Modern, overdeveloped societies in the West are already in a severe crisis, which will eventually turn into a long global emergency in the decades ahead.
A quite realistic asessment of our failing civilization. We have existing examples of how this process works. Haití, for instance, has been in population overshoot and state of collapse for ages. Government ceases to exist, and a more primitive, feudalistic local organization takes its place: local gangs. But we also have worse examples of present day collapse: Palestines in Gaza, crowded and desperate, make an attempt at breakout and are crushed brutally.
Haiti has not collapsed - I was there 6 months after the quake... they still had food.. and some electricity... petrol was available... flights into the country were available
Haiti had to repay a debt to France after their independence in order to be allowed to trade with them again, not being completed until 1947. The Ordinance of Charles X wasn't repealed by the French Parliament until 2016:
So you yourself your immediate family need resources, sources of cheap high protein food and plenty of fat. You folks with dietary restrictions might find hunger the best sause. Rice flower corn meal sugar yeast oats beans dried milk dehydrated eggs. Pasta. Spices. You find meat or vegitables or fruit you must know how to prepare and store that. Barter that skill if you know how to do it. Other skills like car repair with available tools knowing how to filter water so its drinkable water. These are all skills if you know them you can barter with. Clothing repair and shoe repair another tool that will be in demand you can barter. These are some but you need enough resources for your family to live 3 or 4 months. On the move if necessary. Picking native plants for food and medicine may save you.You also have to know who in your family has proficiency In weapons because the have nots will take from the haves. And I want you to be one of the haves. You cooking skill should include wood cook stoves made in the dirt as you travel. The wood becomes charcoal when added to food grade sand (for fish tanks) you have water filtration for already boiled water. Any group that you might consider joining should have complimentary skill so you can each cover something the other group doesn't know. Find yourself some place out of the way, a cabin, preferably with a basement incase severe fighting comes to you. You should always hide first as getting mixed up in that kind of thing is dangerous, solves nothing, and gets people hurt or killed. My parent were peppers in their own way so yeah
I totally agree with your prognosis. Now, can we start building local networks of people who realize what is coming and start to collaborate in preparation? How can your readers in a geographical area connect with one another?
The Int'l Degrowth Network (and especially the group in Burlington VT, near where I live) are delusional. They want both sustainable communities AND open borders. Sorry, but you can't have fundamentally incompatible goals and expect to be at all effective let alone to be taken seriously.
I don't necessarily support any of the groups' aims in the link I gave. Nor frankly have I spent any time reviewing any of the material or groups on there other than one geographically close to me, and like you was a little disappointed. I simply offered it as an answer to your question "How can your readers in a geographical area connect with one another?"
This right here, as just one example of those delusions. I started drafting a reply to Kent but it got long. Maybe I'll just go ahead and post it later.
The reason "collapse" isn't overtly recognized/discussed by many people is that they don't want to let go of the system that gave them privilege in return for mouthing their handlers' social and political shibboleths while holding themselves over those who create and maintain actual material civilization.
The UVM people I worked with and knew considered "sustainability" to be a sort of calligraphic flourish on Bernie Sanders type socialism as usual AND they expected their cozy academic/permastate sinecures to exist in perpetuity (through the state taxing others). Getting paid to promote organic Pop Tarts.
The talkers-for-a-living will ride that bomb to ground zero, so long as it keeps them from ever having to go pull cable, bend conduit, run a digger, load/offload TEUs, or otherwise hump physics to maintain infrastructure/logistics. What did they say to coal miners thrown out of work--"learn to code."
“The reason "collapse" isn't overtly recognized/discussed by many people is that they don't want to let go of the system that gave them privilege in return for mouthing their handlers' social and political shibboleths while holding themselves over those who create and maintain actual material civilization.”
This! Ive been working on this as well, trying to implement training in skills for surviving in austere conditions. People aren’t even thinking about community security.
I have signed up for short course in how to ambush farmers ... the focus is on being able to kill with a sniper rifle from 1km away.... what you do is the evening before the Kill Shot... is you and your gang of trained killers set up shop in a concealed position with a clear line of sight to the farmer's garden under the cover of night...
Then the next morning when the farmer steps into the garden to till the soil... you fire a bullet into his head...
Then you help yourself to his women and veggies and chickens... in whatever order you please.
In the UK they are called “local resilience forums” (LRF) and “climate action networks” (CAN). Between the two they are probably your best bet to connect to people with the skills and mindset to build the communities we need to survive.
"We"? Who is that? The question has no answer except in the rearview mirror. You may or may not have local networks arise. They will do so organically on an "as-needed" basis or not. This is the way life has always worked. Cos today? People have to get on with the business of today. No one is going to sign up to do tomorrow's business today, for one thing, it's not a functional approach. When the business of today become networking on survival with local folks, that's what you will be doing. Hopefully there will be some local folks worth networking with for you.
Won’t a drastically reduced world population actually make a lot of these issues easier to deal with? As you rightly point out, population numbers are trending down for a host of reasons. One only needs to look at the population pyramids of the modern world to see that a 40%+ decline in population over the next 50 - 100 years is in progress. Seems like this will extend the useful life of energy reserves and make alternatives more viable because demand will be lower by default.
To be clear, I am not advocating for population control or anything of the sort. Nor am I saying that this means the proverbial Line can keep going up and to the right. Rather it seems that most decisions being made are to deal with these conundrums, not to actually solve them. It strikes me that the powers that be understand all of this and are trying (crudely and riddled with major issues) to manage through this in a way that doesn’t lead to catastrophe.
I agree that there is an element of government-approved corporate consolidation to keep the grift going. But I can’t help but think that physics will help bring an end to that. Not in some dramatic way, but in a reorienting of resources such that they are allocated based on underlying factors, not top down directives.
As you say, collapse isn’t some Event, but a long process of adjustment in which we all must deal with physical reality. Given this, it seems to me that the best thing a person can do is understand that this isn’t something to hide from in a bunker. Rather you must live actively and try and use this understanding to your advantage.
You say, "population numbers are trending down", and that is simply not the case. World population is increasing, and will continue to increase for many years.
The financial system tried to vaporize a few times in the past 20 years. It is always surprising how much money can be printed to plug the holes.
As Sorcerer writes, each time this happens, it introduces new inefficiencies and opportunities for the wealthy to claim more.
For now, at least, we do have enough food to feed most people. Maybe war changes that. But if tomorrow we had a 20-30% drop in the stock market, nothing would change about the reality that the economy does still have the capacity to function (food, gas, electricity). Yes, money printing would be necessary to prop it up for a while longer; and yes, each time we print, there's some loss of faith, price of gold goes up, etc, etc.
People will work hard to get food back into markets, etc. Yes, the poorest will suffer, and yes, over the past decades, especially, we have substantially reduced the resiliency of our systems, but barring nuclear war or a major electromagnetic event that destroys all the computers, probably most things will continue to muddle along, just always a little worse, and always more worse for the poor.
The supply chain requires letters of credit in order to function. So - a financial institution that can finance, email/internet for transactions, and credit-worthiness of the entity needing the letter of credit. I'm sure this is a vast over-simplification.
People may WANT to get the food and supplies back into markets, but how do they do that? The infrastructure must be able to reboot. Backup systems, commercial batteries, diesel generators, etc. must be able to be resupplied. Your financial transaction must have a way to get through.
Same way they did it in Bassett, Virginia several years ago - by locating next to a couple of fast food chains and turning French fry oil into fuel. Or other vegetable sources, what have you. Look closer, more local. That quirky neighbor who is always tinkering in his shed. There are always people figuring out new ways of doing things. I don’t think innovation is going to evaporate, ever.
You have to understand that once the population stabilizes, demand for huge systems will be less overall. Few will be commuting to work. Few will be farming thousands of acres. Everything will be less, everything will be small. Local. Quiet.
If you have always lived in cities, this may be hard to understand. For those in the hinterlands and small towns, it’s kind of obvious.
No one said there would be anything. Don’t read my words and cherry pick seeds for your fever dreams. The point is, and was, people create new and innovative ways to do things all the time, and diesel can be made from vegetable oil. We do not need fossil fuels. But you’d rather sit in your corner and snarl and rant and rave at thoughtful people on the internet so you do you. Have a nice day.
I lived in Hong Kong for 16 years and continue to do business in HK China... I lived in Indonesia for 7 years... New Zealand for 8 years... I have travelled to 50+ countries...
B, Thank you, You have more of the collapse pieces assembled correctly than most. You have included some views of several unfolding futures. However, you have not put numbers on "who is going to get injured and when." Let me provide one view in the form of short animation-- Civilization's: "Running out of gas" story. youtu.be/b5z5R6xqEG0 9 minutes
There are several more short videos that may help with your project. They are posted at www.skil.org. I even suggest the design of a civilization that would not collapse. ”A non-injury producing Civilization” 55 minutes
The owners are likely to overlay war, famine and pestilence over the degradation taking place in the hyperfinancialized west.
Don't bite.
Grow vegetables; give away what you can't eat or store effectively. Be a friend. Have a good bike that is well fitted to your body that can carry modest luggage or groceries. Ride it at least 4 hours a week, though you may have to work up to that.
Pray and meditate, in a group if you can find one that you fit into.
I'd agree. Most historical evidence indicates that in such cases people tend to group together and co-operate. It seems to me that the individualistic ripping- your-face-off-for-a-can of beans is mostly an Americanism, promulgated by Hollywood memes and the mass ownership of guns, which isn't relevant to the vast majority of the countries of the world.
Once the fossil fuel sources dry up, any would-be marauders would be horse and foot bound just like everyone else. And mostly foot-bound. I think it has been Dr William Rees pointing out about horses and the current lack of.
I also agree with you and Mark. There will always be a few assholes. But not everyone is an asshole. As Mr Rogers said - look for the helpers. There are always helpers.
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.
Not really. You’re missing my point that I can make friends, support others, and still be prepared for the collapse. I think you’re assuming that being prepared means surviving through it. Maybe it just means being prepared to make my exit with my friends and family before it gets too bad to bother to keep going.
Indeed the majority will die of starvation ... but many will be murdered and eaten
Keep in mind this time the famine will be permanent -- and the world will have collapsed...
So there will be no police to stop the mayhem..... in fact they will be participants.
Soon, reports began to emerge of rampant cannibalism. The first cases were usually kept quiet. People would notice a body by the side of the road and return late at night to take a few pieces of flesh before hiding the corpse. Or back-alley butcher shops would suddenly have a supply of fresh meat available at high prices. And of course, the starving customers preferred not to ask questions about where it had come from. But eventually, even this horrible source of food was exhausted. And people stopped waiting for their neighbors to die before they ate them.
By 1933, the rumors of cannibalism were too widely spread to be ignored. So, the Soviets dispatched their secret police to investigate. What they found was shocking. Not only were people cannibalizing the dead, but there were thousands of cases of people committing murder and eating their victims. Often, these victims weren’t strangers, but family members. Soviet records recorded cases where parents killed their children and shared the flesh among the rest of the family. In one shocking case, a family didn’t even wait until they were out of food to kill their daughter-in-law. Instead, they fed some of her corpse to their pigs in order to fatten them up and ate the rest themselves.
Of course, the children who were the most frequent victims were also desperate, as was recorded by a woman who ran an orphanage in Kharkov. “One day the children suddenly fell silent, we turned around to see what was happening, and they were eating the smallest child, little Petrus,” she wrote, “And Petrus was doing the same, he was tearing strips from himself and eating them, he ate as much as he could. The other children put their lips to his wounds and drank his blood.” Not only were people cannibalizing each other, they were cannibalizing themselves.
Not only were people cannibalizing the dead, but there were thousands of cases of people committing murder and eating their victims. Often, these victims weren’t strangers, but family members. Soviet records recorded cases where parents killed their children and shared the flesh among the rest of the family.
In one shocking case, a family didn’t even wait until they were out of food to kill their daughter-in-law. Instead, they fed some of her corpse to their pigs in order to fatten them up and ate the rest themselves.
The Amish where I live are transitioning to e-bikes and a solar panel. It’s amazing to see what they can haul in the small “baby buggy” type trailers they attach.
I think a collapse is like Hemingway’s description of bankruptcy, “Slowly, and then all at once”. In the West, we have a debt-based financial system. It requires perpetual growth, or it will collapse. Growth means growth in capital, labor, and inputs.
(Why growth? - All money is loaned into existence at interest, so it requires $10 + interest to pay back the original $10 that was loaned out. The sum, greater than the original $10, must come from somewhere, must come from future growth.)
If fiat currency is a demand on future units of energy, then growth is based on the (unwarranted) assumption that future energy will be available to satisfy my demand. Right now, the economy runs on the delusion that this will be the case, i.e., the energy will be there to satisfy all of the existing claims.
So the question arises, what happens when it is clear that growth is no longer possible? Will I loan out $10, knowing that I will only get $8 back? Wasn’t this the issue in 2008, a potential locking up of the financial system? Banks did not want to loan out money because they weren’t sure that they were going to get paid back. Supply chains run on this liquidity, this willingness to loan out money. When the supply chains stop, and the workers go back to their villages (China), are they coming back? – I think that once the supply chains break, I am not sure that they will come back.
I think that the Western financial system will collapse, a bunch of people will starve to death, and then, depending on the bandit situation, regional supply chains may spring up to take up the slack, but these are big ifs. (FE would point to the spent fuel ponds scattered around and say that vaxxing (predominately) the Western world, was not an accident. Sometimes you have to be cruel to be kind, amirite?)
recently i discovered there is a 'post-doom' wikipedia article - the concept was articulated by michael dowd, who died last october at the age of 64
in some ways collapse is already under way, but it might be like going bankrupt - slowly, step by step, and then suddenly all at once - the gradualness of what's going on now might have a major inflection point
This is very good. Ian Welsh has been hammering on these points for a long time. "ianwelsh.net", an excellent site. Others- William Gibson, the SF author, has a concept of "The Jackpot" which is a realistic simulation as outlined above, leading to a much smaller population of survivors.
I believe that railroads will re-emerge as the dominant form of transportation, due to economics of fuel use. But, they won't be the same mix of train sizes. Very small solar-powered/large-battery railcars are feasible today. If I was managing a "family office" for a multigeneration fortune today, I would buy railroads and rights-of-way.
Good overview. FIY, I often point out that "REAL downshifting is necessary for our own mental health anyway, even if limitless energy were available", but it is also something that would, in your words, "make collapse much more human".
How did you collapse? First slowly - then all at once.
The deterioration has been underway for decades... but the Central Banks have been fending off the implosion with stimulus.
Alas what cannot continue will stop .... actually it will not stop ... they will continue to try to delay the implosion --- but the the stimulus will push on a string at some point
We edge closer to that moment every day.
When it stops working --- the financial system will implode... the global supply chains will implode... there will be no food... you won't be able to buy a toothbrush....
Trade-Off Financial System Supply-Chain Cross-Contagion: a study in global systemic collapse.
Fortunately The Men Who Run the World have worked out a plan to minimize the suffering... what's the point of hunting down your neighbour's kids and raping and murdering them when everyone is going to die anyway....
A breath of fresh air and honesty, thank you. One of the most serious consequences of this very likely scenario of a stop-start collapse, very unevenly distributed spatially and taking decades, is that it will make possible a wilful denial and deception (and self-deception) about the true nature of what is happening. The developed world establishment has always "accepted" that there are parts of the world and parts of our societies where poverty, social desperation, violence etc are "difficult to eradicate"; thus, under this likely scenario of a slow collapse, it will be relatively easy for people to simply enlarge the mental area of these problematic zones and thus avoid facing the bigger picture of what is happening, even as it engulfs more and more of our world.
Indeed, the tendency towards greater and greater economic inequality, with a super rich class who are more and more powerful and insulated from most of planetary reality and continue promoting high-consumption, high-exploitation visions, will counterintuitively become portrayed as the evidence that our human status quo can continue, and that the "problems" come from the growing numbers of people who defy the establishment and the law because they are forced into desperate measures to obtain the essentials of life such as food, housing, employment, etc. Hence the clear growth of the far right in many parts of the world. There are really only two possible directions for the social evolution in this process: either we (and especially the rich 20%) accept the global nature of our overshoot predicament, and that we must work collectively to find our way through it, with global justice and rights, and ecological realities as our guides; or we will head more and more directly into extremes of inequality, fascism and barbarism as the rich effectively "mine" the poor. Neither path offers a clear future for a human civilization but only the first option offers any hope for maintaining what we currently consider human values and human rights.
True, it will be nothing like the movies. You paint one possibility but there are many. However, I doubt that humans will eventually get back to a "truly sustainable way of life." I doubt humans ever could, once that first digging stick was invented. I also can't see the top 0.1% having holidays abroad if others can't because there would be no air traffic infrastructure without the requisite demand though I guess some may have the ability to use private jets on private runways without too much risk of air or ground collisions, provided they stocked up on jet fuel, so long as the craft don't need repairs or maintenance.
Lets take a look at what happened in NYC when the power went out - see the video -- reality check....
https://fasteddynz.substack.com/p/the-utter-futility-of-doomsday-prepping
A quite realistic asessment of our failing civilization. We have existing examples of how this process works. Haití, for instance, has been in population overshoot and state of collapse for ages. Government ceases to exist, and a more primitive, feudalistic local organization takes its place: local gangs. But we also have worse examples of present day collapse: Palestines in Gaza, crowded and desperate, make an attempt at breakout and are crushed brutally.
Most people aren’t thinking about how to form community with robust security skills to stave off gang rule.
Probably because they are aware of this https://fasteddynz.substack.com/p/the-utter-futility-of-doomsday-prepping
Haiti has not collapsed - I was there 6 months after the quake... they still had food.. and some electricity... petrol was available... flights into the country were available
I have known some people from Haiti and I don’t think there was anything to fall from. Collapse? Were they ever even on their feet?
Haiti had to repay a debt to France after their independence in order to be allowed to trade with them again, not being completed until 1947. The Ordinance of Charles X wasn't repealed by the French Parliament until 2016:
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Haitian_independence_debt
France has yet to offer any reparations, but somehow Haiti is America's responsibility.
Flights suspended... not sure if they are restored yet.
https://www.cbsnews.com/miami/news/american-airlines-suspends-flights-to-haiti/
So you yourself your immediate family need resources, sources of cheap high protein food and plenty of fat. You folks with dietary restrictions might find hunger the best sause. Rice flower corn meal sugar yeast oats beans dried milk dehydrated eggs. Pasta. Spices. You find meat or vegitables or fruit you must know how to prepare and store that. Barter that skill if you know how to do it. Other skills like car repair with available tools knowing how to filter water so its drinkable water. These are all skills if you know them you can barter with. Clothing repair and shoe repair another tool that will be in demand you can barter. These are some but you need enough resources for your family to live 3 or 4 months. On the move if necessary. Picking native plants for food and medicine may save you.You also have to know who in your family has proficiency In weapons because the have nots will take from the haves. And I want you to be one of the haves. You cooking skill should include wood cook stoves made in the dirt as you travel. The wood becomes charcoal when added to food grade sand (for fish tanks) you have water filtration for already boiled water. Any group that you might consider joining should have complimentary skill so you can each cover something the other group doesn't know. Find yourself some place out of the way, a cabin, preferably with a basement incase severe fighting comes to you. You should always hide first as getting mixed up in that kind of thing is dangerous, solves nothing, and gets people hurt or killed. My parent were peppers in their own way so yeah
I totally agree with your prognosis. Now, can we start building local networks of people who realize what is coming and start to collaborate in preparation? How can your readers in a geographical area connect with one another?
This is the overriding question for me.
Check out this Degrowth Database, it has lots of local efforts and data
https://docs.google.com/spreadsheets/d/18Z7kTs0smhOU9S3DyGNJ_MBQeu3XKW2qdxa3unOEn6I/edit#gid=0
The Int'l Degrowth Network (and especially the group in Burlington VT, near where I live) are delusional. They want both sustainable communities AND open borders. Sorry, but you can't have fundamentally incompatible goals and expect to be at all effective let alone to be taken seriously.
I don't necessarily support any of the groups' aims in the link I gave. Nor frankly have I spent any time reviewing any of the material or groups on there other than one geographically close to me, and like you was a little disappointed. I simply offered it as an answer to your question "How can your readers in a geographical area connect with one another?"
Thank you Natasha.
The way to find the farmers is to watch for smoke coming out of the chimney.
How do borders help?
If you have to ask you’ll never understand the answer.
Try me.
This right here, as just one example of those delusions. I started drafting a reply to Kent but it got long. Maybe I'll just go ahead and post it later.
The reason "collapse" isn't overtly recognized/discussed by many people is that they don't want to let go of the system that gave them privilege in return for mouthing their handlers' social and political shibboleths while holding themselves over those who create and maintain actual material civilization.
The UVM people I worked with and knew considered "sustainability" to be a sort of calligraphic flourish on Bernie Sanders type socialism as usual AND they expected their cozy academic/permastate sinecures to exist in perpetuity (through the state taxing others). Getting paid to promote organic Pop Tarts.
The talkers-for-a-living will ride that bomb to ground zero, so long as it keeps them from ever having to go pull cable, bend conduit, run a digger, load/offload TEUs, or otherwise hump physics to maintain infrastructure/logistics. What did they say to coal miners thrown out of work--"learn to code."
“The reason "collapse" isn't overtly recognized/discussed by many people is that they don't want to let go of the system that gave them privilege in return for mouthing their handlers' social and political shibboleths while holding themselves over those who create and maintain actual material civilization.”
That is exactly one problem.
Delusional Fools
hahahahaha... 8 billion .. without food... think about that
This! Ive been working on this as well, trying to implement training in skills for surviving in austere conditions. People aren’t even thinking about community security.
https://fasteddynz.substack.com/p/the-utter-futility-of-doomsday-prepping
I have signed up for short course in how to ambush farmers ... the focus is on being able to kill with a sniper rifle from 1km away.... what you do is the evening before the Kill Shot... is you and your gang of trained killers set up shop in a concealed position with a clear line of sight to the farmer's garden under the cover of night...
Then the next morning when the farmer steps into the garden to till the soil... you fire a bullet into his head...
Then you help yourself to his women and veggies and chickens... in whatever order you please.
Did I mention that https://fasteddynz.substack.com/p/the-utter-futility-of-doomsday-prepping
In the UK they are called “local resilience forums” (LRF) and “climate action networks” (CAN). Between the two they are probably your best bet to connect to people with the skills and mindset to build the communities we need to survive.
I have no interest in "building local networks" with people who've been freeloaders for the past 60 years.
"We"? Who is that? The question has no answer except in the rearview mirror. You may or may not have local networks arise. They will do so organically on an "as-needed" basis or not. This is the way life has always worked. Cos today? People have to get on with the business of today. No one is going to sign up to do tomorrow's business today, for one thing, it's not a functional approach. When the business of today become networking on survival with local folks, that's what you will be doing. Hopefully there will be some local folks worth networking with for you.
Where can you get one of those red houses?
Norway
They look Swedish to me. Very common here.
Sherwin-Williams
Thank you B🙏
Won’t a drastically reduced world population actually make a lot of these issues easier to deal with? As you rightly point out, population numbers are trending down for a host of reasons. One only needs to look at the population pyramids of the modern world to see that a 40%+ decline in population over the next 50 - 100 years is in progress. Seems like this will extend the useful life of energy reserves and make alternatives more viable because demand will be lower by default.
To be clear, I am not advocating for population control or anything of the sort. Nor am I saying that this means the proverbial Line can keep going up and to the right. Rather it seems that most decisions being made are to deal with these conundrums, not to actually solve them. It strikes me that the powers that be understand all of this and are trying (crudely and riddled with major issues) to manage through this in a way that doesn’t lead to catastrophe.
I agree that there is an element of government-approved corporate consolidation to keep the grift going. But I can’t help but think that physics will help bring an end to that. Not in some dramatic way, but in a reorienting of resources such that they are allocated based on underlying factors, not top down directives.
As you say, collapse isn’t some Event, but a long process of adjustment in which we all must deal with physical reality. Given this, it seems to me that the best thing a person can do is understand that this isn’t something to hide from in a bunker. Rather you must live actively and try and use this understanding to your advantage.
Justin Frank, you are mistaken:
You say, "population numbers are trending down", and that is simply not the case. World population is increasing, and will continue to increase for many years.
https://ourworldindata.org/population-growth-over-time
When the financial system vapourizes... the entire world will within hours ... descend into chaos.
The supermarkets will within a day or so be looted and permanently emptied.
There will be no power - so no water. There will be no petrol.
This is what collapse light looks like - black in NYC 1997
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=4krDA1kjsP0
This was a temporary situation - and yet...
The coming collapse will be rapid - and global... and we will be killing and eating each other as we face starvation.
Fortunately the men who run the world will not allow it to come to this - they are exterminating us
https://www.headsupster.com/forumthread?shortId=220
The financial system tried to vaporize a few times in the past 20 years. It is always surprising how much money can be printed to plug the holes.
As Sorcerer writes, each time this happens, it introduces new inefficiencies and opportunities for the wealthy to claim more.
For now, at least, we do have enough food to feed most people. Maybe war changes that. But if tomorrow we had a 20-30% drop in the stock market, nothing would change about the reality that the economy does still have the capacity to function (food, gas, electricity). Yes, money printing would be necessary to prop it up for a while longer; and yes, each time we print, there's some loss of faith, price of gold goes up, etc, etc.
People will work hard to get food back into markets, etc. Yes, the poorest will suffer, and yes, over the past decades, especially, we have substantially reduced the resiliency of our systems, but barring nuclear war or a major electromagnetic event that destroys all the computers, probably most things will continue to muddle along, just always a little worse, and always more worse for the poor.
The supply chain requires letters of credit in order to function. So - a financial institution that can finance, email/internet for transactions, and credit-worthiness of the entity needing the letter of credit. I'm sure this is a vast over-simplification.
People may WANT to get the food and supplies back into markets, but how do they do that? The infrastructure must be able to reboot. Backup systems, commercial batteries, diesel generators, etc. must be able to be resupplied. Your financial transaction must have a way to get through.
How do you produce diesel when the global supply chains are gone - permanently?
Same way they did it in Bassett, Virginia several years ago - by locating next to a couple of fast food chains and turning French fry oil into fuel. Or other vegetable sources, what have you. Look closer, more local. That quirky neighbor who is always tinkering in his shed. There are always people figuring out new ways of doing things. I don’t think innovation is going to evaporate, ever.
You have to understand that once the population stabilizes, demand for huge systems will be less overall. Few will be commuting to work. Few will be farming thousands of acres. Everything will be less, everything will be small. Local. Quiet.
If you have always lived in cities, this may be hard to understand. For those in the hinterlands and small towns, it’s kind of obvious.
Wow.... you think there will be fast food outlets after the global economy collapses...
I am surprised you are able to read and write
No one said there would be anything. Don’t read my words and cherry pick seeds for your fever dreams. The point is, and was, people create new and innovative ways to do things all the time, and diesel can be made from vegetable oil. We do not need fossil fuels. But you’d rather sit in your corner and snarl and rant and rave at thoughtful people on the internet so you do you. Have a nice day.
There will be no petrol... cuz expensive energy is why the economy is going to collapse
Not global.
America & the "west" are going down hard.
Have you been outside the west besides to a tourist trap?
I lived in Hong Kong for 16 years and continue to do business in HK China... I lived in Indonesia for 7 years... New Zealand for 8 years... I have travelled to 50+ countries...
I can confirm that China is fucked https://fasteddynz.substack.com/p/china-no-way-out
B, Thank you, You have more of the collapse pieces assembled correctly than most. You have included some views of several unfolding futures. However, you have not put numbers on "who is going to get injured and when." Let me provide one view in the form of short animation-- Civilization's: "Running out of gas" story. youtu.be/b5z5R6xqEG0 9 minutes
There are several more short videos that may help with your project. They are posted at www.skil.org. I even suggest the design of a civilization that would not collapse. ”A non-injury producing Civilization” 55 minutes
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=dYR5Ix-1wMs. Jackalpert4@gmail.com
Hilarious!!!
The owners are likely to overlay war, famine and pestilence over the degradation taking place in the hyperfinancialized west.
Don't bite.
Grow vegetables; give away what you can't eat or store effectively. Be a friend. Have a good bike that is well fitted to your body that can carry modest luggage or groceries. Ride it at least 4 hours a week, though you may have to work up to that.
Pray and meditate, in a group if you can find one that you fit into.
I have nothing fancy since before Y2k.
Kindness is weakness in a collapsed world... I do not recommend that at all.
Someone will rip your face off for a can of beans
We shall see. It might be location-specific. I believe that you are mistaken.
I may bet my life on that.
We'll see...
I'd agree. Most historical evidence indicates that in such cases people tend to group together and co-operate. It seems to me that the individualistic ripping- your-face-off-for-a-can of beans is mostly an Americanism, promulgated by Hollywood memes and the mass ownership of guns, which isn't relevant to the vast majority of the countries of the world.
Once the fossil fuel sources dry up, any would-be marauders would be horse and foot bound just like everyone else. And mostly foot-bound. I think it has been Dr William Rees pointing out about horses and the current lack of.
I also agree with you and Mark. There will always be a few assholes. But not everyone is an asshole. As Mr Rogers said - look for the helpers. There are always helpers.
One can be a friend, be kind, be helpful, build community, and can also be armed and prepared. Two things can happen at the same time.
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
Thanks for all that, but it doesn’t directly have anything to do with my comment.
It kinda does actually
Not really. You’re missing my point that I can make friends, support others, and still be prepared for the collapse. I think you’re assuming that being prepared means surviving through it. Maybe it just means being prepared to make my exit with my friends and family before it gets too bad to bother to keep going.
This is plain wrong.
In any famine in recorded history, the vast majority of people died of hunger, not homicide.
Indeed the majority will die of starvation ... but many will be murdered and eaten
Keep in mind this time the famine will be permanent -- and the world will have collapsed...
So there will be no police to stop the mayhem..... in fact they will be participants.
Soon, reports began to emerge of rampant cannibalism. The first cases were usually kept quiet. People would notice a body by the side of the road and return late at night to take a few pieces of flesh before hiding the corpse. Or back-alley butcher shops would suddenly have a supply of fresh meat available at high prices. And of course, the starving customers preferred not to ask questions about where it had come from. But eventually, even this horrible source of food was exhausted. And people stopped waiting for their neighbors to die before they ate them.
By 1933, the rumors of cannibalism were too widely spread to be ignored. So, the Soviets dispatched their secret police to investigate. What they found was shocking. Not only were people cannibalizing the dead, but there were thousands of cases of people committing murder and eating their victims. Often, these victims weren’t strangers, but family members. Soviet records recorded cases where parents killed their children and shared the flesh among the rest of the family. In one shocking case, a family didn’t even wait until they were out of food to kill their daughter-in-law. Instead, they fed some of her corpse to their pigs in order to fatten them up and ate the rest themselves.
Of course, the children who were the most frequent victims were also desperate, as was recorded by a woman who ran an orphanage in Kharkov. “One day the children suddenly fell silent, we turned around to see what was happening, and they were eating the smallest child, little Petrus,” she wrote, “And Petrus was doing the same, he was tearing strips from himself and eating them, he ate as much as he could. The other children put their lips to his wounds and drank his blood.” Not only were people cannibalizing each other, they were cannibalizing themselves.
https://fasteddynz.substack.com/p/the-utopia-tv-series
Just in case you miss this part:
Not only were people cannibalizing the dead, but there were thousands of cases of people committing murder and eating their victims. Often, these victims weren’t strangers, but family members. Soviet records recorded cases where parents killed their children and shared the flesh among the rest of the family.
In one shocking case, a family didn’t even wait until they were out of food to kill their daughter-in-law. Instead, they fed some of her corpse to their pigs in order to fatten them up and ate the rest themselves.
The Amish where I live are transitioning to e-bikes and a solar panel. It’s amazing to see what they can haul in the small “baby buggy” type trailers they attach.
Interesting...
I think a collapse is like Hemingway’s description of bankruptcy, “Slowly, and then all at once”. In the West, we have a debt-based financial system. It requires perpetual growth, or it will collapse. Growth means growth in capital, labor, and inputs.
(Why growth? - All money is loaned into existence at interest, so it requires $10 + interest to pay back the original $10 that was loaned out. The sum, greater than the original $10, must come from somewhere, must come from future growth.)
If fiat currency is a demand on future units of energy, then growth is based on the (unwarranted) assumption that future energy will be available to satisfy my demand. Right now, the economy runs on the delusion that this will be the case, i.e., the energy will be there to satisfy all of the existing claims.
So the question arises, what happens when it is clear that growth is no longer possible? Will I loan out $10, knowing that I will only get $8 back? Wasn’t this the issue in 2008, a potential locking up of the financial system? Banks did not want to loan out money because they weren’t sure that they were going to get paid back. Supply chains run on this liquidity, this willingness to loan out money. When the supply chains stop, and the workers go back to their villages (China), are they coming back? – I think that once the supply chains break, I am not sure that they will come back.
I think that the Western financial system will collapse, a bunch of people will starve to death, and then, depending on the bandit situation, regional supply chains may spring up to take up the slack, but these are big ifs. (FE would point to the spent fuel ponds scattered around and say that vaxxing (predominately) the Western world, was not an accident. Sometimes you have to be cruel to be kind, amirite?)
Yes ... to repeat https://fasteddynz.substack.com/p/the-utter-futility-of-doomsday-prepping
isn't this the definition of a ponzi scheme?
recently i discovered there is a 'post-doom' wikipedia article - the concept was articulated by michael dowd, who died last october at the age of 64
in some ways collapse is already under way, but it might be like going bankrupt - slowly, step by step, and then suddenly all at once - the gradualness of what's going on now might have a major inflection point
This is very good. Ian Welsh has been hammering on these points for a long time. "ianwelsh.net", an excellent site. Others- William Gibson, the SF author, has a concept of "The Jackpot" which is a realistic simulation as outlined above, leading to a much smaller population of survivors.
I believe that railroads will re-emerge as the dominant form of transportation, due to economics of fuel use. But, they won't be the same mix of train sizes. Very small solar-powered/large-battery railcars are feasible today. If I was managing a "family office" for a multigeneration fortune today, I would buy railroads and rights-of-way.
hahahahahaha.... railroads.... hahahaha take a look at what happens when things unravel https://fasteddynz.substack.com/p/the-utter-futility-of-doomsday-prepping
Good overview. FIY, I often point out that "REAL downshifting is necessary for our own mental health anyway, even if limitless energy were available", but it is also something that would, in your words, "make collapse much more human".
See as example the central part of this post: https://mfioretti.substack.com/p/a-nuclear-power-offer-that-you-cannot
Delusion is infinite
Wrong wrong wrong wrong.
How did you collapse? First slowly - then all at once.
The deterioration has been underway for decades... but the Central Banks have been fending off the implosion with stimulus.
Alas what cannot continue will stop .... actually it will not stop ... they will continue to try to delay the implosion --- but the the stimulus will push on a string at some point
We edge closer to that moment every day.
When it stops working --- the financial system will implode... the global supply chains will implode... there will be no food... you won't be able to buy a toothbrush....
Trade-Off Financial System Supply-Chain Cross-Contagion: a study in global systemic collapse.
https://mahb.stanford.edu/library-item/trade-off-financial-system-supply-chain-cross-contagion/
8 billion in the dark... starving ... and pissed off...
So NO it will not resemble a movie --- The Gates of Hell will Open.
Murder, rape, cannibalism - spent fuel ponds - extinction.
Fortunately The Men Who Run the World have worked out a plan to minimize the suffering... what's the point of hunting down your neighbour's kids and raping and murdering them when everyone is going to die anyway....
Here is the plan https://fasteddynz.substack.com/p/the-ultimate-extinction-plan-uep
A breath of fresh air and honesty, thank you. One of the most serious consequences of this very likely scenario of a stop-start collapse, very unevenly distributed spatially and taking decades, is that it will make possible a wilful denial and deception (and self-deception) about the true nature of what is happening. The developed world establishment has always "accepted" that there are parts of the world and parts of our societies where poverty, social desperation, violence etc are "difficult to eradicate"; thus, under this likely scenario of a slow collapse, it will be relatively easy for people to simply enlarge the mental area of these problematic zones and thus avoid facing the bigger picture of what is happening, even as it engulfs more and more of our world.
Indeed, the tendency towards greater and greater economic inequality, with a super rich class who are more and more powerful and insulated from most of planetary reality and continue promoting high-consumption, high-exploitation visions, will counterintuitively become portrayed as the evidence that our human status quo can continue, and that the "problems" come from the growing numbers of people who defy the establishment and the law because they are forced into desperate measures to obtain the essentials of life such as food, housing, employment, etc. Hence the clear growth of the far right in many parts of the world. There are really only two possible directions for the social evolution in this process: either we (and especially the rich 20%) accept the global nature of our overshoot predicament, and that we must work collectively to find our way through it, with global justice and rights, and ecological realities as our guides; or we will head more and more directly into extremes of inequality, fascism and barbarism as the rich effectively "mine" the poor. Neither path offers a clear future for a human civilization but only the first option offers any hope for maintaining what we currently consider human values and human rights.
True, it will be nothing like the movies. You paint one possibility but there are many. However, I doubt that humans will eventually get back to a "truly sustainable way of life." I doubt humans ever could, once that first digging stick was invented. I also can't see the top 0.1% having holidays abroad if others can't because there would be no air traffic infrastructure without the requisite demand though I guess some may have the ability to use private jets on private runways without too much risk of air or ground collisions, provided they stocked up on jet fuel, so long as the craft don't need repairs or maintenance.