I have to ask: shouldn't industrial life stop anyway? I often read posts here and elsewhere (Richard Heinberg, Jessica Wildfire, Craig Tindale, Jem Bendell, Nate Hagens) that have an underlying implication that we should try to handle the economy differently so that modern life can continue.
But no matter how you slice it, our global economy is tearing the Web of Life apart . . . and collectively we're completely and thoroughly unable to stop this global monster from doing so, no matter *what* those of us who see what ought to be done think, feel, or want.
So, in a weird, frightening, and tragic way, isn't what the US & Israel are doing in the Middle East hurrying a process that is going to happen anyway (and *needs* to to happen, I'm guessing, from the standpoint of the living biosphere)? In his post that you quote, "Systemic Risk: A 12-Order Cascading Analysis of a Zero-Flow Strait of Hormuz Closure," Tindale says with regards to this war: "The whole world will be compelled to support efforts to bring this situation under control immediately." But Good God, to what end?!? So that we can drag out this modern industrial ecocide a bit longer and more comfortably?
And I ask this with grief and dread (Jem Bendell has a strangely helpful piece called "Don't forget the Dread," by the way). It's deeply, deeply disorienting -- what a small word to try to describe this horror! As a family man I'm not happy (okay, *terrified* . . . how am I going to take care of my loved ones?) with what is happening and going to happen -- but my guess is that from the standpoint of the rest of non-human life, this collapse can't happen soon enough.
I just wish we collectively had the wherewithal to execute something like Richard Heinberg's energy descent protocol and at least have a controlled descent, rather than an uncontrolled crash. But I don't see how the larger forces at play will ever allow that to happen.
Spot on! Thank you for giving voice to a perspective shared by many of us. I wish no harm to innocent human beings, but the reality is innocent human beings (and all life on earth) are being harmed across the globe in countless ways right now - often in the name of upholding this terrible, unsustainable, extractive global economy. It will end one way or another. Unfortunately (and 100% predictably), global leaders will do nothing to ramp down in any kind of planned way that does as little damage as possible.
I'm with you completely. Terrified for my children, but somehow resigned that this collapse is inevitable. I can only hope that it'll help reach critical awareness in communities sooner to start building resilient systems for food, clean water, shelter, emergency medicine, and other true priorities.
> we should try to handle the economy differently so that modern life can continue.
That is not at all what I get from Nate Hagens/Jem Bendell. They're arguing for a managed descent instead of a deadly crash (Bend vs break). At the same time there's an akcnowledgement that managing the descent may not be possible, so in order to be able to bend, we must be ready for the breaking points and survive them with grace and humanity.
You're welcome. I'm reminded again from these responses that there *are* people paying attention to this predicament, and it helps to not feel so damned alone and strange for paying attention to these unfolding catastrophes.
These and Richard Abbot's comments remind me that it behooves me to *also* find those who are local so we might work try to figure out how to meet this collapse.
To that end: In my wanderings this morning after reading B and these comments and clicking on the post's links, I found this:
Adam Cohen Feb 26
Growing is HALF the Battle!
"The future of food isn’t “organic vs conventional.” It’s 30 miles vs 3,000.
"A community that can feed itself shouldn’t need a continent-spanning supply chain to do it.
"Local production only matters when local distribution makes it normal, and not a special occasion."
This points me to what I *can* do — link arms with others in my community to figure out how we're going to feed, clothe, shelter, and help each other as we go bouncing down this steep ravine of collapse.
Since you are asking, I saw this coming decades ago and finally built the tool for decentralizing and localizing food production to avoid complete dependence on unsustainable fuel and fertilizers propping up global industrialized agriculture. Building an online farmers market was the easy part. Getting people who are currently accustomed to ordering food that arrives in minutes to plan for food that takes months is a whole other battle, especially when they're not even aware of the tremendous risks to food security the current system imposes. This is a one person operation, I built it from scratch starting more than 5 years ago. If anyone takes this seriously and wants to connect, please be in touch.
I wrote a grant to the Echoing Green foundation in the late 90’s for an easily replicable online portal to facilitate mutual aid, skill sharing and tool lending, a labor credit system revaluing volunteer labor and anonymized data collection and heat map for community assessments and creating visual displays of progress. I sent a detailed breakdown to the Governor’s office on how to manage a degrowth scenario by identifying local permaculture, watershed and conservation leaders rather than signing off on top-down digital control measures for rationing and crowd control. Something as simple as a printed token system in 3 denominations say 12k coins for 500 family groups focused just on community gardening, adaptive reuse and salvage, home maintenance, water infrastructure, foraging and cooking, elder and childcare could jumpstart each neighborhood in a severe supply chain disruption.
Did anything materialize from your efforts? It sounds like a really well thought out plan. Encouraging anyone to adopt degrowth strategies, economic contraction, localization of labor instead of outsourcing the hard parts-- that's the real challenge. Everyone appreciates the luxuries of modern life, so much so that many would probably rather die in abundance than live with scarcity.
Great idea. I was looking for spare irrigation parts at the local hardware store near our family cabin and met a younger guy who after telling Him about my plan for a food plot told me there is an older lady with an overgrown apple orchard over the line in NY State. The fellow and his sister are from one of the pioneer families in the valley and want to do something with the orchard. I told him that I’m growing rootstock and learning how to graft fruit trees. The match made in heaven, lol.
We're all learning as we go if we're adapting. I was a software engineer from silicon valley before becoming a chicken and hugelkultur farmer. I can't think of a more important problem to work on and big tech is ignoring it so I had to do it myself if it were to happen. The situation you describe is perfect for my market, Farmor. Distribute surplus fruit for some extra cash, reduce waste, get to know your neighbors, establish connections now while there are still safety nets (however long they may last).
Absolutely correct. But unfortunately scaling down our economy means that we will have to scale down our population. And that will get ugly. Famines and wars fought for material resources will achieve the desired results but not in a nice way.
Im asking myself the same question. How the earth could heal itself, if only we weren't burning it down first. Patriarchy was a failed system running a full steam. We could have changed that course with Gore instead of Bush. But the 6th extinction has arrived and its time for Mother Earth to exact its revenge. Just case in point, many will die, but we've said over population will be the death of us. A few will survive, I'm sure.
My neighbour is a mining engineer... he flies in and out of the Pilbara ... I spoke to him yesterday ... there is no shortage of diesel at the mines...
I can confirm this as even the remote parts of AU have plenty of diesel... the price has actually come down from 3.65 about two weeks ago...
Yes, the Iran war is just hastening the inevitable. The modern way of life, modernity is, and always was, unsustainable, since it relies on non-renewable resources, apart from the environmental toll it takes. As mentioned in B's post, copper was already set to peak soon but all the "transition" hopefuls seemed to completely ignore that. Environmentalists, almost without exception, want the modern way of life to continue, and so are just as blind as the self-styled rational optimists.
It's scary, but kind of compelling viewing. I thought I might not see collapse before I die (I may have another 25 years or so) but now it looks as if I might get to see it. Oh well, nothing I can do about it.
It has to. If we want to keep this planet inhabiteable, we have to relinquish our will to cheat nature and subject ourselfs back to its control. That includes modern medicine and probally even aggriculture.
No technological or scientific magic trick will safe us
I've thought the same. Personally, I thing individuals are made in the image of God. But the structure of society is simply cancerous. Our entire culture. Political and social order in increasingly that other never enough, and endless desire. Even something like strawberries in December. We can't seem to put the bottle down so to speak.
Thanks, Honest Sorcerer. I guess we’re done as a species. Nothing to do but heap scorn on any hopers, sit around the campfire with a bottle of bourbon, and be right about the end of everything human.
I could list all the planetary evolutionary bottlenecks and crises-for-us, that our species has navigated in the last 300,000 or so years, during which the planet itself gyrated wildly in climate and geography, to arrive here - but I’ve learned the futility of marshaling evidence against faulty premises.
I would encourage you to be more specific as to what is actually over. What cannot survive is our civilization based on mindless extraction. That’s fine. What cannot survive is our myopia as humans that cannot imagine that the ‘other’ has anything to contribute to us. Sure. Good riddance. What cannot survive is our arrogance as a species that has us distinct and separate ourselves from the natural systems of our planet. Great! What cannot survive is our childish Jungian perplexity, waiting to be ‘saved’ from responsibility, that is fundamentally unable to imagine existence and/or creation not revolving around us exclusively. As Kurt Vonnegut would put it, ‘So it goes.’
“J’accuse!”, Honest Sorcerer. You also limit yourself to the bounds of your own perceptions and reasonings. Which is fine. But you limit the rest of US to YOUR situational definition. How typically human. Here I take my leave.
Personally, I’m in a great mood. The current world geopolitical situation, dominated as it is by such latter-day malignant and toxic actors and systems that brought us all here, who desperately grasp for last-minute throw-of-the-dice salvation (from accountability), is coming to a completely predictable, miserable end. Fabulous!
Unfortunately, that means us humans have to get off our personal, cultural and civilizational duffs, and evolve OURSELVES. Into a species that is functional, in the higher sense that our survival now demands. One more time, as we will discover.
If you remain parked around the campfire, with a bottle of scorn for anyone else who is not as smartly contemptuous of your species as you are, then here I take my leave. Life itself is too interesting and fascinating and promising, at least for some of us, to remain there. Things just won’t be the way they were before. A small price to pay.
Bravo. I was about to reply but this is better and kinder than my take. He’s a sophisticated doomer, which means his current facts are largely correct and his conclusion is non-falsifiable by design. If things recover, he’ll say we got lucky. If they don’t, he was right. The “never” framing is the tell - it’s unfalsifiable rhetoric, not physical reasoning.
Thanks David. I agree with you: the words ‘always’ and ‘never’ are indeed the tell, in engaging with anyone. Save your time. Black/white, right/wrong, yes/no reasoning. No shading. Meaning no real conversation, or interest in discovery and movement.
We westerners seriously need to enlarge our vocabulary. There are things we need to revisit. Like Negotiation. Diplomacy. Conversation, back and forth. Beyond using the offer of these as a stratagem to murder your opponents.
As we admonish children: ‘use your words.’ Why fascism fails: fascists are simply and profoundly unable to engage in basic conversation. Very curious. Resulting in relatively quick and enormously damaging trajectories, in the process of mobilizing everyone against them in self-defense. Predictable over time. And predictably enormously expensive.
Recasting all this as a mystery: human refusal to learn, in the face of completely predictable circumstances and outcomes. Count me as genuinely puzzled. What is so scary about investigation of evidence that leads to actual behavior change? Is catastrophe really emotionally preferable?
Great insights, thanks for the enlightened framing!
There are a multitude of movements and gurus: The Great Turning, The Great Simplification, The Symbiocene, Relocalization, Deep Transition, Deep Adaptation, and so on.
Whatever you call it and whomever you follow, we’ve undoubtedly hit the Limits To Growth predicted by D. Meadows et al., (Club of Rome) in the 1970’s.
As the EcoEvoBio saying goes, “migrate, adapt or die” and 🌎 overshoot is real.
A dear (beyond human) friend recently said, “you humans are part of the story, but it isn’t about you”.
Another wise one said, “anyone who says they know how this is going to end is full of shit”.
Upton Sinclair cut the Gordian knot on refusal to learn: "It is difficult to get a man to understand something, when his salary depends on his not understanding it."
Damn fine point, Mr. Abbot — thank you . . . though I make a distinction between "our species" and "modern humans." Perhaps B has that distinction, too.
In the larger picture, life has evolved out from under five extinctions. Perhaps it will do so a sixth time. You have reminded me that it's vital to remember that we're a flash in time in the greater cosmic play.
‘Our species’ or ‘modern humans’? What’s in a name? The play is the play, whether performed on the New York stage, or by Ms. Jones fifth-grade class. We merely critique the particular performance.
However, our standards have been set, by our simply being here commenting to each other electronically. That we are here, itself dictates that it is premature to count us out. And especially premature and unnecessary to count EACH OTHER out.
Oh, I think there *is* so much in a name . . . but sigh, my time is frustratingly pulled away from engaging more from this good conversation. But I will take a good sentiment away from your comments, and I thank you for that — "All the best! Lots is to come! Not to be missed!"
Just contemplating "66 kg graphite, 53 kg copper, 40 kg nickel, 24 kg manganese, 13 kg cobalt, 9 kg lithium [etc]" to make *one* EV... the destruction of mountains, and all the life on them is a crime. Yet the nauseating car ads often show the hideous contraptions against backdrops of pristine wilderness, not in huge traffic jams in choking, filthy cities, or speeding past long-suffering pedestrians (and wildlife).
Of course these monsters are no better than petrol/diesel cars, but the marketing hype says 'green' lol.
This civilization is destroying the planet, as it has since its inception. The level of destruction seems to increase exponentially, 'thanks' to modern science and technology. Mining is at the heart of it all, and there is no such thing as 'sustainable mining'.
All the science & tech is labelled 'progress', proof of human ingenuity. Witness the latest, utterly pointless Moon 'mission', supposedly a precursor to building bases there 'independent' of Earth (as if), which in turn will pave the way to Mars (yeah, right!).
This brings to mind something I think about sometimes: that just driving an old car is way better for the planet than buying the most “environmentally friendly” new one. If the entire automotive industry was reduced 90% and the emphasis was placed on keeping parts production for old vehicles to keep them running, I suspect it would save a dramatic amount of energy. My family’s van is 10+ years old, and my personal car turns 40 this July, and the only thing stopping these vehicles from lasting a few more decades at minimum is really just whether replacement parts can be supplied to keep them going (and of course oil production I guess, but that’s a whole different story.)
I used to think that, but ten ears ago I bought an electric car and rooftop solar. I don't care how much gasoline costs. There are tens of thousands of electric trucks now, millions of cars, acres of solar. Oil shocks oh my!
Maybe you should distinguish between cars as shiny objects for gratification, amd cars as appliances, like the boxy, efficient people/goods mover they can be. In ten years, my Kia Soul EV has used naught but sunshine and wiper blades. I also don't drive much, another obsession that pays. off. There are also too damn many humans, especially greedy ones. Work on that.
You utterly miss the point: you've 'forgotten' that it takes tonnes of fossil fuel powered mining and manufacturing for your "Kia Soul EV" to only use "naught but sunshine and wiper blades"...! Enjoy your energy blindness dead end cul de sac, whilst you blame others for the greed you display here.
Too many humans is a fundamental issue. It's been neglected for decades, resulting in the disaster heading out way now. It's also the easiest problem to address, all it takes is education and contraception. Smaller families over the longer term fixes everything. Absolutely everything. Thankfully it's happening by itself now as more and more people realise the mess we're in and are just deciding that children are too expensive and the future is uncertain.
The pronatalist economists, advertisers, politicians, religions and capitalists are trying to stop it, but they are failing
Every study I have ever read over the last three decades has shown that educating women is the most effective strategy for lowering birth rates. As it is, birth rates in many industrialized countries are already well below replacement rates. Various governments have tried all kinds of strategies for getting women in below-replacement rate countries to have more babies, with very little success in most countries. Parents are looking at the mess the world is in and deciding not to have children. There are, of course, long lag times built into such demographic changes, and there are still enough places having more than replacement-level children that the global population is still growing. All that said, even if population stabilized tomorrow, we would still be facing the need for huge cutbacks in the throughput of the global economy.
I grew up in a draughty old house, with no central heating (though we did have a range in the kitchen), mostly cold water, no car, no TV (the radio was great), no washing machine (we had a wringer) - even when I was married and a mother to four children, with cloth nappies); we mostly grew our own vegetables... everyday life was busy and tough, but we grew up tough, healthy, resilient and happy; comradeship and community made Life. In fact, I am more optimistic for my grandchildren and great-children, at the thought of this atomized society collapsing... and please don't accuse me of being an oldster hankering after/being nostalgic for bygone days and, of course, it will be extremely difficult for people who have become 'soft'... My hope is we can build on our past and present amazing knowledge and forge a brighter future for us humans, for mother nature and for the planet; but next time round in humility not arrogance. Humans are ingenious when faced with challenges. The Stoics saw adversity as a positive:
Seneca: "No man is more unhappy than he who never faces adversity. For he is not permitted to prove himself."
Marcus Aurelius: "Just as nature takes every obstacle, every impediment, and works around it - turns it to its purposes, incorporates it into itself - so, too, a rational being can turn each setback into raw material and use it to achieve its goal."
"Mr. Johnson’s thesis can be summarized without much difficulty: after generations of extravagant and reckless industrial expansion, we are clearly entering an age of economic scarcity. While human demands continue to rise, natural resources, especially the non-renewable kind, become harder to find and more expensive to extract, process, transport and distribute. This simple brute fact is the basic cause of inflation, despite the inability of most professional economists to see it. (The dismal science” has never been more dismally obtuse than it is today.) The law of diminishing returns is coming into effect. Technological developments can delay the process but not halt or reverse it; nor can we rely on government or big business to save us. Planning for further growth delays the adjustments that must be made, makes a fair sharing of necessary sacrifices more troublesome, and if carried too far will make more severe and painful, because rapid, the inevitable decline of the international economic machine. The best way to deal with the end of affluence is to accept itnot fight itand to begin, here and now, the unavoidable adaptations, on an individual, family, and community basis. Piecemeal, experimental, and muddling."
That's how we got here, that's how we'll continue.
The point of investing in a green energy transition was to develop the technological means to reduce dependence on fossil fuels. Had so many knee-jerk contrarians not spent the past 50 years endlessly pointing out all the reasons why there can't possibly be any alternative to fossil fuels, we'd be much farther along in creating a chance for industrial civilization to not only endure the environmental rupture, but overcome it. I laugh at all the conspiracies now being trotted out, about the attempt to do something positive to reduce fossil fuel dependence as a big plot to destroy, say, Germany. Do you not realize that the oil industry has been the most powerful conspiracy in human history? A suicide pact with legions of cynical enablers.
I look at the stablecoin/crypto thing and wonder the same thing. Don’t these systems have to be based on the laws of nature at some point? Physics, at least?
Thanks, B! Unbelievable the number of cornucopians in the comments. When I point out the bottlenecks, many of which I have learned from you, my cornucopian friends go, "but recycling..." and "utility scale batteries..." and "MSRs and SMRs, and nuclear fusion..." I used to hand them Alice J. Friedemann's book, Life After Fossil Fuels, and now they say, "it's 5 years old, sooo out of date!"
When this economy crumbles away, the cornucopians will continue to cling to their fantasies, and claim all setbacks are temporary, just until we can get the right bullies - er - politicians into office.
I wish I had a hardcopy annual report, co-authored by you and Friedemann, updated every year, to hand to the cornucopians, but I'm sure they'll come up with some new outrageous claim.
I've been down this pessimism rabbit hole at an earlier time due to the excellent work of Jean Leherrere and the late Jay Hanson. The numbers for replacing fossil fuels with renewables do not work with even the speculative best possible efficiency panels and turbines yet to be invented, but the numbers do work when you add biodiesel as a component. Renewables act as the energy positive component to power energy-negative refineries that take in row crops and pump out diesel fuel to run the energy-negative fuel agriculture and it all works fine and dandy with enough surplus energy and fuel to run a civilization at 1960s tech levels.
With one problem. Metal ore quality declines are still unsolved and they only get worse into the coming decades.
Advanced economies keep talking as if they can narrate themselves into a “next economy,” but the underlying civilization still runs on extraction, fuel, logistics, and heavy industry.
That’s why transition rhetoric so often outruns material reality.
No new economy for us there isn't. The controlled demolition seems to be running to plan though. Multi tiered existence. Some will get all the nice things, but most are superflous to requirements. Food, shelter, warmth will be our focus, with a very limited, ever dwindling supply.
Community in the West is a hard problem. Beyond deep tribalism there is little cooperation across the various socioeconomic and cultural strata. Lots of distrust, lots of exploitation. Warming up to each other now, now that there is a predicament, not when there was a K recovery, is asking too much too late in the game. We didn't cultivate cooperation historically, it won't start growing from nothing today. Sad reality.
I think community can be hard anywhere but not impossible. My lived experience over the past half century + has thankfully involved time spent with very successful, resilient communities in a number of places here in the ‘west’…if we’d like to work towards a more equitable, sustainable world, we will likely need to work on our community building skills.
Sorry for your challenging experiences on this front; I hope that enduring them will help you to find the right combination of factors to help you fit in with the community you need when the time is right.
My experiences with the self sustaining communities that I have interacted with have been of an evolving and enlightening nature; it took me a bit at first to recognize how protective they were of their homeostasis…once I got over my hurt feelings I began to understand why they behaved this way, and was able to interact in a more realistic and acceptable way, which has been a hugely powerful lesson for me.
Is there a name for the cascade of interconnected failures that happen at just the right critical time making it impossible to recover system growth? Do we have a technical term that points at this phenomenon in which, despite all our best efforts, we won’t be able to grow the metabolic throughput of the global economy anymore?
I guess the terms might be critical transition or tipping point or something. But I guess I’m looking for more of a technical explanation rather than a vocabulary word. Why now? Why didn’t the 2008 GFC or Covid set off the cascade? Looks like Newbury also has an article yesterday sort of exploring this.
Be a lot more convincing if there weren't so many "much" "many" "most" descriptors instead of numbers and links. I drive a solar powered electric car. Batteries work, and solar, after production, uses the sun as fuel. Not impressed.
Have you missed the entire point of the article, as well as countless others? The "after production" is a hell of a hang-up.
The Second Law of Thermodynamics is a bitch. Batteries and solar panels have a finite lifespan, and cannot be recycled in an efficient manner. There are fundamental physical reasons for why this is so. And batteries and solar panels require enormous amounts of fossil fuels to produce at every step in the manufacturing process. And even if we had a magical source of infinite solar panels and batteries, there are many other reasons why our civilization has a finite lifespan.
Maybe learn some high school science and read these articles with fresh eyes?
The Ammonia powered ship. (Green ammonia is still more expensive that gas derived ammonia - it was a major issue that ammonia went from $550 to $650, green ammonia (made using electrolysed hydrogen from renewable sources) is $850. It would, with the technologies reaching this level of sophistication, be an entirely different economy. But it's interesting to watch it improve.
Ammonia has about 18.6MJ/kg, diesel is 43MJ/kg. That part alone should raise questions, let alone the production of ammonia at scale required to replace industrial fuels, especially considering where so much of that production used to happen and is now offline.
Cascading systems failure is in progress. I don't think it can be stopped now. Even if the Strait reopened tomorrow. Things are about to get very messy.
I have to ask: shouldn't industrial life stop anyway? I often read posts here and elsewhere (Richard Heinberg, Jessica Wildfire, Craig Tindale, Jem Bendell, Nate Hagens) that have an underlying implication that we should try to handle the economy differently so that modern life can continue.
But no matter how you slice it, our global economy is tearing the Web of Life apart . . . and collectively we're completely and thoroughly unable to stop this global monster from doing so, no matter *what* those of us who see what ought to be done think, feel, or want.
So, in a weird, frightening, and tragic way, isn't what the US & Israel are doing in the Middle East hurrying a process that is going to happen anyway (and *needs* to to happen, I'm guessing, from the standpoint of the living biosphere)? In his post that you quote, "Systemic Risk: A 12-Order Cascading Analysis of a Zero-Flow Strait of Hormuz Closure," Tindale says with regards to this war: "The whole world will be compelled to support efforts to bring this situation under control immediately." But Good God, to what end?!? So that we can drag out this modern industrial ecocide a bit longer and more comfortably?
And I ask this with grief and dread (Jem Bendell has a strangely helpful piece called "Don't forget the Dread," by the way). It's deeply, deeply disorienting -- what a small word to try to describe this horror! As a family man I'm not happy (okay, *terrified* . . . how am I going to take care of my loved ones?) with what is happening and going to happen -- but my guess is that from the standpoint of the rest of non-human life, this collapse can't happen soon enough.
I just wish we collectively had the wherewithal to execute something like Richard Heinberg's energy descent protocol and at least have a controlled descent, rather than an uncontrolled crash. But I don't see how the larger forces at play will ever allow that to happen.
Deep sigh . . . prayers to all.
Spot on! Thank you for giving voice to a perspective shared by many of us. I wish no harm to innocent human beings, but the reality is innocent human beings (and all life on earth) are being harmed across the globe in countless ways right now - often in the name of upholding this terrible, unsustainable, extractive global economy. It will end one way or another. Unfortunately (and 100% predictably), global leaders will do nothing to ramp down in any kind of planned way that does as little damage as possible.
I'm with you completely. Terrified for my children, but somehow resigned that this collapse is inevitable. I can only hope that it'll help reach critical awareness in communities sooner to start building resilient systems for food, clean water, shelter, emergency medicine, and other true priorities.
> we should try to handle the economy differently so that modern life can continue.
That is not at all what I get from Nate Hagens/Jem Bendell. They're arguing for a managed descent instead of a deadly crash (Bend vs break). At the same time there's an akcnowledgement that managing the descent may not be possible, so in order to be able to bend, we must be ready for the breaking points and survive them with grace and humanity.
This echoes the energy descent protocol.
Thanks for the Jen Bendell recommendation. You are echoing so much of what I think and feel.
You're welcome. I'm reminded again from these responses that there *are* people paying attention to this predicament, and it helps to not feel so damned alone and strange for paying attention to these unfolding catastrophes.
These and Richard Abbot's comments remind me that it behooves me to *also* find those who are local so we might work try to figure out how to meet this collapse.
To that end: In my wanderings this morning after reading B and these comments and clicking on the post's links, I found this:
Adam Cohen Feb 26
Growing is HALF the Battle!
"The future of food isn’t “organic vs conventional.” It’s 30 miles vs 3,000.
"A community that can feed itself shouldn’t need a continent-spanning supply chain to do it.
"Local production only matters when local distribution makes it normal, and not a special occasion."
This points me to what I *can* do — link arms with others in my community to figure out how we're going to feed, clothe, shelter, and help each other as we go bouncing down this steep ravine of collapse.
Best wishes to all.
Since you are asking, I saw this coming decades ago and finally built the tool for decentralizing and localizing food production to avoid complete dependence on unsustainable fuel and fertilizers propping up global industrialized agriculture. Building an online farmers market was the easy part. Getting people who are currently accustomed to ordering food that arrives in minutes to plan for food that takes months is a whole other battle, especially when they're not even aware of the tremendous risks to food security the current system imposes. This is a one person operation, I built it from scratch starting more than 5 years ago. If anyone takes this seriously and wants to connect, please be in touch.
I wrote a grant to the Echoing Green foundation in the late 90’s for an easily replicable online portal to facilitate mutual aid, skill sharing and tool lending, a labor credit system revaluing volunteer labor and anonymized data collection and heat map for community assessments and creating visual displays of progress. I sent a detailed breakdown to the Governor’s office on how to manage a degrowth scenario by identifying local permaculture, watershed and conservation leaders rather than signing off on top-down digital control measures for rationing and crowd control. Something as simple as a printed token system in 3 denominations say 12k coins for 500 family groups focused just on community gardening, adaptive reuse and salvage, home maintenance, water infrastructure, foraging and cooking, elder and childcare could jumpstart each neighborhood in a severe supply chain disruption.
Do you have a copy of that which you'd be willing to share? nathan+ths@schema.nz
For the grant application, I was unsuccessful but then I found Bright Neighbor in Portland Oregon.
https://brightneighbor.com
https://www.facebook.com/brightneighbor/info
Did anything materialize from your efforts? It sounds like a really well thought out plan. Encouraging anyone to adopt degrowth strategies, economic contraction, localization of labor instead of outsourcing the hard parts-- that's the real challenge. Everyone appreciates the luxuries of modern life, so much so that many would probably rather die in abundance than live with scarcity.
Great idea. I was looking for spare irrigation parts at the local hardware store near our family cabin and met a younger guy who after telling Him about my plan for a food plot told me there is an older lady with an overgrown apple orchard over the line in NY State. The fellow and his sister are from one of the pioneer families in the valley and want to do something with the orchard. I told him that I’m growing rootstock and learning how to graft fruit trees. The match made in heaven, lol.
We're all learning as we go if we're adapting. I was a software engineer from silicon valley before becoming a chicken and hugelkultur farmer. I can't think of a more important problem to work on and big tech is ignoring it so I had to do it myself if it were to happen. The situation you describe is perfect for my market, Farmor. Distribute surplus fruit for some extra cash, reduce waste, get to know your neighbors, establish connections now while there are still safety nets (however long they may last).
Love it. Keep me posted. Thanks for a good reminder for what to do with all the dead standing White Ash trees on our land.
I've done the same. Would be good to exchange notes
Absolutely correct. But unfortunately scaling down our economy means that we will have to scale down our population. And that will get ugly. Famines and wars fought for material resources will achieve the desired results but not in a nice way.
Im asking myself the same question. How the earth could heal itself, if only we weren't burning it down first. Patriarchy was a failed system running a full steam. We could have changed that course with Gore instead of Bush. But the 6th extinction has arrived and its time for Mother Earth to exact its revenge. Just case in point, many will die, but we've said over population will be the death of us. A few will survive, I'm sure.
Of course renewable energy was always Bullshit... but it was a necessary lie:
https://fasteddynz.substack.com/p/the-three-pillars-of-bullshit
My neighbour is a mining engineer... he flies in and out of the Pilbara ... I spoke to him yesterday ... there is no shortage of diesel at the mines...
I can confirm this as even the remote parts of AU have plenty of diesel... the price has actually come down from 3.65 about two weeks ago...
https://petrolspy.com.au/map/location/au/qld/4873/kimberley#:~:text=Map%20of%20today's%20petrol%20prices%20near%20Kimberley%20QLD%3A&text=Ampol%20Mossman%20%E2%80%93%20Unleaded%20252.9%2C%20Diesel,252.9%2C%20Diesel%20299.9%2C%20U95%20266.9
Hormuz never closed https://fasteddynz.substack.com/p/and-the-morons-sigh-with-relief
YOU ARE BEING PLAYED
Yes, the Iran war is just hastening the inevitable. The modern way of life, modernity is, and always was, unsustainable, since it relies on non-renewable resources, apart from the environmental toll it takes. As mentioned in B's post, copper was already set to peak soon but all the "transition" hopefuls seemed to completely ignore that. Environmentalists, almost without exception, want the modern way of life to continue, and so are just as blind as the self-styled rational optimists.
It's scary, but kind of compelling viewing. I thought I might not see collapse before I die (I may have another 25 years or so) but now it looks as if I might get to see it. Oh well, nothing I can do about it.
Shouldnt industrial life stop anyway?
It has to. If we want to keep this planet inhabiteable, we have to relinquish our will to cheat nature and subject ourselfs back to its control. That includes modern medicine and probally even aggriculture.
No technological or scientific magic trick will safe us
Too bad, Nothing Good Has Ever Happened. It will only get worse and More Jewish as time goes on.
SUFFAH.
I've thought the same. Personally, I thing individuals are made in the image of God. But the structure of society is simply cancerous. Our entire culture. Political and social order in increasingly that other never enough, and endless desire. Even something like strawberries in December. We can't seem to put the bottle down so to speak.
Thanks, Honest Sorcerer. I guess we’re done as a species. Nothing to do but heap scorn on any hopers, sit around the campfire with a bottle of bourbon, and be right about the end of everything human.
I could list all the planetary evolutionary bottlenecks and crises-for-us, that our species has navigated in the last 300,000 or so years, during which the planet itself gyrated wildly in climate and geography, to arrive here - but I’ve learned the futility of marshaling evidence against faulty premises.
I would encourage you to be more specific as to what is actually over. What cannot survive is our civilization based on mindless extraction. That’s fine. What cannot survive is our myopia as humans that cannot imagine that the ‘other’ has anything to contribute to us. Sure. Good riddance. What cannot survive is our arrogance as a species that has us distinct and separate ourselves from the natural systems of our planet. Great! What cannot survive is our childish Jungian perplexity, waiting to be ‘saved’ from responsibility, that is fundamentally unable to imagine existence and/or creation not revolving around us exclusively. As Kurt Vonnegut would put it, ‘So it goes.’
“J’accuse!”, Honest Sorcerer. You also limit yourself to the bounds of your own perceptions and reasonings. Which is fine. But you limit the rest of US to YOUR situational definition. How typically human. Here I take my leave.
Personally, I’m in a great mood. The current world geopolitical situation, dominated as it is by such latter-day malignant and toxic actors and systems that brought us all here, who desperately grasp for last-minute throw-of-the-dice salvation (from accountability), is coming to a completely predictable, miserable end. Fabulous!
Unfortunately, that means us humans have to get off our personal, cultural and civilizational duffs, and evolve OURSELVES. Into a species that is functional, in the higher sense that our survival now demands. One more time, as we will discover.
If you remain parked around the campfire, with a bottle of scorn for anyone else who is not as smartly contemptuous of your species as you are, then here I take my leave. Life itself is too interesting and fascinating and promising, at least for some of us, to remain there. Things just won’t be the way they were before. A small price to pay.
Bravo. I was about to reply but this is better and kinder than my take. He’s a sophisticated doomer, which means his current facts are largely correct and his conclusion is non-falsifiable by design. If things recover, he’ll say we got lucky. If they don’t, he was right. The “never” framing is the tell - it’s unfalsifiable rhetoric, not physical reasoning.
Thanks David. I agree with you: the words ‘always’ and ‘never’ are indeed the tell, in engaging with anyone. Save your time. Black/white, right/wrong, yes/no reasoning. No shading. Meaning no real conversation, or interest in discovery and movement.
We westerners seriously need to enlarge our vocabulary. There are things we need to revisit. Like Negotiation. Diplomacy. Conversation, back and forth. Beyond using the offer of these as a stratagem to murder your opponents.
As we admonish children: ‘use your words.’ Why fascism fails: fascists are simply and profoundly unable to engage in basic conversation. Very curious. Resulting in relatively quick and enormously damaging trajectories, in the process of mobilizing everyone against them in self-defense. Predictable over time. And predictably enormously expensive.
Recasting all this as a mystery: human refusal to learn, in the face of completely predictable circumstances and outcomes. Count me as genuinely puzzled. What is so scary about investigation of evidence that leads to actual behavior change? Is catastrophe really emotionally preferable?
A question, not a conclusion.
Catastrophe has some historical precedence so I guess we’re susceptible to doom narratives. Forgive a plug for one of my articles here but I think we have a doom shaped hole in us that we need to fill with something: https://beyondsurvival.substack.com/p/were-doomed-this-is-my-last-newsletter?utm_campaign=post&utm_medium=web
Great insights, thanks for the enlightened framing!
There are a multitude of movements and gurus: The Great Turning, The Great Simplification, The Symbiocene, Relocalization, Deep Transition, Deep Adaptation, and so on.
Whatever you call it and whomever you follow, we’ve undoubtedly hit the Limits To Growth predicted by D. Meadows et al., (Club of Rome) in the 1970’s.
As the EcoEvoBio saying goes, “migrate, adapt or die” and 🌎 overshoot is real.
A dear (beyond human) friend recently said, “you humans are part of the story, but it isn’t about you”.
Another wise one said, “anyone who says they know how this is going to end is full of shit”.
Upton Sinclair cut the Gordian knot on refusal to learn: "It is difficult to get a man to understand something, when his salary depends on his not understanding it."
Damn fine point, Mr. Abbot — thank you . . . though I make a distinction between "our species" and "modern humans." Perhaps B has that distinction, too.
In the larger picture, life has evolved out from under five extinctions. Perhaps it will do so a sixth time. You have reminded me that it's vital to remember that we're a flash in time in the greater cosmic play.
Mr Christopher,
‘Our species’ or ‘modern humans’? What’s in a name? The play is the play, whether performed on the New York stage, or by Ms. Jones fifth-grade class. We merely critique the particular performance.
However, our standards have been set, by our simply being here commenting to each other electronically. That we are here, itself dictates that it is premature to count us out. And especially premature and unnecessary to count EACH OTHER out.
All the best! Lots is to come, not to be missed.
Oh, I think there *is* so much in a name . . . but sigh, my time is frustratingly pulled away from engaging more from this good conversation. But I will take a good sentiment away from your comments, and I thank you for that — "All the best! Lots is to come! Not to be missed!"
Just contemplating "66 kg graphite, 53 kg copper, 40 kg nickel, 24 kg manganese, 13 kg cobalt, 9 kg lithium [etc]" to make *one* EV... the destruction of mountains, and all the life on them is a crime. Yet the nauseating car ads often show the hideous contraptions against backdrops of pristine wilderness, not in huge traffic jams in choking, filthy cities, or speeding past long-suffering pedestrians (and wildlife).
Of course these monsters are no better than petrol/diesel cars, but the marketing hype says 'green' lol.
This civilization is destroying the planet, as it has since its inception. The level of destruction seems to increase exponentially, 'thanks' to modern science and technology. Mining is at the heart of it all, and there is no such thing as 'sustainable mining'.
All the science & tech is labelled 'progress', proof of human ingenuity. Witness the latest, utterly pointless Moon 'mission', supposedly a precursor to building bases there 'independent' of Earth (as if), which in turn will pave the way to Mars (yeah, right!).
The sooner this shitshow is over, the better.
This brings to mind something I think about sometimes: that just driving an old car is way better for the planet than buying the most “environmentally friendly” new one. If the entire automotive industry was reduced 90% and the emphasis was placed on keeping parts production for old vehicles to keep them running, I suspect it would save a dramatic amount of energy. My family’s van is 10+ years old, and my personal car turns 40 this July, and the only thing stopping these vehicles from lasting a few more decades at minimum is really just whether replacement parts can be supplied to keep them going (and of course oil production I guess, but that’s a whole different story.)
I used to think that, but ten ears ago I bought an electric car and rooftop solar. I don't care how much gasoline costs. There are tens of thousands of electric trucks now, millions of cars, acres of solar. Oil shocks oh my!
Maybe you should distinguish between cars as shiny objects for gratification, amd cars as appliances, like the boxy, efficient people/goods mover they can be. In ten years, my Kia Soul EV has used naught but sunshine and wiper blades. I also don't drive much, another obsession that pays. off. There are also too damn many humans, especially greedy ones. Work on that.
You utterly miss the point: you've 'forgotten' that it takes tonnes of fossil fuel powered mining and manufacturing for your "Kia Soul EV" to only use "naught but sunshine and wiper blades"...! Enjoy your energy blindness dead end cul de sac, whilst you blame others for the greed you display here.
How would you propose "working on" the problem of too damn many humans?
Too many humans is a fundamental issue. It's been neglected for decades, resulting in the disaster heading out way now. It's also the easiest problem to address, all it takes is education and contraception. Smaller families over the longer term fixes everything. Absolutely everything. Thankfully it's happening by itself now as more and more people realise the mess we're in and are just deciding that children are too expensive and the future is uncertain.
The pronatalist economists, advertisers, politicians, religions and capitalists are trying to stop it, but they are failing
Every study I have ever read over the last three decades has shown that educating women is the most effective strategy for lowering birth rates. As it is, birth rates in many industrialized countries are already well below replacement rates. Various governments have tried all kinds of strategies for getting women in below-replacement rate countries to have more babies, with very little success in most countries. Parents are looking at the mess the world is in and deciding not to have children. There are, of course, long lag times built into such demographic changes, and there are still enough places having more than replacement-level children that the global population is still growing. All that said, even if population stabilized tomorrow, we would still be facing the need for huge cutbacks in the throughput of the global economy.
I grew up in a draughty old house, with no central heating (though we did have a range in the kitchen), mostly cold water, no car, no TV (the radio was great), no washing machine (we had a wringer) - even when I was married and a mother to four children, with cloth nappies); we mostly grew our own vegetables... everyday life was busy and tough, but we grew up tough, healthy, resilient and happy; comradeship and community made Life. In fact, I am more optimistic for my grandchildren and great-children, at the thought of this atomized society collapsing... and please don't accuse me of being an oldster hankering after/being nostalgic for bygone days and, of course, it will be extremely difficult for people who have become 'soft'... My hope is we can build on our past and present amazing knowledge and forge a brighter future for us humans, for mother nature and for the planet; but next time round in humility not arrogance. Humans are ingenious when faced with challenges. The Stoics saw adversity as a positive:
Seneca: "No man is more unhappy than he who never faces adversity. For he is not permitted to prove himself."
Marcus Aurelius: "Just as nature takes every obstacle, every impediment, and works around it - turns it to its purposes, incorporates it into itself - so, too, a rational being can turn each setback into raw material and use it to achieve its goal."
On the other hand, see https://www.amazon.com/Muddling-Toward-Frugality-Warren-Johnson/dp/1935212168/ref=sr_1_1 . First edition was published in 1978. Some people evidently can see farther than others.
"Mr. Johnson’s thesis can be summarized without much difficulty: after generations of extravagant and reckless industrial expansion, we are clearly entering an age of economic scarcity. While human demands continue to rise, natural resources, especially the non-renewable kind, become harder to find and more expensive to extract, process, transport and distribute. This simple brute fact is the basic cause of inflation, despite the inability of most professional economists to see it. (The dismal science” has never been more dismally obtuse than it is today.) The law of diminishing returns is coming into effect. Technological developments can delay the process but not halt or reverse it; nor can we rely on government or big business to save us. Planning for further growth delays the adjustments that must be made, makes a fair sharing of necessary sacrifices more troublesome, and if carried too far will make more severe and painful, because rapid, the inevitable decline of the international economic machine. The best way to deal with the end of affluence is to accept itnot fight itand to begin, here and now, the unavoidable adaptations, on an individual, family, and community basis. Piecemeal, experimental, and muddling."
That's how we got here, that's how we'll continue.
The point of investing in a green energy transition was to develop the technological means to reduce dependence on fossil fuels. Had so many knee-jerk contrarians not spent the past 50 years endlessly pointing out all the reasons why there can't possibly be any alternative to fossil fuels, we'd be much farther along in creating a chance for industrial civilization to not only endure the environmental rupture, but overcome it. I laugh at all the conspiracies now being trotted out, about the attempt to do something positive to reduce fossil fuel dependence as a big plot to destroy, say, Germany. Do you not realize that the oil industry has been the most powerful conspiracy in human history? A suicide pact with legions of cynical enablers.
If an “industrial economy” isn’t based on a preservation of biological balance it’s a Dead End.
I look at the stablecoin/crypto thing and wonder the same thing. Don’t these systems have to be based on the laws of nature at some point? Physics, at least?
Thanks, B! Unbelievable the number of cornucopians in the comments. When I point out the bottlenecks, many of which I have learned from you, my cornucopian friends go, "but recycling..." and "utility scale batteries..." and "MSRs and SMRs, and nuclear fusion..." I used to hand them Alice J. Friedemann's book, Life After Fossil Fuels, and now they say, "it's 5 years old, sooo out of date!"
When this economy crumbles away, the cornucopians will continue to cling to their fantasies, and claim all setbacks are temporary, just until we can get the right bullies - er - politicians into office.
I wish I had a hardcopy annual report, co-authored by you and Friedemann, updated every year, to hand to the cornucopians, but I'm sure they'll come up with some new outrageous claim.
There is no dinting the armour of virtue-signalling people!
Incredible how in 6 months the narrative around oil has moved from "over-supplied" to "energy crisis".
The oil system was always fragile.
The conflict in the Middle East just made it impossible to hide.
I've been down this pessimism rabbit hole at an earlier time due to the excellent work of Jean Leherrere and the late Jay Hanson. The numbers for replacing fossil fuels with renewables do not work with even the speculative best possible efficiency panels and turbines yet to be invented, but the numbers do work when you add biodiesel as a component. Renewables act as the energy positive component to power energy-negative refineries that take in row crops and pump out diesel fuel to run the energy-negative fuel agriculture and it all works fine and dandy with enough surplus energy and fuel to run a civilization at 1960s tech levels.
With one problem. Metal ore quality declines are still unsolved and they only get worse into the coming decades.
So mine waste dumps. Metals don't disappear.
The real point here is substrate dependence.
Advanced economies keep talking as if they can narrate themselves into a “next economy,” but the underlying civilization still runs on extraction, fuel, logistics, and heavy industry.
That’s why transition rhetoric so often outruns material reality.
Advanced economies feel like a large part of the root problem…
This will slide right into the blog post I am composing.
This is a deadly and delicate dance down the ladder of resource-consumption...
It turned out like this:
Precariously Baqlanced https://drjohnsblog.substack.com/p/precariously-balanced
No new economy for us there isn't. The controlled demolition seems to be running to plan though. Multi tiered existence. Some will get all the nice things, but most are superflous to requirements. Food, shelter, warmth will be our focus, with a very limited, ever dwindling supply.
Thankfully there are myriad resilient alternatives and an abundance of ingenuity to achieve them…community is a key part of that paradigm, IMO/E.
Community in the West is a hard problem. Beyond deep tribalism there is little cooperation across the various socioeconomic and cultural strata. Lots of distrust, lots of exploitation. Warming up to each other now, now that there is a predicament, not when there was a K recovery, is asking too much too late in the game. We didn't cultivate cooperation historically, it won't start growing from nothing today. Sad reality.
I think community can be hard anywhere but not impossible. My lived experience over the past half century + has thankfully involved time spent with very successful, resilient communities in a number of places here in the ‘west’…if we’d like to work towards a more equitable, sustainable world, we will likely need to work on our community building skills.
Sorry for your challenging experiences on this front; I hope that enduring them will help you to find the right combination of factors to help you fit in with the community you need when the time is right.
My experiences with the self sustaining communities that I have interacted with have been of an evolving and enlightening nature; it took me a bit at first to recognize how protective they were of their homeostasis…once I got over my hurt feelings I began to understand why they behaved this way, and was able to interact in a more realistic and acceptable way, which has been a hugely powerful lesson for me.
Is there a name for the cascade of interconnected failures that happen at just the right critical time making it impossible to recover system growth? Do we have a technical term that points at this phenomenon in which, despite all our best efforts, we won’t be able to grow the metabolic throughput of the global economy anymore?
Agenda 2030.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ZFHHOBiUrkg
“Cascade Failure”
Karma?
Polycrisis?
Entropy?
Collapse?
I guess the terms might be critical transition or tipping point or something. But I guess I’m looking for more of a technical explanation rather than a vocabulary word. Why now? Why didn’t the 2008 GFC or Covid set off the cascade? Looks like Newbury also has an article yesterday sort of exploring this.
https://theuaob.substack.com/p/the-brittle-fracture-why-the-hormuz?r=juavj&utm_medium=ios
Be a lot more convincing if there weren't so many "much" "many" "most" descriptors instead of numbers and links. I drive a solar powered electric car. Batteries work, and solar, after production, uses the sun as fuel. Not impressed.
Have you missed the entire point of the article, as well as countless others? The "after production" is a hell of a hang-up.
The Second Law of Thermodynamics is a bitch. Batteries and solar panels have a finite lifespan, and cannot be recycled in an efficient manner. There are fundamental physical reasons for why this is so. And batteries and solar panels require enormous amounts of fossil fuels to produce at every step in the manufacturing process. And even if we had a magical source of infinite solar panels and batteries, there are many other reasons why our civilization has a finite lifespan.
Maybe learn some high school science and read these articles with fresh eyes?
Latest next economy links:
https://www.gov.uk/government/news/worlds-first-dual-fuel-ammonia-powered-vessel-arrives-in-the-uk
The Ammonia powered ship. (Green ammonia is still more expensive that gas derived ammonia - it was a major issue that ammonia went from $550 to $650, green ammonia (made using electrolysed hydrogen from renewable sources) is $850. It would, with the technologies reaching this level of sophistication, be an entirely different economy. But it's interesting to watch it improve.
https://reneweconomy.com.au/giant-gold-mine-operating-with-90-pct-renewables-says-it-has-virtually-eliminated-diesel-costs/
Diesal is not irreplaceable. Far from it.
Ammonia has about 18.6MJ/kg, diesel is 43MJ/kg. That part alone should raise questions, let alone the production of ammonia at scale required to replace industrial fuels, especially considering where so much of that production used to happen and is now offline.
True, but it's still far better than Lithium Batteries. It sounds like Ammonia can meet the needs of shipping, when batteries maybe can't.
Cascading systems failure is in progress. I don't think it can be stopped now. Even if the Strait reopened tomorrow. Things are about to get very messy.
The hope is that the misanthropy writ large will fade with system collapse 🙏🏻