And still, there are this kind of very optimistic studies circulating from hightly qualified people claiming that there will be more than enough mineral ressources to undergo any energy transition.
As it might be true in theory, as indeed the ressources do exist somewhere in the earth's crust, everything seem to depend somehow on "make mineral extractions economically viable". By some unspecified means including new technologies that we cannot fail to conjure as we will need them so badly.
It seems to me that it doesn't account at all for the exponentially increasing need of energy to mine ever decreasing concentrated minerals or ever more difficult to reach. Making it not a only a "medium term challenge".
What do you thing ?
As of course, quite a few people are more than happy to believe it as it confirm everything they hope for.
All so true. Classical economics models always assume unlimited resources from the earth, ignoring the externalities. We need to have all these Chicago School economists and supply-siders take a class in ecological economics.
"Can anyone reasonably expect that people will start to buy twice as much food and electricity if they were given ‘free money’?"
Great article thanks B!! From the beginning of the Covid Operation through the various troubles and then segway into War, I was following Lockdown Skeptics on reddit, Allison McDowell, Sociable.co, AIER and the Brownstone Institute. If you were paying attention, none of these huge errors are a mistake so having some advanced warning I spent my stimulus $$ on DIY solar, low tech tools and backup systems for food, water, shelter and defense. I suggest you take the same route. Please consider that the planned degrowth moves and WEF Style neoliberal techno feudalism may be an obvious tell for plotted low energy future to tip off greater resetters, critical thinkers and agrarian preppers to jumpstart relocalization efforts. Multiple nefarious plans, profit motives and redundancies piggybacking on the reset rollout. True Believers in the transition in this context are pin cushions for the elite attempting to Fast Track gene-based cures to common diseases and protect core industrial civilization.
You mean, someone is in control? And able to make plans and execute them? Golly, they forgot to shutdown those websites and substacks you've been reading.
I struggle with this paradox a lot. I'm somewhere in-between you and Replenish.
I don't think there is a sprawling nefarious plot across corporate and government entities, but I do think that institutions and incentive systems have been arranged in such a way to render a conspiracy unnecessary. Propaganda is easy, because human psychology is so vulnerable and so well-understood. You simply split people into two opposing tribes so nothing can be accomplished other than advancing the interests of the elite. Both tribes receive AI-tailored propaganda that justify and even glorify elite capture, usually by demonizing the other side and creating crisis events, thereby "necessitating" unfettered corporations and an increasingly powerful state.
Modern propaganda is incredibly sophisticated in this way. Elites can permit heterodox content because the two tribes are so big, angry, and distracted. Anyone who reads outside the Overton window won't get a platform, and if they do they'll be marginalized to irrelevance, or discredited.
Inconvenient information about vaccine efficacy and safety? Tell the libs anyone doubting the vaccine is anti-science, selfish, and brainwashed. Growing populist resentment against corporations? Tell the right-wingers that communists are infiltrating corporate boards pushing woke dogma.
Neither side is paying attention to the issues that matter. If someone like us comes in to try and explain what's really going on, it is like greeting the audience in Plato's Cave. Who are you? What nonsense is this? And even the smart ones in the audience can be duped into a false sense of agency, because as you pointed out, the alternative content does *exist*... but it only exists because it will never matter, and that grants modern elites an even tighter form of control than censorship could ever achieve. What they have is better: a group of subjects who truly believe they are free.
Another well-articulated summary of yet a further aspect of our species’ predicament brought about by a society’s attempts to pursue infinite growth on a finite planet and how our ruling class attempts to keep the party going for a tad longer (mostly for them and their ilk) as we bump up against and try to ignore the planet’s biogeophysical limits to growth.
Debauching a currency as a society continues to expand but encounters diminishing returns on its investments in complexity has a long and storied history. In fact, the 'strategy' of economic machinations of this type to kick-the-can-down-the-road as it were has been around for about as long as complex societies and their currencies have been. The most famous (at least for those schooled in Western cultures) is that of the multi-generational devaluation of the Roman denarius.
“In Part 1, I argue that energy underpins everything, including human complex societies. In Part 2, I suggest that the increasing need for diminishing resources, especially finite or limited ‘renewable’ ones, invariably leads to geopolitical tension between competing polities. Part 3 further posits that this geopolitical competition creates internal societal stresses that are met with rising authoritarianism and attempts at sociobehavioural control of domestic populations by the ruling elite.
Economic manipulation — mostly through the financial/monetary systems of a society, that the ruling caste controls — is part and parcel of addressing the societal stresses that arise as things become more complex (as a result of the problem-solving aspects of a society), competition with other polities increases, resources become more dear, and control of the population takes on greater urgency.”
Pre/history has witnessed this story play out countless times in a rather predictable fashion. First, a society addresses its various problems using the least expensive and easiest-to-achieve ‘solutions’. The surpluses that result from this approach allow for a society to continue expanding (hydrocarbons having strapped powerful rockets to this recurrent tendency). Eventually, however, diminishing returns on these ‘solutions’ are encountered. More expensive and harder-to-achieve ‘solutions’ are then pursued.
Surpluses can stave off having to abandon growth for a while but eventually a point is reached where the masses begin to bear the brunt of the economic contraction that accompanies expansion or even just to maintain the status quo—the elite finding ways to insulate themselves for as long as possible. In a society with a complex economic/monetary system, manipulation via currency devaluation is one of the go-to ‘solutions’ since it can disguise responsibility for the inevitable decline in living standards that is experienced from it while benefitting a few at the top of the power and wealth structures that exist in large, complex societies.
On the surface this approach can appear to be effective, and certainly the narrative managers that work on behalf of the ruling class to steer beliefs amongst the masses stress this to be the case. In reality, however, this currency devaluation is like eating one’s seed corn: it always ends badly, for everyone since it is stealing from the future…
I provide some further thoughts on this phenomena in these posts:
Economists are confused about inflation, the thing they should understand better than anyone, because they do not distinguish between the price of stuff rising due to depletion vs. the price of stuff rising because the money supply is growing faster than stuff. When the stuff is energy needed to make other stuff they get really confused.
There is mention these days that the current "inflation", post-COVID, is largely due to low-supply driving prices up, so price increases can come from more monetary-demand for something, or decreased supply of that thing, or both.
This is such a 2012 conservative position. All the cool kids acknowledge that climate change is real and anthropogenic, but it is not the five-alarm crisis the left makes it out to be, and following the liberal plan to end fossil fuels would kill many more people much more quickly than climate change. Denying it, though? Cringe...
Thank You, B. "Inflation" is also "where you measure it". Consumer-statistics measure "inflation" as a basket of goods and services at street level, which means that the massive asset-price-inflation for QE and subsequent interventions was not measured as "inflation".
This asset-price-inflation has been a payoff for continued participation of the top 5-10% of global wealth which invests in financial assets. This has kept this cohort onboard with the western dollar/eurodollar financial system, getting real-returns-on-investments. Since the real-economy has not expanded, losses of actual-wealth to the bottom 90% have resulted, and have been pushed to where the populations have had the least political power.
What is often missed is that the inflection point for diveregence of physical economy and nominal "wealth" took place in 1980-1981 when Fed Chairman Paul Volcker raised interest rates to over 20% to support the "value" (price, really) of the $US, at the cost of the real US economy, which was crushed. Also, the return-on-investment support for the $US had to keep being extracted from the productive economy. Volcker was privately targeting wages of construction workers as his personal metric, as revealed at private meetings. He "crushed" those wages.
There is no more crushing-of-wages which can be done to support rent-extraction to "investors", which has supported the price of the $US for so long, while bleeding the real productive US economy, and funding wars to maintain $US system dominance (maintaining global oil and other markets in $US).
At the point where the $US is no longer price-supported by global investors, it will need to be value-supported by American trade goods and services, which include oil, natural gas, airplanes, wheat, corn and soybeans. This will involve massive debt-default, perhaps by devaluing the $US against gold, and certainly through the crash of asset-prices.
"Smart money" has been repositioning out of risk-assets and into real-estate and other real assets since about 2016, by my personal estimation. That seemed more pervasive after 2018, including rural housing after that. These are large global firms buying up property.
The really big systemic-risk question is that of enforcement of ownership-rights in the future, after a systemic collapse/reset. Will global corporate landowners be forced to sell to locals?
Will all such corporate assets be taken over by governments, with some kind of payout to pensioners and pension-funds to maintain social stability? Will the funding for wars finally decrease, or will it consume everything?
We are parties to these moves of society, not just observers, but how might we meaningfully and constructively engage in these solutions to the problems at hand?
And still, there are this kind of very optimistic studies circulating from hightly qualified people claiming that there will be more than enough mineral ressources to undergo any energy transition.
As it might be true in theory, as indeed the ressources do exist somewhere in the earth's crust, everything seem to depend somehow on "make mineral extractions economically viable". By some unspecified means including new technologies that we cannot fail to conjure as we will need them so badly.
It seems to me that it doesn't account at all for the exponentially increasing need of energy to mine ever decreasing concentrated minerals or ever more difficult to reach. Making it not a only a "medium term challenge".
What do you thing ?
As of course, quite a few people are more than happy to believe it as it confirm everything they hope for.
https://www.sustainabilitybynumbers.com/p/transition-mineral-demand-part-one
All so true. Classical economics models always assume unlimited resources from the earth, ignoring the externalities. We need to have all these Chicago School economists and supply-siders take a class in ecological economics.
Yes, Hannah Ritchie works with Our World in Data.
So the funny thing is that our host, looking at the same data, seems to reach very opposite conclusions...
Thank you B 🙏
"Can anyone reasonably expect that people will start to buy twice as much food and electricity if they were given ‘free money’?"
Great article thanks B!! From the beginning of the Covid Operation through the various troubles and then segway into War, I was following Lockdown Skeptics on reddit, Allison McDowell, Sociable.co, AIER and the Brownstone Institute. If you were paying attention, none of these huge errors are a mistake so having some advanced warning I spent my stimulus $$ on DIY solar, low tech tools and backup systems for food, water, shelter and defense. I suggest you take the same route. Please consider that the planned degrowth moves and WEF Style neoliberal techno feudalism may be an obvious tell for plotted low energy future to tip off greater resetters, critical thinkers and agrarian preppers to jumpstart relocalization efforts. Multiple nefarious plans, profit motives and redundancies piggybacking on the reset rollout. True Believers in the transition in this context are pin cushions for the elite attempting to Fast Track gene-based cures to common diseases and protect core industrial civilization.
You mean, someone is in control? And able to make plans and execute them? Golly, they forgot to shutdown those websites and substacks you've been reading.
Good one! Thanks for the reply.
You might like this explanation..
Human stupidity or greed?
Preexisting machine intelligence.. perhaps the Gnostic Demiurge? Archons?
Or as simple as Desmet's "mass formation" psychosis?
All of the Above?!
"..Someone is in control?""
https://www.indy100.com/science-tech/simulation-theory-evidence-proven-2666457498
I struggle with this paradox a lot. I'm somewhere in-between you and Replenish.
I don't think there is a sprawling nefarious plot across corporate and government entities, but I do think that institutions and incentive systems have been arranged in such a way to render a conspiracy unnecessary. Propaganda is easy, because human psychology is so vulnerable and so well-understood. You simply split people into two opposing tribes so nothing can be accomplished other than advancing the interests of the elite. Both tribes receive AI-tailored propaganda that justify and even glorify elite capture, usually by demonizing the other side and creating crisis events, thereby "necessitating" unfettered corporations and an increasingly powerful state.
Modern propaganda is incredibly sophisticated in this way. Elites can permit heterodox content because the two tribes are so big, angry, and distracted. Anyone who reads outside the Overton window won't get a platform, and if they do they'll be marginalized to irrelevance, or discredited.
Inconvenient information about vaccine efficacy and safety? Tell the libs anyone doubting the vaccine is anti-science, selfish, and brainwashed. Growing populist resentment against corporations? Tell the right-wingers that communists are infiltrating corporate boards pushing woke dogma.
Neither side is paying attention to the issues that matter. If someone like us comes in to try and explain what's really going on, it is like greeting the audience in Plato's Cave. Who are you? What nonsense is this? And even the smart ones in the audience can be duped into a false sense of agency, because as you pointed out, the alternative content does *exist*... but it only exists because it will never matter, and that grants modern elites an even tighter form of control than censorship could ever achieve. What they have is better: a group of subjects who truly believe they are free.
Hey B, followed from Medium..,great, as always
Another well-articulated summary of yet a further aspect of our species’ predicament brought about by a society’s attempts to pursue infinite growth on a finite planet and how our ruling class attempts to keep the party going for a tad longer (mostly for them and their ilk) as we bump up against and try to ignore the planet’s biogeophysical limits to growth.
Debauching a currency as a society continues to expand but encounters diminishing returns on its investments in complexity has a long and storied history. In fact, the 'strategy' of economic machinations of this type to kick-the-can-down-the-road as it were has been around for about as long as complex societies and their currencies have been. The most famous (at least for those schooled in Western cultures) is that of the multi-generational devaluation of the Roman denarius.
I penned a rather lengthy Contemplation on the economic manipulation we will experience increasingly as part of a series on our energy future (see: https://stevebull-4168.medium.com/todays-contemplation-collapse-cometh-xcix-1eaf7ac0c5c6). In this fourth and final installment (that aligns with your piece) I begin with this:
“In Part 1, I argue that energy underpins everything, including human complex societies. In Part 2, I suggest that the increasing need for diminishing resources, especially finite or limited ‘renewable’ ones, invariably leads to geopolitical tension between competing polities. Part 3 further posits that this geopolitical competition creates internal societal stresses that are met with rising authoritarianism and attempts at sociobehavioural control of domestic populations by the ruling elite.
Economic manipulation — mostly through the financial/monetary systems of a society, that the ruling caste controls — is part and parcel of addressing the societal stresses that arise as things become more complex (as a result of the problem-solving aspects of a society), competition with other polities increases, resources become more dear, and control of the population takes on greater urgency.”
Pre/history has witnessed this story play out countless times in a rather predictable fashion. First, a society addresses its various problems using the least expensive and easiest-to-achieve ‘solutions’. The surpluses that result from this approach allow for a society to continue expanding (hydrocarbons having strapped powerful rockets to this recurrent tendency). Eventually, however, diminishing returns on these ‘solutions’ are encountered. More expensive and harder-to-achieve ‘solutions’ are then pursued.
Surpluses can stave off having to abandon growth for a while but eventually a point is reached where the masses begin to bear the brunt of the economic contraction that accompanies expansion or even just to maintain the status quo—the elite finding ways to insulate themselves for as long as possible. In a society with a complex economic/monetary system, manipulation via currency devaluation is one of the go-to ‘solutions’ since it can disguise responsibility for the inevitable decline in living standards that is experienced from it while benefitting a few at the top of the power and wealth structures that exist in large, complex societies.
On the surface this approach can appear to be effective, and certainly the narrative managers that work on behalf of the ruling class to steer beliefs amongst the masses stress this to be the case. In reality, however, this currency devaluation is like eating one’s seed corn: it always ends badly, for everyone since it is stealing from the future…
I provide some further thoughts on this phenomena in these posts:
Collapse Cometh IV (https://olduvai.ca/?p=65832); Collapse Cometh XI (https://olduvai.ca/?p=65906); Collapse Cometh XXXII (https://olduvai.ca/?p=66287); Collapse Cometh CXII (https://stevebull-4168.medium.com/todays-contemplation-collapse-cometh-cxii-ab66bd1b4ae9).
Economists are confused about inflation, the thing they should understand better than anyone, because they do not distinguish between the price of stuff rising due to depletion vs. the price of stuff rising because the money supply is growing faster than stuff. When the stuff is energy needed to make other stuff they get really confused.
There is mention these days that the current "inflation", post-COVID, is largely due to low-supply driving prices up, so price increases can come from more monetary-demand for something, or decreased supply of that thing, or both.
Climate change.. hahahahahaha
This is such a 2012 conservative position. All the cool kids acknowledge that climate change is real and anthropogenic, but it is not the five-alarm crisis the left makes it out to be, and following the liberal plan to end fossil fuels would kill many more people much more quickly than climate change. Denying it, though? Cringe...
Thank You, B. "Inflation" is also "where you measure it". Consumer-statistics measure "inflation" as a basket of goods and services at street level, which means that the massive asset-price-inflation for QE and subsequent interventions was not measured as "inflation".
This asset-price-inflation has been a payoff for continued participation of the top 5-10% of global wealth which invests in financial assets. This has kept this cohort onboard with the western dollar/eurodollar financial system, getting real-returns-on-investments. Since the real-economy has not expanded, losses of actual-wealth to the bottom 90% have resulted, and have been pushed to where the populations have had the least political power.
What is often missed is that the inflection point for diveregence of physical economy and nominal "wealth" took place in 1980-1981 when Fed Chairman Paul Volcker raised interest rates to over 20% to support the "value" (price, really) of the $US, at the cost of the real US economy, which was crushed. Also, the return-on-investment support for the $US had to keep being extracted from the productive economy. Volcker was privately targeting wages of construction workers as his personal metric, as revealed at private meetings. He "crushed" those wages.
There is no more crushing-of-wages which can be done to support rent-extraction to "investors", which has supported the price of the $US for so long, while bleeding the real productive US economy, and funding wars to maintain $US system dominance (maintaining global oil and other markets in $US).
At the point where the $US is no longer price-supported by global investors, it will need to be value-supported by American trade goods and services, which include oil, natural gas, airplanes, wheat, corn and soybeans. This will involve massive debt-default, perhaps by devaluing the $US against gold, and certainly through the crash of asset-prices.
"Smart money" has been repositioning out of risk-assets and into real-estate and other real assets since about 2016, by my personal estimation. That seemed more pervasive after 2018, including rural housing after that. These are large global firms buying up property.
The really big systemic-risk question is that of enforcement of ownership-rights in the future, after a systemic collapse/reset. Will global corporate landowners be forced to sell to locals?
Will all such corporate assets be taken over by governments, with some kind of payout to pensioners and pension-funds to maintain social stability? Will the funding for wars finally decrease, or will it consume everything?
We are parties to these moves of society, not just observers, but how might we meaningfully and constructively engage in these solutions to the problems at hand?