I agree with all you said except for your last sentence about asking elders if their best years we're at the very end of aging and decline. Not sure if that is true at all and don't get your meaning here.
I think it’s pointing to a truth that many of us reach upon understanding that in the future we will be materially poorer. We think this means we will be more unhappy, but in reality it’s technological progress which has eroded our interdependence, our sense of community, and ultimately our satisfaction with life.
*yawn* humanity has faced many extinction events. People survived before cheap energy, people will survive after. I used to get worried about peak oil and the implications but why stress over a predicament? (A problem which cannot be solved).
1. They did not farm using petro chemical inputs... without these inputs the soil grows nothing without years of organic inputs... what do you eat for years? Oh right you eat the animals that might provide the manure...
2. There are 4000 Spent Fuel Ponds Around the Globe…
If you don’t cool the spent fuel, the temperature will rise and there may be a swift chain reaction that leads to spontaneous combustion–an explosion and fire of the spent fuel assemblies. Such a scenario would emit radioactive particles into the atmosphere. Pick your poison. Fresh fuel is hotter and more radioactive, but is only one fuel assembly. A pool of spent fuel will have dozens of assemblies.
One report from Sankei News said that there are over 700 fuel assemblies stored in one pool at Fukushima. If they all caught fire, radioactive particles—including those lasting for as long as a decade—would be released into the air and eventually contaminate the land or, worse, be inhaled by people. “To me, the spent fuel is scarier. All those spent fuel assemblies are still extremely radioactive,” Dalnoki-Veress says.
It has been known for more than two decades that, in case of a loss of water in the pool, convective air cooling would be relatively ineffective in such a “dense-packed” pool. Spent fuel recently discharged from a reactor could heat up relatively rapidly to temperatures at which the zircaloy fuel cladding could catch fire and the fuel’s volatile fission product, including 30-year half-life Cs, would be released. The fire could well spread to older spent fuel. The long-term land-contamination consequences of such an event could be significantly worse than those from Chernobyl. Source
Japan’s chief cabinet secretary called it “the devil’s scenario.” Two weeks after the 11 March 2011 earthquake and tsunami devastated the Fukushima Daiichi Nuclear Power Plant, causing three nuclear reactors to melt down and release radioactive plumes, officials were bracing for even worse. They feared that spent fuel stored in pools in the reactor halls would catch fire and send radioactive smoke across a much wider swath of eastern Japan, including Tokyo. Source
Estimates of the cancer burden in Europe from radioactive fallout from the Chernobyl accident Source (Note: The Chernobyl accident was relatively minor, involved no spent fuel ponds, and was controlled by pouring cement onto the reactor. This was breaking down so a few years back they re-entombed.)
“However, many of the radioactive elements in spent fuel have long half-lives. For example, plutonium-239 has a half-life of 24,000 years, and plutonium-240 has a half-life of 6,800 years. Because it contains these long half-lived radioactive elements, spent fuel must be isolated and controlled for thousands of years.” Source
It does not matter how remote you are, the jet stream and ocean currents will circulate these toxic cancer-causing substances around the globe. They will be picked up by convection and pour deadly rain on your crop and water supply.
Nobody survives the collapse of civilization. This will be an extinction event.
The US currently leads the entire world ("WE'RE #1!") in years of life in poor health before death, at 12.6 years.
I don't plan to spend my last 12.6 years in poor health. I'll stay healthy if it is in my control, and end it if health starts to show a terminal decline.
Canada has a pretty liberal medically assistance in dying (MAID). You do not have to prove that you are terminally ill.
Thanks, B, but apparently you missed the recent paper by James Hansen,et.al., in which he/they cite the C3S data: the ave. global surface temps have increased 0.4 degC in just the last 2 yrs., so 0.2 annually, so 1.64 + 0.2 + 1.84 by 2026, 2.04 by 2027, and 1 degC increase every 5 yrs. thereafter. Any child unfortunate enough to be born today (108K net) will have turned 22 when the surface temp has increased to the unlivable 6 degC in 2047. No need for candles. No need for a cake. Bringing another child into this dying world is thoughtless and selfish, and he/she will hate you for it.
You are seeing the truth and, yes, it is "dark", but actually hotter than hell. Go to C3S and James Hansen and see for yourself, but hurry before the billionaires shut down the net.
And your expertise is? I read everything I can find on climate collapse. And you? Hansen is the gold standard, so, of course, you've read his recent multipage, multiauthored paper, right? No? How about following C3S "Climate Pulse" page daily? No? Then, shut the hell up.
We'll see if this is actually how it plays out. I think it's pretty clear that climate change all by itself, that is, just this one symptom of a vast overshoot on all levels, is going to make civilization as we have known it impossible. Whether the direst of predicitons actually happen depends on what we missed/couldn't know in the modeling, and there will be plenty of that. I'm with you on the kids thing. I have nothing honest to say to friends, intelligent people no less, who announce to me they're having a child (or another one, egads), and haven't for years. "Are you on glue?" is just too rude. But children rarely seem to arrive as the result of any rational thought. It's ALL biological programming stirred-up in a broth of emotion. That's where children come from. Most of the people i've known are virtually powerless in the face of their programming and their emotions, end of the day.
Yes, it is, as are our declining fertility rates. Not great news for our model, which as one academic studying specifically this situation, said will result in the case of our civilization as the equivalent of a big business venture that can no longer find anyone to employ to run the thing. Great for the rest of the living planet, in the longer run.
You might appreciate my 2018 book, "Stress R Us", which introduces the term "population density stress", covers the full spectrum of "stress diseases", and includes the stress induced fall in fertility/fecundity. Stanford has a PDF in their e-library and allows it to be downloaded for free. We are now 3,000 times more numerous than were our migratory self-sustaining ecologically balanced ancestral Hunter-Gatherer/pastoralist clans/bands (never bigger than 150, the Dunbar number) just a few thousand years ago, and still living in their clans/bands in refugia in the remote corners of earth. We have become a plague upon the earth and Mother Nature is making increasingly strong efforts to rid Herself of us. Have a blessed day and thanks for the dialog.
You're welcome, thank-you. I think even folks like you and don't have anywhere near the full inkling of just how impossibly screwed we are right now, on every significant level. The 20th Century was a disaster beyond comprehension.
Trust me, I've been a doomer for many years, as I saw how my patients (25K over 42 yrs.) were suffering from stress filled lives and "stress diseases", thus I wrote an published "Stress R Us" in 2018, 7 yrs ago. I respect the heck out of you and your work. I love your thread and went through all of it. Thank you! Have a blessed day in the natural world and know that you/we are not alone.
Hi Greeley, I read the Hansen paper too. I am a 30 year Overshoot Doomer veteran and agree that the future is grim for the young or already grim depending on if you have been beaten by anyone of the unprecedented global warming Jacked disasters like the LA fires. In addition to all the homes and businesses the fire has wiped out a big battery storage facility - so much for alt energy come to save the world from runaway climate change (already well underway). Climate change by itself is enough to cause a mass human die-back or extinction all on it's own, only it's not alone, it's not the only Overshoot predicament/consequence humans are facing, as many here know.
I'm very interested in looking at you book 'Stress R Us' and learning about "population density stress". Around the year 2000 I was sober for about 6 months and still looking for help when I came across Robert Sapolsky's Book 'Why Zebras Don't Get Ulcers'. It was a BIG help. Sapolsky is a Stanford Prof. His free, online, Human Behavioral Biology course on youtub and other books have helped me understand myself and the humans. Since your book is free online in the Stanford E-library is that a coincidence or is your work on stress related to Sapalosky's work on stress? Here is a link to download it.
I do not consider human Overpopulation to be a root cause of Overshoot, I see it as a symptom/consequence.
The root cause is evolution under the dictates of thermodynamics.
NATURE ABHORS A GRADIENT
Below is a short essay that will give you the gist of what I believe and why.
* The purpose of life is to disperse energy*
"The truly dangerous ideas in science tend to be those that threaten the collective ego of humanity and knock us further off our pedestal of centrality. The Copernican Revolution abruptly dislodged humans from the center of the universe. The Darwinian Revolution yanked Homo sapiens from the pinnacle of life. Today another menacing revolution sits at the horizon of knowledge, patiently awaiting broad realization by the same egotistical species. The dangerous idea is this: the purpose of life is to disperse energy. Many of us are at least somewhat familiar with the second law of thermodynamics, the unwavering propensity of energy to disperse and, in doing so, transition from high quality to low quality forms. More generally, as stated by ecologist Eric Schneider, "nature abhors a gradient," where a gradient is simply a difference over a distance — for example, in temperature or pressure. Open physical systems — including those of the atmosphere, hydrosphere, and geosphere — all embody this law, being driven by the dispersal of energy, particularly the flow of heat, continually attempting to achieve equilibrium. Phenomena as diverse as lithospheric plate motions, the northward flow of the Gulf Stream, and
occurrence of deadly hurricanes are all examples of second law manifestations. There is growing evidence that life, the biosphere, is no different. It has often been said the life's complexity contravenes the second law, indicating the work either of a deity or some unknown natural process, depending on one's bias. Yet the evolution of life and the dynamics of ecosystems obey the second law mandate, functioning in large part to dissipate energy. They do so not by burning brightly and disappearing, like a fire torching a forest, but through stable metabolic cycles that store chemical energy and continually reduce the solar gradient. Photosynthetic plants, bacteria, and algae capture energy from the sun and form the core of all food webs.
Virtually all organisms, including humans, are, in a real sense, sunlight transmogrified, temporary waypoints in the flow of energy. Ecological succession, viewed from a thermodynamic perspective, is a process that maximizes the capture and degradation of energy. Similarly, the tendency for life to become more complex over the past 3.5 billion years (as well as the overall increase in biomass and organismal diversity through time) is not due simply to natural selection, as most evolutionists still argue, but also to nature's "efforts" to grab more and more of the sun's flow. The slow burn that characterizes life enables ecological systems to persist over deep time, changing in response to external and internal perturbations."
Thanks for the very well thought out and reasoning, but we disagree on two points. BTW, I know Sapolsky's work, but he falls down in the behavioral analysis. Life is neg-entropic, it counters entropy and absorbs energy, rather than dissipating it. Also, IMHO, overshoot is the product of too many humans using too many natural resources and producing too much pollution. My book is the product of a lifelong career in medicine/psychiatry and I am grateful to the good folks at Stanford who keep it in their e-library for the free downloads. I wish you all the best and a blessed evening.
I have four (anglo) young women of childbearing age as children - two mine - two steps - and among the four there is only one child - an "accident." None of them plans on having another. Typical of their cohort, as nearly as I can tell. By contrast, there is a significant Hispanic population in the same region where I live - and they are having kids like nothing has changed. Sigh...
Ignorance isn't gonna be bliss for anyone much longer, i don't reckon. Young adults today know, or at least sense, they'll be lucky to feed and house just themselves. I can understand the very wealthy and the big landowners having some kids today, there's at least a hypothetical chance that something of their dynasties will make it through the bottleneck. That majority of us with no significant land and no real wealth? The most random individuals can expect to survive long into the future even just themselves.
I follow the climate science, including C3S and the work of the iconic James Hansen. You might give it a whirl. 6mm of permafrost is melting globally annually as it absorbs our over production of heat energy, the equivalent of 20+ Hiroshima nuclear bomb blasts PER SECOND, where each one releases 63 trillion BTUs. Not so fast, Eddy.
Having children is a wonderful endeavor that requires the type of selflessness in a day-to-day sense along with love and purpose to survive the trying times. It doesn’t have to but it can. It brings city folks into homesteading and creates hope.
Even if we don’t make it to 2050, I will be so glad to be a mother. And by the way, I really think we will. It’s going to be hard but possible depending on where you live.
God bless you, Amy, and your family. Homesteading is key and staying close to Mother Nature has been my salvation, as an only, lonely child. I had to be independent and that probably explains why I was a lousy husband/father, I just didn't need anyone else enough to let them know how special they were to me. So, four ex-wives and 4 children who choose not tp have contact with me. My 25K+ psychiatry/general practice medical patients were my family and I was especially good at caring for them. Now, I need and very much enjoy this contact with lovely fellow humans like yourself. Have a blessed evening and day tomorrow and thereafter. The alarm that I'm raising about what appears to be coming with climate collapse, let alone the insanity in Washington, is for the unborn children who otherwise may have a terrible time just surviving in a collapsing climate and society in the very near future. Namaste'
Sorry you had to grow up lonely. That's a unique type of torture for a social animal. Hyperindependence is still celebrated in the US. People have kids and want them to sleep by themselves, feed themselves, play by themselves as fast as possible. A child's ability to do so is met with pride. The less they bother the parents, the better. It's backwards and frustrating. My kids are 1 and 3 so will be coming of age when things get really tough but I believe in them - not because they are independent but because, I hope, they continue to be connected to life and love and know how to work cooperatively. Yes, I love homesteading as well as community projects. It's great you can reflect and help people realize their humanness. We need more of it
Good piece. There is no solution for a civilization in the throes of decline and fall of course, which is precisely why they enter into their stage of decline and fall - the lack of solutions. It's truly shocking how short lived the material/economic zenith of this model lasted - a single generation. The very definintion of unsustainability. Essentally, we'd hit our best-before date by 1970 ending the explosive growth of wealth fueled by the harnessing of all that oil at incredibly favorable terms that kicked in on the heels of WWII. Apparently it's typical of a civilization reaching this milestone where their resource situation dictates stagnation to be able to string this "plateau" out through financial maneuvers like the lowering of interest rates, the abstraction of money from resource reality, and offering easier and easier credit to more and more people for about a half a century, and then it quits working. Which seems to be the case indeed with us. 2020 being the half-century mark and the world now becoming rapidly more chaotic. This time around it's even worse, however - we have all the colateral damage of the explosion of excess everything we witnessed in the 20th Century coming for our throats. Perhaps your comment about the last golden years will prove apt. Studies have indicated that people overall were happier during the Great Depression, in London during the blitz, and as soldiers when they are engaged in actual war, than we typically are in baseline, easy-peasey peaceful modern times. Why? Life has become real once more relative to our baseline programming.
Having worked for years in the oil and gas industry, I can say that much of my experience confirms your views...While Federally regulated gas pipelines must be maintained to fairly high standards, not so distribution pipelines...Some of those on the East Coast were built a century ago, and are wooden..The only reason that they still work at all is the clay soil holding them in place.Chicago's lines are decaying rapidly as well...As to renewables, we knew 40 years ago that they would do more harm than good, because they are not dispatchable, therefore requiring expensive gas fired spinning reserves..Wind power is a total fraud, since the energy required to build, install, maintain, and recycle them is far more than they will ever produce..Billy Bob Thornton discusses this at length in the new series Landman, which involves drilling and maintaining wells in the Permian...Solar definitely does not return its cost in energy, though might be right for homeowners facing huge utility bills, which will likely escalate in the future....
There will always be oil, gas and coal, but the cost of getting it out of the ground and to the end use market will continue to escalate to the point where it's effectively useless to our society..
China presumes it will become the master of the universe. Its problem is that its workmanship is shoddy, and everything it builds "for the world" is not viable. Building a trade empire is honourable, in that trade helps lift the world out of poverty. The pressures against it including rampant fraud from within, and energy pressures as the Honest Sorcerer illustrates.
It seems to me, China is internally giving up. It gave it a shot, but its people are from a Communist background, and that sentiment does not lend itself well to free enterprise, which is essential for this kind of venture.
Inevitably, the world is going to retract its trade routes due to energy constrictions. I suspect that China might be able to benefit by and with countries near it, but anything further out will be expensive and unmaintainable.
So, now what? We are better at nailing the problems than dealing what to do about them, which I keep pointing to and trying to deal with. Read the last part after “What if there was NO techno fix.” That is what we should be putting heads as smart as your together to deal with, which is on my drawing board to invite.
One movement for this is called Localism. You are probably familiar with it. Generally, it is the notion that resources needed for living must be sourced within a few kilometers, and no more than 100.
In order for Localism to work, external influences need to be muted, so that locals can work together in order to form solutions which are right for them.
This is a challenge, when things like Facebook and Instagram capture so much attention. Substack is a good start, but breaking the big data bond is an essential first step to sustainable autonomy.
You’re pointing to the intelligent way we should be thinking and acting. Bio-regionalism is a phrase in play for an intelligent redesigning. But first we have to get a perspective where humanity is motivated by caring about our mutuality and not by self-service.
There was a rather good Nate Hagens podcast recently covering this. It feels very much like a Chicken and Egg problem. Does it start from grass roots, or through some kind of generally understood decree from a benevolent group of influential leaders.
The problem is, that neither has any chance of being heard when the focus is not on the concerns of the individual, but on compelling images from everywhere else.
Humans are a myopic species. Are there any hidden paths to break the lock?
Bill Gates ‘Predicts’ Black Swan Event Will Depopulate 94% of Global Population
Perhaps it will happen the way you see it. But, just in case there is a James Bond style finale to the effort... I'm going to just hedge my bets by living in the middle of nowhere, at least some of the time.
Yes, many will carry on thinking it's the 'left', Bill Gates and big government who are the 'they' and not Trump/Musk/Big Oil and Blackrock.
The energy, environmental and climate crisis doesn't care who we blame.
Billions are going down regardless, not because of the 'vaccine'- that was just more income generation, but because of the cost of producing energy and its cost to the Planet.
The benevolent leaders would have to uplift humanity, and that could be a fine way to do it. They would deliberate about getting humanity united as sacred creatures and not the selfish ones we are now. I have hi-fived Nate Hagens, who is discovering that unseen world of spirit where he’s looking deeper than surface levels, like in this great podcast he did: https://substack.com/@suzannetaylor/p-149922938:
I think Nate has the right idea. Ive been working on a solution which fits well within his thought process. Im pretty sure he is extremely busy, but Im hoping he will be able to read a five pager overview I have written on it at some point.
I don't believe that any change will happen top down, because the Technosphere as Dmitri Orlov calls it, has no interest in changing its path. For that reason, only a bottom up solution has a chance of working. It would need to be community by community with success stories, before a greater audience would pay attention.
The solution needs to be comprehensive, and include a standalone parallel micro economy, on a town by town basis.
we will go on with the fantasy of 'normality' until the grocery stores and petrol stations no longer dispense our necessary 'survival goods'---and then things will get nasty as we enter 'denial' mode for as long as were are able.
politicians will slide into emergency mode---which means using the military to control civil unrest.
that will get worse as denial gets more and more intense
timetables are impossible to place of course...the end times for one region or group, might still allow another group to survive a while longer.
Few fossil fuel providers properly decommission and clean up old or damaged wells/pipelines. Even where required by regulation, coopted and corrupted governments at all levels, even (especially?) in the West, allow them to endlessly defer such obligations. As usual, public coffers will have to be raided to clean up corporations' messes.
Decommissioning a full size nuke plant takes decades and tons of money (and diesel). And concrete, if the plan is to bury the low-level radioactive material leftover from demolition. Of course, there is still no proven practicable plan on how to safely dispose of the highly radioactive material like fuel rods. Once again, deferment of decommissioning is all most jurisdictions can come up with. All of which should cause major concern when discussing the proposed (but still not functional) SMRs, especially as suggestions have been made that these could be operated under the aegis of small municipalities and BigTech corporations (e.g. next to their AI datacentres). Oversight and responsibility? Not much. And the cleanup costs will once again accrue to the taxpayers who don't benefit from tax loopholes, credits, and deferments.
Are you walking to work? Are you living in a cave?
Do you not think that if global warming was the threat to our species that bbccnn tells us it is (ad nauseam) we’d actually be doing something about it?
Do you not think that the fellas who run the world would meet at Davos and hammer out an urgent plan to eliminate wasteful, climate damaging activities?
Do you not think they would ban things like:
private jets and non-essential air travel
yachts
ice rinks
sports stadiums
resorts
ski lifts
Taylor Swift concerts
Nope. No plan. No bans.
Instead we are told that solar panels, windmills and EVs — which are all manufactured using enormous amounts of fossil fuels are the answer. Does anyone other than a barnyard animal actually believe these will reduce carbon emissions? If so then you get reclassified as a retarded moron and you should seek a rope and a strong branch and cure yourself of your stupidity.
Meanwhile Al Gore and Elon continue to fly on their private jets, Obama buys a sea level holiday home in Hawaii, and best of all, Leo invests in a multi million dollar concrete ‘eco- hotel’ inches above the water line in Belize. Odd given any day now sea levels are certain to rise 18 feet.
The thing is, even if global warming was real there is nothing that could be done about it without collapsing civilization. Banning high energy, useless activities such as air travel and tourism, would result in massive job losses and degrowth. Degrowth would lead to more job losses and before you know it we’d be trapped in a deflationary death spiral and the global economy would collapse.
If I know this, the Ministry of Truth knows this, yet they pound us with endless global warming articles urging immediate action.
The immediate action to deal with global warming generally involves transitioning off of fossil fuels. The UK, which is experiencing a severe affordable energy crisis that will soon collapse the country, wants to triple down on their renewable energy pledge.
According to recent statements by Keir Starmer, the UK Prime Minister, the country needs to significantly increase its renewable energy production, aiming to become a "clean energy superpower" by achieving at least 95% of its electricity generation from clean sources like renewables and nuclear power by 2030; this includes plans to drastically expand offshore and onshore wind, solar power, and potentially new nuclear projects to meet this goal.
Starmer KNOWS that this is impossible. He KNOWS that solar panels and windmills are dirty tech and are by no measure renewable. He knows that there is no way to store ‘renewable’ energy other than using extremely expensive batteries manufactured by burning fossil fuels. He KNOWS that there is already an affordable energy crisis and that therefore attempting to build out storage would only drive energy costs far higher and exacerbate the problem. HE KNOWS ALL OF THIS!!!
Yet he insists that renewable energy is the solution. Because the barnyard animals demand a solution. The barnyard animals will not accept that we are running out of affordable energy and on the verge of collapse. They demand more solar panels and windmills and EVs. Because the MSM has told them to think that this is a solution.
There is no solution. There is only collapse and starvation.
How true..."Economic growth at the cost of environmental disaster." How many privileged Americans think about conservation? The need to stop spending money on unnecessary goods and services. Stop wasting the resources! They wind up supporting the Dead Food and Dead People Industries. People down through history got by with far less than the average American has today. They did not create the damage that has been done in the last 189 years, since the U.S. patent office opened.
Charles Marohn, founder of Strong Towns, has been hammering away at this very issue for about a decade -- the unsustainability of the American post-World-War-II suburban experiment.
I agree with all you said except for your last sentence about asking elders if their best years we're at the very end of aging and decline. Not sure if that is true at all and don't get your meaning here.
I think it’s pointing to a truth that many of us reach upon understanding that in the future we will be materially poorer. We think this means we will be more unhappy, but in reality it’s technological progress which has eroded our interdependence, our sense of community, and ultimately our satisfaction with life.
We will be dead. No cheap energy - no civilization
https://fasteddynz.substack.com/p/financial-system-supply-chain-cross
We're all dead, regardless of how much energy costs.
This is an extinction event. It's different
*yawn* humanity has faced many extinction events. People survived before cheap energy, people will survive after. I used to get worried about peak oil and the implications but why stress over a predicament? (A problem which cannot be solved).
1. They did not farm using petro chemical inputs... without these inputs the soil grows nothing without years of organic inputs... what do you eat for years? Oh right you eat the animals that might provide the manure...
2. There are 4000 Spent Fuel Ponds Around the Globe…
If you don’t cool the spent fuel, the temperature will rise and there may be a swift chain reaction that leads to spontaneous combustion–an explosion and fire of the spent fuel assemblies. Such a scenario would emit radioactive particles into the atmosphere. Pick your poison. Fresh fuel is hotter and more radioactive, but is only one fuel assembly. A pool of spent fuel will have dozens of assemblies.
One report from Sankei News said that there are over 700 fuel assemblies stored in one pool at Fukushima. If they all caught fire, radioactive particles—including those lasting for as long as a decade—would be released into the air and eventually contaminate the land or, worse, be inhaled by people. “To me, the spent fuel is scarier. All those spent fuel assemblies are still extremely radioactive,” Dalnoki-Veress says.
It has been known for more than two decades that, in case of a loss of water in the pool, convective air cooling would be relatively ineffective in such a “dense-packed” pool. Spent fuel recently discharged from a reactor could heat up relatively rapidly to temperatures at which the zircaloy fuel cladding could catch fire and the fuel’s volatile fission product, including 30-year half-life Cs, would be released. The fire could well spread to older spent fuel. The long-term land-contamination consequences of such an event could be significantly worse than those from Chernobyl. Source
Japan’s chief cabinet secretary called it “the devil’s scenario.” Two weeks after the 11 March 2011 earthquake and tsunami devastated the Fukushima Daiichi Nuclear Power Plant, causing three nuclear reactors to melt down and release radioactive plumes, officials were bracing for even worse. They feared that spent fuel stored in pools in the reactor halls would catch fire and send radioactive smoke across a much wider swath of eastern Japan, including Tokyo. Source
Estimates of the cancer burden in Europe from radioactive fallout from the Chernobyl accident Source (Note: The Chernobyl accident was relatively minor, involved no spent fuel ponds, and was controlled by pouring cement onto the reactor. This was breaking down so a few years back they re-entombed.)
“However, many of the radioactive elements in spent fuel have long half-lives. For example, plutonium-239 has a half-life of 24,000 years, and plutonium-240 has a half-life of 6,800 years. Because it contains these long half-lived radioactive elements, spent fuel must be isolated and controlled for thousands of years.” Source
It does not matter how remote you are, the jet stream and ocean currents will circulate these toxic cancer-causing substances around the globe. They will be picked up by convection and pour deadly rain on your crop and water supply.
Nobody survives the collapse of civilization. This will be an extinction event.
https://fasteddynz.substack.com/p/the-utter-futility-of-doomsday-prepping
Good riddance to a most vile species
The US currently leads the entire world ("WE'RE #1!") in years of life in poor health before death, at 12.6 years.
I don't plan to spend my last 12.6 years in poor health. I'll stay healthy if it is in my control, and end it if health starts to show a terminal decline.
Canada has a pretty liberal medically assistance in dying (MAID). You do not have to prove that you are terminally ill.
Thanks, B, but apparently you missed the recent paper by James Hansen,et.al., in which he/they cite the C3S data: the ave. global surface temps have increased 0.4 degC in just the last 2 yrs., so 0.2 annually, so 1.64 + 0.2 + 1.84 by 2026, 2.04 by 2027, and 1 degC increase every 5 yrs. thereafter. Any child unfortunate enough to be born today (108K net) will have turned 22 when the surface temp has increased to the unlivable 6 degC in 2047. No need for candles. No need for a cake. Bringing another child into this dying world is thoughtless and selfish, and he/she will hate you for it.
You are seeing the truth and, yes, it is "dark", but actually hotter than hell. Go to C3S and James Hansen and see for yourself, but hurry before the billionaires shut down the net.
Also ask other scientists, including various ones who illustrate the unsettled nature of the 'science'.
Hansen is not the only one deserving of attention.
And your expertise is? I read everything I can find on climate collapse. And you? Hansen is the gold standard, so, of course, you've read his recent multipage, multiauthored paper, right? No? How about following C3S "Climate Pulse" page daily? No? Then, shut the hell up.
We'll see if this is actually how it plays out. I think it's pretty clear that climate change all by itself, that is, just this one symptom of a vast overshoot on all levels, is going to make civilization as we have known it impossible. Whether the direst of predicitons actually happen depends on what we missed/couldn't know in the modeling, and there will be plenty of that. I'm with you on the kids thing. I have nothing honest to say to friends, intelligent people no less, who announce to me they're having a child (or another one, egads), and haven't for years. "Are you on glue?" is just too rude. But children rarely seem to arrive as the result of any rational thought. It's ALL biological programming stirred-up in a broth of emotion. That's where children come from. Most of the people i've known are virtually powerless in the face of their programming and their emotions, end of the day.
A recent PEW survey found that 47% of Americans 18-50yo are NOT planning on having children. Great news!
Yes, it is, as are our declining fertility rates. Not great news for our model, which as one academic studying specifically this situation, said will result in the case of our civilization as the equivalent of a big business venture that can no longer find anyone to employ to run the thing. Great for the rest of the living planet, in the longer run.
You might appreciate my 2018 book, "Stress R Us", which introduces the term "population density stress", covers the full spectrum of "stress diseases", and includes the stress induced fall in fertility/fecundity. Stanford has a PDF in their e-library and allows it to be downloaded for free. We are now 3,000 times more numerous than were our migratory self-sustaining ecologically balanced ancestral Hunter-Gatherer/pastoralist clans/bands (never bigger than 150, the Dunbar number) just a few thousand years ago, and still living in their clans/bands in refugia in the remote corners of earth. We have become a plague upon the earth and Mother Nature is making increasingly strong efforts to rid Herself of us. Have a blessed day and thanks for the dialog.
You're welcome, thank-you. I think even folks like you and don't have anywhere near the full inkling of just how impossibly screwed we are right now, on every significant level. The 20th Century was a disaster beyond comprehension.
Trust me, I've been a doomer for many years, as I saw how my patients (25K over 42 yrs.) were suffering from stress filled lives and "stress diseases", thus I wrote an published "Stress R Us" in 2018, 7 yrs ago. I respect the heck out of you and your work. I love your thread and went through all of it. Thank you! Have a blessed day in the natural world and know that you/we are not alone.
Hi Greeley, I read the Hansen paper too. I am a 30 year Overshoot Doomer veteran and agree that the future is grim for the young or already grim depending on if you have been beaten by anyone of the unprecedented global warming Jacked disasters like the LA fires. In addition to all the homes and businesses the fire has wiped out a big battery storage facility - so much for alt energy come to save the world from runaway climate change (already well underway). Climate change by itself is enough to cause a mass human die-back or extinction all on it's own, only it's not alone, it's not the only Overshoot predicament/consequence humans are facing, as many here know.
I'm very interested in looking at you book 'Stress R Us' and learning about "population density stress". Around the year 2000 I was sober for about 6 months and still looking for help when I came across Robert Sapolsky's Book 'Why Zebras Don't Get Ulcers'. It was a BIG help. Sapolsky is a Stanford Prof. His free, online, Human Behavioral Biology course on youtub and other books have helped me understand myself and the humans. Since your book is free online in the Stanford E-library is that a coincidence or is your work on stress related to Sapalosky's work on stress? Here is a link to download it.
https://mahb.stanford.edu/library-item/stress-r-us/
I do not consider human Overpopulation to be a root cause of Overshoot, I see it as a symptom/consequence.
The root cause is evolution under the dictates of thermodynamics.
NATURE ABHORS A GRADIENT
Below is a short essay that will give you the gist of what I believe and why.
* The purpose of life is to disperse energy*
"The truly dangerous ideas in science tend to be those that threaten the collective ego of humanity and knock us further off our pedestal of centrality. The Copernican Revolution abruptly dislodged humans from the center of the universe. The Darwinian Revolution yanked Homo sapiens from the pinnacle of life. Today another menacing revolution sits at the horizon of knowledge, patiently awaiting broad realization by the same egotistical species. The dangerous idea is this: the purpose of life is to disperse energy. Many of us are at least somewhat familiar with the second law of thermodynamics, the unwavering propensity of energy to disperse and, in doing so, transition from high quality to low quality forms. More generally, as stated by ecologist Eric Schneider, "nature abhors a gradient," where a gradient is simply a difference over a distance — for example, in temperature or pressure. Open physical systems — including those of the atmosphere, hydrosphere, and geosphere — all embody this law, being driven by the dispersal of energy, particularly the flow of heat, continually attempting to achieve equilibrium. Phenomena as diverse as lithospheric plate motions, the northward flow of the Gulf Stream, and
occurrence of deadly hurricanes are all examples of second law manifestations. There is growing evidence that life, the biosphere, is no different. It has often been said the life's complexity contravenes the second law, indicating the work either of a deity or some unknown natural process, depending on one's bias. Yet the evolution of life and the dynamics of ecosystems obey the second law mandate, functioning in large part to dissipate energy. They do so not by burning brightly and disappearing, like a fire torching a forest, but through stable metabolic cycles that store chemical energy and continually reduce the solar gradient. Photosynthetic plants, bacteria, and algae capture energy from the sun and form the core of all food webs.
Virtually all organisms, including humans, are, in a real sense, sunlight transmogrified, temporary waypoints in the flow of energy. Ecological succession, viewed from a thermodynamic perspective, is a process that maximizes the capture and degradation of energy. Similarly, the tendency for life to become more complex over the past 3.5 billion years (as well as the overall increase in biomass and organismal diversity through time) is not due simply to natural selection, as most evolutionists still argue, but also to nature's "efforts" to grab more and more of the sun's flow. The slow burn that characterizes life enables ecological systems to persist over deep time, changing in response to external and internal perturbations."
MORE
https://www.edge.org/response-detail/10674
Thanks for the very well thought out and reasoning, but we disagree on two points. BTW, I know Sapolsky's work, but he falls down in the behavioral analysis. Life is neg-entropic, it counters entropy and absorbs energy, rather than dissipating it. Also, IMHO, overshoot is the product of too many humans using too many natural resources and producing too much pollution. My book is the product of a lifelong career in medicine/psychiatry and I am grateful to the good folks at Stanford who keep it in their e-library for the free downloads. I wish you all the best and a blessed evening.
I have four (anglo) young women of childbearing age as children - two mine - two steps - and among the four there is only one child - an "accident." None of them plans on having another. Typical of their cohort, as nearly as I can tell. By contrast, there is a significant Hispanic population in the same region where I live - and they are having kids like nothing has changed. Sigh...
Ignorance isn't gonna be bliss for anyone much longer, i don't reckon. Young adults today know, or at least sense, they'll be lucky to feed and house just themselves. I can understand the very wealthy and the big landowners having some kids today, there's at least a hypothetical chance that something of their dynasties will make it through the bottleneck. That majority of us with no significant land and no real wealth? The most random individuals can expect to survive long into the future even just themselves.
How is that great?
I came to my sense when I was told two decades or so back that within 5 years the muskeg would melt and we'd boil... never happened... wont happen
https://fasteddynz.substack.com/p/the-three-pillars-of-bullshit
Changing one's mind is a difficult task for most people...
I follow the climate science, including C3S and the work of the iconic James Hansen. You might give it a whirl. 6mm of permafrost is melting globally annually as it absorbs our over production of heat energy, the equivalent of 20+ Hiroshima nuclear bomb blasts PER SECOND, where each one releases 63 trillion BTUs. Not so fast, Eddy.
Having children is a wonderful endeavor that requires the type of selflessness in a day-to-day sense along with love and purpose to survive the trying times. It doesn’t have to but it can. It brings city folks into homesteading and creates hope.
Even if we don’t make it to 2050, I will be so glad to be a mother. And by the way, I really think we will. It’s going to be hard but possible depending on where you live.
God bless you, Amy, and your family. Homesteading is key and staying close to Mother Nature has been my salvation, as an only, lonely child. I had to be independent and that probably explains why I was a lousy husband/father, I just didn't need anyone else enough to let them know how special they were to me. So, four ex-wives and 4 children who choose not tp have contact with me. My 25K+ psychiatry/general practice medical patients were my family and I was especially good at caring for them. Now, I need and very much enjoy this contact with lovely fellow humans like yourself. Have a blessed evening and day tomorrow and thereafter. The alarm that I'm raising about what appears to be coming with climate collapse, let alone the insanity in Washington, is for the unborn children who otherwise may have a terrible time just surviving in a collapsing climate and society in the very near future. Namaste'
Sorry you had to grow up lonely. That's a unique type of torture for a social animal. Hyperindependence is still celebrated in the US. People have kids and want them to sleep by themselves, feed themselves, play by themselves as fast as possible. A child's ability to do so is met with pride. The less they bother the parents, the better. It's backwards and frustrating. My kids are 1 and 3 so will be coming of age when things get really tough but I believe in them - not because they are independent but because, I hope, they continue to be connected to life and love and know how to work cooperatively. Yes, I love homesteading as well as community projects. It's great you can reflect and help people realize their humanness. We need more of it
Good piece. There is no solution for a civilization in the throes of decline and fall of course, which is precisely why they enter into their stage of decline and fall - the lack of solutions. It's truly shocking how short lived the material/economic zenith of this model lasted - a single generation. The very definintion of unsustainability. Essentally, we'd hit our best-before date by 1970 ending the explosive growth of wealth fueled by the harnessing of all that oil at incredibly favorable terms that kicked in on the heels of WWII. Apparently it's typical of a civilization reaching this milestone where their resource situation dictates stagnation to be able to string this "plateau" out through financial maneuvers like the lowering of interest rates, the abstraction of money from resource reality, and offering easier and easier credit to more and more people for about a half a century, and then it quits working. Which seems to be the case indeed with us. 2020 being the half-century mark and the world now becoming rapidly more chaotic. This time around it's even worse, however - we have all the colateral damage of the explosion of excess everything we witnessed in the 20th Century coming for our throats. Perhaps your comment about the last golden years will prove apt. Studies have indicated that people overall were happier during the Great Depression, in London during the blitz, and as soldiers when they are engaged in actual war, than we typically are in baseline, easy-peasey peaceful modern times. Why? Life has become real once more relative to our baseline programming.
Also the impact of living in community with a shared goal. It seems to suit our wiring to operate in smaller groups.
If you are living in a family of three with a shared goal today you are doing well.
Having worked for years in the oil and gas industry, I can say that much of my experience confirms your views...While Federally regulated gas pipelines must be maintained to fairly high standards, not so distribution pipelines...Some of those on the East Coast were built a century ago, and are wooden..The only reason that they still work at all is the clay soil holding them in place.Chicago's lines are decaying rapidly as well...As to renewables, we knew 40 years ago that they would do more harm than good, because they are not dispatchable, therefore requiring expensive gas fired spinning reserves..Wind power is a total fraud, since the energy required to build, install, maintain, and recycle them is far more than they will ever produce..Billy Bob Thornton discusses this at length in the new series Landman, which involves drilling and maintaining wells in the Permian...Solar definitely does not return its cost in energy, though might be right for homeowners facing huge utility bills, which will likely escalate in the future....
There will always be oil, gas and coal, but the cost of getting it out of the ground and to the end use market will continue to escalate to the point where it's effectively useless to our society..
At some point what remains... will stay in the ground ... forever
I don't know whether to laugh or cry. Citing Billy Bob Thornton as a source of science and engineering fact. No wonder.
Is China still intent on pushing forward with the Belt & Road initiative?
China presumes it will become the master of the universe. Its problem is that its workmanship is shoddy, and everything it builds "for the world" is not viable. Building a trade empire is honourable, in that trade helps lift the world out of poverty. The pressures against it including rampant fraud from within, and energy pressures as the Honest Sorcerer illustrates.
It seems to me, China is internally giving up. It gave it a shot, but its people are from a Communist background, and that sentiment does not lend itself well to free enterprise, which is essential for this kind of venture.
Inevitably, the world is going to retract its trade routes due to energy constrictions. I suspect that China might be able to benefit by and with countries near it, but anything further out will be expensive and unmaintainable.
So, now what? We are better at nailing the problems than dealing what to do about them, which I keep pointing to and trying to deal with. Read the last part after “What if there was NO techno fix.” That is what we should be putting heads as smart as your together to deal with, which is on my drawing board to invite.
One movement for this is called Localism. You are probably familiar with it. Generally, it is the notion that resources needed for living must be sourced within a few kilometers, and no more than 100.
In order for Localism to work, external influences need to be muted, so that locals can work together in order to form solutions which are right for them.
This is a challenge, when things like Facebook and Instagram capture so much attention. Substack is a good start, but breaking the big data bond is an essential first step to sustainable autonomy.
You’re pointing to the intelligent way we should be thinking and acting. Bio-regionalism is a phrase in play for an intelligent redesigning. But first we have to get a perspective where humanity is motivated by caring about our mutuality and not by self-service.
There was a rather good Nate Hagens podcast recently covering this. It feels very much like a Chicken and Egg problem. Does it start from grass roots, or through some kind of generally understood decree from a benevolent group of influential leaders.
The problem is, that neither has any chance of being heard when the focus is not on the concerns of the individual, but on compelling images from everywhere else.
Humans are a myopic species. Are there any hidden paths to break the lock?
Edit: BioFi was mentioned in the podcast - https://www.hylo.com/groups/biofi
These guys https://fasteddynz.substack.com/p/who-runs-the-world do not harbour delusional thinking... they understand that when this happens https://fasteddynz.substack.com/p/financial-system-supply-chain-cross
8B+ starve to death...
That is why they injected 6B+ with the 'vaccine'... they are exterminating us https://fasteddynz.substack.com/p/the-ultimate-extinction-plan-uep
That ... is the solution ... the only solution ... the final solution
This headline has been making the rounds:
Bill Gates ‘Predicts’ Black Swan Event Will Depopulate 94% of Global Population
Perhaps it will happen the way you see it. But, just in case there is a James Bond style finale to the effort... I'm going to just hedge my bets by living in the middle of nowhere, at least some of the time.
Yes, many will carry on thinking it's the 'left', Bill Gates and big government who are the 'they' and not Trump/Musk/Big Oil and Blackrock.
The energy, environmental and climate crisis doesn't care who we blame.
Billions are going down regardless, not because of the 'vaccine'- that was just more income generation, but because of the cost of producing energy and its cost to the Planet.
The benevolent leaders would have to uplift humanity, and that could be a fine way to do it. They would deliberate about getting humanity united as sacred creatures and not the selfish ones we are now. I have hi-fived Nate Hagens, who is discovering that unseen world of spirit where he’s looking deeper than surface levels, like in this great podcast he did: https://substack.com/@suzannetaylor/p-149922938:
I think Nate has the right idea. Ive been working on a solution which fits well within his thought process. Im pretty sure he is extremely busy, but Im hoping he will be able to read a five pager overview I have written on it at some point.
I don't believe that any change will happen top down, because the Technosphere as Dmitri Orlov calls it, has no interest in changing its path. For that reason, only a bottom up solution has a chance of working. It would need to be community by community with success stories, before a greater audience would pay attention.
The solution needs to be comprehensive, and include a standalone parallel micro economy, on a town by town basis.
I fail to see any ... intelligence ... https://fasteddynz.substack.com/p/the-dumbest-species-ever
Like this? https://fasteddynz.substack.com/p/the-dumbest-species-ever
we will go on with the fantasy of 'normality' until the grocery stores and petrol stations no longer dispense our necessary 'survival goods'---and then things will get nasty as we enter 'denial' mode for as long as were are able.
politicians will slide into emergency mode---which means using the military to control civil unrest.
that will get worse as denial gets more and more intense
timetables are impossible to place of course...the end times for one region or group, might still allow another group to survive a while longer.
i've tried to lay down the basic parameters:--
https://www.amazon.co.uk/End-More-resources-humankind-unsustainable-ebook/dp/B00D0ADPFY
There are solutions but everyone pretends not to understand them so as not to risk their job. Just read the website https://WWW.SPAWHW.EU
Actually ... this is the end of the world...
https://fasteddynz.substack.com/p/the-utter-futility-of-doomsday-prepping
yes we confront a discontinuity. i have attempted to describe ways to find the other side of the discontinuity
https://bio-paradigm.blogspot.com/2010/09/mechanical-logic-vs-biological-logic.html
and
https://bio-paradigm.blogspot.com/2010/09/mechanical-logic-vs-biological-logic.html
Re: infrastructure maintenance/repair.
Few fossil fuel providers properly decommission and clean up old or damaged wells/pipelines. Even where required by regulation, coopted and corrupted governments at all levels, even (especially?) in the West, allow them to endlessly defer such obligations. As usual, public coffers will have to be raided to clean up corporations' messes.
Decommissioning a full size nuke plant takes decades and tons of money (and diesel). And concrete, if the plan is to bury the low-level radioactive material leftover from demolition. Of course, there is still no proven practicable plan on how to safely dispose of the highly radioactive material like fuel rods. Once again, deferment of decommissioning is all most jurisdictions can come up with. All of which should cause major concern when discussing the proposed (but still not functional) SMRs, especially as suggestions have been made that these could be operated under the aegis of small municipalities and BigTech corporations (e.g. next to their AI datacentres). Oversight and responsibility? Not much. And the cleanup costs will once again accrue to the taxpayers who don't benefit from tax loopholes, credits, and deferments.
-CT
Are you enjoying the cold showers?
Are you walking to work? Are you living in a cave?
Do you not think that if global warming was the threat to our species that bbccnn tells us it is (ad nauseam) we’d actually be doing something about it?
Do you not think that the fellas who run the world would meet at Davos and hammer out an urgent plan to eliminate wasteful, climate damaging activities?
Do you not think they would ban things like:
private jets and non-essential air travel
yachts
ice rinks
sports stadiums
resorts
ski lifts
Taylor Swift concerts
Nope. No plan. No bans.
Instead we are told that solar panels, windmills and EVs — which are all manufactured using enormous amounts of fossil fuels are the answer. Does anyone other than a barnyard animal actually believe these will reduce carbon emissions? If so then you get reclassified as a retarded moron and you should seek a rope and a strong branch and cure yourself of your stupidity.
Meanwhile Al Gore and Elon continue to fly on their private jets, Obama buys a sea level holiday home in Hawaii, and best of all, Leo invests in a multi million dollar concrete ‘eco- hotel’ inches above the water line in Belize. Odd given any day now sea levels are certain to rise 18 feet.
The thing is, even if global warming was real there is nothing that could be done about it without collapsing civilization. Banning high energy, useless activities such as air travel and tourism, would result in massive job losses and degrowth. Degrowth would lead to more job losses and before you know it we’d be trapped in a deflationary death spiral and the global economy would collapse.
If I know this, the Ministry of Truth knows this, yet they pound us with endless global warming articles urging immediate action.
The immediate action to deal with global warming generally involves transitioning off of fossil fuels. The UK, which is experiencing a severe affordable energy crisis that will soon collapse the country, wants to triple down on their renewable energy pledge.
According to recent statements by Keir Starmer, the UK Prime Minister, the country needs to significantly increase its renewable energy production, aiming to become a "clean energy superpower" by achieving at least 95% of its electricity generation from clean sources like renewables and nuclear power by 2030; this includes plans to drastically expand offshore and onshore wind, solar power, and potentially new nuclear projects to meet this goal.
Starmer KNOWS that this is impossible. He KNOWS that solar panels and windmills are dirty tech and are by no measure renewable. He knows that there is no way to store ‘renewable’ energy other than using extremely expensive batteries manufactured by burning fossil fuels. He KNOWS that there is already an affordable energy crisis and that therefore attempting to build out storage would only drive energy costs far higher and exacerbate the problem. HE KNOWS ALL OF THIS!!!
Yet he insists that renewable energy is the solution. Because the barnyard animals demand a solution. The barnyard animals will not accept that we are running out of affordable energy and on the verge of collapse. They demand more solar panels and windmills and EVs. Because the MSM has told them to think that this is a solution.
There is no solution. There is only collapse and starvation.
More https://fasteddynz.substack.com/p/are-you-enjoying-the-cold-showers
yes i intuited this a while ago: https://www.researchgate.net/publication/256048802_Sustainable_Investment_Means_Energy_Independence_From_Fossil_Fuels
and have been exploring future parameters:
https://www.researchgate.net/publication/333581837_Is_it_true_that_'Small_Is_Beautiful'
we need a paradigm shift: https://bio-paradigm.blogspot.com/2010/09/mechanical-logic-vs-biological-logic.html
How true..."Economic growth at the cost of environmental disaster." How many privileged Americans think about conservation? The need to stop spending money on unnecessary goods and services. Stop wasting the resources! They wind up supporting the Dead Food and Dead People Industries. People down through history got by with far less than the average American has today. They did not create the damage that has been done in the last 189 years, since the U.S. patent office opened.
Charles Marohn, founder of Strong Towns, has been hammering away at this very issue for about a decade -- the unsustainability of the American post-World-War-II suburban experiment.
https://www.strongtowns.org/journal/2020/5/14/americas-growth-ponzi-scheme-md2020