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There are times when the winds that shape the future blow strong enough to be heard over the jabber of everyday life, and this is one of those times. For a while now I’ve been mulling over a handful of often-repeated comments on this blog, and I find that if I look through them, into the landscape of ideas that structure them, it’s possible to glimpse some of the driving forces behind the history of our era.

The comment that set off this most recent period of reflection came a couple of weeks ago. The person who wrote it complained that he’d tried to follow the advice I’ve offered for some time now—“collapse now and avoid the rush”—by trying to organize an intentional community up in the Italian mountains. His project fell flat when nobody else wanted to join. Having related this story, he proposed that other readers of this blog join with him to create “a meaningful, synergistic community.”

I’m embarrassed to say that I lost my temper and yelled at him. In my defense, I’d note that all through my blogging career I’ve been pointing out that the notion of heading off to the countryside to found an intentional community is not a viable response to the crisis of our age. I proposed “collapse now and avoid the rush” as an alternative to that fantasy, not an excuse for it. Thus it was annoying to see my suggestion plopped onto the Procrustean bed of collective chatter and turned into yet another excuse to chase the same overfamiliar mirage. It was particularly annoying because that sort of reflexive flight from unfamiliar ideas happens astonishingly often these days.

…click on the above link to read the rest of the article…

OIL SYSTEM COLLAPSING SO FAST It May Derail Renewables Warn French Government Scientists

October 20, 2021

OIL SYSTEM COLLAPSING SO FAST It May Derail Renewables Warn French Government Scientists

A Gas/Oil Power Station. Photo: Victor Lucas/Alamy

Forget ‘peak oil’. Nafeez Ahmed reveals how the oil and gas industries are cannibalising themselves as the costs of fossil fuel extraction mount

A team of French government energy scientists are warning that the collapse of the global oil system is coming so rapidly it could derail the transition to a renewable energy system if it doesn’t happen fast enough. In just 13 years, global oil production could enter into a terminal and exponential decline, accompanied by the overall collapse of the global oil and gas industries over the next three decades.

But this is not because the earth is running out of oil and gas. Rather, it’s because they are increasingly eating themselves to stay alive. The oil and gas industries are consuming exponentially more and more energy just to keep extracting oil and gas. That’s why they’ve entered a downwards spiral of increasing costs of production, diminishing profits, rising debt and irreversible economic decline.

Hanging on for dear life to the old, dying fossil fuel paradigm is a recipe for civilisational suicide.

The implication is that global energy shortages and price spikes will be a taste of things to come if we stay dependent on fossil fuels. Yet a growing narrative has instead wrongly pinpointed the ‘clean energy transition’ as the culprit.

The Economist, for instance, describes the global gas price spikes as “the first big energy shock of the green era”, blaming inadequate investment in renewables and “some transition fossil fuels” (like gas). This could lead to “a popular revolt against climate policies.”

This implies that the fundamental driver of global energy volatility is the transition away from fossil fuels: but this flawed narrative has it exactly backwards.

…click on the above link to read the rest of the article…

The Long Descent — Decline and Fall of Industrial Society

October 19, 2021

The Long Descent — Decline and Fall of Industrial Society

The title of this piece is borrowed from John Michael Greer’s 2008 book The Long Descent, the central thesis of which is threefold. Firstly, the industrial civilisation we take for granted is unsustainable and is in decline. The evidence for this is all around us but many choose to downplay or ignore the evidence. Secondly, “The roots of the crisis lie in the cultural stories that shape the way we understand the world.” Since the dawn of the Industrial Revolution, we simply told ourselves a story, created a modern myth, weaved the narrative that endless progress and increasing prosperity were inevitable. Despite a few little bumps on the road, the only way was up. Lastly, it is too late for industrialisation and technology to solve the problems that industrialisation and technology have created. And when we say ‘problems’, we should more correctly say ‘predicament’. Problems have solutions, predicaments have outcomes. We can respond to a predicament, but it cannot be ‘solved’, and our predicament is this: There is simply not enough easily accessible, affordable energy remaining to maintain industrial civilisation as we know it. In general, we are referring here to fossil fuels; the coal, petroleum, natural gas, oil shales, bitumens, tar sands etc. on which industrial civilisation depends. Equally, however, it is becoming increasingly clear that it will be impossible to replace these energy sources with either so-called renewables, or nuclear. Although fossil fuels continue to form within the Earth, only the most trivial use of them could ever have been deemed ‘sustainable’. As things stand, most of the high grade, easily accessible deposits have been extracted, so even using fossil fuels as a way to transition to an enduring and genuinely renewable energy base is no longer possible…

…click on the above link to read the rest of the article…

The Future of the World Economy is Perma-Crisis

October 17, 2021

The Future of the World Economy is Perma-Crisis

These Aren’t Shortages — They’re the Beginning of the Longest, Hardest Economic Collapse in History

Sshh, don’t tell anyone. In my other life, I’m a musician. I’m lucky enough to be working with a vocalist who many of you’ve probably heard of. Her voice is magic. It’ll give you goosebumps and chills when she sings. After a few songs together, I scratched my head. Nothing I could do in the computer, in the studio, could improve that magical voice. So we thought: what we should do was buy a really good microphone and amplifiers that suited this set of songs especially. Off I went — and little did I know.

I looked, and looked, and looked. Sold out — everywhere. Not one to be found. They hadn’t made any for three months, six months. ETA? Nobody could say. I scratched my head again. Now what? Meanwhile, outside her house, in London, people were “brawling” — that’s polite British-speak for “rioting” — over gas.

That’s a tiny slice of life right about now. What’s it made of? Shortages. Here are just a few of the things — simple things — I’ve tried to buy. Sorry, no luck. A desk — lumber’s in short supply. Electronics — chips are famously in shortage. A car — good luck with that. Some basic studio stuff — an amplifier. Who knows when they’re even going to resume production?

It’s not just me, because it can’t be. Shortages are so widespread now that, like I said, they’re “brawling” in London over gas. Meanwhile, they can’t get milk, vials for blood tests. There’s talk of energy shortages this winter. In America, it’s cars and gadgets and computers.

Suddenly, things have changed. It’s not the same anymore. Welcome to the End of the Age of Cheap Stuff.

…click on the above link to read the rest of the article…

Bonus: Galactic-Scale Energy with Tom Murphy

October 16, 2021

Bonus: Galactic-Scale Energy with Tom Murphy

…click on the above link to listen to the show…

5 Signs a Civilization is About to Fail

October 11, 2021

5 Signs a Civilization is About to Fail

15 Common Dynamics of SHTF Collapses

October 9, 2021

15 Common Dynamics of SHTF Collapses

When it comes to how we see and prepare for SHTF, thinking in terms of real and probable rather than fictional and possible can make a big difference. Even though SHTF has many forms and levels and is in essence complex, random, diverse and unsystematic, some patterns and principles are common to the way things unfold when it hits the fan.

With Toby and Selco’s Seven Pillars of Urban Preparedness as inspiration, I came up with a different list of the 15 dynamics and realities of collapses.

#1 SHTF is nuanced and happens in stages

Thinking about SHTF as an ON/OFF, all-or-nothing endgame is a common mistake that can lead to severe misjudgments and failures in critical areas of preparedness. Part (or parts) of the system crash, freeze, fail, or become impaired. This is how SHTF happens in the real world. And when it does, people run for safety first, i.e., resort to more familiar behaviors, expecting things to “go back to normal soon.”

By “normal behaviors,” I mean everything from hoarding stuff (toilet paper?) to rioting, looting, and crime, and yes, using cash – as these happen all the time, even when things are normal. But no one becomes a barterer, a peddler, a precious metals specialist in a week. Society adapts as time passes (and the situation requires). That’s why preppers who are also SHTF survivors (and thus talk from personal experience) insist that abandoning fantasies and caring for basics first is crucial. This is not a coincidence. It is how things happen in the real world.

…click on the above link to read the rest of the article…

Take us to DEFCON 1

October 3, 2021

Take us to DEFCON 1

The US military defines its Defense Readiness Condition (DEFCON) levels as follows:

DEFCON 5 is normal readiness.
DEFCON 4 is above normal readiness.
DEFCON 3 is the air force ready to mobilize in 15 minutes.
DEFCON 2 is all forces ready to fight in 6 hours.
DEFCON 1 is the maximum state of readiness and means nuclear war is imminent or has already started.

I have my own definitions that I use for my personal life.

I spent the first 50 years of my life at DEFCON level 5. That would be as a normal, fully in denial, culturally conforming, dopamine & status seeking, energy maximizing, member of a superorganism.

Then I had a stress related meltdown and while recovering stumbled on peak oil. After seeking and failing to find a good path forward other than population reduction, I wondered what else I was in denial about, and widened my field of view to include climate change, pollution, species extinction, unsustainable debt, etc., all of which I eventually came to understand are related and fall under the umbrella of human overshoot.

Now at DEFCON level 4, a realty based state of awareness, I began to think about making changes to my life, took a 6 month course on small scale farming, and did some volunteer work on a small organic farm.

Then the 2008 global financial crisis (GFC) occurred and I went to DEFCON level 3.

Confident that a collapse would occur within 10 years, I changed everything in my life. A new location where I’d be happy finishing my life, a simpler slower lifestyle, satisfying physical work, improved health, and thank goodness, Varki’s MORT theory to keep me sane with an explanation for the insanity all around me.

…click on the above link to read the rest of the article…

Today’s Contemplation: Collapse Cometh XXX

September 22, 2021

Today’s Contemplation: Collapse Cometh XXX

Today’s post has been prompted by some thoughts regarding the inability of our political systems to respond in a timely manner to our plight of ecological overshoot penned by Rex Weyler, co-founder of Greenpeace, and posted by Alice Friedemann of energyskeptic.com.

* * *

I agree with virtually everything Rex argues, especially the role of self-interest by our political class for their apparent rejection of the notion of ecological overshoot and what needs to be done to address the negative impacts this predicament will have on our societies (we can’t avoid these impacts but we might be capable of mitigating their worst outcomes somewhat). My experience with government (I spent many years involved with unions/federations/councils and their political action committees, including chairing some and being directly involved in negotiating contracts, thus having to deal directly with senior administrators and politicians) and readings pertaining to various sociocultural areas (e.g., economics, geopolitics, political systems, pre/history, etc.) have solidified for me the notion that our sociopolitical institutions are for a variety of reasons the last place we should be looking to ‘correct our course’ and attempt to confront the many complex issues of our overshoot and that are beginning to become more obvious. In fact, it is likely (I believe guaranteed) that our ‘ruling class’ will continue to do the exact opposite of what is needed.

…click on the above link to read the rest of the article…

The Illusion of Stability, the Inevitability of Collapse

September 4, 2021

The Illusion of Stability, the Inevitability of Collapse

Beneath the illusory stability of rising GDP, the extremes of debt, leverage, stimulus and speculative frenzy required to keep the ‘phantom wealth bubble’ from imploding are all rising parabolically.

Imagine being at a party celebrating the vast wealth generated in the last ten months in stocks, cryptocurrencies, real estate and just about every other asset class. The lights flicker briefly but the host assures the crowd the generator powering the party is working perfectly.

Being a skeptic, you slip out on the excuse of bringing in more champagne and pay a visit to the generator room. To your horror, you find the entire arrangement held together with duct tape and rotted 2X4s, the electrical panel is an acrid-smelling mess of haphazard frayed wire and the generator is over-heated and vibrating off its foundation bolts. Whatever governor the engine once had is gone, it clearly won’t last the night.

The party is the U.S. economy, and the generator room is the Federal Reserve, its proxies and the U.S. Treasury, all running to failure. What we’re experiencing in real time is the illusion of stability and the inevitability of collapse. I’ve prepared a few charts to illuminate this reality graphically.

Here’s the illusion of stability in a nutshell: while the broadest measure of the economy, gross domestic product (GDP) has continued marching higher (in both nominal and real/inflation-adjusted terms), the amount of Federal Reserve stimulus and Federal debt required to keep pushing GDP up at the same rate has exploded higher and is tracking a parabolic blow-off.

…click on the above link to read the rest of the article…

A Prayer for Nonbelievers

September 3, 2021

A Prayer for Nonbelievers

I was ten years old when The Limits to Growth first saw print. I have a dim memory of seeing a newspaper article or two about it, but I had other things on my mind in 1972—my parents got divorced that year, and an already difficult childhood promptly got much worse—and several years passed before I found time to read it. Its portrayal of a future of hard limits made immediate sense to me. Somehow I never managed to absorb the widespread American conviction that there will always be more so long as you whine for it loudly enough, and so the book became one of the volumes that shaped my youthful sense of where the future was headed.

In the 1970s you could talk about such things. The public library in Burien, Washington where I got most of my reading fodder then was well stocked with books on energy and the environment. If I couldn’t find what I wanted there I could catch the Route 130 bus to the downtown branch of the Seattle Public Library, not yet replaced by the monument to architectural incompetence that now squats on its site, and bring home a double armload of volumes on similar topics. By that time, too, I had read enough to follow the logic of The Limits to Growth in detail.

It was not, as the corporate media insisted it was, a prophecy of doom. That’s one of the details that got swept under the rug by the mainstream back in the 1970s and still gets swept under the rug by the project’s critics today. The point of The Limits to Growth was that we as a species, and as a community of nations, had a choice…

…click on the above link to read the rest of the article…

Tao of Degrowth

September 1, 2021

Tao of Degrowth

I am a degrowther and a doomer but this is not what your first reaction indicates. We are taught to be optimistic and so forth. People loath pessimist and doomers. People tire of people who cry wolf constantly. This is what the doom movement has done for decades now. There is some truth to this but there is also the reality of the slow boil. A frog will slowly boil without realizing its fate. Humans because of our short-termism and immediate gratification tendencies slow boil with periods of change. Some of this is beneficial because it is the degree of shock and the duration that is the key variable of survivability so adapting slowly allows survivable change.

My doom approach is different. I am a visionary of sorts in regards to the tipping over of an age. This is academic and I have been studying this for decades now. I have been living the response for over a decade. I have digested the available science not as a specialist but as a generalist with some specialization. I study all fields in general picking through them in relation to decline. I specialize in energy and systems for my theoretical approach. It is my assessment that a multifaceted tipping over is now at or near the peak point. The tipping over is at or near where diminishing returns to technological efforts go non-liner into problem creation. I see an extinction event for life systems with localized failure and general decline. The planetary systems that support life is in abrupt change with climate but also the nutrient, carbon, and hydrologic cycles. Finally, systematically, civilization is in a phase of degrading.

…click on the above link to read the rest of the article…

What a CATASTROPHIC Supply Chain Breakdown Will Look Like

August 25, 2021

What a CATASTROPHIC Supply Chain Breakdown Will Look Like

“…there were also times when they had the illusion not only of safety but of permanence.” – George Orwell.

When a society falls apart, it’s hard to know exactly how it will all fracture and break apart. We can tell a little bit of our course by the challenges we face as a community, a nation, a world of countries. When war is at your door, you can predict what things you won’t have: electricity, water, gas, safety, and so forth. When a natural disaster strikes, you can also bet on the same services falling apart, and, given the length of the disaster, maybe social order too. Some disasters have a local or regional zone and impacted radius. Some are larger in scope and suck in other stable areas like a spiraling vortex.

How does it fall apart, though? What can you expect from a complete supply chain failure? How can that spiral out of control and pull you and your safe zone in like a vortex? In this video, I want to take you through some of the significant failures that can occur in the supply chain and how they can place pressure on and potentially cause other systems to fail. Our world is a network of systems. As one system fails, it can burden different systems and may cause their failure as well. Understanding these connections, their push and pull, their cause and effect helps us understand and even predict the sequence of any disaster. It helps us know what will play out next. So, let’s jump in…

TINY TREMORS LEAD TO MAJOR EARTHQUAKES

…click on the above link to read the rest of the article…

You’re Not Going to Homestead Through Collapse

August 23, 2021

You’re Not Going to Homestead Through Collapse

No matter how self-sufficient you become

“By collapse, I mean a drastic decrease in human population size and/or political/economic/social complexity over a considerable area, for an extended time.” — Jared Diamond in Collapse: How Societies Choose to Fail or Succeed (2005)

People who criticize billionaires for foolishly building underground bunkers believe they can survive the impending doom of climate change by hunkering down on a homestead.

Both groups are attempting to escape the realities of collapse. It’s a race that most humans will likely lose. It’s now a question of whether the species can survive extinction.

On one hand the survivalists (rightfully) poo-poo plans for colonizing Mars as too difficult on a “dead planet” while simultaneously clinging to the belief that for all their beans and bullets, gardens and wells —the hoarded supplies of a prepper will see them through the sixth mass extinction on a dying Earth. It’s the poor-man’s version of an Elysium space station.

The cognitive dissonance must physically hurt.

And let’s admit what no one is saying out loud. The carefully made plans for some sort of Neo-Thoreau lifestyle is more about surviving the collapse of civilization in relative safety and comfort than reducing a carbon footprint — the same attitude that put us in this predicament in the first place.

Here are just a few of the reasons this fantasy won’t work.

Collapse will be everywhere but not all at once.

The central idea of catabolic collapse is that human societies pretty consistently tend to produce more stuff than they can afford to maintain…

…click on the above link to read the rest of the article…

Cognitive Dissonance and Outright Lies at the Edge of Extinction

August 22, 2021

Cognitive Dissonance and Outright Lies at the Edge of Extinction

In recent weeks and months I have been amazed at the general public and most scientists ability to ignore the blatant evidence that we are in early stage, non-linear runaway warming. From individual activists, to the donation soaked and addicted corporate NGO’s, who are literally dependent on “Business as Usual” to maintain their cash flows, they ignore the elephant in the room, squandering vital time to prepare for the already unfolding collapse.
On an individual basis the decision to deny the severity of the situation is up to each persons conscience and/or courage to accept the predicament we find ourselves in but when it comes to research universities and their tenured scientists, governments and the large NGO’s it’s a ‘Dereliction of Duty’ for them not to be ‘completely frank’. That for me is abject dishonesty, especially toward the youth. I’ve previously singled out Dr Michael E Mann, the corporate media’s ‘Go To Mann’, for this dishonesty.

Below I will lay out just a few examples showing that we are in the runaway phase of this extinction event.
This fire season alone, “Australia’s wildfires have destroyed more than a fifth of the country’s forests, making the blazes “globally unprecedented” following a years-long drought linked to climate change, researchers said Monday.” Bushfires burned a fifth of Australia’s forest: Bushfires burned a fifth of Australia’s forest: study Remember this is not an El Nino year, the next El Nino, if we have one, will be brutal and will put this event on steroids. The double feedback from these fires is that the forests were formerly carbon sinks so that has been lost and all the carbon that has ben released will accentuate the predicament.

…click on the above link to read the rest of the article…

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