you’ll think the same about agriculture. But that’s usually the end of the journey and most can’t even make it that far. Lonesome territory at the top of collapse mountain. But once you get here, your journey is a wrap. You will see how silly all this frantic and desperate clinging on is (like Nate’s The Great Simplification). You’ll especially get a kick out of anything involving an awakening of consciousness or a paradigm shift. Dowd had a great line, “if you don’t understand overshoot, you will misinterpret everything that’s important”. Time to change “overshoot” to “fire”.
The good and the bad of this outlook, good first. It will put an end to those “rotten to the core” thoughts that humans are hardwired for destruction. Conquering fire is what’s hardwired for destruction, period. The simplification makes it much easier to stop focusing on all those things that are hardwired into breaking energy constraints (extreme overshoot & ecological degradation, Wetiko, MPP, climate change, collapse, etc). Which in turn gives me a much better chance of letting go of it all and just sit back and genuinely be entertained by watching it unfold. Helps me to understand why humanity is drenched in evil. Which actually helps me to forgive myself and the rest of humanity for going down this road. (kind of like the famous “it’s not your fault” scene from Good Will Hunting.
And the blame game starts to evaporate. No longer valid for me to point the finger at elites, USA, white skin, politicians, technology, etc. But the best benefit is the same relief as when I found un-Denial/MORT. Being able to understand the batshit crazy times we are in is the greatest joy/relief one can receive post red pill. It makes swallowing the pill (which I regretted many times) much more bearable.
Morpheus: This is your last chance. After this, there is no turning back. You take the blue pill – the story ends, you wake up in your bed and believe whatever you want to believe. You take the red pill – you stay in Overshootland, and I show you how deep the rabbit hole goes.
Now the bad. Obviously, the big one is the darkness of it all. Understanding that there is not supposed to be any intelligence higher than pre fire (in the universe), will mess with your modern (human centered) brain. If you’re not careful you could end up in a very nihilistic state of mind. Also, this might make you doubt or cloud up any religious beliefs you have (My spiritual advisor on this site, Charles, and his views about “the world is 1 without 2. It is as it is and not some imaginary else. There is nothing to be either fearful, angry, saddened or cheerful about. It is just as it is.” LOL, three years ago I would have dismissed him as a lunatic and now I’m all about trying to find that exact frequency).
And the entertainment value for movies/tv is dropping significantly for me (I’m losing interest in watching off grid life pretending to be comedic and dramatic). But I’ll take the tradeoff because certain music is now hitting me on a much deeper level.
In closing, I would like to give you my quick pitch. If you can’t get yourself to agree that fire and agriculture are evil, then move over to fossil fuels. Any events in history that can be traced to using fossil energy (and that no other species had ever done prior to or since) is absolutely not acceptable and completely off limits per life and the planet. Fire is the one that starts it all. I’m sure there are important evolutionary events (or freak accidents) that lead to fire, but I’m sticking with the flame as the beginning of evil (going off grid).
Over 100 billion stars in our galaxy (and ours is an average one). Two trillion Milky Ways in the universe. Certainly, there is much life out there. If MORT is as rare as we think, then most species that break the 1st energy constraint never get to the 2nd one. That paints an incorrect picture that fire is acceptable. MORT is inevitable for everyone who cracks the 1st barrier. It’s all part of the fail-safe plan. (if you don’t believe MORT theory then it should be even easier to see that fire automatically leads to agriculture). If MORT is astronomically rare, then so is harnessing fire.
The maximum power principle (MPP) always frustrated me because I was looking at it wrong. I thought it meant that if you run the human experiment 100 times, every time it’s going to play out similar to our story. I was taking it too literal. Every planet that has had a Great Reset to get back to no broken energy constraints will look identical as far as the processes in chronological order; new species, fire, MORT, agriculture, fossil fuels, extinction. This fail-safe plan is another word for MPP. But the way each planet gets there can be drastically different. I’m sure some had no concept of monetary value. Or some went all in with space travel. Others may have avoided war altogether. And maybe some even perfected the equality aspect and truly lived in a utopian civilization (for their species only of course). And as hard as it is to believe, I bet some even did it much worse than us.
But regardless of how they got to their “Peak of what’s possible in the universe”, they all have the same thing in common. They’re off the grid from the rest of life (no longer a species) and they are solely responsible for their planet’s Great Reset because they started playing around with fire (something that had never been done on that planet prior). This simplifies things quite a bit for me about our insane civilization (and human behavior). Everything after breaking the first energy constraint is irrelevant. Good, evil, indifference… irrelevant. (See, I sound like Charles already 😊)
I like this quote from Leave the World Behind because it sums up everything and is so easily understood from the top of collapse mountain:
We fuck each other over all the time, without even realizing it. We fuck every living thing on this planet over and think it’ll be fine because we use paper straws and order the free-range chicken. And the sick thing is, I think deep down we know we’re not fooling anyone. I think we know we’re living a lie. An agreed-upon mass delusion to help us ignore and keep ignoring how awful we really are.
A year ago Steve Bull assembled a best of compilation of essays titled It Bears Repeating from writers that discuss human overshoot.
Steve contacted me and I contributed my un-Denial Manifesto that launched this site.
Other writers and their essays in the compilation are:
Michael Dowd – Forward & Afterword
Steve Bull – That Uncertain Road, Part 1
David Casey – Preparing
Alice Friedemann – Net Energy Cliff Will Lead to Collapse of Civilization
Kevin Hester – Militarism’s Role in The Sixth and Possibly Last ‘Great’ Extinction
Tristan Sykes and Dr. Kate Booth (Just Collapse) – Talk Collapse for a Just Collapse
Erik Michaels – Bargaining to Maintain Civilization
Dr. Simon Michaux – Challenges and Bottlenecks for the Green Transition
Dr. Tim Morgan – Written in the Skies
Dr. Bill Rees – The Human Eco-Predicament: Overshoot and the Population Conundrum
Mike Stasse – Turning Marginal Land Into Fertile Soil
Tim Watkins – The Narrative Problem After Peak Oil
Max Wilbert – Climate Profiteers Are the New War Profiteers
Connie Barlow – The Legacy of Catton’s 1980 book, Overshoot
Steve recently contacted me again asking for suggestions of writers that might contribute to a second volume of It Bears Repeating. This triggered me to search for volume 1 on this site, and for reasons I cannot explain, it seems I never provided a link to the original compilation.
Stellarwind72 proposed we write an essay on how to remain in good mental health while being aware of our overshoot predicament.
I have assembled here ideas from thirteen un-Denial participants plus my own.
If any reader would like to add their own list of tips, please send me a message and I will update the essay with your contribution.
14-Jun-2024 Friend Jack Alpert, who has developed the only viable plan to minimize suffering and retain some of our species’ best accomplishments, has contributed to this compilation.
ABC
The insights of yours truly, on how to engage with the predicament.
“We are survival machines – robot vehicles blindly programmed to preserve the selfish molecules known as genes.” – Richard Dawkins
“Right, as the world goes, is only in question between equals in power, while the strong do what they can and the weak suffer what they must.” – Thucydides
Both statements are correct, philosophically one might describe them followingly.
Yes, I am happy with what’s happening in the world. Whatever the outcome. Whatever the way it unravels. (Which doesn’t mean I don’t have problems which come and go and need to be solved, up and downs, fears and obsessions probably like many.)
I so wanted to share with you the ticket out of thinker’s hell, out of humanist’s hell. It turns out to be hard. It all seems so simple now, that I don’t even remember what exactly triggered a change of state.
I could try to recount my encounter with non-duality. I could list some of the leads I followed: Ramana Maharshi, UG Krishnamurti, Swami Prajnanpad, Ramesh Balsekar, Paul Hedderman. And, how one day, the whole mental edifice crumbled. The whole indoctrination of science, layers upon layers painstakingly acquired during years of learning, repetition and practice, nothing but rumbles. Not to be replaced.
Would it be understood (comparing science to a belief system is anathema to many: sometimes the only way to notice we are wearing a pair of glasses is to try wearing another one)? Would it be of any use? Isn’t one of the points that no generalization is possible, that every one’s experience is fiercely unique.
Maybe it’s the realisation that there is a limit to our ability to predict the future, or that the worst already happened (more than once) in the past (the Shoah, Native American genocide, …), or witnessing so many experts defending tooth and nail their own version of truth, or noticing that imagination of a dreaded outcome has nothing to do with the actual experience, or going through some hardships and realising that things just go on, or that the world is 1 without 2 (it is as it is and not some imaginary else), or seeing how tough life is on most people yet they somehow manage, or that it’s always all an experience, good or bad, it’s entertaining (like I am the station in front of which trains come and go and I have no agency on which type of trains or the schedule. So I might just as well enjoy the show), or realising the shallowness of the myths that have been stacked one upon each other (by religion, by science, by the self, by the mind, …) and for which we deploy so much fervour and energy.
Maybe it’s simply the recurring small encounters with beauty, with life. Gardening does that for me, fearlessly exchanging with people to reach the depths and truth of an aspect of their mental shape too (as we are doing now), or just greedily inhaling every small details reaching my small field of consciousness.
Or, it may just be getting bored of negativity.
As much as I had wished to share this state, it seems not to be really communicable. It will dawn on you, I am sure. And some day, you will be suddenly laughing out loud in the middle of the fields. If anybody sees you then, they will think all that worrying ended up getting the best of you. 🙂
Anyway, thank you for finding and periodically bringing to our attention smart people doing original thinking on this topic of collapse. I am grateful for your clear eyesight, your ability to separate the chaff from the wheat. Especially, it has been a great support during covid.
To conclude, here are the most important ideas I want to share:
Redemption, betterment, moksha, liberation, self-realization, illumination, enlightedment, progress, self-improvement, planet rescue… As if the world could be any different than it is. As if it could be improved upon. As if we had control. As if the dynamic of life were a math problem with an optimum solution. If you meet the Buddha, kill him. I say burn them all, Fahrenheit 451 style: Buddha, Jesus, Darwin, Einstein, Malthus, the Meadows. They clutter our souls. Time for renewal. Snap out of any form of idealism, absolutely any kind of indoctrination. Now the earth was formless and empty. Go back there and start anew.
To me, it’s thinking which shapes our experience by arbitrarily slicing, labelling everything, arbitrarily picking a perimeter to focus on (identification), a start and an end, creating concepts: birth, death, progress, evolution, species, collapse, NPK (chemistry), MPP, MORT, you name it… That’s all delusional. There is no way anything can be understood. It is not meant to. And that’s fine. There is nothing to be either fearful, angry, saddened or cheerful about. It is just as it is. And that’s awe-striking.
As far as I understand, this is UG Krishnamurti, this is non-duality (not 2, which does not imply 1 either).
And then, there is all that matters, that which can’t be put in words…
el mar
el mar´s approach:
Take care!
Be friendly and balanced, don’t believe every bullshit.
Be peaceful, self-critical but don’t put up with everything.
“Come down”, think “small”, for species-appropriate human husbandry.
Buy regionally, support local producers, manufacturers and craftspeople. Eat healthy, fresh, unprocessed food
Start a kitchen garden. Start small.
Learn something crafty and practical.
Cooperate and share with like-minded people.
Listen to your inner voice – not to ideologues and pied pipers from the right and left.
Avoid mass consumption and mass media.
Inspire other people to join this movement.
Saludos
Florian
It’s pretty funny to me, I’m a “young person” (< 40 years) and I’m not following a single of Robs points.
I live in a big city (I was born here) and work in tech (which I enjoy within reason) and I can afford to only work 30h. In a slow collapse scenario I will have to trade my database knowledge for food lol but, personally, this is not the future I envision.
My own version of the future is a lot more bleak so I live my life of pleasure, sitting comfortably in my office hardly working knowing that it could end next month, year or decade. Which also has it upsides because I don’t need to worry about my retirement.
Gaia
Do you remember my post on suffering that you decided should be a guest essay (and that quite floored me to see my words the next day front and centre!)? My core outpouring then, and even more now, is the question, was it all worth it? That so few have benefited so much at the expense of so many? Even to the point of the destruction of our biosphere, endangering life systems at the macro and molecular level through our hubris in thinking we can grasp power and control far beyond our reach. In my darkest hours I feel that deepest, helpless, purging sorrow is the only true emotion we can justifiably claim; all other feelings and reactions to our existence are derivative of our denial that allows us to continue living so. It’s denial that keeps me as positive and equanimous as I seem to all around, if anything I feel an imposter as I should be more depressed and grieving for the world and humanity as a whole. I consider this recent post a continuation of that lament on suffering and even more a personal outcry of remorse and regret that I was not as conscious of my role and responsibility in the greater good and suffering as I could have been, or if I was aware, I certainly was not courageous as I know is rightful in failing to use my one life boldly to declare justice as others have done.
As children, we naturally understand and feel injustice aggrievedly, possibly because we are otherwise helpless and dependent upon the goodness of others, but also in our naivete and innocence we trust that others know and care how we feel, and would treat us as we and they wish to be. Through a thousand thousand cuts of disappointment and breaches of trust, cog-turning assimilation into the culture and society into which we were born, it comes to pass that we throw off that banner of righteousness and justice in exchange for a yoke of resignation and complacency. We carry our burden with hardly a murmur, willingly or not, wittingly or not, so we can stake our claim of existence in this society upon which we are wholly dependent. To conform with the dominant tribe is our survival strategy, and the more complex our society becomes, it is clear that for the masses there is little choice but to continue the status quo or be cast out. We come to realize our relative individual unimportance to the system, so it is not much of a step to endorse anothers’ insignificance, especially those outside of our tribe. Then it is no matter at all to deny their right to existence, and all manner of injustices become justified. For all my complicitness of inaction, I shall bear my own guilt. It is through recognition of myself in the majority that will lead to my release of judgment for them, and if by grace I can come to some measure of forgiveness, I hope to absolve myself a little, too.
Truth to tell, at some level we know we are here because someone else is not, we have because someone else does not. My ancestors survived at the cost of another, and now I have my material life at the expense of another. There is no way else to balance this equation, however we try to reconcile it. It is all justified because we are who we are, and they are who they are–as in the developed world, complete and worthy, still deciding if the “developing” ones have a right to exist. The colour of our skin, the language we speak, the land we find ourselves, and most expediently, the exchange rate we decided upon, keeps everyone in their own respective domain and hierarchy of who shall have and not have. We call it fair trade to keep us in the West living in our high standard whilst those whose labour and resources we have stolen through our inflated dollars can only keep living in their degraded standards. Any child can see through this unfairness which we have called our globalised world. Genocide still may be abhorrent, but slavery, as long as it is at arm’s length, has its merits. I am a beneficiary of this and cannot and will not erase that stain upon my conscience. We need not wait for AI to overcome our humanity; we have already given away a greater part of that when as a species we chose to continue following the algorithms of power as a method for survival instead of allowing our still small voice of conscience to heed the golden rule. Until we embrace the earth as our village and kinship with all life, we are quite alone on this blue-green planet, spinning alone in this corner of the universe.
I contend that we all have the possibility of a Hitler as well as Mother Theresa–the only difference is quantity of intention and scope of action, but the quality is already in us. It must be so if we are a species together, the family trait of both runs deep and will out given the right circumstances. Our continued survival as a species has depended on at times dominance and exploitation, and at other times, cooperation and altruism. Daily we balance between the spectrum in all our decisions, whether consciously or not. As a species, we perhaps could never have evolved differently, but gifted with the birthright of consciousness and conscience, individually we could have chosen differently. We know it can be done because it has been done, we all have done it–have risen to the occasion of defending the defenseless, be it a rescued bird or standing for a friend against a bully. Courage in those moments is a direct line to our hearts, bypassing our brains working out what is in it for us. I daresay those are the times we felt most alive and sure of our purpose, the moments when we consider anothers’ well-being before our own. This quality of beneficence is every bit a part of our species as well, all we lack is consistency, which is the mark of mastery. Whilst some rare few may achieve instant enlightenment, the other path, however long and arduous, will also reach the goal through awareness and effort. We must be able to practice our kindness and goodness; it matters not how small the task before us as we have the quality already, it is merely the quantity we can choose to increase or withhold. We can choose kindness and rightfulness again and again, until it is no longer a choice but defines us.
Despite these physically, mentally, and emotionally draining times, I am going along as well as I can be, seizing the joy and wonder in every day as I know how precious life, and the passing time that unravels life, are. I now understand clearly why Cicero (considered a Skeptic, not a Stoic) stated that gratitude is the greatest of and the parent of all virtues. I find comfort in managing the daily tasks that so many wish they could do with as much freedom and ease as I have enjoyed all my life, and in helping others by being more generous with my time through practical action or listening ear. Giving back is the choice I am hanging onto for having the privilege of receiving so much. Knowing now as I do that our life of continued ease will be greatly foreshortened due to our own making, crystalises for me the certainty that my remaining days and choices are fast becoming last chances to consolidate what I have learned as a human being on this planet. And even more importantly, to prove to myself that my life has been an examined one and the highest version of what I can be. Whilst I cannot save humanity, I can still save the part of me that can be more grateful, kind, compassionate, accepting and forgiving. It is the only and true thing remaining for me to do, and for which my entire life was preparation.
Rob here, I’ve added to Gaia’s contribution a powerful paragraph she wrote as a comment a month ago:
The on-going genocide of the Palestinians really nailed it for me. Now we know that given the opportunity, we would act just the same way the majority of Germans did, in turning a blind eye to what we know is morally unjust and thinking we can continue with our own lives. We will watch the slaughter and deplore it, but why don’t we have the courage to upend our lives by doing something radical in effort to stop it? It’s the same for the response to Covid. It seems the most radical thing a Westerner can do (and more power to the pro-Palestine youngsters at universities who still have heart and guts) is publicly protest but why are we not all walking out of our jobs or going on hunger strikes and the like? What does it take to really take a stand, to deliberately override every instinct of survival by choosing suffering and even death (like Aaron Bushnell, who conflagrated himself) for an ideal? The drive to protect ourselves and just keep living the lives we are accustomed, especially us in the West is overwhelming–we have too much to lose and we know we cannot survive outside our system. We are workers in the hive, and we are programmed for only the hive. Knowing this, we finally come to understand that we are not free beings and never have been, but that does not mean we do not still have choice and our internal world can be closer to what we want to make it. That’s why the Stoic philosophy is particularly attractive to me; I have succumbed to relinquishing any hope of changing the outer world but I can still find meaning, purpose and joy in life by improving my inner self.
Hamish McGregor
There are no specific actions I take, to help with coping – unless being constantly negative, whining, passive aggressive and excess criticism (of everything) counts.
Hideaway
In working out where we are headed, I cope via a variety of mechanisms. We are a close family, my wife and our children, and we come from close families, so there is always the following of everyone’s progress through life as a positive to look forward to. We are financially well off, as I’ve invested well by predicting the way the world would try to head, given what I know of resources, which has allowed our children to have a much easier path. They are well aware of my findings and none of our children, in their 30’s, have chosen to have kids, so no grandchildren to worry about. They say they will just return to the farm when civilization collapses.
I have native areas of bush (forest for non Aussies) on our property that are regenerating from before we bought, 40 years ago. Taking a long walk through these areas gives a regenerative feel for the world overall. Life will go on after us, until it can’t, but will spring up somewhere else in the universe. Life is for living and I enjoy spreading the word of what’s happening in reality, so it doesn’t get me down at all. We have plenty of food, heat when necessary and great shelter that we built with our own hands. I cut wood from our bush for heating the house, mostly from storm damage, or dead/dying trees as the bush goes through it’s natural succession, so providing our own heat source in winter is also cathartic.
I get a type of internal peace knowing that there is no purpose to life, it just exists, so making the most of it with as many different experiences as possible in great company is what counts. being part of a like minded community of thinkers at un-Denial also helps with sanity as it clearly shows I’m not ‘out of my mind’ with my findings on the direction of the world, so thanks to all contributors at un-Denial and especially to Rob for hosting the site..
I am not going to prep for the down slope for four reasons:
There is no protection from the roving hoards. Both, preppers and non-preppers, will end up with nothing to eat but each other very quickly — probably in the next 50 years and most certainly in a hundred years.
Running, hiding, and being the last man eating the last can of corn in the last cupboard is not what I want to work toward.
I cannot drink a good glass of wine and watch the sunset without guilt.
That I am old and I might make it out of here before tragedy strikes brings me no joy.
I will feel bad every day if I do not try to fix things I can see are broken.
Some fixes I do not care to work on. I am done being distracted by efforts to fix the miss perceptions and dysfunctional behaviors resulting from our limbic brain which evolved too slowly to keep up with our cognitive capacities to create civilization’s momentum.
My work focus each day:
Define a viable Human Earth system in terms of behavior that controls mass and energy flows that can exist continuously without degradation of the earth’s productive capacity.
Define the collective behavior required to transition to this Human Earth system.
Implement the required behavior:
i) Extracting bad behavior takers from the population:
a) Old age deaths
b) Starvation deaths
c) Deaths from violence
ii) Coerce the required behavior from the remaining population:
a) Physical enslavement
b) Social contract enslavement
iii) Create universal upgrade in cognitive processes in every living person.
Some milestones on this journey:
The existing 8 billion people living today will not be living in 2100. They will have died from:
Old age
Starvation
Violence
The human population that exists in 2100 will be the sum of births after today. If the system that is viable under the above definitions is only 50 million that means births will have to be limited to about 500,000 a year.
If we have only natural births, not test tube babies, that will initially be only 1 birth for every 140 woman, but will increase until it reaches 2.00 in 50 years.
Implementing this will be a challenge.
At one extreme it will require immediate sterilization of 8 billion people with some mechanism for refertilization to get 500,000 annual births.
This path creates great injury and can only be selected when compared to the worse alternative of an estimated 13.4 billion people dying of starvation and conflict during the next 80 years on the present path.
The rest of the transition is equally painful and difficult to implement.
I expect that existing cultural machinery will struggle and probably fail in making a transition to the defined viable civilization. It is more likely to descend into a dark age — probably with little chance of recovery to present science and technology.
Some other more powerful transition mechanisms may be applied by groups or individuals to our predicament. Individuals may soon become powerful enough to sterilize the 8 billion. Others may become capable of culling any portion of the 8 billion.
These options may be implemented (not abiding current ethics) with much lower total lives or environments injured.
These alternative paths forward for the human experiment on earth may be selected and implemented independent of existing organizations.
I have worked my entire adult life understanding the creation of cognitive processes that if they were universal among the 8 billion, the collected behavior to implement a viable earth system would be possible. Each individual behavior would result with the same reliability as that individual selecting to not step off the curb in front of a rushing bus.
I have made much progress but lacking a quick and universal way of inserting these cognitive abilities into a whole global population over night I imagine the individual-produced interventions of sterilization and culling to be implemented to avoid the unrecoverable dark age on our horizon.
marromai
As far as I can see, it always comes down to the same thing: oneself is powerless when it comes to the big picture, you can only make sure that you and your loved ones are doing well. That’s also what I try to do as best as I can (like the closing words from my first guest post – carpe diem).
My coping methods are:
I am present at work because I need the money, but I only do the minimum required. I know that our economic system is doomed, but I cannot survive without it because I am inevitably a part of it.
I avoid the mass media and scrutinize any news.
The state is not my friend. I avoid contact wherever possible. State rules and laws are interpreted as flexibly as possible to my advantage (of course only where they don’t harm other people).
Most people don’t know what I know or dismiss it as nonsense. I keep my knowledge to myself and don’t try to “convert” anyone.
Current “Science” is just another religion – I know that I know nothing. However, (old) science offers us models and techniques that explain many things well or have made them possible in the first place. I use these where it makes sense to me.
I am not afraid of death, because I will return to the big picture – only dying could be unpleasant…
We will never understand the big picture, because as long as we are alive we are a split-off part of it, and can therefore never observe it in its entirety.
“I hope that when the world comes to an end, I can breathe a sigh of relief because there will be so much to look forward to.” (Donnie Darko)
But nonetheless:
Try not to worry too much – as long as I can survive this day, the next one will also be possible. It’s like an incremental approach on living 🙂
We should stop sinking into depressive moods we have created and start enjoying life in the here and now. The doomsday fantasies are due to the phase of prosperity, in which the human brain looks for new problems because our fundamental needs have already been satisfied. Even in ancient Rome, doomsday prophecies and the proclamation of new ages were booming – and yet the Romans lived relatively well for centuries without apocalyptic upheavals.
nikoB
nikoB’s farm
1993 was when I first became aware that progress (as we in the west generally think of it) was not really leading us to this consequence-free wonderful utopia in the not too distant future. The first was witnessing first hand, the clearfell logging occurring in forests across Australia. The second event that got doubts flowing in my head was my uncle casually remarking – what are we going to do when oil runs out?
Over the next decade I was a rampant greenie, studying ecology and horticulture but not really putting much of the bigger picture together. Climate change was a problem but still so far away – so fixable. That was all to change when a friend invited me to a lecture by Richard Heinberg and David Holmgren. Peak oil came and put a stop to all my illusions. The door was opened and I stepped through.
It was 2006 and I was in my mid-thirties with a young family just starting out. It wasn’t long before I was aware of the Oil Drum, Nate Hagens, Jim Kunstler, Dmitry Orlov, The Druid JM Greer, the Chris Martenson crash course and many, many other places of ideas and discussion. To say this altered my thinking on everything is a massive understatement. Priorities changed overnight and I launched myself into a personal crusade to bring the truth of the peril that awaited us to anyone who would listen.
So fast forward to today, to cut through what is really a fairly dull story with maybe a few juicy details, I basically learnt that no one gives a “solidly digested meal” about resource depletion and overshoot. No matter how many ways you approach the subject. For it became a passion to try and work out the magical key that will unlock humanity’s thinking. All it did was result in the loss of close friends and family. I was mostly just a downer to people when I used to be one of the funniest people in the room (thanks to class clown training).
So where does this leave me now nearly 20 years later of being a peak oiler and recent anti-vaxxer. Reevaluating everything I do because what I have been doing hasn’t yielded results in changing minds.
I am lucky to be blessed with a partner who shares much of the same view of overshoot and its consequences. We spend quite a substantial amount of time discussing all the issues it brings bubbling to the surface. I am also blessed in that she shares the same passion for self sufficiency living that I do and together we work our little farm in the hinterlands of the northern rivers area of New South Wales Australia.
What I am slowly coming to the realisation of, is that we must not lose our passions, humanity and connections. For too long they were side lined and sacrificed for the greater virtue of telling everyone just how it is. The loss I felt was immense but that was balanced by the anger that I felt that nobody could see that what I think is so bloody obvious and that no one cares to do anything about it.
So in order to repair broken relationships (because I miss them) I have had to change my priorities and my thinking as well I suppose, so that I don’t just naturally clash with most people. This is difficult, especially not judging people for their ignorance and self destructive behaviours. But as it turns out I have all my own ignorant self destructive behaviours.
Maybe time is short before collapse makes living a nightmare, Hideaway makes many compelling arguments that this complex system is exceedingly brittle and can only withstand so many spanners thrown into the gears. Or perhaps the druid is right and that the collapse is catabolic, step by step, some big, some small but pretty much all down hill. Either way my thinking has changed on how to deal with it, though I must say the covid saga produced a huge detour and removed many friends from my circle and I would venture to say that most are not destined to return. But now I am getting back on track to living while compartmentalising the potential horror of a potential future.
I have decided to let go of the major criticisms I have of the human condition which are beautifully spelt out here in Rob’s blog over and over again. I don’t know if any of it really matters as we are all dead in the end. It is the journey as they say that matters not the destination. If we really think about it we know that is true as the destination is a hole in the ground.
So now I look to seeking the connections I can find with people that are easy to build on and see where it leads. Time to encourage rather than discourage. Soak up the interpersonal transactions and notice when something deeper occurs. But at the same time I won’t gladly immerse myself in exchanges full of bovine discharges.
As a focus for my own passions, I am back to making music, finding the humour in most things without resorting to be overly sarcastic or caustic. Observing and appreciating absurdity is great for that. Giving love as much as I can and forgetting the anger and the hate. I won’t pretend that it is easy but it does seem to be the most beneficial path and I must remember to forgive myself if I stray from it at times.
Paqnation (aka Chris)
Surprisingly, our story was more depressing to me when I was in full Daniel Quinn sustainable/wisdom mode. The whole “where did we go wrong” thing haunts you when you know humans “can” get it right. Now that un-Denial has set me straight on some of these core issues, our story is less depressing in that respect. I do think denial is at the heart of the matter, but I bounce around on how much emphasis to put on MORT, eToM, and MPP. And I am now slowly shifting to a new state of mind where it’s all about energy constraints and you can pretty much throw everything else out the window.
Society can be full of Quinn type worldviews or full of overshoot, MORT aware citizens. It doesn’t matter. Once those sacred constraints are broken, there is no way out of the madness. And there is no way to resist using this new energy technology because if you don’t, someone else will, and you will be conquered and/or killed. By the time your civilization has enough EROEI to start understanding concepts like overshoot and sustainable vs unsustainable… it’s too late. You are now way too addicted to the comforts of this energy surplus to voluntarily decrease usage. And you’re already in massive overshoot because of all the self-induced damage to your environment (mining and domestication of plants/animals). Ditto for your worldviews too. Separation of nature along with a superior way of looking at your own species are unavoidable default worldviews that come along with busting through energy constraints. The most depressing thing for me nowadays is the realization that this kind of modern intelligence (cleverness) has no purpose in the entire universe.
I have two techniques for my sanity. One thing is trying to accept the inevitability of it all. Understanding that the best-case scenario for Mother Earth is NTHE, helps me to go with more of a “I might as well partake in the Peak before it’s all gone” mentality. But the most important technique is hanging out on this website. When I first came onto the scene of un-Denial, I was shot out of a cannon. The two years prior that I was learning about overshoot, etc., I never had a reliable outlet to ask any questions. That all changed when I got here. I cannot talk to anyone in my personal life about collapse, but now I have an online support group. The following is more of a love letter to you guys for how much you’ve given me and my appreciation for being part of this Tribal Connection.
Here are some quotes I collected from un-Denial comments that caused me think and increased my awareness:
Monk: Something that helps me a lot is when I see dumped rubbish, which happens a lot in “magical NZ”. And I just think to myself how excited I am for collapse, because spoilt brat humans don’t deserve everything that we’ve got when we can’t even do something so basic for nature as pointing rubbish in the bin.
Rob: For the last 10,000 years we broke through normal resource constraints with agriculture (bigger share of solar energy) and fossil energy (ancient solar energy) and became a destructive unsustainable species, that is smart enough to know better, but denies what it is doing.
Mike: In a climax ecosystem, the system appears to be in balance with all species living in harmony. But it’s an illusion and no species intended it that way. Quinn probably got it wrong, in that respect. (Chris here, Mike calling out Quinn like that was the beginning of my internal temper tantrum)
Gaia: So over time, the ascendancy of lighter skinned humans in the cooler climates prevailed and these were the climates where agriculture and feudal living flourished, cementing the dominance of this culture type rather than the nomadic style of earlier hunter/gatherer societies which matched well with the grassland/savannah fauna of equatorial Africa.
Rob: The probability of getting 100% of things wrong by mistake is 0%.
Monk: They dug up a lot of roman prepping gold in villas in the UK. Funny to think of them prepping all that gold and never getting to use it.
Hamish: Too many people treat dogs like fashion accessories and discard them immediately when they have health issues.
NikoB: I always think of it in terms of give and take. What did you take from this world in order to live and what did you give back?
AJ: …reinforcing my opinion that the grandchildren of the victims of genocide are now the perpetrators of genocide.
Charles: I love watching the activity in a compost bin, on the surface of a decomposing carcass, the eerie colours of mushrooms feeding off dead logs… Death doesn’t really feel like an end: there is so much activity going on, and (in good temperature and moisture conditions) recycling happens so fast one can almost witness the migration of energy.
Rob: I envy people who obtain comfort from believing there is some form of spirituality in the universe that cares about us. Unfortunately I see a flow of electrons looking for a home.
Gaia: That’s just it, Rob! I identify best with being a bunch of electrons looking for a home! …Then the electrons I borrowed can go do something else for the rest of eternity.
Stellarwind72: What if intelligence over a certain level is inherently maladaptive on long timescales, because it allows you to destroy the very ecology you depend upon.
Hamish: If I ever have to turn away people seeking help, I will offer them my thoughts and prayers – that seems to be the solution to all calamities from the shit stains in Washington DC and state capitals.
ABC: “Progress” equals to mental regress in many if not most aspects, nothing short of “wickedness”.
Florian: If you are happy with what you have or even downsize then you are, from an evolutionary perspective, a defective individual and the chance is very very high that you will be thrown on the genetic trash heap. There is this saying, To understand all is to forgive all and while it can be hard to not show emotion in this absolute cluster-fuck there is absolutely no point to attach yourself to an outcome.
Charles: Life, to me is a constant invitation (sometimes quite painful) to open up to possibilities.
Rob: I’m still fascinated by denial. I see it every day in every single person I interact with. No one speaks reality, except the few that hang out here.
AJ: The lack of humility and stating that one could make a mistake, always makes me suspicious of a person’s conclusions.
Monk: Without fossil fuels the planet would have become a frozen wasteland. It looked like earth was heading for permanent ice age because too much carbon got lock up.
Rob: I believe one of the reasons we had so much coal is that large plants were enabled by the evolutionary invention of lignin and it took quite a while for fungi to figure out how to digest lignin. Today coal would not accumulate in the same quantities.
Notabilia: Remember, none of us fossil fuel colossi have to stick around when our inherited profligate way of existence hits the ground below the cliff. That will become the one remaining “civil right”. (Chris here, this one got me focused on writing my exit strategy article)
ABC: Wisdom has no inherent value in a world of energy, and never stood a chance against unhinged violence.
NikoB: Perhaps having a good spice rack will put those cannibalism fears to rest.
Stellarwind72: Our leaders seem to think that if Putin is allowed to win in Ukraine, he will invade several other countries, similar to what Hitler did after the Munich agreement.
Gaia: Maybe we can even say that MORT (denial) has been our species’ only true religion, for through it we almost became like the gods, or more poetically, it was the way in which the gods could become human.
Charles: I believe Quinn/Murphy’s story will propagate because it shows a possible way ahead for survival. It is becoming useful in this world of limits, of civilisation/technology collapse.
Hideaway: Crocodiles have existed in pretty much the same form for 200 million years, that’s long term sustainability.
Monk: Anthropologists do think pre-historic people had a lot more sex than their civilized counterparts.
Charles: I find the terms reincarnation and “life after death” misleading. They are too loaded. One should perhaps use “informational remnant through structural reorganization”.
Hamish: I’ve given up on the idea of saving people, society, knowledge, culture, wisdom. If I can help nature that will be enough.
Rob: The problem is our citizens, not our leaders.
Hideaway: Increasingly I’m thinking most major solar and wind installations are nothing more than a scam paid for by subsidies from the government, then quickly sold to whatever pension fund that wants ‘green’ credentials in their portfolio.
Stellarwind72: If MORT is true, the story of humanity will turn out to be a tragedy. The species intelligent enough to realize it is in overshoot doesn’t do much about it due to denial.
Rob: Life is not some spiritual mystery, but rather a predictable outcome of the fact that the universe abhors an energy gradient, and life is its best mechanism for degrading energy. (and) “If life is nothing but an electron looking for a place to rest, death is nothing but that electron come to rest.” (Rob here, I think that’s a paraphrased quote from Dr. Nick Lane)
Chris here. These next two get me emotional and make me think about what could’ve been (Closest to me ever having my own family was in 2003, but we both agreed on abortion. One of my biggest regrets).
ABC: I’d like to have a family, rear children and experience being a father. I know it is extremely selfish if not cruel by all definitions knowing our predicament, however I cannot shake this primal biological urge of self-interest and naïveté of having a “sense of meaning”.
CampbellS: We saw the southern lights, aurora astralis, here in the Far North of NZ. First time for me in my 53 years. Pretty spectacular and awe inspiring. Was nice to share it with my teenage kids.
And this is a nice little moment between the young, cocky Skywalker and the much wiser Obi-Wan Kenobi. They could both see the magic early on:
Paqnation: I actually think he/she is Art Berman, Simon Michaux or someone like that. I have a hard time with energy (which is why I love Sid Smith), but Hideaway is like an energy oracle.
Rob: Hideaway is better than both Berman and Michaux. Berman is deeper on oil but shallower on other energies and overshoot. Michaux has some worrying woo-woo.
One final note. While going through all my comments, I came across what is by far the most MORT thing on this entire website = My anti-pornography article. 😊
scarr0w
My journey to tranquility ( 🙂 ) is as follows:
I’ve known for as long as I have memory that I was “different”. Not exactly on the spectrum, not genius, not sociopath, but maybe a dash of each. I was in parochial school my first four years, and it was not a good fit for me. To get along, one should just fill in the answer blanks in your Baltimore Catechism workbook, not ask the nun to explain grace. Questioning the pablum we are spoon fed is not a way to be one of the gang.
Anyway, from childhood experiences, I over time built a mental outlook that more or less has evolved to be expressed best by the Niebuhr/Wygal serenity prayer. I generally kept my own council, especially when I fully realized the overshoot predicament we are in while working for a company that builds stuff for the fossil industry. I guess you could say I was “in the closet”.
Serenity, or at least equanimity is not an easy thing to maintain all the time, but I’ve gotten better over time. Raising kids, staying on the treadmill even after realizing that’s what it is, etc… can test your resolve. While I follow collapse progress and analysis at sites like Rob’s and several others, it is more to keep current, not to perseverate on (and let’s face it, being witness to this huge event in the human story is fascinating). Mostly I am grateful that I was lucky enough to be born in a location and time that will never be again.
Currently, some mental energy is on local political issues (I’m on the county board, trying to see opportunities to shift policy into more future ready states), but primarily I try to slowly make a few acres of land more in tune with what the local biome wants to be. That will be enough.
I liked a lot of what others said, especially Gaia, but since my emotion circuits were partly burnt out as a kid, I just don’t get wound up over the path out culture has chosen, or my role in it. I know others suffer and indirectly I benefit, those of us aware just have to live with a foot in both worlds, slowly reducing our complicity as best we can. Not much help for others, but that’s where I am.
Stellarwind72
Being overshoot aware constantly weighs on me. Given my young age (I was born right before the turn of the millennium), I know that the sh*t will hit the fan in my lifetime. From time to time, I feel existential dread. I know that there is a substantial risk of me dying early due to the effects of overshoot and collapse.
Sometimes just being able to talk about this issue with other people helps me with anxiety, knowing that there are other people who are aware of what is going on.
I sometimes like listening to classical music and taking hot baths to calm my nerves, but given how those are both dependent on large amounts of surplus energy (I mostly listen to classical music on YouTube), I don’t know how long I will be able to keep doing that.
Rob Mielcarski
In no particular order of importance, here are some things that have helped me remain partially sane with overshoot awareness.
Collapse Early and Avoid the Rush
There is no way to predict which of the many paths we will take (inflation, deflation, war, confiscation, theft, etc.), however we know with certainty that the destination of fossil energy depletion will be less material wealth, less food abundance, a lower energy lifestyle, and much less help from governments.
I think it is a wise strategy to voluntarily downsize your lifestyle and learn to live happily with less so that when everyone else is shocked and losing their minds due to loss of wealth and entitlements, you are already happily living the new normal.
Some things that have worked for me include:
Pretend you can’t buy gasoline and see how little driving you can get by with.
Stop flying. Find ways to vacation locally like camping.
Monitor your electricity consumption in real time and practice using less.
Practice food storage and preparation without refrigeration.
Practice low energy cooking like one-pot meals and pressure cooking.
Practice living at lower temperatures in the winter.
Shower when dirty, not every day.
Change clothes when they are dirty, not every day.
Stop eating out. Cook all your food from scratch.
Cut your own hair.
Maintain your vehicles yourself.
Practice fixing things that break.
Local Food
I think we face 5 main threat vectors and it is unclear which will strike first:
nuclear war (due to resource scarcity)
accelerating warming (due to aerosol reduction)
asset bubble crash (due to extreme debt and degrowth)
energy scarcity (due to depletion of low-cost non-renewable reserves)
deadly covid variant a la Bossche (due to our idiot unethical leaders)
The most important common denominator is likely to be food scarcity.
I once had a dream to buy a farm and build a doomstead. I took a small scale farming course and after about 5 years of employment as a farm laborer I learned that I lacked the money and the passion and the time to pull it off successfully. So I switched to plan B. I now assist a local farm with construction and maintenance in return for a source of local food. I still buy the majority of my calories at the grocery store but I know we can ramp up calorie production when SHTF.
Prepping
I work hard at being a wise frugal prepper which means I stock things that:
I like to eat and have a good shelf life so they won’t be wasted
are likely to become scarce first like protein, fat, and caffeine
are essential for good health
are purchased when on sale to save money
I maintain a detailed spreadsheet of consumables with quantity, cost, date of purchase, best-by date, storage location, date opened, date finished, and predicted duration the item will last. This allows me to:
track my consumption of each item so I can accurately predict how long each will last, and to adjust inventory levels based on my assessment of world events
track price inflation and to stock more of what is expected to inflate fastest
rotate inventory so I always eat the oldest first
conduct shelf life tests and record results so I know when a best-by date can extended or ignored
calm down – reviewing my spreadsheet reduces my stress
I have methodically gone through every durable item and service I use and asked what will I do if that item breaks and cannot be fixed or replaced, or can’t be fueled. For those items that I consider essential I have purchased a spare, or I have plan for accomplishing the same thing a different way, or I know I can do without. Here are a few examples:
my town water supply is not gravity fed and depends on electric pumps so I installed a hand operated pitcher pump on an old shallow well on my property
I can light my living area with 4 different types of energy
I can cook with 7 different types of energy
I can heat my living area with 3 different types of energy and I have practiced living with the thermostat at 15C
I have 4 different modes of transportation and I have some spare parts
I can keep my refrigerator operating, which is the main thing I care about in a power outage, for a couple weeks
I have spare parts to keep my computer, which is my main indoor hobby, going until I’m dead
I have spare hiking boots, which is my main outdoor hobby, to last until I’m too old to hike
Doing something to prepare provides a sense of agency over things out of my control which improves my mental well-being.
Prepping is of course not a fix to permanent scarcity or a catastrophe, but it might sustain life during a temporary shortage, and it might make life more enjoyable when non-essential but highly valued items like coffee become unavailable.
Prepping can be a good use of limited savings given that inflation is a likely outcome of energy scarcity. I smile every time I see price increases on things I have in inventory.
Health
When things get tough, good health will be one of our most important assets.
Most available employment will require manual labor, and if you’re out of shape and overweight you may be unemployable.
I expect pensions and safety nets to vaporize so many will be forced to work until they die.
I expect the availability and affordability of health care services to decline as governments become impoverished.
Covid taught me that I do not want to use our unethical and incompetent healthcare system if I can avoid it.
So I try to maintain good health by:
eating healthy unprocessed, low sugar foods
fasting 16 hours every day
getting some exercise
sleeping 8 hours
taking a few critical supplements like vitamin D and C
no alcohol or tobacco
Gratitude
Someone wise said something like “the foundation of happiness is gratitude”.
I believe it.
The lifestyle of the poorest Canadian is better than a pharaoh. It is easy to forget how lucky we are in the rich western countries at this point in history.
The majority of my good fortune came from being born in Canada, not from my skill or hard work.
So I try to be grateful.
A few things that work for me include:
cook deliberately: I plan my meals, and I think about the path the food took to get to my kitchen, and I try to show respect to the food by cooking it nicely, and wasting nothing
eat deliberately: I try to slow down and appreciate what I am eating
drive deliberately: when I press the accelerator I think about the miracle of fossil energy
shower deliberately: I think about the path the water took to get to my house, and the energy it took to heat the water, and what a luxury a hot shower is
Learn to Enjoy Your Own Company
I spend quite a bit of time alone for several reasons:
I find it easier to “collapse early and avoid the rush” when I am not surrounded by people competing for status
nobody likes being around a doomer, I’m invited less these days
I struggle to chit chat about things that do not matter
I have become less tolerant of people who believe nonsense and are incapable of changing beliefs regardless of evidence – yes I know MORT is often the cause, but I still don’t enjoy the company of people in denial
So I have learned to enjoy my own company.
I have conversations with myself, and I listen to interesting (and sometimes aware) people via podcasts and audiobooks, and I interact with a few nice and aware people at un-Denial.
MORT
When you become overshoot aware you realize there is near zero awareness and zero discussion in society about anything that matters, and not only are we doing nothing that a wise species should do, we are doing everything possible to make our predicament worse. This can be crazy making.
Understanding Dr. Ajit Varki’s Mind Over Reality Transition (MORT) theory has been a big help to maintaining my mental health because it provides a scientific explanation for why almost everyone in the world, including our brightest intellectuals and all of our leaders, are oblivious to everything that matters.
If I Was a Young Person
If I was a young person, knowing what I know now, and wondering what to do, I would:
not live in a big city
avoid occupations that depend on discretionary spending (except maybe brewing beer and distilling alcohol)
learn a useful skill that poor people will need and value
learn a skill that can be performed with today’s complex power equipment, and yesterday’s simpler manual equipment
I’d personally lean towards a trade like carpentry, plumbing, masonry, electrician, roofer, mechanic, etc. but I’m sure there are many other viable occupations
farming would be good but land is too expensive for most people to buy today; a good compromise is a skill that generates income and a home garden or rented community garden plot that you tend after work; or if you are passionate about farming, join a good farm as a laborer and work up to a position with responsibility
Today’s post includes a recent sobering comment on overshoot reality by un-Denial regular Hideaway that I thought deserved more visibility, and a new essay on acceptance by B, who has recently emerged as one of the best writers about human overshoot.
The ideas of Hideaway and B complement some of the recent discussions here about acceptance and the nature of our species.
P.S. I did not receive permission from B to re-post his essay but I’m hoping that since un-Denial is not monetized he will not object, and I will of course remove the essay if B expresses concern.
By Hideaway: On Radical Reality
The human enterprise of modernity and 8.1+ billion humans is going down. Reduction in available energy is the trigger and there is nothing we can do to stop it, or make it less unpleasant, or save the macrofauna from extinction.
As we build more energy machines of any type, their output increases overall energy available, and used, providing this happens faster than the retirement of old energy producing machines. Over the last few decades we, as in humanity in it’s entirety, have increased fossil fuel use developing more, tearing up the environment more, while increasing the build of renewables.
On a world wide scale, we have not replaced any fossil fuel use, we have just increased all energy use with more fossil fuels being part of that increase, and renewables being part of the increase. At some point growing energy use must stop, unless we make the planet uninhabitable for all life, which means we stop anyway.
Because of our economic system, as soon as we stop growing energy production and use, the price of energy goes up, and we go into recession/depression. It becomes impossible to build ‘new’ stuff of any kind once energy use declines, unless we take the energy from other users, for our ‘new’ builds.
Building more renewables, batteries, EVs, etc., currently means using more fossil fuels to build it all. There is no realistic attempt to build it all with electricity from renewables, nor is that possible. If we diverted existing renewable energy production to, for example, a new mine, then that renewable energy, removed from a city, would have to be made up by increasing fossil fuel generated electricity for the city.
If we ‘ran’ the new mine from new renewables, then these have to be built first, meaning we need the mine for the minerals to build the renewables, or we take minerals from existing users, elsewhere. It’s all just more, more, more and none of the proponents of renewables, including major green organizations want to acknowledge it.
The circular economy can’t work as we cannot physically recycle everything, plus we would need to build all the recycling facilities. If we were to try and do this without increasing total energy use, where does the energy come from to build these new recycling facilities? Other energy users? For the last couple of centuries it’s always come from ‘growth’, especially in energy use. None of us, nor our parents or grandparents, have known a world where the amount of energy available to humanity does anything other than grow.
Because of losses of all materials due to entropy and dissipation into the environment, we will always need mining, of ever lower ore grades, meaning an increasing energy use for mining. It is simply not possible to maintain output from mines once we go to zero energy growth, unless the energy comes from other uses, and users.
Once energy production growth stops, the price of all energy rises, because we need energy production to go up just to maintain the system, as population grows, ore grades decline, etc. If energy production was to fall, the price becomes higher, making everything else cost more. We can see this on a micro scale every time an old coal power plant is closed. On average, the wholesale price of electricity goes up, until compensated for by some newer form of electricity production (the new source taking energy to build).
Visions for the future usually include extra energy efficiency for buildings, etc. but never, ever, include the energy cost of these energy efficiency gains. For example, a simple hand wave about using double glazed or triple glazed windows. To do this, on a worldwide scale, we would need to build a lot of new glass factories, and probably window manufacturers as well. It will take more energy to do this, just like everything else ‘new’.
The phrase ‘build new’ means more energy is required for construction and mining the minerals for the new or expanded factories. The Adaro coal power plant (new) and aluminium smelter (also new) in Indonesia are perfect examples of our predicament. The world needs more aluminium for ‘new’ solar PVs, EVs, wiring, etc. which means more energy use and environmental damage, regardless of whether we use fossil fuels, solar panels, or pumped hydro backup.
Civilization is a Ponzi scheme energy trap, we either grow energy and material use, or we stagnate, and then collapse. Following feedback loops, we see there is no way out of this predicament.
People often claim the future is difficult to predict, yet it is simple, obvious, and highly predictable for humanity as a whole. We will continue to use more energy, mine more minerals, and destroy more of the environment, until we can’t. The first real limit we will experience is oil production, and we may be there already.
Once oil production starts to fall with a vengeance as it must, say 2-3 million barrels/day initially, then accelerating to 4-5 million barrels/day, it will trigger a feedback loop of making natural gas and coal production more difficult as both are totally dependent upon diesel, thus reducing the production of both, or if we prioritize diesel for natural gas and coal production, then other consumers of diesel, like tractors, combines, trucks, trains, and ships, must use less.
Mining and agriculture will come under pressure, sending prices for all raw materials and food through the roof. World fertilizer use is currently above 500 million tonnes annually. A lot of energy is required to make and distribute fertilizer. World grain yields are strongly correlated to fertilizer use, so less energy means less fertilizer, which means less food, unless we prioritize energy for agriculture by taking energy from and harming some other part of our economy.
If we banned discretionary energy uses to keep essential energy uses going, while overall energy continues to decline, then large numbers of people will lose their jobs and experience poverty, further compounding the problems of scarcity and rising prices.
Money for investing into anything will dry up. If governments print money to help the economy, inflation will negate the effort. If governments increase taxes to fund more assistance, then more people and businesses will be made poorer.
The ability to build anything new quickly evaporates, people everywhere struggle between loss of employment, loss of affordable goods and services, increased taxation, and will be forced to increase the well-being of their immediate ‘group’ to the detriment of ‘others’. Crime rates go through the roof, the blame game increases, with some trying to dispossess others of their resources. This will occur for individuals, groups and countries. Crime and war will further accelerate the decline in energy production, and the production and shipment of goods in our global economy. One after the other, at an accelerating rate, countries will become failed states when the many feedback loops accelerate the fossil fuel decline. Likewise for solar, wind and nuclear.
We rapidly get to a point where our population of 8.1+ billion starts to decline, with starving people everywhere searching for their next meal, spreading from city to country areas, eating everything they can find, while burning everything to stay warm in colder areas during the search for food. Every animal found will eaten. Farming of any type, once the decline accelerates, will not happen, because too many people will be eating the seed, or the farmer. Cows, sheep, horses, chooks, pigs, deer, basically all large animals will succumb because of the millions or billions of guns in existence and starving nomadic people.
Eventually after decades of decline, humans will not be able to be hunter gatherers as we will have made extinct all of megafauna. Whoever is left will be gatherers of whatever food plants have self-seeded and grown wild. Even if we were able to get some type of agriculture going again, there would be no animals to pull plows, all old ‘machinery’ from decades prior would be metal junk, so food would remain a difficult task for humans, unless we found ways to farm rabbits and rats, without metal fencing. While we will use charcoal to melt metals found in scavenged cities, it will limited to producing a few useful tools, like harnesses to put on the slaves plowing the fields, or for keeping the slaves entrapped.
Once we go down the energy decline at an accelerating rate, nothing can stop complete collapse unless we can shrink population much faster than the energy decline, which itself may very well be pointless as we have created such a globalised economy of immense complexity, where fast population decline, has it’s own huge set of problems and feedback loops.
Our complex economy requires a large scale of human enterprise. Reduce the scale, and businesses will have less sales, making everything more expensive. Rapid population decline will mean many businesses won’t just reduce production, but will often stop altogether when the business goes bust.
Because of interdependencies of our complex products, a scarcity of one seemingly uncritical component will have far reaching effects on other critical products. Maintenance parts will become difficult to obtain, causing machinery to fail, in turn causing other machines to fail that depended on the failed machines. Think of a truck delivering parts required to fix trucks. The same applies to production line machines, processing lines at mines, or simple factories making furniture, let alone anything complicated. If we only reach population decline as energy declines the problem is still the same.
So what is radical acceptance? For me, it means: accepting that no single technological civilization based on finite resources is sustainable. Neither in the bronze age, nor in the iron age; let alone in an era of industrial revolutions. None. Why? Because all spend their nest egg — be it fertile topsoil, forests or coal, lithium and copper — a million times faster than it can be replenished. Recycling and “sustainability” practices can only slow down the process somewhat… At least in theory, but rarely in practice. The “circular economy”, together with „renewables” are nothing but fairy tales we tell ourselves to scare off the wolfs at night. Sorry to be this blunt, but the decline of this techno-industrial civilization is inevitable, and is already well underway.
The only type of civilization (if you want to use that term), which proved to be more or less sustainable so far, was a basic hunter-gatherer society; complemented perhaps with some agroforestry, pottery and some low key metallurgy. Anything beyond that inevitably destroyed the soil and the very resource base supporting the entire edifice. With that said, I’m not suggesting that we should immediately go back to the caves and mud huts… That would be impossible for 4 billion of us, entirely supported by large scale agriculture based on artificial fertilizers and a range of pesticides. However, it is important to note, that this is the direction we are headed, with the only question being how fast we will get there and how many humans can be sustained via such a lifestyle.
And this is where acceptance comes into view. Once you understand (not just “know”) that burning through a finite amount of mineral reserves at an exponential pace leads to depletion and environmental degradation at the same time, you start to see how unsustainable any human civilization is. All that technology (in its narrowest technical sense) does is turning natural resources into products and services useful for us, at the cost of polluting the environment. Technology use is thus not only the root cause of our predicament, but it can only accelerate this process. More technology — more depletion — more pollution. Stocks drawn down, sinks filling up. Simple as that. Of course you can elaborate on this matter as long as you wish, conjuring up all sorts of “game changer” and “wonder” machines from fusion to vertical gardens, the verdict remains the same. It. Is. All. Unsustainable. Period.
There are no clean technologies, and without dense energy sources like fossil fuels there wont be any technology — at least not at the scale we see today.
Many people say: Oh this is so depressing! And I ask: why? Because your grand-grand children will have to work on a field and grow their own food? Or that you might not even have grand-grand children? I don’t mean that I have no human feelings. I have two children whom I love the most. I have a good (very good) life — supported entirely by this technological society. Sure, I would love to see this last forever, and that my kin would enjoy such a comfortable life, but I came to understand that this cannot last. Perhaps not even through my lifetime. I realize that I most probably will pass away from an otherwise totally treatable disease, just because the healthcare system will be in absolute shambles by the time I will need it the most. But then what? Such is life: some generations experience the ‘rising tide lift all boats’ period in a civilization’s lifecycle, while others have to live through its multi-decade (if not centuries) long decline.
I did feel envy, shame, and anxiety over that, but as the thoughts I’ve written about above have slowly sunk in, these bad feelings all went away. It all started look perfectly normal, and dare I say: natural. No one set out to design this modern iteration of a civilization with an idea to base it entirely on finite resources; so that it will crash and burn when those inputs start to run low, and the pollution released during their use start to wreck the climate and the ecosystem as a whole. No. It all seemed like just another good idea. Why not use coal, when all the woods were burnt? Why not turn to oil then, when the easily accessible part of our coal reserves started to run out? At the time — and at the scale of that time — it all made perfect sense. And as we got more efficient, and thus it all got cheaper, more people started to hop onboard… And why not? Who wouldn’t want to live a better life through our wondrous technologies? The great sociologist C. Wright Mills summed up this process the best, when writing about the role of fate in history:
Fate is shaping history when what happens to us was intended by no one and was the summary outcome of innumerable small decisions about other matters by innumerable people.
Scientifically speaking this civilization, just like the many others preceding it, is yet another self organizing complex adaptive system. It seeks out the most accessible energy source and sucks it dry, while increasing the overall entropy of the system. We as a species are obeying the laws of thermodynamics, and the rule set out in the maximum power principle. Just like galaxies, stars, a pack of wolves, fungi or yeast cells. There is nothing personal against humanity in this. We are just a bunch of apes, playing with fire.
Once I got this, I started to see this whole process, together with our written history of the past ten thousand years, as an offshoot of natural evolution. Something, which is rapidly reaching its culmination, only to be ended as a failed experiment. Or, as Ronald Wright put it brilliantly in his book A Short History of Progress:
Letting apes run the laboratory was fun for a while, but in the end a bad idea.
So, no. I’m not depressed at all. It was fun to see how far a species can go, but also reassuring that it was a one off experiment. Once this high tech idiocy is over, it will be impossible to start another industrial revolution anyway. There will be no more easy to mine, close to surface ores and minerals. Everything left behind by this rapacious society will remain buried beneath a thousand feet of rocks, and will be of such a low quality that it will not worth the effort. Lacking resources to maintain them, cities, roads, bridges will rust and crumble into the rising seas, while others will be replaced by deserts, or lush forests. The reset button has been pressed already, it just takes a couple of millennia for a reboot to happen.
Contradictory as it may sound: this is what actually gives me hope. Bereft of cheap oil, and an access to Earth’s abundant mineral reserves, future generations of humans will be unable to continue the ecocide. There will be no new lithium mines, nor toxic tailings or hazardous chemicals leaching into the groundwater. Our descendants will be forced to live a more sustainable, more eco-friendly life. There will be no other way: the ecocide will end. This also means, that there will be no “solution” to climate change, nor ecological collapse. They both will run their due course, and take care of reducing our numbers to acceptable levels. Again, don’t fret too much about it: barring a nuclear conflict, this process could last well into the next century, and beyond. The collapse of modernity will take much longer than any of us could imagine, and will certainly look nothing like what we see in the movies. And no, cutting your emissions will not help. At all. Live your life to its fullest. Indulge in this civilization, or retreat to a farm. It’s all up to you, and your values. This is what I mean under the term, radical acceptance.
We are a species of this Earth, and paraphrasing Tom Murphy, we either succeed with the rest of life on this planet or go down together. Nurturing hope based technutopian “solutions”, and trying to remain optimistic does not solve anything. This whole ordeal is unsustainable. What’s more, it was from the get go… And that which is unsustainable will not be sustained. And that is fine. We, as a species are part of a much bigger whole, the web of life, and returning to our proper place as foraging humanoids will serve and fit into that whole much better than any technutopian solution could.
un-Denial 