I don't expect the suddenly part to arrive in 2050...
The Precarious State of the Shale Oil Industry:
Try to get your head around the idea that by 2027, US tight oil production might be 12 MM BOPD, not the 9 MM it is now, which is what cheerleaders say it will be, and that means we'll actually have to find and extract 12 MM BOPD... before we can ever grow the new 3 MM.
Man, that is a slew of new wells! Thats gonna take like...four times the HZ wells we've already drilled in the US.
Unfortunately Eddy the Normies of the world can't quite think through energy cost of energy, even if they get to the 12million they don't realise that the net energy will probably be less than the 9million currently produced. We are already at 1 in 6 when it goes to 1 in 5 it's game over
Water is an issue... but I think more importantly... funding is required to make it happen... as in shale loses hundreds of billions of dollars... so you need something like the Fed who can pump out reserve currency without causing hyperinflation ...
And the thing is ... the energy return on shale is abysmal ...so the beast can only be fed so much of it without seizing up... the beast needs a diet of mostly cheap energy (conventional)... if you give it too much alternative energy like shale tar sands deep sea .. you poison the beast...
Great summary article B. I’m curious, with the ~5 years (estimated of course), what are you and other readers doing with your time to either brace or adapt? I hesitate to say “prepare” as nobody can truly prepare for this comprehensively.
Well personally if i had the money i would buy land and start preparing for self sufficiency. But due to our current neoliberal system we are barely paid enough to survive week to week let alone to build up saving. so honestly? Nothing. Though Jim Bendall has videos and resources on how to prep. Your best bet would be to join an eco village if they will take you.
I have prepared, a lot of people already have, Zuckerberg did it on a Hawaiian Island, others do it out in rural towns or in the hills. There is little difference between them all security wise. Oh yes someone has Billions so we assume they are safe as houses, but that's not always the case. They have to worry about their own people inside the fence.
If history is any guide you really only have to weather 6 month or so of total anarchy, which might not come at all. So you're left with providing for yourself into retirement with limited or no income. Not easy to manage without 20 years of preparation I am afraid. So... join yourself to a government department that isn't going away, or some other entity that will thrive in a collapsing industrial world. I can think of no other options this late in the game. And it is very late in the game. But we all have to start somewhere so for some it starts today with cutting out the Lattes and the Netflix subscription and putting that money to better uses. Good luck.
The hordes of people who haven't prepared - including myself - will probably die far more rapidly than decent properly-prepped ones. My question is: then what?
Fossil fuel extraction is the death of us. Questions? We are 3,000 times more populous than were our ecologically balanced self-sustaining migratory Hunter-Gatherer ancestral clan/bands, and all thanks to sedentary grain/crop agriculture and fossil fuel extraction. What could go wrong? Everything?
But I understand that you are comparing to pre-agriculture (H-G) where I was referencing pre-Columbian. So a bigger ratio than I was thinking. But, check my math.
Just the facts, Mam (Joe Friday). The last ecologically balanced and self-sustaining zero population growth human population was about 10kya, and it was about 2.6M. As soon as we started consuming the high energy grain based diet as sedentary agriculturalists, we began our journey into unsustainable, ecologically unbalanced 6th Extinction. At exactly what number that happened is debatable, but doubtless long before your 1 M number. As my free e-book PDF, "Stress R Us", says and the brilliant book by Denise Schmandt-Besserat explains in her "Before Writing", H-Gs had no "capital", no money, no numbers, no writing until the agricultural revolution and the jump to sedentary agriculture. She deserved a dynamite cup in her lifetime. Wikapedia gives the population at year 1 at 150-330 M with a 50% confidence level. Other sources give 5M at 3K BCE. Hard to swallow? I agree, but it's the truth. We are massively overpopulated and Mother Nature is doing Her damnedest to limit our reproduction to save the rest of diverse life on Her planet.
Any child born today will celebrate his/her 23rd BD in 2047, when the earth's surface temps are 6 degC over the 1991-2020 baseline and our entire worldwide ecosystem is in a state of freefall. The suffering and death will be Biblical. Is that what you want for the children unfortunate enough to be born to selfish, thoughtless parents today? Remember, all of those technologies were present at year 1, when our ancestors numbered 150-330M. Your rhetorical question is, well, stupid.
You're getting there. But you're still missing one important factor. The financial system. There are debts, globally, to the tune of hundreds of trillions of dollars. When it becomes clear that those can never be repaid, the banks, all of them, will fail all at once (you've seen how financial panics play out in the past).
How do you think this fantastically complicated machine that everyone on the planet depends on for just about everything will behave without banks?
It's going to fall to pieces like a collapsing house of cards. All at once.
You've gone from this taking multiple decades, to maybe a decade. But in places like London, or New York, or Mexico City, it'll be over in a few months at most.
The powers that be have been holding this thing back for a few decades now. Fracking etc. saved our bacon for a while. That game is nearly done and the longer they've been delaying the inevitable, the faster that inevitable will unfold, once it becomes no longer physically impossible to keep delaying.
A few places might hold it together for a few more years, but not for many. Things are far too interconnected for more than that to be possible.
Personally, judging by that Exxon graph, I'm leaning more towards 2027 than 2030.
The banks won't all fail because we can print our way out of debt overhang . Stagflation is the future . The banks have already failed the Treasury markets are pure distortion from printing to keep the whole thing liquid . It's all just nonsense at this point but it all comes down to stagflationary period hitting hard soon
That'll only work for so long. Even if the banks do hold it together, industrial civilisation is a vastly complex thing. Designed only to grow. Sooner or later something critical will break. 15% pa decline in petroleum will topple something or another. Do a search on cascading systems failure. this mess is a system of systems, everything interdependent. The more complex, the more fragile. Once that critical thing breaks, the whole mess will come down. We were hours away from the cash machines shutting down in 2007-08 The bailouts stopped it.
Stagflation, I agree, but without so much of the stagnant economy and more of a contracting economy.
Printing only works as long as you can make interest repayments and people trust your money. For the US Federal Government that's about one trillion a year now! Where does that money come from? A good chunk is extracted from things like the Infrastructure Investment and Jobs Act. I think 70 EV chargers have been built with those $500 Billion lol, and not much else.
They strip out money from places like that to pay interest or they simply borrow more to pay interest, but it has an end.
From what I see, the banks as we know them are going to be eliminated and a centralized digital currency system used instead. If you look at who owns (and controls) the Federal reserve bank it's actually a handful of big commercial banks. They hold the stock in it. How they will transition to making loans through the new system is unclear to me but when the banks were all closed in 1933 only certain ones were allowed to re-open. They acquired all the debts from the now insolvent banks and people went on either repaying or losing their homes etc.
That was the Great Reset 01, 02 will be a similar affair but worse, either way a large portion of the debt must be cleared like in Reset-01 so a collapse is assured. As for the Banks as we know them, where are the branches now? They are closing them up all across my Nation. ATM machines too are vanishing so something big is on the horizon that doesn't include physical cash at all.
Because it won't work. Money is just a representation of energy to be produced. It would have to shrink in proportion to the available energy. At a certain point energy starts to cost more energy to produce than you get from the end product.
Then it gets abandoned.
This thing is breaking. We don't have the resources to create a replacement system, not that that would even be possible with ecosystems collapsing around us. With climate creating more and more physical destruction as we go. Industrial civilisation is inherently unsustainable, this is just the end point of that.
As to when, I don't know. It looks like soon to me.
"As we are getting closer and closer to that ominous “sudden” phase — kicking into motion around 2030"
My guess is we'll head over the cliff a little sooner as the oil exporting nations will cut exports. This will kickstart the collapse. Probably sooner than 2030.
First resource wars will ramp up. Countries with power will not sit around & watch their citizens starve. Can you imagine a politician not using their available power to put their countries first?
I would love some help playing out some likely next steps. The financial system will collapse, savings will be gone there is no where safe to store money. What will happen to debt? If you own a mortgage?
I have read some of the brutish predictions. I also believe, or would like to, that there could be pockets of community and coherence.
Buy physical assets. Buy guns and ammo. When the system collapses the money will be useless so buy useful things while you can. Banks won't be able to go after you when they collapse.
Here is a video of Tad Patzek explaining the reality; it is queued up to the precise point where he explains what happens when we step down from 600 exajoules/year to 400 exajoules/year. This is the best use of an hour and 12 minutes one can get on what we can expect moving forward:
We’re inside the train, looking out the windows, faces pressed, at the approaching cliff. Outside the train? The biological answers (not on our human-life-timescale) are already arriving. Species solution: population crash. Already baked in, headed our way. Evenly distributed (as much as can be) by universal demographic reproductive rates collapsing to below 2.1. Over a planetary and whole-systems timescale (a few hundred years) homo sapiens will even out at maybe 1 B or so, whatever carrying capacity actually is, at resource consumption rates TBD by new (or old) technologies deployed then.
Our problem (not the planet’s) is our incessant drama about physical realities not conforming to our emotional and cultural registers. This is your revelation to me, B. How these realities actually meet, in our lifetimes- lucky us.
Kind of a calmdown. Physical reality prevails over time. Our species ‘sorcery’ outs itself as plain old pyramid scheme, ultimately only fooling ourselves. The House does win. Nature Bats Last. Pay me now, pay me later. Oh well. Enjoy today!
I am skeptical of this line of argument. Someone might.like to explain why this is so wrong. Apologies but long exposure to subtle ff propaganda makes me suspicious of those looking for greater investment in them.
Not so strangely. Nuclear has never been profitable; requires huge government subsidies (there's that money thing again). Huge energy inputs for cement and high strength steel, let alone mining and refining the fuel. Water and backup electrical requirements. And there are still, globally, no safe means (even short term, but especially long term) of disposing of the highly radioactive fuel, nor the slightly less radioactive structure and systems when it is time to decommission (also energy intensive). Nuclear is neither green nor clean.
Interesting read. Kind of reminded me of the Surplus Energy Economics website which I have been following for quite a while. It has many articles exploring different facets of this complex mega-problem - well worth checking out especially for all the comments and responses to the articles:
What bizarre doomer content, this is. Humanity will be fine. Unless we start a global great power or even nuclear war, or AI gets out of control. We have more than enough solar and nuclear energy options to power humanity at much higher levels.
I don't expect the suddenly part to arrive in 2050...
The Precarious State of the Shale Oil Industry:
Try to get your head around the idea that by 2027, US tight oil production might be 12 MM BOPD, not the 9 MM it is now, which is what cheerleaders say it will be, and that means we'll actually have to find and extract 12 MM BOPD... before we can ever grow the new 3 MM.
Man, that is a slew of new wells! Thats gonna take like...four times the HZ wells we've already drilled in the US.
Where? https://www.oilystuff.com/single-post/the-hamster-wheel
Shale is the only growing source of oil... when this turns down ... the financial system will implode
It looks like he does say 2030 is the rough kickoff, per the first paragraph:
“As we are getting closer and closer to that ominous “sudden” phase — kicking into motion around 2030”
Unfortunately Eddy the Normies of the world can't quite think through energy cost of energy, even if they get to the 12million they don't realise that the net energy will probably be less than the 9million currently produced. We are already at 1 in 6 when it goes to 1 in 5 it's game over
It's interesting, shale oil is all over the world, a lot of it in Australia, but no one but the US ever went ahead with it, food for thought...
Water is an issue... but I think more importantly... funding is required to make it happen... as in shale loses hundreds of billions of dollars... so you need something like the Fed who can pump out reserve currency without causing hyperinflation ...
And the thing is ... the energy return on shale is abysmal ...so the beast can only be fed so much of it without seizing up... the beast needs a diet of mostly cheap energy (conventional)... if you give it too much alternative energy like shale tar sands deep sea .. you poison the beast...
Great summary article B. I’m curious, with the ~5 years (estimated of course), what are you and other readers doing with your time to either brace or adapt? I hesitate to say “prepare” as nobody can truly prepare for this comprehensively.
Well personally if i had the money i would buy land and start preparing for self sufficiency. But due to our current neoliberal system we are barely paid enough to survive week to week let alone to build up saving. so honestly? Nothing. Though Jim Bendall has videos and resources on how to prep. Your best bet would be to join an eco village if they will take you.
I have prepared, a lot of people already have, Zuckerberg did it on a Hawaiian Island, others do it out in rural towns or in the hills. There is little difference between them all security wise. Oh yes someone has Billions so we assume they are safe as houses, but that's not always the case. They have to worry about their own people inside the fence.
If history is any guide you really only have to weather 6 month or so of total anarchy, which might not come at all. So you're left with providing for yourself into retirement with limited or no income. Not easy to manage without 20 years of preparation I am afraid. So... join yourself to a government department that isn't going away, or some other entity that will thrive in a collapsing industrial world. I can think of no other options this late in the game. And it is very late in the game. But we all have to start somewhere so for some it starts today with cutting out the Lattes and the Netflix subscription and putting that money to better uses. Good luck.
How do you defend yourself against the hordes of people who haven't prepared?
The hordes of people who haven't prepared - including myself - will probably die far more rapidly than decent properly-prepped ones. My question is: then what?
Fossil fuel extraction is the death of us. Questions? We are 3,000 times more populous than were our ecologically balanced self-sustaining migratory Hunter-Gatherer ancestral clan/bands, and all thanks to sedentary grain/crop agriculture and fossil fuel extraction. What could go wrong? Everything?
A median estimate of pre-Columbian population in the Amercas is 50 million. Double that for the whole world: 100 million.
Current population is 80X greater.
Paleodemographers peg the worldwide H-G populations at 5-10M until about 10kya, so 3,000 more now.
8000 ÷ 10 = 800
8 B/5 M = 1,600, but most paleodemographers use 8 B/2.6 M = 3,076 or 3K.
But I understand that you are comparing to pre-agriculture (H-G) where I was referencing pre-Columbian. So a bigger ratio than I was thinking. But, check my math.
8200 ÷ 5 (in millions) = 1640
My benchmark is the rate of extinctions which quickened after 1800. So I say a pre-1800 population is sustainable, e.g. 1 billion or less.
Rodes.pub/OneBillion
Just the facts, Mam (Joe Friday). The last ecologically balanced and self-sustaining zero population growth human population was about 10kya, and it was about 2.6M. As soon as we started consuming the high energy grain based diet as sedentary agriculturalists, we began our journey into unsustainable, ecologically unbalanced 6th Extinction. At exactly what number that happened is debatable, but doubtless long before your 1 M number. As my free e-book PDF, "Stress R Us", says and the brilliant book by Denise Schmandt-Besserat explains in her "Before Writing", H-Gs had no "capital", no money, no numbers, no writing until the agricultural revolution and the jump to sedentary agriculture. She deserved a dynamite cup in her lifetime. Wikapedia gives the population at year 1 at 150-330 M with a 50% confidence level. Other sources give 5M at 3K BCE. Hard to swallow? I agree, but it's the truth. We are massively overpopulated and Mother Nature is doing Her damnedest to limit our reproduction to save the rest of diverse life on Her planet.
>>No capital, no money, no numbers, and no writing<<
Is this the future you want for humans?
Any child born today will celebrate his/her 23rd BD in 2047, when the earth's surface temps are 6 degC over the 1991-2020 baseline and our entire worldwide ecosystem is in a state of freefall. The suffering and death will be Biblical. Is that what you want for the children unfortunate enough to be born to selfish, thoughtless parents today? Remember, all of those technologies were present at year 1, when our ancestors numbered 150-330M. Your rhetorical question is, well, stupid.
You're getting there. But you're still missing one important factor. The financial system. There are debts, globally, to the tune of hundreds of trillions of dollars. When it becomes clear that those can never be repaid, the banks, all of them, will fail all at once (you've seen how financial panics play out in the past).
How do you think this fantastically complicated machine that everyone on the planet depends on for just about everything will behave without banks?
It's going to fall to pieces like a collapsing house of cards. All at once.
You've gone from this taking multiple decades, to maybe a decade. But in places like London, or New York, or Mexico City, it'll be over in a few months at most.
The powers that be have been holding this thing back for a few decades now. Fracking etc. saved our bacon for a while. That game is nearly done and the longer they've been delaying the inevitable, the faster that inevitable will unfold, once it becomes no longer physically impossible to keep delaying.
A few places might hold it together for a few more years, but not for many. Things are far too interconnected for more than that to be possible.
Personally, judging by that Exxon graph, I'm leaning more towards 2027 than 2030.
Joe
The banks won't all fail because we can print our way out of debt overhang . Stagflation is the future . The banks have already failed the Treasury markets are pure distortion from printing to keep the whole thing liquid . It's all just nonsense at this point but it all comes down to stagflationary period hitting hard soon
That'll only work for so long. Even if the banks do hold it together, industrial civilisation is a vastly complex thing. Designed only to grow. Sooner or later something critical will break. 15% pa decline in petroleum will topple something or another. Do a search on cascading systems failure. this mess is a system of systems, everything interdependent. The more complex, the more fragile. Once that critical thing breaks, the whole mess will come down. We were hours away from the cash machines shutting down in 2007-08 The bailouts stopped it.
Stagflation, I agree, but without so much of the stagnant economy and more of a contracting economy.
Printing only works as long as you can make interest repayments and people trust your money. For the US Federal Government that's about one trillion a year now! Where does that money come from? A good chunk is extracted from things like the Infrastructure Investment and Jobs Act. I think 70 EV chargers have been built with those $500 Billion lol, and not much else.
They strip out money from places like that to pay interest or they simply borrow more to pay interest, but it has an end.
From what I see, the banks as we know them are going to be eliminated and a centralized digital currency system used instead. If you look at who owns (and controls) the Federal reserve bank it's actually a handful of big commercial banks. They hold the stock in it. How they will transition to making loans through the new system is unclear to me but when the banks were all closed in 1933 only certain ones were allowed to re-open. They acquired all the debts from the now insolvent banks and people went on either repaying or losing their homes etc.
That was the Great Reset 01, 02 will be a similar affair but worse, either way a large portion of the debt must be cleared like in Reset-01 so a collapse is assured. As for the Banks as we know them, where are the branches now? They are closing them up all across my Nation. ATM machines too are vanishing so something big is on the horizon that doesn't include physical cash at all.
Which year with no collapse would induce you to recalculate?
2030? 2035? 2040?
They are just numbers. 0s and 1s at that. Why can't the banks and the governments get together and make up some new numbers.
Consider the alternative.
Because it won't work. Money is just a representation of energy to be produced. It would have to shrink in proportion to the available energy. At a certain point energy starts to cost more energy to produce than you get from the end product.
Then it gets abandoned.
This thing is breaking. We don't have the resources to create a replacement system, not that that would even be possible with ecosystems collapsing around us. With climate creating more and more physical destruction as we go. Industrial civilisation is inherently unsustainable, this is just the end point of that.
As to when, I don't know. It looks like soon to me.
"As we are getting closer and closer to that ominous “sudden” phase — kicking into motion around 2030"
My guess is we'll head over the cliff a little sooner as the oil exporting nations will cut exports. This will kickstart the collapse. Probably sooner than 2030.
First resource wars will ramp up. Countries with power will not sit around & watch their citizens starve. Can you imagine a politician not using their available power to put their countries first?
Thank you B🙏
I would love some help playing out some likely next steps. The financial system will collapse, savings will be gone there is no where safe to store money. What will happen to debt? If you own a mortgage?
I have read some of the brutish predictions. I also believe, or would like to, that there could be pockets of community and coherence.
Buy physical assets. Buy guns and ammo. When the system collapses the money will be useless so buy useful things while you can. Banks won't be able to go after you when they collapse.
I'm a little less 'optimistic' and more gun shy of complexity.
Complexity is the weak link because of its inherently complex nature.
It's often the fine detail that trips us up!
At least we we're at discussing the predicament!
https://kevinhester.live/2017/08/08/the-myth-of-human-progress-and-the-collapse-of-complex-societies-chris-hedges/
Professor Guy McPherson and I have dived into the "Peak Oil" component of this collapse."
https://kevinhester.live/2023/05/17/global-peak-oil-remains-an-existential-threat/
Here is a video of Tad Patzek explaining the reality; it is queued up to the precise point where he explains what happens when we step down from 600 exajoules/year to 400 exajoules/year. This is the best use of an hour and 12 minutes one can get on what we can expect moving forward:
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=nsbtt-6Dpww&t=2002s
What a fantastic article! I really appreciate this rare reality, honesty and intelligence. Sending a few coffees to stimulate your brain even more :-)
We’re inside the train, looking out the windows, faces pressed, at the approaching cliff. Outside the train? The biological answers (not on our human-life-timescale) are already arriving. Species solution: population crash. Already baked in, headed our way. Evenly distributed (as much as can be) by universal demographic reproductive rates collapsing to below 2.1. Over a planetary and whole-systems timescale (a few hundred years) homo sapiens will even out at maybe 1 B or so, whatever carrying capacity actually is, at resource consumption rates TBD by new (or old) technologies deployed then.
Our problem (not the planet’s) is our incessant drama about physical realities not conforming to our emotional and cultural registers. This is your revelation to me, B. How these realities actually meet, in our lifetimes- lucky us.
Kind of a calmdown. Physical reality prevails over time. Our species ‘sorcery’ outs itself as plain old pyramid scheme, ultimately only fooling ourselves. The House does win. Nature Bats Last. Pay me now, pay me later. Oh well. Enjoy today!
I am skeptical of this line of argument. Someone might.like to explain why this is so wrong. Apologies but long exposure to subtle ff propaganda makes me suspicious of those looking for greater investment in them.
https://www.iea.org/reports/world-energy-outlook-2023
Strangely enough, people who believe we are going to run out of energy never approve of nuclear power.
Not so strangely. Nuclear has never been profitable; requires huge government subsidies (there's that money thing again). Huge energy inputs for cement and high strength steel, let alone mining and refining the fuel. Water and backup electrical requirements. And there are still, globally, no safe means (even short term, but especially long term) of disposing of the highly radioactive fuel, nor the slightly less radioactive structure and systems when it is time to decommission (also energy intensive). Nuclear is neither green nor clean.
Interesting read. Kind of reminded me of the Surplus Energy Economics website which I have been following for quite a while. It has many articles exploring different facets of this complex mega-problem - well worth checking out especially for all the comments and responses to the articles:
https://surplusenergyeconomics.wordpress.com/
What bizarre doomer content, this is. Humanity will be fine. Unless we start a global great power or even nuclear war, or AI gets out of control. We have more than enough solar and nuclear energy options to power humanity at much higher levels.