Too many humans are using/depleting too many natural resources and producing too much pollution/environmental damage. We are 3,000 times more numerous and consumptive than were our ancestral migratory ecologically balanced Hunter-Gatherers/pastoralists. What could go wrong? Everything.
We have achieved overshoot on lot of non renewable resources. Our (official) financial/political systems are based on continuous growth? But we live in a closed system?!
Those who can do math KNOW how this ends- And we are starting to see the sharp elbows come into play as this game of geopolitical musical chairs is being played out for what's left.
As a German Biologist - this is about Sheeple farmed in the Techno Sphere stable prison. My Father was a Wehrmacht Soldier 1942 - close to Stalingrad. He did not have the Morale and Courage to desert and tell the world what was happening. He stayed as Soldier in the Wehrmacht Techno Farm - sheer luck to survive. We are in a similar global Warlike Situation. Those with Inner Strength and Morale and Courage - run away from the Techno Farm. It pays well to spray the Mind Opiates to convince the Sheeple to stay there - as the War will be won and soon over. The Life Lottery. One wins big for sure!
o. Using their credit card, 100 million Americans put a deposit down on an EV from Company T
o. Company T goes to buy enough electricity to make the 100 million EVs
o. The Utility goes to buy natural gas but can't get enough (we all know why) so they must increase electricity price (This doesn't increase electricity, it is used to force the buyer into consuming less).
o. Company T can't build 100 million EVs at the increased price (there isn't enough electricity<-natural gas is the root problem but pricing is the mechanism that matches consumption to production)
o. Company T goes bankrupt.
o. The number of EVs, in best circumstance, equal the amount of natural gas available to generate electricity.
I think you need to consider a slowdown rather than black & white on/off. Natural Gas is produced at some rate, and I don't think that the reserves will be exhausted soon.
There is the question of whether we can build enough PV, windmills, and batteries with the remaining gas reserves to completely replace them. I'm super curious as to who is looking into all that.
The Honest Sorcerer has answered that in other essays he's written. He writes about how fossil fuels will never be exhausted, but their mining will slow down as their costs (more fossil fuels) rise. He's also answered the 2nd. PVs, windmills and batteries can never completely replace fossil fuels because they must be recycled/disposed of in 30 years. Even with recycling, you lose X% of materials with each recycle which leads to a time, far off but coming nonetheless, when they reach their limit because they can't produce enough energy themselves to mine or recycle the materials, etc.
He seems to "look into all that" 24/7 haha. Anyway, he answers those questions and more. Just look back to his earlier pieces.
I appreciate the response. I suppose I'll flip through his posts. I'd like to see the numbers. Of course PV panels, windmills and batteries consume material resources, and resources are technically finite on earth. But the time span matters. Will we run out of copper in 100 years or 1,000? I'm very curious.
My name is Josef Rapaport and together with my wife Gellai Judit we are your loyal followers.
I am an artist and Judit is a life coach.we are both members of Hungarian Deep adaptation forum
We would like to come to your lecture at the Brain Bar in Budapest but cannot afford the tickets. We would like join only your session so is there any way as the members of DA Hungary and your followers to get a free or a reduced price tickets?
Great analysis! It looks like Americans are being led down the path to an inflationary crack up boom....The delusional nature of the current AI stock market boom is demonstrated by the contract just signed by Open AI to pay Oracle 60 billion/yr for data centers..Open AI is currently losing billions every year and faces stiff competition from numerous competitors, including the Chinese...I doubt that Oracle will ever get paid anything, but this deal propelled its stock price to new highs....And by the way, does AI actually increase GDP? It will result in more unemployment, because the laid off workers will face a terrible job market in a recessionary environment...
Well said. I also expect eventual debt deflation but we may get a period of hyper-inflation before everything shuts down. CBs and governments will do everything they can to prevent deflation. China is struggling with this now.
Just a couple of notes:
Buy-now-pay-later does not increase the money supply. The purchased asset is transferred to the "borrower" who pays back the seller in installments. Only the creation of debt without an asset transfer creates money. Commercial banks do this, but not BNPL vendors. Of course, if the BNPL purchaser borrows money from a bank to make the installment payment, money is created.
The velocity of money is *defined* as GDP divided by M2. Any decrease in the GDP/M2 ratio results in slower velocity. Thus an increase in debt, thereby increasing the money supply, decreases velocity. If GDP were constant (flat), then inflation and velocity would vary inversely with high correlation (approaching -1.0).
Very interesting. We discern approaching changes in the weather in varying ways. My wife picks up certain things earlier than me because a drop in air pressure gives her a certain type of headache, usually quite a while before the signs in the clouds or the changing air temperature arrives.
I think all people of mature age in all walks of life have certain pattern recognition skills which alert them to an approaching economic storm. Our governments have developed multiple strategies (electricity bill rebates, first home buyer grants, new taxes initially only affecting small sectors of the population, etc) to try and shift perceptions to boost confidence and thereby increase spending and reduce saving by the average punter.
I think these strategies are all failing these days. The new taxes result in capital flight from certain sectors of the economy, or even certain nations as a whole, as it seems the UK is discovering atm. In Australia we have, by historical standards, ridiculously high levels of immigration. This means the government and its MSM propagandists can say "The economy is growing, we are not in recession", but we are in a GDP per capita recession. Government spending as a share of GDP has never gone back to pre-Covid levels and is creeping up by about 0.5 percent of GDP PER YEAR!!
The proportion of the economy in the hands of oligopoly-type "crony capitalist' corporations is at record highs. The mainstream media narrative is that the economy is still recovering from Covid, but "doing well" (LOL!!). I think most people know on some level this is not true - that something seriously is wrong.
I fear a disorderly crisis, deflationary in nature, but also global. The same way that the QE was global during the fake pandemic, the response to the deflationary collapse will be global. Baceuae it will be global, the politicians will be able to say, "We didn't cause this, we are good economic managers! This is because of an unexpected external shock forced upon us!!".
Whatever the finer points,the big picture will be the same, austerity for the masses and a transfer of wealth into the financially parasitic top 0.1% of the global "wealth" pyramid.
They will make sure that this little matter of high priority is taken care of first before telling us, "There was no alternative, There was no money left for a bail out so this time it had ro be a bail in. Everybody was told ahead of time, this is what would happen. You were given plenty of advance notice. There was no alternative!! Sorry that that the affordable transition we promised to a sustainable, renewable economy is not going to be possible any more. Also, those diversity, equity and inclusion goals we had talked about cannot be extended beyond those that we already delivered to LGBT and transgender people and refugees. But hey, we did do a good job there didn't we?!!! So everybody clap now as we receive our United Nations awards for our service to humanity!!"
"Furthermore, we wish to reassure you of our commitment to inregrity and transparency,. We made a promise to you, "You will own nothing and be happy!" and we will now keep that promise. Our algorithms have harvested your data and individualised apps have been prepared to maximise the daily dopamine hit each of you desire while wearing your virtual reality headsets! So please everybody click download immediately so that we can achieve a 95 percent success rating on KPI 1 - "You will own nothing and be happy!" You know, like the 95 percent "safe and effective" solutionwe rolled out to the last crisis. Some people have said we lied about that. But 95 percent of the people who received that intervention are still alive. Less than 5 percent are dead - well I mean, dead yet. But we will reach that KPI in due course. You should have realised by now that we are incredibly effective in everything we do in order to meet our KPIs.
A great read, it felt more succinct and grounded than previous renditions, bringing everything together in a smooth function.
Unfortunately it made me angsty 🤣🤣🤣
While reading the segment on captured politics via special interests, I wondered to myself how much faulty and manipulated data contributes to our current debacle. I'm fairly certain there's a lot of obfuscation and manipulation of data, intentional misdirection of knowledge (especially concerning willfully keeping the majority ignorant of causal relationships and in the dark of simple arithmetic, for instance the energy required to produce energy as you mentioned, renewables being the example par excellence) and finally manipulating markets. Manipulating markets sticks with me because (in general terms) "we" in the West all profess to love capitalism, but revert to rule breaking, monopolistic habits, corporatism between state and big business. Yesterday while out with acquaintances and friends, I wouldn't have been able to broach a conversation on these topics as they would have looked at me as a lunatic or party pooper. It's a sign of the times.
Might be that fossil fuels get too expensive before we manufacture enough PV wind & batteries to replace them. It just feels like a really hard thing to say without running the numbers. Has someone run the numbers?
We have been in a period of exponential de-growth ever since Covid-19. Energy supplies have once more stopped growing after 2024 (the post covid recovery peak) much like they did after 2018. With Covid at least they gave us the facade of growth after shutting everything down, creating global demand destruction, and then restarting everything with massive stimulus injections.
This time we have to face the reality head on which will be far more impactful on the Western economies. The goal of the exponential and involuntary de-growth phase is to keep the core essentials held together for as long as possible while ignoring and salami slicing everything else in greater proportions.
De-growth marks the ballooning of real unemployment; the sinking of asset prices (excluding Western stocks & precious metals); demand destruction of energy consumption to keep fuel prices and inflation low; the increasing difficulty of debt repayment in a contacting economic environment with no available yields on simplicity/complexity left or new investment avenues remaining; fixed high interest rates to keep consumption down, trigger systemic business closures, and to keep ballooning national debt/bonds attractive; increases in overall crime; fighting economic/trade wars to force other countries into decline first; and zero-sum geopolitics.
This appears to be the last and final peak which the previous period of low interest rates, high oil prices, tapping unconventional oils, and the increased investment in existing oil fields could do to stall the energy and economic cliff. Energy and its continued growth is the economy. Otherwise, the EROEI and decline rates are exponentially worsening every moment with net oil exports soon to follow. There’s no such thing as spare capacity, Saudi America, or riding the plateau moving forward.
Producers and Petro States can’t survive on $60/barrel oil for long. New complex fields or projects are not going to get developed either. While global civilization cannot handle $90/barrel oil which will cause its own demand destruction to ripple throughout the supply chain over several economic quarters (causing uncontrolled recession and a plunge in oil prices anyway), large unpopularity with elected leaders/officials, and cause fuel/food riots in other countries.
Shale is poised to free-fall after its core gets completely drilled out. The West is at war with Russian oil. The rest of the world faces high decline rates on the existing giant oil fields which are poised to hit a double digit average decline rate by 2030. New smaller fields also decline rapidly into the double digits. We may now earnestly see Hubert’s decline slope but since its a global model and we’re heavily reliant on legacy fields then we’ll reach a point where the new extraction replacement cost is higher than the low buying price civilization can afford (rendering the remaining reserves or the Petro State itself uneconomic) and or the EROEI has advanced to such a low level that they cannot scale up the needed energy, technology, and resources to combat the exponential production decline.
From our current predicament I think we have 10 years at most under a cheap energy and exponential de-growth model regime. There’s no point in projecting when crude oil and condensate production will halve (or even drop by a quarter) since such a continuing paradigm for our civilization doesn’t exist and under the export land model there would be no oil exports left either. Chaos, collapse, and cannibalism. So ends the era of modernity and techno slavery (total dependance on technology to the point of overshoot and near-extinction).
"Back then, a downward spiral of falling demand, reduced production, wage cuts, increased unemployment, and business failures ultimately lead to an economic depression lasting a decade (4), till the second world war began."
I don't think your mention that back then the solution was a World War is coincidental. A third one could be the "solution" a couple years from now, similarly.
Too many humans are using/depleting too many natural resources and producing too much pollution/environmental damage. We are 3,000 times more numerous and consumptive than were our ancestral migratory ecologically balanced Hunter-Gatherers/pastoralists. What could go wrong? Everything.
We have achieved overshoot on lot of non renewable resources. Our (official) financial/political systems are based on continuous growth? But we live in a closed system?!
Those who can do math KNOW how this ends- And we are starting to see the sharp elbows come into play as this game of geopolitical musical chairs is being played out for what's left.
As a German Biologist - this is about Sheeple farmed in the Techno Sphere stable prison. My Father was a Wehrmacht Soldier 1942 - close to Stalingrad. He did not have the Morale and Courage to desert and tell the world what was happening. He stayed as Soldier in the Wehrmacht Techno Farm - sheer luck to survive. We are in a similar global Warlike Situation. Those with Inner Strength and Morale and Courage - run away from the Techno Farm. It pays well to spray the Mind Opiates to convince the Sheeple to stay there - as the War will be won and soon over. The Life Lottery. One wins big for sure!
Keep an eye on NZ... it is de-industrializing due to electricity shortages https://fasteddynz.substack.com/p/necrosis-in-new-zealand
A hypothetical based on your story.
o. Using their credit card, 100 million Americans put a deposit down on an EV from Company T
o. Company T goes to buy enough electricity to make the 100 million EVs
o. The Utility goes to buy natural gas but can't get enough (we all know why) so they must increase electricity price (This doesn't increase electricity, it is used to force the buyer into consuming less).
o. Company T can't build 100 million EVs at the increased price (there isn't enough electricity<-natural gas is the root problem but pricing is the mechanism that matches consumption to production)
o. Company T goes bankrupt.
o. The number of EVs, in best circumstance, equal the amount of natural gas available to generate electricity.
I think you need to consider a slowdown rather than black & white on/off. Natural Gas is produced at some rate, and I don't think that the reserves will be exhausted soon.
There is the question of whether we can build enough PV, windmills, and batteries with the remaining gas reserves to completely replace them. I'm super curious as to who is looking into all that.
The Honest Sorcerer has answered that in other essays he's written. He writes about how fossil fuels will never be exhausted, but their mining will slow down as their costs (more fossil fuels) rise. He's also answered the 2nd. PVs, windmills and batteries can never completely replace fossil fuels because they must be recycled/disposed of in 30 years. Even with recycling, you lose X% of materials with each recycle which leads to a time, far off but coming nonetheless, when they reach their limit because they can't produce enough energy themselves to mine or recycle the materials, etc.
He seems to "look into all that" 24/7 haha. Anyway, he answers those questions and more. Just look back to his earlier pieces.
I appreciate the response. I suppose I'll flip through his posts. I'd like to see the numbers. Of course PV panels, windmills and batteries consume material resources, and resources are technically finite on earth. But the time span matters. Will we run out of copper in 100 years or 1,000? I'm very curious.
Dear Honest Sorcerer
My name is Josef Rapaport and together with my wife Gellai Judit we are your loyal followers.
I am an artist and Judit is a life coach.we are both members of Hungarian Deep adaptation forum
We would like to come to your lecture at the Brain Bar in Budapest but cannot afford the tickets. We would like join only your session so is there any way as the members of DA Hungary and your followers to get a free or a reduced price tickets?
Thank you 🙏
No need to attend... here's your future https://fasteddynz.substack.com/p/collapse-and-cannibalism
Great analysis! It looks like Americans are being led down the path to an inflationary crack up boom....The delusional nature of the current AI stock market boom is demonstrated by the contract just signed by Open AI to pay Oracle 60 billion/yr for data centers..Open AI is currently losing billions every year and faces stiff competition from numerous competitors, including the Chinese...I doubt that Oracle will ever get paid anything, but this deal propelled its stock price to new highs....And by the way, does AI actually increase GDP? It will result in more unemployment, because the laid off workers will face a terrible job market in a recessionary environment...
Well said. I also expect eventual debt deflation but we may get a period of hyper-inflation before everything shuts down. CBs and governments will do everything they can to prevent deflation. China is struggling with this now.
Just a couple of notes:
Buy-now-pay-later does not increase the money supply. The purchased asset is transferred to the "borrower" who pays back the seller in installments. Only the creation of debt without an asset transfer creates money. Commercial banks do this, but not BNPL vendors. Of course, if the BNPL purchaser borrows money from a bank to make the installment payment, money is created.
The velocity of money is *defined* as GDP divided by M2. Any decrease in the GDP/M2 ratio results in slower velocity. Thus an increase in debt, thereby increasing the money supply, decreases velocity. If GDP were constant (flat), then inflation and velocity would vary inversely with high correlation (approaching -1.0).
Very interesting. We discern approaching changes in the weather in varying ways. My wife picks up certain things earlier than me because a drop in air pressure gives her a certain type of headache, usually quite a while before the signs in the clouds or the changing air temperature arrives.
I think all people of mature age in all walks of life have certain pattern recognition skills which alert them to an approaching economic storm. Our governments have developed multiple strategies (electricity bill rebates, first home buyer grants, new taxes initially only affecting small sectors of the population, etc) to try and shift perceptions to boost confidence and thereby increase spending and reduce saving by the average punter.
I think these strategies are all failing these days. The new taxes result in capital flight from certain sectors of the economy, or even certain nations as a whole, as it seems the UK is discovering atm. In Australia we have, by historical standards, ridiculously high levels of immigration. This means the government and its MSM propagandists can say "The economy is growing, we are not in recession", but we are in a GDP per capita recession. Government spending as a share of GDP has never gone back to pre-Covid levels and is creeping up by about 0.5 percent of GDP PER YEAR!!
The proportion of the economy in the hands of oligopoly-type "crony capitalist' corporations is at record highs. The mainstream media narrative is that the economy is still recovering from Covid, but "doing well" (LOL!!). I think most people know on some level this is not true - that something seriously is wrong.
I fear a disorderly crisis, deflationary in nature, but also global. The same way that the QE was global during the fake pandemic, the response to the deflationary collapse will be global. Baceuae it will be global, the politicians will be able to say, "We didn't cause this, we are good economic managers! This is because of an unexpected external shock forced upon us!!".
Whatever the finer points,the big picture will be the same, austerity for the masses and a transfer of wealth into the financially parasitic top 0.1% of the global "wealth" pyramid.
They will make sure that this little matter of high priority is taken care of first before telling us, "There was no alternative, There was no money left for a bail out so this time it had ro be a bail in. Everybody was told ahead of time, this is what would happen. You were given plenty of advance notice. There was no alternative!! Sorry that that the affordable transition we promised to a sustainable, renewable economy is not going to be possible any more. Also, those diversity, equity and inclusion goals we had talked about cannot be extended beyond those that we already delivered to LGBT and transgender people and refugees. But hey, we did do a good job there didn't we?!!! So everybody clap now as we receive our United Nations awards for our service to humanity!!"
"Furthermore, we wish to reassure you of our commitment to inregrity and transparency,. We made a promise to you, "You will own nothing and be happy!" and we will now keep that promise. Our algorithms have harvested your data and individualised apps have been prepared to maximise the daily dopamine hit each of you desire while wearing your virtual reality headsets! So please everybody click download immediately so that we can achieve a 95 percent success rating on KPI 1 - "You will own nothing and be happy!" You know, like the 95 percent "safe and effective" solutionwe rolled out to the last crisis. Some people have said we lied about that. But 95 percent of the people who received that intervention are still alive. Less than 5 percent are dead - well I mean, dead yet. But we will reach that KPI in due course. You should have realised by now that we are incredibly effective in everything we do in order to meet our KPIs.
This is an extinction event
I feel like we need to ban AI data centers for the good of civilization. Those resources should be used elsewhere. It’s a complete waste
Or maybe, those resources just shouldn’t be used? Isn’t that the point?
Well, we're lucky it's a feeling and not also a thought.
Thanks for another analysis well worth reading.
As I understand it your focus is on the US here, but do you see the same patterns in Europe?
I will try to find out for myself but am a bit unsure of how to find and assess the proper data.
For one thing I believe Europe (yet) has not had a jump in price on electricity, but I have not looked at any actual data for every country.
Europe is far worse than America https://fasteddynz.substack.com/p/euro-death-spiral
Thanks, but… you kind of lost me at your ’fake Ukraine war’ talk.
Sorry.
Hmm... ok?
Well, I disagree.
A great read, it felt more succinct and grounded than previous renditions, bringing everything together in a smooth function.
Unfortunately it made me angsty 🤣🤣🤣
While reading the segment on captured politics via special interests, I wondered to myself how much faulty and manipulated data contributes to our current debacle. I'm fairly certain there's a lot of obfuscation and manipulation of data, intentional misdirection of knowledge (especially concerning willfully keeping the majority ignorant of causal relationships and in the dark of simple arithmetic, for instance the energy required to produce energy as you mentioned, renewables being the example par excellence) and finally manipulating markets. Manipulating markets sticks with me because (in general terms) "we" in the West all profess to love capitalism, but revert to rule breaking, monopolistic habits, corporatism between state and big business. Yesterday while out with acquaintances and friends, I wouldn't have been able to broach a conversation on these topics as they would have looked at me as a lunatic or party pooper. It's a sign of the times.
Thanks again, B. I'll include this in my next blog post.
I feel like there's a lot of "maybe" in this.
Might be that fossil fuels get too expensive before we manufacture enough PV wind & batteries to replace them. It just feels like a really hard thing to say without running the numbers. Has someone run the numbers?
We have been in a period of exponential de-growth ever since Covid-19. Energy supplies have once more stopped growing after 2024 (the post covid recovery peak) much like they did after 2018. With Covid at least they gave us the facade of growth after shutting everything down, creating global demand destruction, and then restarting everything with massive stimulus injections.
This time we have to face the reality head on which will be far more impactful on the Western economies. The goal of the exponential and involuntary de-growth phase is to keep the core essentials held together for as long as possible while ignoring and salami slicing everything else in greater proportions.
De-growth marks the ballooning of real unemployment; the sinking of asset prices (excluding Western stocks & precious metals); demand destruction of energy consumption to keep fuel prices and inflation low; the increasing difficulty of debt repayment in a contacting economic environment with no available yields on simplicity/complexity left or new investment avenues remaining; fixed high interest rates to keep consumption down, trigger systemic business closures, and to keep ballooning national debt/bonds attractive; increases in overall crime; fighting economic/trade wars to force other countries into decline first; and zero-sum geopolitics.
This appears to be the last and final peak which the previous period of low interest rates, high oil prices, tapping unconventional oils, and the increased investment in existing oil fields could do to stall the energy and economic cliff. Energy and its continued growth is the economy. Otherwise, the EROEI and decline rates are exponentially worsening every moment with net oil exports soon to follow. There’s no such thing as spare capacity, Saudi America, or riding the plateau moving forward.
Producers and Petro States can’t survive on $60/barrel oil for long. New complex fields or projects are not going to get developed either. While global civilization cannot handle $90/barrel oil which will cause its own demand destruction to ripple throughout the supply chain over several economic quarters (causing uncontrolled recession and a plunge in oil prices anyway), large unpopularity with elected leaders/officials, and cause fuel/food riots in other countries.
Shale is poised to free-fall after its core gets completely drilled out. The West is at war with Russian oil. The rest of the world faces high decline rates on the existing giant oil fields which are poised to hit a double digit average decline rate by 2030. New smaller fields also decline rapidly into the double digits. We may now earnestly see Hubert’s decline slope but since its a global model and we’re heavily reliant on legacy fields then we’ll reach a point where the new extraction replacement cost is higher than the low buying price civilization can afford (rendering the remaining reserves or the Petro State itself uneconomic) and or the EROEI has advanced to such a low level that they cannot scale up the needed energy, technology, and resources to combat the exponential production decline.
From our current predicament I think we have 10 years at most under a cheap energy and exponential de-growth model regime. There’s no point in projecting when crude oil and condensate production will halve (or even drop by a quarter) since such a continuing paradigm for our civilization doesn’t exist and under the export land model there would be no oil exports left either. Chaos, collapse, and cannibalism. So ends the era of modernity and techno slavery (total dependance on technology to the point of overshoot and near-extinction).
It would be interesting to have your views on this: https://ember-energy.org/app/uploads/2025/09/Slidedeck-The-Electrotech-Revolution-PDF.pdf
"Back then, a downward spiral of falling demand, reduced production, wage cuts, increased unemployment, and business failures ultimately lead to an economic depression lasting a decade (4), till the second world war began."
I don't think your mention that back then the solution was a World War is coincidental. A third one could be the "solution" a couple years from now, similarly.