According to the plot of the movie, The Matrix, robots had won the war on humanity and put each and every one of us into a virtual reality prison; taking our minds back to the “peak of our civilization, 1999”. Based on the data published by the Energy Institute just recently, the Wachowskis were just two decades off the mark — not bad if you ask me. Understanding that energy is the economy, and after examining the underlying dynamics we now have every reason to believe that 2019 was indeed the high water mark for western civilization (at least in economic terms); marking the beginning of a multi-decade long descent ahead back to a much simpler life.
Clearly Asia will not survive one or two decades when the OECD countries implode... it's a globalized world... supply chains will rupture permanently... and everyone will starve. Almost all food is produced with petro chemical inputs...those won't be available.
How kind of them to do us this favour... they could have retired to their oak panelled board room and downed some purple kool aid ... when the collapse hit... and left us to rip each other to pieces...
The Eurasia-Africa World Continent has sufficient resources, incl FF energies, to last quite a significant while - they are also the places that need more resources invested, however.
The 'Deep Greenies' and Peak Oilers hit the nail 24+ years ago - use the remaining resources to build/retro resilient and low-power homes, and design a rewarding low energy 'middle class' lifestyle, while teaching and introducing permaculture cooperatives.
And as we live in democracies as opposed to autocracies, we are now set pretty. [Slaps himself back awake].
Instead, our democratic autocracy rulers looked ahead, and decided their own luxury, and spawned brats, came first. So they hit the accelerator even.
Genocidal thoughts come naturally in such environments.
Global communities like kibbutz without peasants and masters, local agricultural knowledge, and at harvests everyone back on the land who can be, with joyous regional festivals after to thank the bounteous Mother Nature.
" a 100% lethal highly contagious mutation of the Covid virus is going to emerge... and it will like Marek's killed all unvaxxed chickens... kill all unvaxxed humans. Those who have been vaxxed will also die as well because they will have no protection against this mutation."
This thought has crossed my mind.
Did you ever read 'White Plague' by Frank Herbert? Various 'elites' will also have planned - and not planned for each other - the release of new diseases tailored for their patented 'vaccines'. Easy money. But they realised the utter mess when they are all releasing separate viruses, and they all go global.
For there is no one single overarching 'conspiracy' or one group in charge.
As such matters tend to do, they will ratchet upwards.
I think there are reasons, good reasons why the Chinese 'dictatorship' stored all that testing equipment ready for use again for strange new diseases.
Ir is a so-called "wicked" problem with no obvious solutions, and maybe no solution at all, at least in terms of technological or economic solutions.
I think your analysis is "on the money" (to use a hackneyed Americanism).
Maybe that little bit of jargon is about to die a dismal death pretty soon. Because these days "money" is just an abstraction, an illusion - merely a claim upon resources and not a resource in itself.
In the mean time, in France (and actually it is the same in the whole Europe), greenhouse gas emissions keep going down and accelerating at 5.3% in the first quarter of 2024 and 4.8% in 2023, twice as much as in 2022.
While part of it come from an increase of nuclear and hydroelectric power use and a mild winter, industry is down by 5.6%, food processing 9.3%, construction 7.6%, transport 3% and so on.
The government is happy with that, saying they are working successfully to tackle climate crisis and pretending not to realize what this really means. But, of course, already lamenting the early political consequences at the ballot box....
I feel like there isn't really anything in our culture to prepare us for this kind of collapse. Most of our stories about collapse make it seem like a singular event. Sure, there's preppers, but their mostly preparing for that one really bad day. This is more a long twilight struggle kind of decline, where people are already struggling for meaning and purpose. You also have the double hit of people not able to afford houses anymore, and the atrophy of skills that could help.
I do have a nit to pick: "Only 7% of bio- can be added to regular diesel without risking harm to the engine. Vehicles modified to work on biodiesel alone are few and far between."
The European Union mandated that all over-the-road diesel vehicles be able to run on 100% biodiesel by 1996.
Rather than either give up selling anything into Europe or running parallel production lines, the US auto industry — which had been successfully fighting such a regulation for years — simply caved.
So any over-the-road diesel vehicle manufactured since 1996 should be compatible with 100% biodiesel. I do not know if this includes off-road machinery and farm equipment, but I suspect a similar "trickle down" regulation from Europe made it so. Those sorts of machines tend to have a much longer lifetime than over-road vehicles, though — I burned 100% biodiesel in a 1962 Ford 3000 tractor, with no issues.
This is not rocket science! All you have to do is replace any rubber that contacts fuel with the synthetic rubber Viton™. Yes, this is slightly more expensive, but it requires no changes in assembly lines or procedures.
I made my own biodiesel for several years. It runs well in vehicles prior to 1996, but you eventually have to replace fuel lines, and possibly re-build the expensive high-pressure fuel pump.
This is not to say that I support commercial-level biodiesel use as any sort of "solution" to our energy woes!
But it could be an option for small- to medium-size farms, especially if combined with "straight vegetable oil" (SVO) use of oils that have not been converted to biodiesel. This requires heating the SVO to reduce its viscosity. I converted a step van to run on SVO that I sucked out of the grease bin of various restaurants. (Actually, this is referred to as "waste vegetable oil," or WVO.)
Note that WVO use does not compete with food — it has already been used as food! But no, there is not enough of it to even make a dent in current diesel use.
I did some calculations, and I came up with an ERoEI of about 6:1 for diesel agricultural use — one hectare of oilseed crops could provide mechanical cultivation of six more hectares. This is probably as good or better than the ERoEI of fracked oil production, but of course, it does not include the oil that went into the manufacture of the farm equipment, which would be necessary for a true "emergy" analysis.
Another thing to consider is biogas. It is fairly easy to produce methane on a farm with the help of animal manures. Collecting it in a low-pressure manner using weather balloons is not too difficult. This would be suitable for cooking, heating, and lighting, but not for high-pressure applications such as Haber-Bosch.
Again, I am in no way promoting these techniques as a way to "save civilization," but it may allow small, isolated farming communities to survive or even prosper in the coming energy decline. And it could serve as a couple-decade "bridge" between thousand-acre monoculture crops from GPS-controlled tractors and ox carts — not for everyone, but perhaps for a small fraction of current industrial agriculture.
I'm always on the lookout for an essay or synthesis that ties together the economic, ecological, and energy realities of our predicament (if only to keep reminding myself that it's this civilization, and not me, that's batshit insane) and you nailed it!
Too many salient points for me to detail all but this affects me directly in NZ!
"The overseas territories of the OECD (Europe, Australia, New Zealand, Japan, South Korea) didn’t even have their own oil supply to start with (at least nowhere near in adequate quantities)."
Recently Aotearoa NZ closed its Only Oil Refinery!
Clearly Asia will not survive one or two decades when the OECD countries implode... it's a globalized world... supply chains will rupture permanently... and everyone will starve. Almost all food is produced with petro chemical inputs...those won't be available.
The silver lining is that the Men Who Run the World https://fasteddynz.substack.com/p/who-runs-the-world have a Plan.... to reduce the suffering https://fasteddynz.substack.com/p/the-ultimate-extinction-plan-uep
How kind of them to do us this favour... they could have retired to their oak panelled board room and downed some purple kool aid ... when the collapse hit... and left us to rip each other to pieces...
Now say thank you to Dr Fauci
The Eurasia-Africa World Continent has sufficient resources, incl FF energies, to last quite a significant while - they are also the places that need more resources invested, however.
The 'Deep Greenies' and Peak Oilers hit the nail 24+ years ago - use the remaining resources to build/retro resilient and low-power homes, and design a rewarding low energy 'middle class' lifestyle, while teaching and introducing permaculture cooperatives.
And as we live in democracies as opposed to autocracies, we are now set pretty. [Slaps himself back awake].
Instead, our democratic autocracy rulers looked ahead, and decided their own luxury, and spawned brats, came first. So they hit the accelerator even.
Genocidal thoughts come naturally in such environments.
Global communities like kibbutz without peasants and masters, local agricultural knowledge, and at harvests everyone back on the land who can be, with joyous regional festivals after to thank the bounteous Mother Nature.
That ain't so bad, actually.
Except to people who think they are born better.
You have a really active imagination...
So how do you see this all working out? IF any of us survive the technological horrors and pollutions we have created?
Food-surplus-producing cooperative small-holding village communities are BY FAR the most resilient, and technology/culture-maintaining social design.
This is how it will end... and why https://fasteddynz.substack.com/p/the-ultimate-extinction-plan-uep
" a 100% lethal highly contagious mutation of the Covid virus is going to emerge... and it will like Marek's killed all unvaxxed chickens... kill all unvaxxed humans. Those who have been vaxxed will also die as well because they will have no protection against this mutation."
This thought has crossed my mind.
Did you ever read 'White Plague' by Frank Herbert? Various 'elites' will also have planned - and not planned for each other - the release of new diseases tailored for their patented 'vaccines'. Easy money. But they realised the utter mess when they are all releasing separate viruses, and they all go global.
For there is no one single overarching 'conspiracy' or one group in charge.
As such matters tend to do, they will ratchet upwards.
I think there are reasons, good reasons why the Chinese 'dictatorship' stored all that testing equipment ready for use again for strange new diseases.
In the West.... :sucks teeth:.
Very interesting read. I have been following the same argument advanced in this article on the Surplus Energy Economics website _ https://surplusenergyeconomics.wordpress.com/
- for about a year now.
Ir is a so-called "wicked" problem with no obvious solutions, and maybe no solution at all, at least in terms of technological or economic solutions.
I think your analysis is "on the money" (to use a hackneyed Americanism).
Maybe that little bit of jargon is about to die a dismal death pretty soon. Because these days "money" is just an abstraction, an illusion - merely a claim upon resources and not a resource in itself.
In the mean time, in France (and actually it is the same in the whole Europe), greenhouse gas emissions keep going down and accelerating at 5.3% in the first quarter of 2024 and 4.8% in 2023, twice as much as in 2022.
While part of it come from an increase of nuclear and hydroelectric power use and a mild winter, industry is down by 5.6%, food processing 9.3%, construction 7.6%, transport 3% and so on.
The government is happy with that, saying they are working successfully to tackle climate crisis and pretending not to realize what this really means. But, of course, already lamenting the early political consequences at the ballot box....
https://www.lefigaro.fr/sciences/la-france-poursuit-la-baisse-de-ses-emissions-de-gaz-a-effet-de-serre-20240626
(Le Figaro being the leading center-right liberal/conservative newspaper around here)
"et de la poursuite des comportements de sobriété" 😆 I wonder why.
Thank you B🙏
"the European and North American economy requires twice as much gas to make the same amount of fertilizer, glass or metal" - Why?
Because we use the other half to heat our homes, offices, workshops, shops, etc. Or to produce electricity for ACs.
Countries that don't heat and don't install ACs don't use that fuel.
If you had to give a guess how many years the not so distant future is, what would it be?
Art Berman gives US fracked oil a few more years on its current plateau before it goes into terminal decline.
Thanks B, this bears repeating until people are prepared to "hear".
I feel like there isn't really anything in our culture to prepare us for this kind of collapse. Most of our stories about collapse make it seem like a singular event. Sure, there's preppers, but their mostly preparing for that one really bad day. This is more a long twilight struggle kind of decline, where people are already struggling for meaning and purpose. You also have the double hit of people not able to afford houses anymore, and the atrophy of skills that could help.
Great article!
I do have a nit to pick: "Only 7% of bio- can be added to regular diesel without risking harm to the engine. Vehicles modified to work on biodiesel alone are few and far between."
The European Union mandated that all over-the-road diesel vehicles be able to run on 100% biodiesel by 1996.
Rather than either give up selling anything into Europe or running parallel production lines, the US auto industry — which had been successfully fighting such a regulation for years — simply caved.
So any over-the-road diesel vehicle manufactured since 1996 should be compatible with 100% biodiesel. I do not know if this includes off-road machinery and farm equipment, but I suspect a similar "trickle down" regulation from Europe made it so. Those sorts of machines tend to have a much longer lifetime than over-road vehicles, though — I burned 100% biodiesel in a 1962 Ford 3000 tractor, with no issues.
This is not rocket science! All you have to do is replace any rubber that contacts fuel with the synthetic rubber Viton™. Yes, this is slightly more expensive, but it requires no changes in assembly lines or procedures.
I made my own biodiesel for several years. It runs well in vehicles prior to 1996, but you eventually have to replace fuel lines, and possibly re-build the expensive high-pressure fuel pump.
This is not to say that I support commercial-level biodiesel use as any sort of "solution" to our energy woes!
But it could be an option for small- to medium-size farms, especially if combined with "straight vegetable oil" (SVO) use of oils that have not been converted to biodiesel. This requires heating the SVO to reduce its viscosity. I converted a step van to run on SVO that I sucked out of the grease bin of various restaurants. (Actually, this is referred to as "waste vegetable oil," or WVO.)
Note that WVO use does not compete with food — it has already been used as food! But no, there is not enough of it to even make a dent in current diesel use.
I did some calculations, and I came up with an ERoEI of about 6:1 for diesel agricultural use — one hectare of oilseed crops could provide mechanical cultivation of six more hectares. This is probably as good or better than the ERoEI of fracked oil production, but of course, it does not include the oil that went into the manufacture of the farm equipment, which would be necessary for a true "emergy" analysis.
Another thing to consider is biogas. It is fairly easy to produce methane on a farm with the help of animal manures. Collecting it in a low-pressure manner using weather balloons is not too difficult. This would be suitable for cooking, heating, and lighting, but not for high-pressure applications such as Haber-Bosch.
Again, I am in no way promoting these techniques as a way to "save civilization," but it may allow small, isolated farming communities to survive or even prosper in the coming energy decline. And it could serve as a couple-decade "bridge" between thousand-acre monoculture crops from GPS-controlled tractors and ox carts — not for everyone, but perhaps for a small fraction of current industrial agriculture.
I'm always on the lookout for an essay or synthesis that ties together the economic, ecological, and energy realities of our predicament (if only to keep reminding myself that it's this civilization, and not me, that's batshit insane) and you nailed it!
What a spectacularly good analysis!
Too many salient points for me to detail all but this affects me directly in NZ!
"The overseas territories of the OECD (Europe, Australia, New Zealand, Japan, South Korea) didn’t even have their own oil supply to start with (at least nowhere near in adequate quantities)."
Recently Aotearoa NZ closed its Only Oil Refinery!
https://kevinhester.live/2022/04/13/the-insanity-of-aotearoa-new-zealand-closing-its-one-and-only-oil-refinery/