Assorted Musings on Collapse, pt 2

#272: “Peak almost everything”, part two. Tim Morgan, Surplus Energy Economics. March 7, 2024.

WINNERS AND LOSERS

It’s been said that “horse-sense” is the innate wisdom that prevents horses from putting bets on human beings.

I’m not a betting man myself, but we can all see the benefits that must accrue from knowing the outcome of a race before any wagers have even been placed. Those benefits can be greater still if all the mainstream pundits carry on tipping the wrong result.

This is the position that we’re now in, and my aim here is to explain, in brief, why this is.

The long-running contest between the economic orthodoxy and the energy-based alternative is ‘all over bar the shouting’ (though there will be plenty of that), and the energy argument has won.

Anyone who understands the economy as an energy system has an inside track over anyone – the majority – who still believes that economics is the study of money.

Thus understood, asset markets are partying at the end of growth. Governments, corporations and investors are planning for a future that cannot happen. The public is increasingly angry with politicians who promise what cannot possibly be delivered.

The background, at its briefest, is that conventional economics insists that the economy can be explained and understood in terms of money alone. If this were true, it would mean that there need never be any end to economic expansion.

The opponents of this orthodoxy, though they may disagree amongst themselves on many other things, share the insight that, on the contrary, ‘infinite economic growth on a finite planet’ is an impossibility, and that prosperity is a material concept, traceable to the characteristics and behaviour of energy, natural resources and the environment. 

The nature of growth

The battleground here is growth. If the orthodoxy was right, growth should be continuing but, in any meaningful sense, it is not. Momentum – the trend-line of the economy – should be rising or, at the very least, constant, but it has long been heading downwards.

Such meagre “growth” as is still being reported is cosmetic, being faked by the reckless injection of credit into the system.

If, in order to deliver one dollar, euro, yen or pound of growth, we have to create more than one dollar, euro, yen or pound of new credit, part of any reported growth is being faked. Using the narrow definition of formal debt, each dollar of global growth has, over the past twenty years, been accompanied by $3.20 of net new borrowing.

On a broader basis, including the credit assets of the NBFI (“shadow banking”) system for which data is incomplete, the ratio of credit expansion to growth is probably well in excess of 7:1.

This, of course, cannot continue in perpetuity. The end result must be default, and a loss of faith in the value of fiat money.

These divergences are illustrated in Fig. 1, from which it will be apparent that the gap between debt and GDP has widened to the point of unsustainability, with average “growth” of 3.5% over the past twenty years manufactured by borrowing at an annual average rate of 11% of GDP. The situation with regard to broader financial liabilities is even worse. ..........

Short Takes — 13: I realize I’m asking a LOT of you, my readers. Richard Crim. March 1, 2024.

I KNOW, I sound like a “crazy” person.

I’m telling you “Climate Science” is BROKEN and the Climate Apocalypse has started. I’m telling you to ignore the mainstream voices and narratives you will hear on television, social media, and the news.

I am “arrogantly” claiming that I “see” what’s happening and understand the Climate System better than almost any other commentator\analyst currently writing.

And, I am asking you to believe me.

Almost no one else agrees with my analysis.

For now.

In five years they will. They will have no choice, in five years it will be obvious I am right.

RIGHT NOW.

Listening to me, believing in my analysis, accepting the validity of what I am saying, is asking a LOT of you, my Readers. I’m telling you that it’s going to get twice as hot, twice as fast than anyone expected.

I’m telling you that the Elites fucked up “big time” and our civilization is about to Collapse.

Asking you to take me seriously is a “BIG ASK”, it’s a lot.

In my next article I am summing up where the data has taken me and what I “see”. Spoiler Alert, it’s not good and it’s going to be FAST.

.............

Don’t read it unless you want to know how bad it’s going to be.

...........

Because the consequence of ACCUMULATION is AMPLIFICATION it has been understood since 1974 that the Poles would warm up faster than the rest of the planet. They have always been our planetary “sacrifice zones”.

..........

Now we know, the GISS model was WRONG and STILL IS.

The Oceans hold onto HEAT about twice as efficiently as the Moderates assumed they would. About twice as much HEAT as the Moderates projected would reach the Poles, is actually what/s happening.

The Moderate Faction in Climate Science, the ones we have been listening too since the 80’s. THEY GOT EVERYTHING WRONG.

.......

Assorted Musings on Collapse

******* The #1 Reason I Became A Doomer. Alan Urban, Collapse Musings. Jan. 16, 2024.
We're not doomed because of climate change, resource depletion, or biodiversity loss. We're doomed because human nature made those things inevitable.

There are many reasons I became a doomer.

Climate change is accelerating and governments aren’t taking it seriously. The sixth mass extinction event is well underway and most people don’t care. Fossil fuels and other crucial resources are running out and most people don’t even know. Pollution in the form of microplastics and forever chemicals are rapidly accumulating in our bodies, lowering sperm counts and causing all sorts of health problems.

And all that is because of overshoot. We’ve already exceeded the carrying capacity of the planet, so it’s only a matter of time before the global population comes crashing down. But overshoot isn’t the main reason I became a doomer. In fact, I became a doomer about a year before I knew what overshoot means.

The main reason I became a doomer is because I realized that the challenge we’re facing is so monumentally large and complicated that humans are incapable of overcoming it. 

This idea upsets some people. They say things like, “What about World War II? Look at how the U.S. mobilized the entire nation to help defeat the Axis powers.”

Yea, after they were attacked and only because they had a clear enemy. This time, we can’t simply declare fossil fuels the enemy and stop using them overnight. Doing that would cause civilization to collapse, anyway.

Besides, fossil fuels aren’t the only problem. As I’ve explained before, we would still be headed for collapse even if there were no climate change or pollution because we’re completely dependent on finite resources (forests, aquifers, fossil fuels, rare-earth minerals, etc.) that will mostly be gone in a matter of decades.

Even after learning all this, people still say things like, “What about the Montreal Protocol? Look at how the entire world came together, created an agreement to protect the ozone layer, and followed through.”

Yea, but there’s a big difference between phasing out CFCs and giving up a source of energy that provides 80% of the world’s power, not to mention plastic, fertilizer, and thousands of other products. Even if we could quit fossil fuels, we would just tear up the world’s remaining ecosystems in search of rare-earth metals and other resources.

Despite the enormity of the polycrisis, people still say things like, “We’ll find a way. Look at everything humans have accomplished over the last two centuries: automobiles, airplanes, telephones, computers, and modern medicine.”

Yea, but only because of fossil fuels. Humans have been about as intelligent as we are today for at least 100,000 years, but we only just now managed to invent all these things. Have you ever wondered why?

It’s because starting about 250 years ago, we harnessed a source of energy that, at the time, was practically limitless. We used this energy to build the modern world, but now we have to somehow maintain the modern world while transitioning away from this source of energy. So-called renewables and battery technologies can’t replace everything fossil fuels do for us, and even if they could, we’re already out of time.

To be clear, I’m not saying humans aren’t intelligent enough to deal with the polycrisis. I believe that if everyone on the planet became collapse-aware and committed to saving the human race and as much of the natural world as possible, we could actually pull it off. The population would still decline due to overshoot, but we could turn the decline into a glide instead of a crash.

The problem isn’t a lack of intelligence. Rather, the problem is both psychological and sociological. Humans are incapable of overcoming the polycrisis because they tend to ignore or deny facts that make them uncomfortable. ...........................

Once you realize that humans have a tendency to deny death, the world starts to make a lot more sense. It explains why so many people believe there’s an afterlife despite a total lack of evidence. It also explains why people deny climate change is real despite the fact that there are decades of evidence and countless studies by thousands of climate scientists from all around the world.

In order to acknowledge that climate change (or peak oil, the sixth mass extinction, etc.) is real, you also have to acknowledge that your lifestyle is contributing to the destruction of the planet and the early death of millions (if not billions) of people. It means that everything the human race has achieved over the last two centuries was all for naught—that all we’ve done is destroy our home and ourselves.

This is a hard pill to swallow for people who believe humans are special. If you believe God created humans and put us here for some divine purpose, it’s hard to accept that we’ve behaved no better than bacteria consuming a piece of fruit. It feels much better to deny the science and continue living like you always have.

So we continue on without changing our ways. ..............

Even those who acknowledge that climate change is real tend to deny the reality of the situation. Recently, I read an article in The Guardian called I thought most of us were going to die from the climate crisis. I was wrong. It’s a case study that perfectly exemplifies the human penchant for denial. ...........

Another reason she’s optimistic is because “low-carbon technologies are becoming cost-competitive.” True, but has she ever thought about how we get the materials for those “low-carbon technologies”?

We use diesel to mine and transport the metals. We use coal or natural gas to produce the cement. We use oil to create the plastic. Until all of these things are made without fossil fuels, these new technologies aren’t exactly “low-carbon.”

To get off of fossil fuels, every fossil fuel power plant and internal combustion engine in the entire world has to be replaced by windmills, solar panels, electric vehicles, and more batteries than you can imagine so we can have power when it’s not windy or sunny.

It would take an unbelievable amount of fossil fuels to achieve this. Meanwhile, we’re already committed to 2°C of warming, after which we’ll start triggering irreversible tipping points. As I said before, we’re already out of time. ..........

Later, she offers another reason for hope when she says, “the world has already passed the peak of per capita emissions. It happened a decade ago. Most people are unaware of this.”

That’s great, but global emissions are still rising. It doesn’t matter if per capita emissions are going down if overall emissions are still going up. But Ritchie is “optimistic we can peak global emissions in the 2020s.”

She could be right about that, but just because our emissions stop rising doesn’t mean the concentration of CO2 in the atmosphere stops rising, too. As our emissions go down, the amount of CO2 in the atmosphere will keep going up, only at a slower rate.

She goes on to explain how thanks to improvements in technology and energy efficiency, her carbon footprint is less than half that of her grandparents’ at her age. Maybe so, but there are also three times as many people in the world today, so we’re still burning more fossil fuels than ever before. ........

Even if everyone in the world lowered their carbon footprint to zero and we stopped emissions overnight, the CO2 that’s already in the atmosphere would keep warming the planet until the Earth reaches a new energy balance.

According to James Hansen, one of the most highly-respected climate scientists in the world, the amount of CO2 already in the atmosphere would lead to 10°C of warming over the next few centuries, and as much as 6 or 7°C in one century. And that doesn’t include future emissions. 

There’s something else that would happen if we stopped emissions overnight: Global temperatures would spike. Few people know this, but a small percentage of sunlight is blocked by pollution (especially aerosols) from fossil fuels. Thanks to this pollution, the planet is about .. cooler than it otherwise would be. .........

I don’t mean to attack Hannah Ritchie. I’m sure she’s a great person, and I think she truly believes what she’s saying, but that’s the problem. She was so terrified of climate breakdown that she convinced herself there’s still hope. She simply couldn’t handle the horrifying reality that billions of people are going to die an early death, so she found a way to deny it.

And now she’s telling people that we can maintain modern civilization and stop climate change. That we can have our cake and eat it too. By doing this, she’s only making things worse. Books and articles like hers make it easier for people to deny reality and continue their carbon-based lifestyles without feeling guilty or afraid.

If climate change had a simple fix—like the Montreal Protocol—we would have done it already. But there is no fix for climate change. At best, we could slow it down, but that would require most people to drastically lower their standard of living—something like a permanent Great Depression. And since that is unthinkable, people deny the truth and tell themselves everything will be okay. 

That’s why I became a doomer. I realized that people are unwilling to make the changes necessary to avoid collapse, so they deny reality and cling to false hope. For decades, scientists have been warning us that we have to act as soon as possible, yet all we’ve done is the bare minimum. I don’t see any signs of that changing.

Humans simply didn’t evolve to handle a situation like this, and now there is research confirming it. According to a study by the University of Maine, certain features of human evolution could be stopping us from solving environmental problems. Researchers looked at how sustainable human systems emerged in the past, and they found two patterns:

Sustainable systems emerge only after groups have failed to maintain their resources. But today, if we don’t learn our lesson until after we’ve exhausted our resources, it will be too late. We won’t have the option to relocate to a new area because climate change and resource depletion are happening everywhere.

Systems of environmental protection tend to address problems within societies, not between societies. To slow down climate change, we would need worldwide regulatory, economic, and social systems. Without that, individual countries and regions will focus on their own problems and could even go to war with their neighbors for resources.

As the lead author, Tim Waring, said, "This means global challenges like climate change are much harder to solve than previously considered…It's not just that they are the hardest thing our species has ever done. They absolutely are. The bigger problem is that central features in human evolution are likely working against our ability to solve them.”

Inexhaustible Flows? Tom Murphy, Do The Math. Feb. 20, 2024.

I recently came across a statement to the effect that once we transition away from fossil fuels to renewable energy like solar, wind, and hydro, we would essentially be home free for the long run—tapping into inexhaustible flows. It is a very pleasant notion, to be sure, and one that I believe is relatively common among enthusiasts for renewable energy.

Naturally, I am concerned by the question of: what magnificent things would we do with everlasting copious energy? As an excellent guide, we can ask what amazing things have we done with the recent bolus of energy from fossil fuels? Well, in the course of pursuing material affluence, we have eliminated 85% of primeval forest, made new deserts, created numerous oceanic dead zones, drained swamps, lost whole ecosystems, almost squashed the remaining wild land mammals, and initiated a sixth mass extinction with extinction rates perhaps thousands of times higher than their background levels—all without the help of CO2 and climate change (which indeed adds to the list of ills). These trends are still accelerating. Yay for humans, who can now (temporarily) live in greater comfort and numbers than at any time in history!

But the direction I want to take in this post is on the narrower (and ultimately less important) technical side. All the renewable energy technologies rely on non-renewable materials. Therefore, inexhaustible flows are beside the point. It’s like saying that fossil fuel energy is not practically limited by available oxygen for combustion, so we can enjoy fossil fuels indefinitely. Or that D–T fusion has billions of years of deuterium available, when there’s no naturally-occurring tritium (thus reliant on limited lithium supply). In a multi-part system, the limiting factor is, well, the limiting factor. Sure, into the far future the sun will shine, the wind will blow, and rain will fall. But capturing those flows to make electricity will require physical stuff: all the more material for such diffuse flows. If that stuff is not itself of renewable origin, then oops. The best guarantee of renewability is being part of natural regeneration (i.e., of biological origin). If solar panels, wires, inverters, and batteries were made of wood and the like: alright, then. ..........

Telling the Truth About Our Future. Art Berman. Feb. 27, 2024.

............................... How many EROI analysts can even explain what I just wrote or know how to find that information? Yet they proclaim with troubling certitude that there is an emerging consensus that fossil fuels have a lower EROI than renewables.

Delannoy and his co-authors do not mean to be misleading. They think they are telling the truth and that’s the problem. True believers are willing to go to any length to convince us of their truth. They believe it so strongly that they cannot be objective.

The sad truth is that a renewable energy transition is imaginary. ................

Society is in a terrible predicament. Papers like Delannoy’s give false hope that there is a renewable pathway that can save us from climate change. But climate change is just the tip of the iceberg.

Over-consumption of all energy is destroying earth’s ecosystem—the true basis of wealth that forms the foundation for human prosperity. This includes the destruction of forests, the genocide of the animal kingdom, the pollution of land, rivers and seas, the acidification of the oceans, and loss of fisheries and coral reefs.

Focusing on climate change alone is a narrow view. Carbon dioxide is just one of the pollutants contaminating the environment. The growth of the human enterprise enabled by excess energy use threatens everything. Substituting renewable for fossil energy will make that problem even worse.

We are well beyond a soft landing for the planet. There are no moderate pathways forward. Pretending that there are is counter-productive. A radical reduction in all energy consumption is the only solution.

The problem is that it’s not the solution that we like but it’s time to start telling the truth about our future.

***** #271: “Peak almost everything”, part one. Tim Morgan, Surplus Energy Economics. Feb 26, 2024.

WORSENING STRESSES IN AN INFLECTING ECONOMY

As almost everyone must have noticed by now, economic and broader affairs are in a strange state of uneasy limbo. The economy certainly hasn’t ‘collapsed’, as some pundits have long been predicting, but neither is it growing, in any meaningful sense.

Conditions are characterised by worsening hardship and widening inequality, and this, compounded by suspicion and mistrust, is making itself felt in increasingly fractious domestic politics. A disturbing feedback loop ties internal political discontent into the stresses of dysfunctional international relations.

There’s a growing feeling that ‘things aren’t working’, and that the continuing affluence of a minority is in striking contrast with the deteriorating economic circumstances (and worsening insecurity) of the majority.

One can almost sense a collective holding of breath as we wait to see ‘what happens next’.

I cannot escape a conviction that very few people really understand that what we’re experiencing now isn’t some kind of temporary economic stasis, but the cusp of a fundamental change for which societies are not prepared.

Accordingly, the aim here is to use the SEEDS model to make sense of this unquiet calm, and to provide some insights into what actually does ‘happen next’.

In summary, hardship and stress at the level of the micro – that is, of the household and the individual – are about to extend into disorder at the level of the macro. We’re heading very rapidly into “peak almost everything”.

The qualifying “almost” is necessary, and we need to know how we can best navigate the turbulence that is now about to commence. We need to work out which activities – which sources of income, employment, revenue, profit and value – are likely to buck the generalised trend of disorderly decline.

The two-stage inflexion

Stated at its simplest, growth in material economic prosperity has long been decelerating towards a point at which the economy as a whole inflects from expansion into contraction. .........

Our best recourse is to objective analysis of economic and financial fundamentals.

Properly defined, the economy is a system for the supply of material products and services to society.

Thus seen, the economy is an energy system, not a financial one. Nothing that has any economic value at all can be provided without the use of energy. Money has no intrinsic worth, but commands value only as an “exercisable claim” on the output of the material economy. We know that the large and complex economy of today has been built on an abundance of low-cost energy sourced from oil, natural gas and coal.

The factor which does most to determine economic prosperity is the material cost of energy supply. If delivering 100 units of energy requires using the equivalent of 99 units in order to make it available, the game is scarcely worth the candle.

If, on the other hand, 100 energy units can be delivered at a cost of only 1 energy unit, this activity is immensely productive of economic value.

Energy is never ‘free’, but comes at a cost measurable in terms of the proportion of accessed energy needed to create and sustain the infrastructure required for energy supply. This cost is known here as the Energy Cost of Energy, abbreviated ECoE.

Globally, trend ECoEs reached their low point in the quarter-century after the Second World War, explaining the super-rapid economic growth enjoyed in that period.

Since then, ECoEs have trended upwards because of the depletion of fossil fuel resources. Oil, gas and coal remain abundant, but have been getting progressively costlier to access. Renewables, with their lesser energy densities, cannot take us back to a halcyon age of ultra-cheap energy.

Being unable – or unwilling – to face the implications of rising ECoEs, we’ve long been playing a game of “let’s pretend” with the economy. Because GDP is a measure of financial transactions – and not of material economic value – we can create a simulacrum of “growth” by pouring ever-increasing amounts of liquidity into the system.

Nobody needed credit deregulation, QE or sub-zero real interest rates in the 1945-70 period, because low ECoEs were driving the economy along, ‘very nicely, thank you’, without recourse to financial manipulation. Only as the economy has decelerated have we adopted various forms of monetary gimmickry in order to pretend that the illogical promise of ‘infinite economic growth on a finite planet’ remains a valid expectation.

Using the concepts of two economies, energy-determined prosperity and money as claim, SEEDS models the trajectories of financial and material economic trends. As can be seen in Fig. 2, ECoEs have been rising relentlessly, and surplus (ex-cost) energy supply has been decelerating towards contraction. Per capita surplus energy has inflected into decline, and prosperity per capita has taken on a downwards trajectory.

Accompanying this, financial stresses have been worsening. Debt has massively outgrown reported GDP as credit expansion has been deployed to create purely cosmetic “growth” (Fig. 3A). It required annual borrowing of more than 11% of GDP to sustain illusory “growth” at a supposed average of 3.5% (3B) over the past twenty years. Broader liabilities have exploded (3C), and the state of disequilibrium between the financial system and the underlying material economy has become extreme (3D).

When we apply the extent of disequilibrium stress pictured in Fig. 3D to the quantum of exposure shown in Fig. 3C, the end result – a massive and disorderly financial correction – becomes a foregone conclusion.

With the exception of the stress measure illustrated in 3D, we don’t need access to the SEEDS system to work out that this ‘bigger-than-the-GFC correction’ cannot long be delayed, and will happen at the moment when the delusory promise of perpetual economic growth loses the last shreds of its credibility. .................

All of these processes are going to change the balance of forces in civil society, such that politics becomes ever more unpredictable.

A point that cannot be emphasised too strongly is that economic deterioration, with all of its attendant stresses, is moving from the predicted to the experienced.

Some discretionary sectors are already contracting. Politics is already becoming dysfunctional. The hardship being presented officially as a temporary problem is, in reality, a foretaste of the shape of things to come – or, perhaps more aptly, the shape of things to go.

What is Latent Heat of Fusion? Erik Michaels, Problems, Predicaments and Technology. Feb. 28, 2024.

Imagine my surprise last week when I read Tom Murphy's article after publishing my own and discovering that there was a common theme to both. Tom often writes about the unsustainability of our behaviors and civilization, but to describe common beliefs of many of the cornucopian-type thinking that so many people have today struck me as funny being it was so coincidental. Isn't it ironic that biological life has figured out how to tap into inexhaustible flows of energy and this is essentially sustainable but technology use (and our dependence upon it) doesn't even come close? A similar article from The Honest Sorcerer also tells the same story.

Perhaps what I often find incomprehensible is how people come to these stances of hopium regarding emerging qualities of collapse and thinking that we are embarking on some sort of beautiful, sustainable journey to the future. Of course, it becomes rather obvious over time that most of these people simply haven't widened their perspective to include all aspects of ecological overshoot and collapse - their perspectives are limited to their own specialty within their own field of study and the silo they seem to be stuck in acts as an echo chamber. ....................... 

Last week, I posted some information about what is commonly called "forever chemicals" to point out the existential issue of pollution loading. This was initially pointed out more than 50 years ago in the Limits to Growth study as shown in this video which I have posted before several times. My purpose last week was to demonstrate how symptom predicaments of overshoot are combining and interacting as threat multipliers not only to civilization, but to our very existence as a species. As usual, a new study came out that proves that this issue is worse than originally thought due to symptom predicaments of climate change spreading these toxins further afield due to extreme weather events and wildlife contaminated with the toxins moving around and further contaminating water and soil. Almost every week, regardless of what topic I write about, I find new information a week or two later proving how the situation is even worse than what I originally wrote about, just like in this particular issue. .............

Two paragraphs up, I posted an article about the AMOC (Atlantic Meridional Overturning Circulation) which delineates some scary thoughts. What I didn't point out there is what I again want to bring to the forefront (I've brought this topic up before (a long time ago), but these things have a tendency to be forgotten). The beginning of this article reviews some of the same information from last week and expands on that theme; but along the same lines of thinking, I want to bring up something most people are not aware of or have forgotten. This is the latent heat of fusion, the topic of today's picture at the top. I was introduced to this by the fact that 80 calories of heat will melt one gram of ice (at 0 degrees Celsius) so that it becomes water (phase change) and then that same amount of heat applied to the water will raise the temperature of that water to 80 degrees Celsius. Think about how the biosphere is losing its cryosphere and what that means for the world's air conditioning system. These exponential changes are now baked into the system through both oceanic thermal inertia and the lag effect. Climate change, the symptom predicament of overshoot, is irreversible on human timescales. 

I needed to get through all the above material to get to this point that today is the absolute best day of the rest of your life.

I don't want to sound grim or bring inconvenient truths to the forefront, but denying the existence of this knowledge makes no sense. Essentially, this is what most people want you to do - deny the existence and implication of these facts. While it is true (and I have repeatedly said this time and again) that we don't know precisely what will happen and when it will happen, certain events are inevitable and it is only a question of when, not if. Collapse of industrial civilization is built in, as it is self-terminating. Once this occurs, the loss of a large portion of the aerosol masking effect (global dimming) will also be lost and global warming will once again suddenly increase, similar to what has taken place over the last several years due to the loss of aerosols produced from the marine shipping industry. Despite reducing particulate matter in the atmosphere, the IMO 2020 rules have had mixed results as this article points out. Once again, something labeled as a "solution" has unexpected results. My point is not to simply ridicule ideas that many people think of as solutions or proper responses; one still needs to respond in an appropriate fashion and certain ideas (like degrowth) are the only appropriate responses available. However, just because these ideas have been brought around to the forefront of society does NOT mean that they will solve the predicament of overshoot or prevent civilization from crashing. Taken together with the inevitable outcomes of climate change and energy and resource decline (both symptom predicaments of overshoot) multiplying each other's effects, these hard facts point out that conditions will never be better than they are right now. 

This is why it is so important to embrace and be grateful for what we have right now and to Live Now!

Doomerism

Doomerism as Lifestyle. Bates, The Great Change. Feb. 18, 2024.

"Some tipping points are worse than others. Human ones are the scariest."

Apocalyptic scenarios are what fuel Eliot Jacobson’s jaundiced outlook for most efforts to do something about climate change. Jacobson is a Professor of Computer Science at UC Santa Barbara. Here he is on Dan Miller’s Climate Chat on February 4, 2024:

Jacobson: I am an environmentalist and so I am in favor of the collapse of global industrial civilization, right? I am in favor of the human footprint on this planet becoming smaller just as quickly as it possibly can…. The problem is that these technologies are more likely to prolong civilization than to aid in its descent. All of the other things that humans are doing, whether it's destroying the biosphere through plastic pollution or what we're doing to our food production and how we treat animals, all of these other harms we are doing to the planet are only going to grow in scale. You're not going to put lithium in place of beef, right? As we create products that will allow civilization to maintain itself and grow even more, we're talking about destruction of our soils and that all boils down to even more suffering for a greater number of humans, even more suffering for a greater number of animals and species on the planet, even a larger ultimate extinction event, right?

You know we're going to hit the Seneca Cliff and the question is, how high up that cliff do we want to compel ourselves to go through these Al, alternative technologies before we go over it? So I'm not going to tell you that they don't work, right? … I think that's outweighed by the long-term impacts it has on allowing population to continue to grow and allowing the destruction of yet other ecosystems.

Miller: Not only would I describe you as a Doomer but I would describe you as a Promoter of Doom.

Jacobson: Yeah very much.

Miller: You're for doom because you think it will be better for the entire Earth or it'll be better for the environment.

Jacobson: Yeah, again, I am an environmentalist. And the best thing that could happen to this planet is to get rid of people.

Miller: Okay well that's very interesting. I didn't expect the conversation to go there, but uh I yeah I guess I don't agree. I mean, first of all, I don't disagree with sort of the premise and a lot of what you say….

Jacobson: We were using the example of [climate science writer and blogger] Michael Mann. Michael Mann is not an environmentalist. He is the opposite of an environmentalist. He is for the destruction of ecosystems. He is for new technologies that are going be placed on locations that are pristine, whether they're mines or fields of solar panels… wind turbines and ocean ecologies, right? He is for them with the idea that that would allow human civilization to continue to grow, which because of all the other impacts of humans will even further degrade various systems, right? So to call me the one who is pro-collapse actually… Michael Mann is setting the stage for a much larger collapse than I am. He said his idea is not just that 8 billion humans should collapse but that 10 or 12 billion humans should collapse. And on our way out we should create even more devastation to the planet, right? So, I absolutely disagree that Michael Mann is in favor of preserving the planet.

You get the point. If you favor green technology, you are just making it worse for the next generation, who will fall off a higher cliff when ecosystems implode. As alluring as I find this view, I am also chastened by the guest editorial that Tyler Austin Harper, assistant professor of environmental studies at Bates College, wrote for The New York Times on January 26, 2024 entitled, “The 100-Year Extinction Panic Is Back, Right on Schedule”:

Our panics are often puffed up, our predictions simply wrong. Human life and labor were not superseded by machines, as some in the 1920s predicted. Or in the 1960s or in the 1980s, two other flash-in-the-pan periods of A.I. hype. The takeaway is not that we shouldn’t be worried but that we shouldn’t panic. Foretelling doom is an ancient human hobby, but we don’t appear to be very good at it.

My own take is that I read the same tea leaves Jacobson does. I get the points Hansen and Simons have raised about the curve of acceleration that global climate catastrophe has entered. And yet, I also recognize there is a lot of inertia in Earth’s systems and Gaia is trying to mend as best she can, all the time.

Harper wrote, “Transformation or extinction have been nature’s invariable alternatives.” Maybe we will get lucky. Maybe an errant genes similar to that of the autistic wolf from whom all modern dogs are descended (sociability genes WBSCR17, GTF2I and GTF2IRD1) will suddenly appear and transform the next generation of homo. Maybe we will all start singing Aquarius.

I’m not in favor of gene manipulation. I think we already have an altruistic gene and a heroic action gene. My efforts now are to muster those genes into service—to help Gaia mend. That may mean having fewer children and grandchildren. It may mean shutting down fossil mining and drilling and those damned nuclear whack-a-moles. I don’t think it means putting an end to Brian von Herzen’s re-greening of the marine food web or John D. Liu’s ecosystem regeneration camps. I don’t think it should stop us from creating more ecovillages, eco-districts, and eco-regions and showing the way to live in harmony with Earth and each other, practically, and with heart.

There is plenty of work to do, and all of it is rewarding, for however long we have.

There is a growing recognition that a viable path forward is towards a new carbon economy, one that goes beyond zero emissions and runs the industrial carbon cycle backwards — taking CO2 from the atmosphere and ocean and burying it in the ground. The triple bottom line of this new economy is antifragility, regeneration, and resilience.

Welsh: Granted That

And This God Has Granted To Me, That. Ian Welsh. Jan 31, 2024. 

I shall live to see the destruction of my enemies.

The great joy of watching the American government be humiliated, over and over again, as their empire collapses.

To watch as those they oppressed cease to fear them, as their enemies circle the old brute, nipping at their heels, tearing at them, as they dies innumerable wounds.

This, God has granted to me.

And so too has God granted to me to watch the end of Neoliberalism. “Greed is good” they screamed, as they strip-mined the economy, becoming the richest rich in the world’s history, even as they destroyed the basis of their power.

Soon they will be the rich of undeveloping countries; the rich of India in 1950. Scream at China as they will, nothing will change that they sold the golden geese to China for cash on the barrelhead and two generations of ephemeral wealth.

The Europeans, so smug and so sure of themselves after centuries at the top, as they fall back to being the meaningless backwater of Eurasia that is Europe’s normal state. “But we live in a Garden!” they will wail, as the garden fills with wheels and wrecked cars.

Satraps of their own colony, slaves to America, colonialists who killed hundreds of millions then screamed that their enemies were evil, not them, no, they were the good people, the civilized people.

This, God has granted me to see.

And then, all the capitalists, in all the countries, China, America, Japan, Russia, Europe, India: everywhere. “We can grow infinitely! We’ll always substitute! Technology will save us! We should engineer products for planned obsolescence! Wealth! Power! Infinity! We are geniuses! This is the best time every and we are the smartest smart people to ever smart!”

And it’s all coming down. Seems that infinite growth on a planet which isn’t infinite doesn’t work out. Seems that places to safely store pollution like CO2 and plastics aren’t infinite on a little green and blue planet. Seems like humans aren't independent of insects and plants and other animals and plankton: that we’re just one life form and if we kill too many of the others that may not work out for us.

God did not grant to me the power or the voice or the gifts necessary to prevent any of this evil.

But God has granted to me to see the end days of my enemies, and if they are my end days as well, still will I enjoy them.

May Bush, and Bill Clinton and Blair and Pelosi and Obama and Biden all live very long lives, with clear minds, that they might see all they created destroyed.

This God has granted to me, to see the destruction of my enemies and the fall of all they built.

I worked to prevent this, with all my might, and failed, as did all of us who fought against these evils. May what is born after be born of good, and learn from the fall of evil.

But still, I will enjoy what God has granted me.

Michaels: Problems vs Predicaments

How Intractable is Our Lack of Agency? Problems, Predicaments, and Technology by Erik Michaels. Jan 31, 2024.

One of my primary goals for the past several years has been (and continues to be) to try to bring about realization of the difference between a problem and a predicament. The reason is that most people tend to see our condition from a reductionist and/or siloed perspective, which is due to the social cultural conditioning, the indoctrination, and the propaganda techniques which form our belief systems. My last article went into some of this, but I want to bring back some articles from some time ago to demonstrate why our lack of agency befuddles us so much (see also this article) and combine them with some newer material just to present how intractable this all is.

I have discussed recently about why people worship technology so much and only tend to see the positive aspects of it and ignore the negative aspects. The cultural conditioning that accompanies civilization and modernity today incorporates a great deal of propaganda which tends to produce the wetiko that we suffer from. Building on what was presented in Fantasies, Myths, and Fairy Tales (link provided in above sentence), I add more information in my article about the MEER idea, proving once again that marketing, advertising, and propaganda are really the only hallmarks the idea is actually big on. With so many false beliefs and denial masking reality within society, how would we (if it was possible) ever bring about radical transformation voluntarily? As I have pointed out time and again, regardless of whether one is talking about the Degrowth Movement, or some version of electrification, or some other type of so-called "solution," these are all seriously thorny issues that are destined for the dust heap of noble ideas that just didn't work out.

The people who are busy promoting these ideas suffer a great deal from optimism bias and, unfortunately, denial of reality. Sure, these folks might be making a living off of marketing their idea, but is the actual idea behind the marketing effort going to provide the solution it is being marketed for? In a nutshell, NO. The trouble here once again is that we aren't suffering from a problem. We are suffering from a predicament; and predicaments have outcomes, not solutions.

I've spent some time in the past pointing out how idealistic plans for utopian societies or communities have all failed, one after another after another after another. Some communities that were established as utopian societies still exist, but these function either differently from how they were originally formed or had rather limited "utopian" qualities to begin with. The Transition Town movement was started to form a model of a more sustainable community, and it has gathered limited success, but these ideas again are based on civilization, which is unsustainable. I've brought up The Venus Project as well, which is destined for failure as well because of the idea it is based upon. Of the two ideas (The Venus Project and the Transition Town movement), the Transition Town movement would be the more sustainable one.

The biggest boondoggle within all of this is the web of propaganda, manipulation, cultural programming and conditioning, indoctrination, and belief systems which surround all of us. Our addiction to energy use and technology use prevents us from tackling precisely what would reduce ecological overshoot, and yet because of the belief systems surrounding us, few if any of us really want to reduce our energy use OR our use of technology. Human loss aversion has much to do with this as I pointed out in a recent article. Nate Hagens adds to these reasons with the Behavioral Stack, which goes into a considerable amount about how we tend to steer our thinking into left-brain thinking (reductionist), which breaks the world down into parts (separate entities) rather than seeing it holistically (interdependent and intertwined, as it actually is). It also describes how we spend most of our time in the dopamine-hijacked world. Most of us are more in a "me" state (all about me) versus a "we" state (all about us), which goes back to the wetiko state of thinking I mentioned earlier. Now, take all of this and add the biological imperative of the Maximum Power Principle, and what do we wind up with? If you answered, "Lack of agency," I think you would be correct.

Many people tend to think that society can reduce overshoot, and they would actually be correct if it was something that everyone wanted to do. However, when almost nobody truly wants to do that, what are the chances that it will ever happen voluntarily? Too many defense mechanisms exist to rationalize the situation and generate more convenient-sounding narratives, which lull people into a false sense of security that "somebody somewhere is working on it and will come up with a solution." AANNDDD, we're back to the whole "solutionista" thing again where I have to remind everyone that we face a predicament, not a problem.

Helping to heal trauma and promote natural togetherness and connectivity is something I think can also help to bring about awareness of wetiko and our other psychological crutches that tend to prevent complete comprehension of the situation we face. Still, we must face the simple facts implied by trauma and the illusion of separateness it facilitates. Even though I am aware of my own wetiko thinking, I don't always catch it at first - it flies under the radar and can be quite stealthy. It is entirely possible that we may never entirely bring awareness of wetiko and the psychological defense mechanisms we employ to the forefront of society or that even if we do, not everyone will be able to see it.

Speaking of being able to see it, many people don't realize precisely where we are as a species. To help bring a more complete sense of this for anyone who hasn't read many of my articles, let me bring up an article I wrote almost 3 years ago, What Will We Miss the Most? In this article, I highlight a video by Tad Patzek (queued up to the specific point in the video where he points out precisely what will happen to civilization - explaining the scenario revolving around the stepping down of civilization to 400 exajoules/year from 600 exajoules/year [rates of energy use]) and an article from Rob Mielcarski that really impressed upon me just how close we are to the point of mass realization of collapse. When I wrote the article, my understanding was that we were 5-8 years away from that point, which is now down to 2-5 years. Those of us who are aware of this can already see it; but unless one is actually looking for it, they will more likely get caught up in the distraction of propaganda, war, politics, etc., and the narratives they generate.

Perhaps one of the best ways to learn about our lack of agency is to point out the simple fact that climate change is irreversible on human timescales or that electricity is unsustainable and the grid will disintegrate this century or that civilization is unsustainable and ask people what they think should be done about it. Most of the responses you get will be complete nonsense based on a considerable amount of ignorance about the subject, but even cogent responses will run the gamut. (Almost) Nobody will suggest returning to the way humans did things before the dawn of agriculture, yet what if that ends up being the only option? With such a range of ideas, most of them unworkable and the remainder of them unfeasible socially and/or politically, how much agency do you think we actually have at changing who and what we are as a species or changing the system of the biosphere to bend to our will? Obviously, we've been trying to change the biosphere since we began using technology and it hasn't worked. Even after thousands of years, we still don't truly control nature. The only other option is to change ourselves.

Right now there are a wide range of response options, including bargaining to maintain civilization, which I expect a rather large portion of society to continue until it can't. But as many of the above links demonstrate, as time moves forward, these options will become fewer and fewer, taking many of the responses available today out of the mix. The likelihood that human society is going to suddenly "wake up" and act responsibly and ethically within the next 2 to 5 years is remote at best. Even if that were to happen, due to the aerosol masking effect (AME) issues I brought up in my last article, conditions would NOT get better as a result. As the outcome of that, I am pretty certain that things will continually worsen from here on out, with war one of the most predictable responses, given our history as a species. In my previous articles, you've seen what Art Berman has to say, you've seen what Tad Patzek has to say, you've seen what Vaclav Smil has to say, and you've seen what Nate Hagens has to say. Here's what The Honest Sorcerer has to say. After reading that article, here's one to follow it up with from Alice Friedemann.

For some folks, this is old hat and something we've known about for quite some time. For others, this might be absolutely devastating news. For those in the latter case, I highly recommend the Spirituality Resources File. I have written a few articles designed specifically to help, such as The Cycle of Life and Activities Which Can Help Us Deal With Climate Anxiety. Another article designed to help is Are You Running Towards Life or Running Away From Death? Whatever you do, Don't Postpone Joy. That is a big reminder to get out there and Live Now!

Radagast: Your Future

Your Future. Rintrah, by Radagast. Jan. 30, 2024.

Propaganda is subtle, it appeals to the emotions. It generally doesn’t try to convince you with facts and logic. It’s the meandering sounds you hear, emanating from a speaker in the background as you wander through a shopping mall.

Most of the propaganda we’re fed, is this sensation, this feeling that tomorrow will look the same as yesterday, with some minor tweaks. But we’re already living through the collapse. This is what it looks like. In 2022, 6% of the population of the Central African Republic died. Most of them died of disease and hunger. The failing harvests cause migrations, which then cause conflicts. You’ll never hear about this on the news.

So what is the propaganda? The propaganda is this attempt at conveying a sense of normalcy to you. To keep doing what you’re doing. To continue business as usual. “Oh it’s a place you never heard of. It has always been politically unstable. It’s the Wagner group’s fault. It’s a brutal dictatorship.”

Everything that happens to you, is sold to you through propaganda as a choice you made. If you don’t have children, it’s not because you can’t afford to, it’s because you’re “queer”, so you choose to live with roommates into your thirties, in a giant metropolis. When I speak to these people, they don’t feel like an impoverished proletariat, that can’t afford to reproduce. They imagine themselves to be the upper middle class, whereas in Egypt or Syria, people in their situation would be participating in a bread riot.

And why wouldn’t they? The Dutch government departments fly their “progress flag”. Biden poses on the White House lawn with their flags behind him. This stuff was invented by some disabled anarchist, sure. But systems of control amplify messaging that fits their own objectives.

The propaganda we receive isn’t so much left wing or right wing. It’s a cultural force, that serves to stabilize society. Degrowth is ultimately the same phenomenon. It’s a cultural attempt, to rebrand something that’s already happening to us, as something we actually chose. Nobody is immune to propaganda. It’s not so much a technique to make us want what elites want. It’s to make us want what is inevitable.

I think a lot of the constant anger that right wingers feel could be addressed if they could just allow themselves to accept that the future is a lie. But they came up with their own brand of propaganda, which serves the exact same purpose, of convincing them that everything is normal. They imagine there to be a shadowy cabal of globalists, who teach them things are not normal.

Unprecedented droughts are normal, unprecedented heatwaves are normal, unprecedented downpours are normal. The lack of insects on your windshield is normal. And if you think it’s not normal, you were brainwashed by the old bald German man who sounds like a Nazi and wants to make us all eat bugs. That’s the emergent propaganda. It’s spontaneously produced, by people who don’t want to understand what’s going on.

It’s anesthesia, it’s a bag of ketamine handed out at a party. When you spend your afternoon, making your soyjack eat the bugs Klaus Schwab comic with the based Chad who says “Yes.” and post it to Twitter or 4chan, you’re the guy who brought the bag of ketamine to the party. You’re the one who helped us all forget, what we already know. In Brave New World, you don’t need the government to hand out Soma. You just need the government to look the other way, then people will do it themselves.

But reality is hard to accept. If you always knew at some level that none of this is normal, then you can gradually build upon it. Ten year old me knew it’s not normal that we put animals in cages and eat them for food. I didn’t yet know this breeds superviruses, antibiotic resistant bacteria and deforests the Amazon, but those are layers you can then stack on top.

But if you don’t figure it out at a young age, then you become forced to puncture a dam as an adult, that holds back a massive wave of water. That’s painful. My mind never built that dam. I always saw that it’s not normal. If you tell me the Panama canal no longer works because the droughts are causing a lack of fresh water, it fits neatly into what I already knew.

The problem is that the water is not going to stop rising. You can keep building your dam higher. Eventually you’ll be living in an alternative reality, you’ll become convinced that India is suffering HAARP induced droughts so that they will accept a Rothschild controlled central bank digital currency. But I don’t think that’s the path to inner peace. Once you can accept what’s happening, you can enjoy the time we have left.

Michaels: on maladaptive thinking

The Evolution of My Thinking. Erik Michaels at 
Problems, Predicaments, and Technology. Jan 24, 2024.


Before I get started, I would like to say that I would love to be wrong about all of this (subject matter contained within this article and my blog in general), but the empirical evidence is not pointing that way. I know that there are lots of people who want more to hope for, but I follow the evidence and where it leads, and I just don't see much room for hope and I still think that Derrick Jensen said it best here about hope. The main reason for this entry is to demonstrate the power of conditioning, indoctrination, and our beliefs, along with manipulative narrative generation within the framework of how we process and think about the predicaments we face.

The evolution of my thinking has undergone a rather huge shift over the last decade and a half. Before I watched Collapse with the late Michael Ruppert, I was your typical American cornucopian and had little knowledge of much of the predicaments I have learned about since then. Ruppert's documentary blasted open the doors of peak oil (energy and resource decline) for me and made me aware of the Limits to Growth and the precursor to ecological overshoot. While I had extensive knowledge about climate change and pollution loading, I was unaware of energy and resource decline and how it will affect us.

As with most people, life was roaring all around me, I was busy working on building my company, and spent my time not only on the weddings themselves, but actively volunteering in my community as well. Life was grand, and it still is, although quite a shift has taken place within me since those days of blissful ignorance. A short 3-4 years after watching Collapse, I discovered overshoot and NTHE. Finally, these predicaments slowly came into focus and I advanced from Stage 2 of Bodhi Paul Chefurka's Continuum of Awareness to Stage 5 over the next several years (see the Continuum of Awareness at the end of Why is Civilization Unsustainable?).

As countless others have done, based upon my new knowledge, I made plans and decisions that would affect me and the rest of my life from that point forward. Some of these plans were rather difficult to make because they represent sacrifice. They go against the grain, so to speak. Some folks just don't really get the fact that personal sacrifice and personal change are the ONLY way to help facilitate external change. Many people seem to think that the way to becoming more sustainable is to buy more "green, clean, renewable, and sustainable" products such as solar panels, EVs, and batteries. Buying products labeled with ANY of those terms changes nothing. More mining, energy use, and material throughput had to be facilitated in order to manufacture those products, no differently than the products they are replacing. If there wasn't anything truly wrong with what they were replaced with, the MORE sustainable choice would have been NOT to buy something new, regardless of what it is. Buying new products in an effort to reduce energy use and material throughput because the newer items are "more sustainable" is an illusory concept. By buying the new product, you are cancelling out any real benefit by continuing the same exact cycle of consumerism you are trying to stop.

I considered buying these types of products myself. After looking into options for a solar system, I concluded that the geographical area I live in is far from ideal for such a system and that solar systems work better in sunnier areas of the world. I also now realize that these systems cannot be maintained once the fossil fuel platform can no longer be maintained itself. Long before the fossil fuel platform can no longer be maintained, however, global supply chains will become problematic and what can be obtained from far away will take a very long time to arrive, if at all. Planning on having access only to local or regional resources is much more realistic. What good would a solar system do me when its realistic life cycle would only last until industrial civilization crashes? Since I already own generators and a power inverter and batteries, adding a solar system would be a massively expensive proposition which really wouldn't help much. Many people simply haven't done their homework to realize how frequently batteries, chargers, inverters, and solar panels degrade or become inoperable and how expensive these systems are to maintain. Add to all of this the inevitable decommissioning and junking/recycling of such materials after their effective life is over. Of course, recycling is yet another whole conversation, but let's just expose the fact that recycling is rather energy intensive and often requires many toxic chemicals, and one never gets the same amount of material out of recycling that one put in. As energy and resource decline continue, recycling will likewise become less and less available to the wider economy, which means more and more junk piling up in landfills - toxic junk. While this is a different conversation than the one I am currently discussing, go to this article for more details on pollution loading or see this file.

Back to this discussion, what the last paragraph demonstrates is that I decided that owning a solar system wouldn't be worth the cost as I couldn't recoup those expenses with the number of cloudy days we have here and the intermittent nature of the electrical supply to begin with (they only produce power when the sun is shining). Likewise, the same thought processes went into other items such as EVs and I came up with the same results - that these are expensive devices and they don't actually change anything we are doing within the system of civilization. In order to actually make a difference, NO car is the better answer by far (Steve Bull points out all the details in this article, so be sure to check all his footnotes). My regular bicycles that I already own are far better than a car for getting from point A to point B. Obviously, this isn't always possible, but there's really no reason to replace anything I have unless what I have is no longer working properly.

The other thing that most people aren't considering is how long the roads they drive on will continue to be maintained at their current rate and at their current quality. This is going to be seriously reduced in the coming years due to collapse, unfolding all around us. In fact, for those of you in the United States, our infrastructure is really in a sad state. For a better understanding of the infrastructural platforms that we depend on daily, check out this article. The system is generally much larger than most people assume and depends on more basic platforms which support the upper layers. Without the basic support structure intact and properly maintained, the upper layers cannot function correctly either. Due to constantly reducing EROEI levels (see this article on what surplus energy is), constantly and continuously reducing amounts of surplus energy will be available to power society.

Combine all these facts with the simple fact that the electrical grid is nowhere near ready to be able to supply the energy that all these EVs would require in the first place (if we were to replace ICE vehicles with EVs). It would be another generation at least before the grid was up to such a level and this is right around the time industrial civilization is expected to be finished. Perhaps a more valid reason NOT to buy an EV is the simple fact that the electrical grid itself is unsustainable and will not outlast industrial civilization, being the one of the weak links that brings the entire system down.

More often than not, many people choose to buy an EV in hopes of making a difference to emissions. Emissions is a symptom predicament of ecological overshoot and cannot be brought down by using more complex technology. The only way to reduce emissions is to reduce overshoot, and this requires less technology use, not more or more complex technology use. Art Berman points this out in his article about how climate change is a rather narrow view of overshoot here.

At the same time that many people hope to use different devices (EVs, solar panels, batteries, and other "clean, green, renewable, and sustainable" devices) instead of ones they already own, they are entirely missing that this doesn't really change anything within the system; they are merely bargaining to maintain civilization which CAN'T be maintained.

Comprehending all of this was difficult and like most people, I went through some serious grief with many periods of denial, anger, bargaining, and depression before reaching acceptance. Even after reaching acceptance I have caught myself going back through different phases of grief. I frequently use sarcasm as a way of coping with all of this, and it does help. But wait...it gets worse! Much worse...

Some people have the wisdom to see all of this and have embarked on projects to build resilience and regeneration through permaculture, planting trees, and/or regenerative agriculture. While this is helpful and a noble goal for people, it just won't be enough. Just like the Degrowth Movement or The Venus Project or even other versions of The Venus Project as I highlighted in my last article, these types of ideas require global unity which is not forthcoming. These types of ideas depend utterly on what amounts to wishful or magical thinking, and the reason I make this statement is because of one of the symptom predicaments of overshoot, climate change. Climate change is slowly but steadily gaining speed and strength and a large portion of the damage has already been done - it's in the rear-view mirror, folks. Discussing ideas about how to reduce emissions at this point is fine, but let's realize that climate change will NEVER get better during our lifetimes or even those of our grandchildren. I struggle with this myself because I hold no illusions in my mind about what the future looks like. Things aren't going to suddenly change most likely (unless a nuclear confrontation takes place), but conditions a decade from now are going to be much different from those today.

Too many people (keep in mind that this is my perspective) do not understand how these changes will affect them. To comprehend these things more fully, the late Will Steffen explained that it isn't just the changing climate so much as it is the rate of change that is so significant. However, even that is paled by the new paper that Hansen et. al. 2023 put out (Global warming in the pipeline). In this new video put out by Nate Hagens, Leon Simons explains the study along with the graphs used for the video where you can follow along as you listen. In order to fully appreciate these changes, it will be helpful to understand how warming affects agriculture and food security. It is further help to understand photosynthesis. Once one has those basics down pat, then one can also understand why almost any type of agriculture will become problematic at best and totally unworkable at worst. An additional set of information is available here in the Aerosol Particulates, Clouds, and Global Dimming file.

Yes, I have posted many of these links before, but it appears rather obvious to me that I need to repeat them as people tend to forget these things (even I do). Perhaps it is the conversations I have with people who fail to understand what it is I am trying to communicate to them because they don't bother to read the articles I post in my conversations, designed to help them understand what I am attempting to communicate. MOST of the information is contained in the articles, so if they don't even bother to read them and continue conversing with me, I am well aware of how well they understand (or lack thereof) the concepts I am trying to communicate. A considerable number of these people clearly don't really want to learn, unfortunately. Initially, this was something I wasn't quite prepared for. Now, I am unfortunately quite used to it. Each one of these conversations teaches me something. Some of them I am impressed with, but overwhelmingly most of them are depressing. Still, they inform me of where I can at least try to direct more information towards. As can be seen in the above paragraph, conditions are progressing pretty much as has been predicted in multiple studies over the past decade, and this should get people focused much more on using less technology, not more. Sadly, this isn't what I am seeing generally. There are a few people who wisely see what is needed with low tech or no tech, but much of society is still chasing more tech or more complex tech, taking us in the wrong direction.

What people need to be doing isn't prescribing technological devices as some sort of way to reduce their ecological footprint, but devising ways instead to change their lifestyles and habits to reflect a lower energy and material throughput future. One successful way to do this is to reduce your income. If you don't have the money to buy gadgets that aren't needed in the first place, you'll appreciate more fully the ones you have. For tools that need replacing, try purchasing hand tools or items that aren't powered by gasoline or electricity. This is the coming reality and one must accept it or suffer.

Needless to say, where I once looked for solutions to every problem I now look to see whether I am facing a problem with a solution or a predicament with an outcome. Predicaments can't be solved, so a response is the best that can be proffered. These responses should be tailored to the future we will be inhabiting, as developing ideas based on today's conditions won't necessarily be of any use tomorrow. EVs won't be of much use if the roads required for them can't be maintained properly. If you live in a desert area today, you may not have a water supply tomorrow. Photosynthesis may be unreliable in the future due to high temperatures, so depending entirely on agricultural crops might be a mistake. Building resilience and regenerative capacity means depending on less technology use, plain and simple. We must all get out of certain mindsets that lead us into trouble.

What I want to promulgate with this post is that most people don't appear to understand that what passes as the correct things to do in response to overshoot are frequently counterintuitive to what many think are the correct things. Buying products or using more technology or more complex technology is a maladaptive behavior and will not help to reduce overshoot. Looking for more efficient technology or items that use less energy or material throughput is a noble idea; but unless what is currently being used needs to be replaced, sticking with what one already has is more often than not a better choice since it has already been manufactured and is located where it needs to be (rather than halfway around the world). The obsession of looking for solutions needs to be replaced with looking for ways to help others. Reductionism and siloed thinking need to be replaced with good, old-fashioned community connectivity. The bottom line is that we are not going to solve anything - the best we can accomplish is to reduce the severity of the outcomes of the predicaments we are enmeshed within. We must come to our senses and realize that the entire human-built world is in the process of simplifying. An individual born today will see within his or her lifetime (IF he or she lives a typical lifetime of about 75 years) the ending of industrial civilization, cars, grid electricity, big box stores, most retail outlets, and many other things that today we take for granted. What I notice with regard to my thinking is that ultimately, my first thoughts (a decade ago) on how to tackle the predicaments we face was precisely the wrong way to go about making the outcomes better. From what I commonly see in groups and threads on certain topics, I can see the same maladaptive thinking at work causing many people to make the incorrect choices in their lives; bringing a reduction of resiliency and regeneration to the forefront rather than an increase. This can only happen if we are changing BOTH how the overall system operates AND our own behavior within that system. Switching to a different or more complex way to power cars or the electrical grid or civilization itself doesn't really change anything does it? No, the system itself is unsustainable, so how it is powered is almost totally irrelevant because it will never make it sustainable. Changing our behavior requires changing our thinking patterns away from wetiko, and this requires a sustained commitment to doing so. As I finished up this article, I came across this video from Nate Hagens which is surprisingly similar.

I understand that most people either aren't going to see these facts or will disagree with them because they don't want to see the facts or agree with them. This unfortunately does not change those facts. Until next time, Live Now!

Conway: The Hump

The Hump. Conway, The Material World. Dec 22, 2023.


Quite early on in Material World I wrote that :

pursuing our various environmental goals will, in the short and medium term, require considerably more materials to build the electric cars, wind turbines and solar panels needed to replace fossil fuels. The upshot is that in the coming decades we are likely to extract more metals from the earth’s surface than ever before.

The point being that while in the long run it’s quite possible that we reduce the size of humanity’s footprint on the planet, in the immediate future we will do a lot more exploiting. We will mine more, refine more and consume more stuff - and the stuff we need for the energy transition will only add to this material intensity. The footprint will grow.

So, how does one square this with a few interesting papers which seem, on the face of it, to be suggesting precisely the opposite thing? Among the most prominent was this recent paper by Joey Nijnens and others. The paper looks at the total amount of material requirements for the energy transition and compares them with our current fossil fuel use.

The charts underline an important point. We use an extraordinary amount of fossil fuels each year (far, far more than most people appreciate). And the main message from this chart is that while we’ll certainly need to do a lot of mining to get the copper, lithium, cobalt etc we’ll need, that weight of “new” stuff will be far less than the weight of all the fossil fuels we’re no longer using.

But the chart, which begins at around 2020, seems to suggest that this is happening now.

In other words, far from increasing in the short to medium term, as I wrote in my book, it looks tantalisingly as if humanity’s material footprint is actually about to fall immediately.

Hannah Ritchie did an excellent post a few weeks ago on that paper and another one making a similar point. As you’ll see from her chart (based on the data in the other paper, this one from Takuma Watari et al), the shape of the line is quite similar:

On the basis of all these charts it looks as if our mineral demand has already peaked, and that it will fall on a more or less constant basis in the coming years. Indeed, if we improve our ability to recycle then the line goes down even faster, so that by 2050 our apparent footprint has diminished considerably.

But is this really plausible? In other words, might things have improved so rapidly since I wrote those words above that I am already wrong - that far from growing, our footprint is about to shrink?

Unfortunately, the answer is no, for two reasons.

The first, and by far the most important, is that the charts above are based not on a realistic forecast for where our mineral consumption may actually head in the coming decades, but a very ambitious pathway we are already short of.

You see, the charts above are predicated on the International Energy Agency’s Net Zero Emissions (NZE) pathway.

Long story short, a couple of years ago the IEA produced an excellent report providing a roadmap for how we might be able to get to net zero across the world. Actually they provided three roadmaps: a very ambitious pathway which could actually get the world to net zero by 2050 (the NZE pathway), as well as two other routes - one based on “announced pledges” (APS) - what governments said they would do and “stated policies” (STEPS), which is, for want of a better phrase, “business as usual”.

You get a sense of the difference between these pathways when you look at the chart above, in which I’ve mapped out what each of these IEA pathways assumes about crude oil production. The net zero pathway involves a very quick fall in global oil production in the coming years. But the other two pathways see oil production fall far more slowly (and, by extension, we fail to keep global temperatures below the 1.5 degree threshold).

Now let’s look at where the IEA thinks, on the basis of its latest assessment of what’s actually happening in the oil market, production is and is likely to head in the coming years. I’ve added another line to the chart:

You probably already get the picture. Far from following the net zero pathway, we are already some way short of it. Actually it’s worse than that: oil consumption is likely to overshoot all of those pathways in the coming years.

This, by the way, is precisely the story told by another recent report, the UN Production Gap 2023 report, which compares some of these pathways with where it actually looks, based on what fossil fuel producers are doing, where we’re heading. Look at the difference between the red lines below and, well, pretty much all the other lines.

You see, on the basis of revealed preference - what fossil producers are actually doing as opposed to what the IEA and others would rather like them to do - those lines aren’t going down in the coming years. They are rising, and in the case of oil and gas they may be considerably higher in 2050 than they are today. Coal production also just hit a record high in 2023.

Now, I suspect and also rather hope that the reality turns out to be considerably lower than those red lines. But what this exercise does is to underline that far from falling in line with the IEA’s best case scenario, right now fossil fuel use is rising above even its worst case scenario.

So any papers looking at future minerals demand and basing it on the IEA’s net zero scenario must be regarded not as exercises in prediction but as interesting thought experiments. Which, in fairness to these papers, is precisely what they are. And they make an important point: that in due course the energy transition should be far less mineral-intensive than today’s fossil fuel era. But the timing implied by those charts is way off.

Now, it’s worth saying, in the supplementary material to their paper, Nijnens et al say that if the world followed the STEPS scenario (eg the IEA’s worst case scenario) then:

“The estimate for 2040 ROM coal and ore extraction in the STEPS scenario is 8470 Mt, a similar extraction to the 2021 NZE ROM coal and ore extraction calculated in this research.”

In other words (and bear in mind this is based on a scenario which we’re already overshooting), our footprint will increase and then plateau before it decreases. And that decrease won’t begin for a while. There will, in other words, be a hump.

Once we get over that hump, the footprint does indeed start to shrink as the dynamics mapped in these papers suggest. As I wrote in the book, squint a bit and you can envisage a future where:

The world will be a healthier, more productive place, with fewer deaths from pollution, and since we will mine far fewer fossil fuels than today, our footprint will genuinely have shrunk across the world.

And for further excellent infographics about the sheer difference in scale between fossil fuel mining and future mining for green energy infrastructure (including stuff like steel), there’s a great recent report from the Energy Transitions Commission. With charts like this one:

But while this might be the case in the future, it’s not going to be the case for quite some time.

And that hump, like it or not, is probably what we’re heading for in the coming years. Those charts at the top are, like the IEA’s net zero model, better thought of as wishful thinking.

That brings us to a broader point, one recently made by the excellent Rob West of Thunder Said Energy: it’s very important to distinguish between the many models of what could constitute a plausible pathway to net zero and the pathway we’re actually on. None of this is to deny that these models are useful guides to how we might be able to shift towards cleaner energy: but they’re what they are. They’re models.

Rob’s own models, while we’re at it, suggest there will indeed be a peak (or maybe better to call it a plateau) for our material consumption around 2030, mostly thanks to a fall in global coal consumption. But his chart - the one above - is very different indeed to the ones at the top. For one thing, it has that hump.

Anyway, all of this is before you consider the other proviso which has to be appended to the analysis in these papers, which is that they aren’t considering all of the materials.

As you’ll know if you’ve read the book or indeed some of my previous blogs, the majority of our planetary footprint isn’t metals or fossil fuels, but the sands and aggregates and stone we dig and blast out of the earth’s surface to provide us with construction materials. It’s concrete; it’s sand used for land reclamation; it’s the aggregates we use to pave our roads.

And frankly there’s little sign of our consumption of that kind of stuff falling any time soon.

It would have been nice to have ended 2023 by declaring that we had reached the point of “peak stuff” - as those charts at the top seem to imply. But the reality is very different.

Our mineral consumption isn’t about to fall. We’re heading for the hump.