Collapse [soon] and avoid the rush

Collapse now and avoid the rush. Rintrah by Radagast. July 3, 2026.

A lot of people on Reddit tend to get really upset, when I show them this:

I’ve seen all sorts of attempts at denying the obvious: Maybe that number on the left is for the entire airplane! Maybe it’s actually misogyny of me to point out that you shouldn’t be spending your twenties traveling around the world!

No, I’m sorry. The corporations and the media deceived you into thinking that something is normal, that is in fact not normal. Every year we’re using an amount of fossil fuels that took many thousands of years to come into existence and we’re using the atmosphere as the place where we dump our waste after we burned those fossil fuels. That’s just not a normal way to live. It’s not a way of living that will remain available to humans for very long.

The reality is as following: Every time you take an intercontinental flight, more carbon dioxide has to be released into the air through combustion, than an entire African village home to dozens of people releases into the air in a single year. Unfortunately, as they tend to grow their own food, such a village also houses the people who are most directly affected by the global warming your flight causes.

Nobody claims that flying is the main cause of climate change. The problem is that it’s much easier for people to stop flying, than it is to stop growing rice. Some greenhouse gas emissions are just unavoidable with the technology we have available right now. And considering that the airline industry is one of the main industries that is constantly growing its carbon footprint, whereas most other industries at least try to reduce their impact, by 2050 the airline industry will in fact be one of the main remaining causes of further global warming, unless we now wake up and collectively start changing the way we live.

I’m pretty sure you might be wondering: “What’s in it for me?” Well the thing is, as with collapse in general, that if you make the lifestyle changes today that are going to be necessary, then you won’t have to experience the discomfort of having them forcibly shoved down your throat tomorrow, which I promise you, is where this will be headed eventually.

Today you might say to me: “Well, I had to travel to the other side of the world, to visit my grandmother’s funeral.” I’m not here to judge you. What I’m here to tell you is: “By the time your mother leaves this world behind, your government may not allow you to visit the funeral. Consider moving to live near your family, while you still have the freedom to make that decision yourself.”

You’ve seen how this went with COVID. The media, the experts, the governments, all stuck their heads in the sand, until at some point in March 2020, by which time it was already impossible to stop this virus from spreading, they all simultaneously implemented lockdown measures. Humans tend to stick their heads in the sand, until eventually they all panic simultaneously.

Well, climate I’m telling you, is not going to be any different. The American oil companies were all warned about this problem, in the 1950’s. By the late 1970’s, they had an accurate picture of what was going to happen. If at any point they chose to warn us, we would have had plenty of time, to figure out an alternative way to live without using any more fossil fuels. They did not warn us, Hansen warned us, in 1988.

If we had taken Hansen’s warning seriously, we would still have had some time to figure out a way to stop using fossil fuels. Hansen’s warning was not taken very seriously. In fact, when Hansen warns us we need to reduce carbon dioxide back below 350 parts per million to stabilize the climate, nobody really listens to him unfortunately. Hansen did not plan for climate change to become a kind of grand existential conflict for humanity. Hansen had hoped we would implement a carbon tax and start building nuclear reactors.

That did not happen. We’re happily continuing the march towards oblivion. So, what you can reasonably expect to happen at some point, is a climate event that is so massive, that we can not choose to ignore it. We will get an event that is so massive, that we end up getting the kind of mass panic we had in March 2020, when we suddenly had tens of thousands of police on the streets of Paris, announcing to people that they had to stay inside.

What would that look like? Well, for that, we have to talk about wet bulb temperatures. When you wrap a thermometer in a water-moistened cloth, it will behave differently. The water will evaporate, depending on the humidity of the air and you will be able to measure a wet bulb temperature.

As humans, we are guaranteed to die when the wet bulb temperature reaches 35 degree Celsius for at least six hours. Our bodies are not able to use sweating to cool down at that temperature anymore. It doesn’t matter if you sit in the shade, you just die at this temperature. Until we started changing the climate, such wet bulb temperatures occurred nowhere on Earth: No part of the Earth reached temperatures too hot for human survival.

The first time we ever saw a wet bulb temperature above 35 degrees on Earth, was in 1987, in Pakistan. By now, these temperatures are emerging in Iran, in Saudi Arabia and in other parts of the Middle East too. ...

Europe is warming twice as fast, as the world as a whole. One of the consequences is that during heat waves, we now see the sort of temperatures in parts of Europe that you would normally only see in the Middle East.

It gets worse, because 35°C was always the generous theoretical ceiling. It was the point past which we were certain nobody survives. But in a recent study on healthy young adults, it was found that none of them were actually able to cool down at that temperature. Their bodies started getting in trouble much earlier, at a wet bulb temperature of around 30.5 degree Celsius. And for elderly, it’s even harder than for young people to cool down.

Heat stress conditions beyond the limit of human survivability are already a regular thing now on Earth. And due to arctic amplification, the fact that we actually see more rapid global warming in parts of the world that lie further north, there is not really any major part of the world anymore where we are safe from these heat waves.

Now combine this realization, with another problem we face: The heat dome. Because we have changed our climate, the weather has started behaving differently. It’s not just a fact that the Earth in general has warmed, but heat waves now behave differently. We now increasingly get heat domes, which are large parts of the world where the heat is simply trapped and the weather becomes stationary.

One such climate change-linked heat dome, happened in 2021 in Canada and the United States, on the Pacific coast. A study estimated that it was almost certainly caused by climate change, which had made it an estimated 150 times more likely for it to happen.

So what happened during the heat dome? For starters, 1400 people are thought to have died in it.

On June 27, Lytton a village of 250 people in Canada, recorded the highest temperature the town had ever seen: 46.6 °Celsius. But the heat was stuck. There was no wind, the heat was not moving, the soil was drying out and the heat just kept building up. The next day, the town reached an even higher temperature: 47.9 °Celsius. Two consecutive record-breaking days.

But the record would be beaten again, the next day. Finally, on June 29, the temperature in Lytton, British Columbia, hit 49.6 °C (121.3 °F), the highest temperature ever recorded in Canada. The next day, a forest fire swept into the city and everyone had to flee, as the town was destroyed. In British Columbia, 815 people suddenly died during the heatwave. Of those, 570 were deemed heat-related. Of those 570, 21% were younger than 65.

The elderly are more vulnerable, but our planet can now reach temperatures hot enough to kill children and healthy young adults too. As I just showed you, our planet can now reach such temperatures, not just in the Middle East, but even in Canada.

So, please allow me, based on what we’ve learned, to offer you a prediction:

At some point, something big is going to happen. Something so horrifying, that many people will not be able to mentally cope with it. And people are going to freak out. They’re going to freak out, like you’ve never seen before. All these realizations people have been suppressing for years, are going to be released in a tidal wave of emotions, all at once. And governments are going to find themselves panicking too, like they did in March 2020.

As I have explained before, the electric grid in Europe is just not equipped to have us all use air conditioning. Only 20% of Europeans have air conditioning. This does not stop people right now however, from buying air conditioning. If everyone used air conditioning, our evening demand peak would be 50% higher than it is right now, enough to crash the grid. Also, please keep in mind, that our cities suffer a massive heat island effect. Cities can be up to ten degree Celsius hotter than the neighboring countryside.

So, what is going to happen? Well, I expect that at some point, we’re going get a heat dome, over a developed country that people think fondly of. It could be Canada, it could be the United States, it could be Japan, it could be a European country. A place that people associate in their mind with happiness and carefreeness, a place they may have visited as tourists, not a place where people expect misery to happen. South Sudan already has two million climate refugees, but nobody cares. No, for panic to emerge, it needs to go seriously wrong in a Western country.

...

That heat dome, is going to stay stuck. People will turn on their air conditioning. The electrical grid will not be able to handle the demand. Thousands, possibly tens of thousands of people, will then suffer a blackout. They will rapidly notice the heat becoming unbearable. People will try to flee, but it will be difficult to flee, as it is often difficult to evacuate an entire town at once.

You will turn on your evening news and you will see video footage, of an entire town just annihilated in a heatwave. If I had to pick my best guess, I would guess Phoenix, Arizona, but as the Pacific heatdome illustrated, it can literally happen to Canada. And this time, the news won’t hold back. They’ll show you what actually happened. They will show you what it actually means, to die like this.

You will see houses with dead grandparents in them, who never left their couch, with their dead dog right next to them. You will see cars stuck in a traffic jam, with Sally Soccermom, Joe Sixpack and their little children in the back of the car, all dead. Not people in Uganda, not people in Sudan, but people who look like you, who look like they could be your colleagues or neighbors, dead.

A kind of climate 9/11, if you will. I honestly don’t expect it will take more than a decade, before we have a climate 9/11. The conspiracy theorists will immediately jump on the opportunity for another explanation: Space weapons! Ionosphere heaters! Weather manipulation! Occult Satanic ritual human sacrifice! It was all predicted in an episode of the Simpsons!

But it’s not going to work, because those same people were saying twenty years ago that it’s all a hoax and that the Earth had not warmed since 1998. People are going to panic, people are going to freak out. Government departments are composed of average human beings and they are going to freak out too. There are decades where nothing happens; and there are weeks where decades happen.

There will be people going crazy. Young women removing all their holiday pictures from Instagram at 3AM. Married middle-class men with children who work at oil companies quitting their job overnight. People who will commit actual sacrifices, in an attempt to appease nature. Psychologists won’t be able to cope with the demand from people having mental breakdowns. The reason it will be such complete insanity is because people already know all of this, but they still suppress it. But at some point, everyone will almost simultaneously become unable to suppress it. What you are living in now, is the quiet before the storm.

And then within a few days, you find yourself waking up in a whole new world. A world where you have to request permission if you want to travel somewhere by airplane. A world where the tires of your SUV are slashed at night and your neighbors pretend not to see you when you walk past them. A world where a handful of people hoard all the beef in your local supermarket and then there is just never any new beef available anymore and you never quite figure out why.

A world where posh people just sit in the dark in the evening, because they don’t want their neighbors to see them using electricity when their solar panels don’t work. This is your worst nightmare, isn’t it? Your Klaus Schwab WEF globalist horror scenario? Well, that’s why I’m telling you: Prepare for it. It’s going to happen. Nature is done with our bullshit and people are going to figure that out the hard way.

So, what I’m telling you, is to collapse now and avoid the rush. Move to live closer to your family and friends now, don’t sit as an “expat” in some city with a bunch of roommates you don’t really like. Stop flying now, because they’re no longer going to let you fly, unless your life depends on it.

Stop eating beef now, because you’ll crave it and the local supermarket won’t have it for you. Sell your car now and buy a bicycle, because your car will one day be a badge of shame, especially if it is big or expensive. Stop having children now, because it’s going to get ugly.

There will be a before and after to all of this. Not because the climate itself will suddenly shift dramatically one day, but because this is just how human psychology works. Negative emotions and realizations tend to be suppressed, until we can’t suppress them. And then when we look around us and see that others can’t suppress them anymore, we find ourselves able to let go too.

So what I’m asking you, is to just prepare for it. Make the changes that are going to be necessary to your life now, rather than being part of the big crowd of people who will try to exit the theater all at once when someone yells fire. Help make this a somewhat orderly and dignified transition.

Radagast: Nobody is prepared for what's going to happen

Nobody is prepared for what’s going to happen. Rintrah by Radagast. Jun 10, 2026.

To help us figure out what’s going to happen to our planet climatologically speaking, you can look at the last time greenhouse gas concentrations were as high as they are today. That era, is called the Pliocene.

The Pliocene was 5,3 to 2,6 million years ago. CO2 levels were at most around 400 parts per million back then. We’re at 430 ppm right now, so we’re actually in the process of leaving the Pliocene type climate behind. But here’s the important thing to understand: During the Pliocene, the global temperature was 2 to 3 degree Celsius above what it is right now! In the Arctic in particular, temperatures are thought to have been ~19 degree Celsius warmer than they are now.

Why? It was not the sun, the sun was slightly fainter than it is today. The continents were also in the same place. No, the main reason is believed to be because the Pliocene had a bunch of forest fires that resulted in the emission of all sorts of smoke particles. Those smoke particles are dark colored and as a result absorb sunlight.

Another part of the puzzle is that right now, we’re still hiding some of the warming that’s baked into the system, through toxic air pollution. When we actually get rid of fossil fuels, that air pollution will disappear too, revealing the global warming that’s still being hidden right now. Most of that hidden warming is on land. Estimates are all over the place, but center around 0.5 degree Celsius globally. That’s warming you’re still going to get, even if you would stop all emissions today.

So this is the sort of stuff that’s baked in, at 400 parts per million. That’s why people like Hansen and Bill McKibben campaigned to rapidly reduce CO2 levels in the atmosphere to less than 350 parts per million. At today’s CO2 concentration, you won’t keep today’s climate. Even the IPCC’s chair, Rajendra K. Pachauri, said that the real target should be 350 parts per million. [ed MW: and that too was WRONG; even at 350, there were no guarantees of maintaining a stable climate; 300 should have been the real target, but politically impossible as we had already left it too far behind]

The 1.5 degree Celsius target you hear about so much, is NOT a scientific target. It’s a political target, invented by diplomats. Long before the world settled on 1.5 degree of warming, we were warned in 1990 that: “Temperature increases beyond 1.0 °C may elicit rapid, unpredictable, and non-linear responses that could lead to extensive ecosystem damage.”

The 2 degree target was dominant before the world began to realize how much damage we were already seeing at today’s level of warming and moved to 1.5 in 2015. That 2 degree target originates with an economist, William Nordhaus, not with climatologists. These days, Nordhaus goes around saying we might as well have 4 degree of warming, a level of warming that would render large swathes of the Earth too hot for human survival.

There is however, no actual scientific basis to the idea that we can just choose to stabilize temperatures at 2 degree or 4 degree Celsius, which is why years ago I made the following comic to illustrate the idiocy of what Nordhaus is proposing:

We’re all in that car together, the people at the steering wheel are insane maniacs and we’re headed for the shark-infested waters.


Of course our CO2 concentrations will never stabilize around 400 parts per million, we’re already at 430 right now and there’s no reason to expect that emissions will reach zero anytime soon. TotalEnergy expects that by 2050 we’ll still be getting 60% of our energy from fossil fuels, down from 80% today. CO2 concentrations will inevitably rise well above what we see today.

If you want to know what the ultimate committed warming is, from today’s greenhouse gas concentrations, you’re looking at 10 degree Celsius of global warming. That’s what you end up with eventually, as the white ice sheets gradually melt and reveal a darker surface that absorbs more sunlight (heat), while the permafrost begins to release greenhouse gasses on its own. This is a process that takes centuries, but the idea people have, that we can stop using fossil fuels and temperatures will stabilize as a result is nonsense.

No, in reality, we’re now stuck with continuing global warming for centuries to come. But in the short term, it’s very likely to accelerate. A recent study suggests we’re facing 0.5 to 1 degree Celsius of warming, in the next ten years. We had 0.488 degree of warming over the past ten years, so this is simply a modest acceleration of what we’ve already seen.

I know Democrats no longer care. I know Greta Thunberg now has other stuff to care about. But this problem is not going away. And anyone who tells you that temperatures will stop going up once we stop our emissions, is lying to you. Because of positive feedback loops in the climate system, there is no way to stabilize temperatures at 3 degree Celsius.

What’s actually happening is that the Earth is transitioning into a hothouse Earth state because of our actions. This is a process that has only just begun, but will continue to unfold for thousands of years to come. If you wanted to stabilize the Earth’s climate, what you would need to do is suck CO2 out of the air and store it somehow. You would need to reduce CO2 levels in the atmosphere from today’s 430 parts per million, down to less than 350 parts per million. [nope! 280-300!!]

You’re not going to achieve that. Even global reforestation won’t remove more than 85 ppm from the atmosphere, which means that within two years even global reforestation wouldn’t be enough. There’s no longer any realistic scenario left, in which global temperatures will stabilize during this century.

Let me illustrate what the problem is. Remember how we were warned in 1990 that above 1 degree of global warming, we could expect extensive ecosystem damage? We’re at 1.5 degree of warming now. So where is the extensive ecosystem damage? Well, take a good look at how much CO2 concentrations are rising every year:

Note how there’s a jump in the amount of CO2 entering the atmosphere in 2023 and 2024. Why is that? That’s when the 2023–2024 El Niño event took place, which caused a spike in global temperatures. The Amazon suffered a severe drought as a result. That drought turned the Amazon from a carbon sink, into a carbon source. The record jump of CO2 concentrations in 2023 and 2024, was a result of the Amazon ecosystem beginning to fail.

Do you realize what this means? Our ecosystems are beginning to die and as a result they’re beginning to dump the carbon they have been sequestering for us, back into the atmosphere. And none of this is about to stop, even if our emissions suddenly stopped today, because of the positive feedback loops we have triggered. Take a good look, at the other little train we have set in motion:

What you’re looking at, is the Earth’s albedo, its ability to reflect sunlight rather than absorb it.

It has declined, mainly because of the gradual disappearance of snow and glaciers and changes in cloud coverage. The disappearance of snow and glaciers is a delayed process, that takes time to unfold, it continues even when emissions stop. The decline in albedo is equivalent in effect to raising CO2 by 110 parts per million. That’s the train that has been set in motion for us.

Again: There is no climate stability, as long as CO2 concentrations remain above 350 parts per million. Even 350ppm is a generous estimate, the safe target may be as low as 300ppm. [ahhh, there it is.] And since o;nobody has a realistic way to bring concentrations back below 350, let alone 300ppm, there is no stability in our lifetimes. This is just how the climate system works. Politicians want to believe they can stabilize the climate at whatever level they want, but they can’t.

There is no stability at 1.5 degree Celsius of warming, it means your car is slowly rolling down the hill. There is no stability at 2 degree Celsius of warming either, it means your car is rolling down the hill a little faster. 2.5 degree, 3 degree? Forget about it.

So what are the consequences in our lifetime? Well let’s start out with some of the basics. In the summer of 2022 France’s nuclear fleet sat at 40% of its peak capacity. The heat was simply too intense to use the river water for cooling, without killing all the life in the rivers. Now wait 10 years, as global temperatures rise 0.5-1 degree Celsius. Europe is warming twice as fast as the world as a whole, so add 1-2 degree Celsius on top of what we get today. Now add the demand from people’s air conditioning. You get blackouts.

Now try India. I quote:

I’m sure some of you have seen the international headlines or the new UN climate warnings about the heat dome over India right now. The IMD (our weather department) has issued red alerts across my region (the northwest/central belt). Yesterday, a town near me recorded 48.2°C.

I want to explain what 48 degrees actually feels like when you live in a developing country, because it is terrifying.

You can’t just “stay inside and run the AC.” The power grid simply cannot handle the load of millions of people trying to cool down, so we are dealing with rolling blackouts. Imagine sitting in the pitch dark in a concrete room that has been baking in the sun for 12 hours, with no ceiling fan, while the ambient temperature inside is still hovering near 40°C at midnight. You don’t sleep; you just pass out from exhaustion.

The taps are running dry because the heat evaporates local reservoirs and water usage spikes. People who have to work outside—street vendors, construction workers, delivery drivers—are collapsing. Even the water coming out of the cold tap during the day is hot enough to literally brew tea.

It feels like we are living on the absolute razor’s edge of what the human body can endure, and it’s only May.

This is what they’re getting in India, right now. By 2030, 21 cities in India, including New Delhi, are expected to have exhausted their groundwater. There won’t be water coming out of the tap. There won’t be water for agriculture. They’re using up their groundwater faster than nature can replenish it. That’s four years from now.

Now try adding 1 degree Celsius of warming on top of what they’re getting right now. What do you think is going to happen? People are going to flee. Not by 2100. Not by 2050. No, within the next ten years, you’re going to have droves of people try to leave India, whether legally or illegally. They’re going to try to leave, in whatever way they can.

The refugee crisis in Europe back in 2015, consisted of 1.3 million refugees, one million of whom were Syrians. Around five percent of Syria’s population of 20 million back in 2015 tried to enter Europe. If 1% of the Indian population tries to flee to Europe, that’s 15 million people.

Now add Pakistan and Bangladesh, which face the same situation as India: Depleting aquifers, sea level rise, overpopulation and global warming. In total, their population will be 2.021 billion people by 2036. If just 1% of their population tries to flee to Europe, that’s 20 million people.

Oh, did you know, the EU signed a deal with India a few months ago, to make migration from India into the EU easier?

You’ve seen the situation in the UK, the conflicts that emerge due to migration over there. If, during the next ten years, one out of every thousand Indians decides to move to the United Kingdom, their former colonial overlord, the Indian population in the country doubles.

Forget about the legal migration for a moment. If your choice is between dwelling in homeless shelters in Europe, or living in a city where it’s 48 degree Celsius, where you don’t fall asleep but collapse from exhaustion, a city without electricity, a city without fresh water coming from the tap, what would YOU do? I would book a plane ticket to Europe and never go back.

The United States has 13 million illegal immigrants, mostly South Americans. How long do you think it takes until they have 13 million illegals from the subcontinent? People will overstay their visa, people will fly to America just to give birth to their kids.

There is no future in India, Pakistan or Bangladesh. The heatwaves are approaching the limits of what a healthy adult can physically survive. The groundwater is being depleted, they won’t have any water coming out of the tap. The electricity grid is not equipped to handle the heatwaves, let alone once the rich start buying air conditioning.

Maybe a miracle happens, maybe they make it through the next ten years without their agricultural production completely failing as they run out of groundwater, without lethal heatwaves, without the electricity grid failing. Maybe they can handle the 49 degree Celsius heatwave, 10 years from now. Wait ten more years, now it’s 50 degree Celsius. Ten more, now it’s 51 degree Celsius. New Delhi, has warmed 2.93 degree Celsius in the past 16 years, because big growing cities are warming up more rapidly than the world as a whole.

At what point do you think things start breaking down? 49 degree heatwaves? 50 degree heatwaves? When do you think people start fleeing for their lives? Want to hear the best part? Once India decides to do everything right, when they stop burning coal, when they stop using internal combustion engines, they will be rewarded with up to 0.7 degree Celsius of global warming on top of what they already have, warming that is currently still being hidden by toxic air pollution.

That’s India for you. Now take a look at Southeast Asia and Oceania. Worldwide, 500 million people depend directly on coral reefs, for food, for tourism and for coastal protection, because the corals break the waves. In Southeast Asia, 70-90% of all the fish people eat come from the coral reefs. Coral reefs are 0.2% of the ocean’s floor, but deliver 10% of fish humans eat.

The coral reefs, are zombies. They’re already dead. Even if you somehow managed to keep global warming to just 1.5 degree of warming, you lose 70-90% of all coral reefs, by midcentury (2050). Gone, not coming back. At 2 degree, you lose 99% of them.

That’s ~500 million people living on small islands, who will need to figure out some other way to survive, within the next 24 years. People whose main protein source, is fish from their coral reefs. What are they going to do? Their economies are going to collapse. Life on some isolated island is affordable because you have tourists visit and because you eat the locally caught fish.

Half a billion people who have to figure out some other way to survive in the next 24 years. If 1% of them decide during the next 24 years that their way to survive is by moving to Europe, that’s five million people. Again, that’s five times the Syrian population that moved into Europe in 2015.

Now try Africa. Africa will have 2.5 billion people by 2050. Make it very simple. We have 2 billion people in India, 2.5 billion in Africa, 500 million people who depend on the coral reefs. All reasonable estimates suggest that by 2050, all these people are going to be in big trouble.

If you have five billion people in trouble and 1% of them try to flee to Europe, that’s fifty million people. That’s fifty times the Syrian population that moved into Europe and 38 times the overall 2015 refugee population that entered Europe.

Why would they move to Europe? They speak the languages. Europe is already multicultural. Europe is wealthy. Europe has a pleasant climate. Where else would they move? China and the Middle East won’t let them in. Africa and India will have enough problems of their own. Russia lies in shambles. Australia has an extreme real estate crisis and hardly lets any people in.

Your only real options to flee, if you don’t want to live in a giant tent city in a neighboring country, are North America and Europe. Australia and New Zealand put together have a population of 35 million people. If 1% of Africans, coral reef dependent islanders and subcontinentals tried to move to Australia and New Zealand, they would double the population of those countries within 25 years. That’s not realistically possible.

So, if you think Europe has a big problem with multiculturalism and immigration right now? Well, wait until 1% of Indians decide they don’t want to live through 49 degree heatwaves without safe drinking water and electricity anymore.

Maybe things get really bad and by 2050, the entirety of Africa looks like Syria did during the civil war, so 5% of the population tries to flee to Europe, just like 5% of Syrians did back in 2015. That’s 125 million people for you. That’s 25% of the EU’s overall projected population. So effectively 20% of your population is African by 2050.

Note: These are not far-fetched estimates. The UN projected 86 million climate refugees for sub-Saharan Africa alone by 2050, back in 2021. But since then, we’ve started to see the consensus shift towards more rapid warming in the near-term, as 2023 and 2024 surprised effectively everyone. And by now, we’re getting serious projections of 0.5-1 degree in the next decade. This is all going to escalate much faster than anyone expected.

But let’s say Eastern Europe decides they don’t want to play along with this and go for the hard approach: They open fire on anyone who tries to enter their countries. Western Europe goes for the soft approach. Now 40% of your Western European population by 2050 is African. The majority of your under 65 population consists of illegal African migrants. How do you maintain a semblance of a functional democracy under those conditions?

Your laws and systems in regards to illegal immigration, were built for today. There are an estimated 3 million people living illegally in Europe right now. Try multiplying that population forty times over the next 25 years, tell me how you’re going to deport them. You won’t have the capacity for it. What you’re going to get under those circumstances, is what you saw in Belfast last night: Citizens deporting them on their own, burning down their houses.

Demographics, is destiny. The numbers don’t lie. Today there are more children born every day in Ethiopia, than in the entirety of the European Union. Ethiopia has more than 100 languages, more than 80 ethnic groups, none above 35% of the overall population. They also have the worst projected impact from climate change for all of Africa.

Where do you think the Ethiopians are going to flee, once their harvests start failing, or the pastoralist tribes start encroaching upon the sedentary tribes? Look at their neighbors. Somalia has been in civil war since 1991, with no end in sight. Sudan is in the middle of a civil war too. South Sudan has the world’s lowest GDP per capita, so don’t expect any help there. Eritrea is a communist dictatorship. Djibouti has a population of one million. That leaves Kenya, which will presumably at some point say “enough is enough”.

So where oh where are the Ethiopians going to flee, once the harvests start to fail? Help me out here. Ideally the destination needs to be wealthy, tolerant, democratic, the climate should be pleasant and there should be programs available that offer housing to refugees, along with ample employment and education opportunities. Can you think of anywhere?

And keep in mind, North America and Europe won’t just be dealing with climate refugees from other parts of the world. No, you’re going to be dealing with internal climate migration too. Decades of drought have caused the Great Salt Lake in Utah to dry up. People in Salt Lake city are now inhaling toxic dust from the lake bed, so they’re fleeing the city. What are they? Climate refugees.

A town in Switzerland was destroyed by a collapsing glacier, so the residents were evacuated. What are they? Climate refugees. The Netherlands plans to destroy a village of 1,100 people, to expand renewable energy infrastructure. What are those residents? Climate refugees. This will perhaps shock people on both sides of the political spectrum, but climate refugees can in fact be white.

The refugee streams you’re going to get as a result of climate change, are unlike anything the world has ever seen in history, but nobody is prepared for it. In fact, most people don’t even have the vaguest clue what they need to be preparing for. Nobody is prepared for what’s going to happen.

Radagast: Degrowth

Is Zeke Hausfather right, is Degrowth dumb? Rintrah by Radagast. Jun 16, 2026

Degrowth is dumb, you heard it here first!

Thank God for Zeke Hausfather! Where would be all be without this man?

Imagine you had a magic wand that would allow you to change the laws of physics, to make it so that CO2 and methane in the atmosphere do not actually cause global warming. Wouldn’t that be great?

Well, a degrowther would argue we would still find ourselves faced with big problems during this century, because the real problem we face, is the overall size of the human economy, the overall demands that we place on the Earth. But that is nonsense of course! As long as we just make sure to keep global warming below 1.5 degree Celsius, everything else will turn out alright on its own!

Today, I want to take a look with you at some of the non-climate problems that we face, that will require us to reduce the size of our economy do things a little differently. Just a little tiny bit, I promise!

Something has to replace fossil fuels, especially oil

Even if fossil fuels did not cause global warming, we would still have to stop using them, for the simple reason that they are finite. It is becoming increasingly expensive, to dig them up out of the Earth. That is a bigger problem than it may seem, because we don’t really have a good sustainable alternative for most of the ways we use them.

What you probably think to yourself is that we can stop using oil, because you’ve seen electric vehicles. Imagine if every van and every passenger vehicle, stopped using oil as fuel and became electric. That would solve just 25% of global oil use. Most of our oil use, is in ways that are much more difficult to replace.

For example, we need fuel for our airplanes. Can’t we turn plants into fuel for our airplanes? Yes we can, but that’s going to require a lot of plants. If we wanted to meet 2050 level demand for air travel with biofuels, we would need to be using 30% of total globally sustainable biomass. That’s not going to happen, because people also need to eat.

But there are other uses of fossil fuels, that also have to be replaced. Around 14% of the oil we use, is used to produce petrochemicals, including plastics. Again, the plastic manufacturers are looking towards our crop production, to produce “bioplastics”. Like biofuels for air travel, this will also be competing with land we use to produce food. And we will need biofuels for heavy duty trucks, which will also require land.

So, in the world where global warming is not a thing, we’re still going to need to stop using oil at some point. And that’s not going to be easy. In fact, it is going to be competing with our need to use our farmland for food.

We don’t have enough fresh water left

This is another big problem for which we don’t have a solution. In large parts of the world, we get our water for food production and other human uses, from water that we pump up from the ground. There is however only limited amounts of water available in the ground below our feet. Globally, 35% of all the fresh water we use, comes from stored groundwater.

Large parts of the world are depleting their groundwater faster than it can be replaced by nature. This is true for India, where the situation is particularly acute, as well as for the United States.

Can’t we just solve this problem with desalination plants? No we can’t, for multiple reasons. To start with, desalination requires a lot of electricity. If India wanted to stop using groundwater and start using desalinated water, they would need to figure out how to produce 122% more electricity than they currently do.

The real cost in some parts of the world is not so much in desalinating the water, as it is in transporting the water. If you could produce the desalinated water and teleport it to the farmland where it is needed, that would quadruple the cost of producing wheat. But we can’t teleport the desalinated water, we have to transport it from the coast, to the place where it is needed. Transporting water is expensive.

Approximately 1% of global freshwater use comes from desalinated water. Desalination will never play more than a minor role in meeting our water needs. It’s simply too expensive for most purposes for which we use freshwater in most of the world.

We don’t have enough copper available in the ground

The world will face a 30% shortage in the amount of copper we need, by 2035. Because of droughts in Chile, it’s currently hard to produce enough copper to meet the world’s global need, as certain methods of copper mining and refining use a lot of water. We also simply face a massive problem with declining core copper grades. Average copper ore grades globally have deteriorated from approximately 1.5% in the 1990s to around 0.6-0.7%.

We don’t have the right iron ore left to produce steel without using fossil fuels.

We don’t have enough of the high quality iron ore we need, to produce steel without using fossil fuels. The world has already exhausted the best iron ore that was available.

We’re losing our soils faster than nature can regenerate them for us

In some parts of the world, we’re making our soils unsuitable for agriculture by polluting them. That is the case in China, where the share of polluted soil grew from 5% in the 1980’s, to 19.4% today. The three main causes are use of pesticides, use of fertilizer and use of mulch. Together this results in the buildup of heavy metal pollutants in the soil, that reduce the growth rate of plants and make those plants unhealthy for human consumption.

In other parts of the world, soils are being lost to erosion. Estimates are that 16% of our soils will be lost within 100 years to erosion.

We’re damaging our soils by polluting them with microplastics

As I explain here, current estimates are that our overall global harvests are reduced by 5.5% by microplastics in our soil. As long as we continue using plastics, we will cause further buildup of microplastics in our soils, thus further reducing agricultural yields.

We’re eating so much fish that the global ocean ecosystem is changing

Because humanity is eating too much fish, jellyfish are taking over the ocean. The jellyfish also eat the eggs and larvae of fish, thus making the problem self-reinforcing. The ocean is approaching a global state shift, towards a jellyfish-bacteria dominated ocean. Jellyfish are not generally eaten by other animals, so the jellyfish blooms just decay, feeding blooms of bacteria. Other factors in the transformation to a jellyfish-bacteria soup ocean, are climate change and the human introduction of pollutants into the ocean, like human sewage and manure from the animals we raise for food.

A jellyfish dominated ocean is bad news, for a number of reasons. For starters, it means we won’t have fish to eat. Second, jellyfish clog our pipes. Jellyfish blooms are already constantly shutting down our nuclear reactors. This will only get worse, as we transition to a global jellyfish-microbial ocean soup. They are also shutting down our desalination plants.

We’re at serious risk of triggering a chain-reaction that destroys all our satellites and makes it impossible to navigate space

We have too many satellites in the air. A Kessler syndrome is now a real possibility, which would leave us without all the different functions satellites deliver to us. According to the experts, we need to start launching fewer satellites into outer space.

Oh yeah and while we’re at it: We’re now having so many old satellites crash back into our atmosphere, that all the aluminum being vaporized is starting to cause significant damage to our ozone layer.

We have to stop using light at night

Global insect populations are declining by 1-2% a year. In Germany they found a 75% decline in insect populations in 27 years. At least part of the reason insect populations are declining, is because we are confusing them with our light pollution at night.

Who cares about the disappearance of the insects, right? Well, ninety percent of all our bird species do. Ninety percent of all bird species depend on insects at least during some part of their life cycle.

Well, who the hell cares about the disappearance of the birds, right? I will just sit inside, staring at my computer screen and not worry about what goes on around me. I just don’t care if 90% of all bird species were to go extinct!

Well, more than 70% of all plants that produce flowers depend on birds to disperse their seeds. But I just hate flowers, alright? Well, birds disperse the seeds of 90% of plants in tropical ecosystems. So, we lose the rain forests without the birds. Well, who the hell cares about the rain forests, right?

The insects, the flowering plants, the birds, the rain forests, let them all die on the altar of our Gross Domestic Product! Well, here’s the problem: We depend on the Amazon rain forest for 20 billion dollar worth of agricultural products every year, because the forest generates so much rain.

And I will admit, I kind of don’t want to die of hunger. As you can see, everything is interconnected. We screw with the insects, we screw with the birds. We screw with the birds, we screw with the plants whose seeds they distribute. We screw with the seeds, we screw with the rain forests. We screw with the rain forests, we screw with the rain we need for our own crops.

So yeah, I am of course not one of those crazy progress-hating degrowthers, but I think we have to reconsider using light at night. I don’t want to get trapped in a global chain reaction of extinctions that leads me to die of hunger.

We have to stop driving our cars everywhere

For one third of species of mammal studied, being hit by cars is the number one cause of death.

This man saved us all, by figuring out a way to reduce global oil consumption by at most 25%!

This may shock some of you to hear, but when a zero-carbon electric vehicle like a Tesla encounters a hedgehog, the hedgehog will still respond to the threat by rolling up. This may shock you when I tell you this too, but that results in the hedgehog being flattened.

As Ben Goldfarb puts it: “We’re living in the middle of the sixth mass extinction event in our planet’s history, and roadkill is truly one of the major reasons for that.” The estimates are that for 50% of endangered species in North America, roads are part of the reason why they are endangered.

You might want to start shutting down your nuclear power plants too

So yeah, we already figured out that in the jellyfish-dominated global ocean soup, nuclear power plants that get their water from the ocean regularly start struggling with the filters being clogged by massive jellyfish blooms, I already showed you this.

But what about the nuclear power plants that get their cooling water from the rivers? Well, they are endangering the species that live in the rivers, like the fish that live in them. You see, the water that is returned into the river, is hotter than the water that was taken from the river. This kills your fish.

Well who cares alright? Let’s just kill everything that lives in the river, we need the electricity!

Yeah I agree, let’s kill everything in the river. We have to take one thing into consideration however: The warm water in the river from the nuclear power plants also triggers harmful algae blooms. Higher water temperatures can accelerate the growth of various waterborne pathogens, including bacteria, viruses, and protozoa. In other words, when we warm up our rivers too much with our nuclear power plants, we are left without safe drinking water.

We might want to start shutting them down at some point, at least during heatwaves in summer. Those crazy hysterical European greens may have been onto something.

My conclusion

So, I agree with Hausfather. Degrowth is dumb. We should not stop growing the economy.

What a silly idea! No, we simply need a simple technofix. Just make sure we keep global warming below 1.5 degree Celsius, build a bunch of nuclear power plants, solar panels and wind turbines and everything will be alright!

And alright, I guess we should simply:

-Start flying less

-Start driving less cars

-Start using less water for agriculture

-Start producing less plastics

-Start producing less copper

-Start producing less steel

-Start launching less satellites into the air

-Start getting used to shutting down our nuclear power plants when the river gets too warm

-Start eating less fish

-Stop dumping our livestock manure into the ocean

-Stop using lights everywhere during the night

But let’s not call that Degrowth. I get it, Degrowth is a forbidden word. Too European in style. No, let’s call what we need to do something else. Let’s call it: Cool growth. Or hey, how about this one? Patriotic Growth. No? How about American Growth?

And finally, I have to be serious for a moment and mention that I have in fact heard of the “decoupling” idea. The idea means effectively nothing to me, I consider it a rhetorical trick. I would recommend anyone who seriously believes in the idea of decoupling, to walk into a local pub in the future and explain to some of the guys sitting there drinking beer, that although they can no longer afford to eat meat, drive a car or fly, the economy has actually grown according to your charts. They would tell you: “Get outta here!” It is not an idea I feel like dignifying with a serious response.


My proposal to Zeke Hausfather

Since degrowth is of course very dumb, my proposal to Zeke Hausfather is as following:

Please explain to people how to increase the size of the global economy and deliver everyone an abundant and equitable future while everyone will have to:

-Start flying less.

-Start driving our cars less.

-Start using less water in agriculture

-Start producing less plastics

-Produce less copper

-Produce less steel

-Launch less satellites into the air

-Start reducing overall electricity consumption, as we will increasingly often have to shut down our nuclear power plants

-Start eating less fish

-Stop dumping our animal manure in the ocean

-Stop using light everywhere during the night

My suspicion is that achieving all of these objectives, would probably require us to engage in fewer economic activities, which would then result in a smaller overall economy.

But that is degrowth, which is dumb. So my question to Mr. Hausfather is: Please show how we can achieve these goals, without reducing the overall size of our economy.

I know you can do it!

Let’s put more people into the world! Let’s further increase the size of our economy! There’s no way this can go wrong!

Discredited and Corrupted

UNFCCC & IPCC: DISCREDITED AND CORRUPTED. Jonathon Porritt. May 12, 2026.

The inaugural Transition Away from Fossil Fuels (TAFF) Conference took place in Colombia at the end of April. It's almost universally reckoned to have been “a measured success”.

We have to hope so given that the whole current climate governance system driven by the United Nations Framework Convention on Climate Change (UNFCCC) and underpinned by scientific advice from the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC) has comprehensively failed the whole of humankind for the last 25 years.

The TAFF Conference in Colombia came about as a direct consequence of the latest manifestation of that systemic failure – at COP30 in Brazil in November 2025. Despite huge support for the idea of governments coming forward with formal “roadmaps” for exiting the world of fossil fuels, that relatively uncontroversial proposal still got voted down by the usual suspects: the USA, Russia, Saudi Arabia, UAE etc etc.

Of course it did. The UNFCCC and the IPCC are bound by the UN’s consensus-based process. All countries have to agree, or there's no agreement. Which means the usual suspects hold all the cards: nothing gets into a COP Final Communique unless they approve it, and nothing gets into the IPCC's Assessment Reports unless they approve it.

BOTH THE UNFCCC AND THE IPCC ARE THEREFORE INSTITUTIONALLY CORRUPTED.

By which I do not mean they have been bought off or that they're led by corrupt and dishonest people. Far from it. They're led by deeply committed, ethical people of unimpeachable integrity. But what I do mean is that they are not in control of their own process output: they are inextricably beholden to a deeply corrupt and self-serving subset of UN member countries.

So, let's get real here: TAFF may well prove to be the next initiative in this tragic pageant of failure. Not least because everything here is still voluntary. There are no mandated deadlines — Colombia’s own roadmap, for instance, commits to an exit from fossil fuels by 2050, when it's all over anyway. There are no sanctions for countries failing to deliver on any milestones set out in their roadmaps. And there are no plans for dealing with the usual suspects: the corrupt petrostates and fossil fuel-compliant countries which have so successfully defended their own interests over the last 30 years.

BUT – let's just give despite-everything hopefulness a whirl here! It doesn't have to be like that, and this was a great start to a new governance process. A little-noticed element of that was the establishment of a new Science Panel for the Global Energy Transition, made up of up to 100 eminent scientists, based at São Paulo University, with an inspiringly eloquent emphasis on scientific integrity and independence. In other words, exactly what the IPCC can never be, incapable as it is (for reasons laid out above) of telling the truth, the whole truth and nothing but the truth.

The IPCC is made up of tens of thousands of scientists in dozens of countries, covering multiple facets of “why” and “how” the climate is changing. It lays down the consensus-based line in great door-stopper Assessment Reports every five or six years. So well was it judged to have carried out that remit that in 2007 it was awarded the Nobel Peace Prize alongside former Vice President Al Gore.

Critics of the IPCC see it as being far too slow, always several years behind the reality of what's happening on the front line of our changing climate, and far too susceptible to brutish political pressure from petrostates and the fossil fuel industry. However, if you're looking for an institutional manifestation of what good science looks like in practice, then the IPCC is seen by many as providing that gold standard — if not by me.

Over the years, the ICC has become very familiar with attacks from climate deniers (serried ranks of pointy-headed flat-earthers have been summarily seen off over the years), by more radical, independent scientists (with whom it's maintained a polite “agree to disagree” position), and by climate activists, who it rather patronisingly ignores. I wasn’t at the TAFF conference, but I’m told that criticism of the IPCC was somewhat subdued — and shared mostly in the bars late at night!

But the IPCC is now in real trouble, with a much more problematic opponent: the world's elite actuaries! The driest, dustiest, most unimpeachably authoritative of global professions has chosen to turn its full firepower on the IPCC – and the fallout could (and should!) transform the world of climate science.

In January 2025, without any huge fanfare, the Institute of Faculty and Actuaries published its “Planetary Solvency: Finding our Balance in Nature” Report, in partnership with scientists at the University of Exeter. It robustly critiques orthodox economic predictions, which estimate that the impact of an average temperature increase of 3°C by the end of the century would be around 2% of annual GDP. “These estimates are precisely wrong, rather than being roughly right, and do not recognise there is a risk of ruin”. The Institute's risk management experts diligently reassessed risks associated with impacts such as fires, flooding, droughts, temperature increases and rising sea levels, through to 2050 and on to the end of the century.

There is now a very strong likelihood that we'll experience an average temperature increase of at least 2°C by 2050 – an outcome described by the report's authors as “catastrophic”. Take a deep breath and get your head around the projected impacts associated with that 2°C rise:

• Economic contraction; GDP loss of over 25%
• Mass human mortality events resulting in over 2 billion deaths
• Warming of 2°C or more triggering high number of climate tipping points
• Breakdown of some critical ecosystem services and earth systems
• Major extinction events in multiple geographies
• Ocean circulation severely impacted
• Severe socio-political fragmentation in many regions; low-lying regions lost
• Heat and water stress driving mass migration of billions
• Catastrophic mortality events from disease, malnutrition, thirst and conflict

Two billion prospective deaths by 2050. That's just 25 years away. And for the final kicker, bearing in mind that we're currently on a business-as-usual trajectory towards at least a 3.7°C temperature increase by 2100, the contraction in GDP then rises to 50% and the number of projected deaths rises to 4 billion.

The Institute's definition of “Planetary Solvency” is fascinating:

“Planetary Solvency” assesses the ongoing ability of the Earth system to support our human society and economy. In the same way that a solvent pension scheme is one that continues to be able to provide pensions, a solvent Earth system is one that continues to provide the natural services we rely on, support ongoing prosperity, and a safe and just future”.

I'm not sure that the IPCC will welcome being called “precisely wrong rather than roughly right”, especially when it dives down into the details of this devastating critique. It basically stands accused of:

1. Relying on excessively narrow, reductionist science, based on retrospective “proof-points”, without any capacity to cope with uncertainty and more sophisticated risk analysis;
2. Failing to take into account the science of critical tipping points: “waiting for certainty” on whether these critical ecosystems will or won't tip “risks ruin”;
3. Slow-moving, static methodologies, which means that its risk assessments are infrequent and seemingly incapable of taking into account irrefutable evidence that the climate is changing far faster than its assessments indicate;
4. Providing false (and therefore very dangerous) reassurance to governments that the scale of the damage done to the global economy by an average temperature increase of 2°C will be “manageable” at around 1.5% of global GDP. This is where the Institute accuses the IPCC of being “wholly wrong”.

In due course, I'm sure the IPCC will provide some kind of riposte. When it does, it will need to take into account another equally devastating report from scientists at The Institute for Climate Risk at the University of New South Wales, confirming the Actuaries’ hypothesis of underestimated financial risks – simply because the IPCC's Integrated Assessment Models on which it has depended for decades are simply incapable of capturing major risks – what actuaries describe as risks with “low probability but catastrophic impact”.

So, does some arcane stand-off between climate geeks and number-crunching actuaries have any relevance for the new Science Panel established by the Transitioning Away From Fossil Fuels Conference just a few weeks ago? It absolutely does! If the IPCC continues to provide governments with seriously flawed assessments of climate risk, furnishing them with every conceivable variety of comfort blanket that protects us from the “whole truth” about accelerating climate change, then there is literally no way governments will ever come up with timely, proportionate responses to the crisis.

We must hope that this Science Panel rapidly provides a new benchmark for genuinely independent and truth-telling science.

(For those interested in the work of the Institute and Faculty of Actuaries, check out its latest report, “Planetary Solvency: Tipping Into The Wild Unknown”, co-authored with Anglia Ruskin University.)

Newbury: The Avatar and the Entropy Dump

The Avatar and the Entropy Dump: Why the 'Deep State' Needs a Mad King. Steven J. Newbury. Apr 14, 2026


If you listen to the world’s leading political scientists and macroeconomists right now—as I have been doing—you will hear a chorus of profound bewilderment. This isn’t the first time I’ve brought this up, but it bears repeating.

From John Mearsheimer describing the geopolitical landscape as a “Titanic heading for an iceberg”, to Jeffrey Sachs diagnosing the US Executive branch with “hyper-irrationality” and an utter collapse of institutional process, the consensus of the intelligentsia is clear: the United States has been captured by a delusional megalomaniac, the ‘Deep State’ has been sidelined, and the destruction of the global economy is the tragic result of a one-man show.

It is perhaps the most successful magic trick in Imperial history.

What these ‘Linguistic Thinkers’ fail to understand is that the chaos they are witnessing is not a failure of process. It is the process itself. The erratic, deeply personalised spectacle of the Executive branch is not a bug in the American geopolitical machine; in April 2026, it is its most vital feature.

To understand why the permanent bureaucracy—an entity that waged a relentless, four-year immune response against Donald Trump during his first term—has completely stood down during his second, we have to stop looking at the ‘software’ of diplomacy and political norms, and look at the ‘hardware’ of global thermodynamics.

The Resource Entropy Singularity

The global system has hit a biophysical wall. We have entered what can be called the Resource Entropy Singularity—the point of no return beyond which the forces driving resource depletion and environmental degradation become overwhelming and irreversible.

For decades, the American Empire maintained its hegemony through the ‘software’ of financialisation, printing fictitious capital to cover the massive physical Maintenance Power (Pmaint) required to run its aging, hyper-complex domestic infrastructure. But thermodynamic debt cannot be deferred forever. Today, the US faces an acute physical crisis: the terminal decline of its Light Tight Oil (LTO) miracle, and a severe refinery mismatch. The US produces light sweet crude, but its heavy industrial machine—its agricultural combines, its rail freight, its military logistics—runs on the heavy middle distillates refined from heavy sour crude.

To survive, the Imperial core must secure the remaining global pools of heavy exergy (specifically Canadian heavy crude) and eliminate international competition for diesel. It must execute a brutal, global triage.

The 15% ‘Triffin Tax’ and the Global Entropy Dump

This is the physical reality driving the 15% universal import tariff. Mainstream economists treat this tariff as ignorant protectionism. In reality, it is a ‘Triffin Tax’.

Historically, the Triffin Dilemma required the US to run trade deficits to supply the world with dollars. The 15% blanket tariff is the intentional, violent reversal of this mechanism. It acts as a mechanical pump, forcefully vacuuming Eurodollars from the international market back into the US core, creating a global funding crisis.

This isn’t trade policy; it is a global entropy dump.

The Second Law of Thermodynamics dictates that you cannot locally reduce entropy (order your own system) without increasing it to a greater degree elsewhere. By combining the Triffin Tax with a naval blockade of the Strait of Hormuz—deliberately starving the Asian manufacturing bloc of energy—the US is attempting to lower its internal entropy by exporting chaos, bankruptcy, and energy starvation to the periphery.

The Avatar Function: Plausible Deniability for the Apocalypse

Herein lies the ultimate utility of the current President.

If a polite, rational, ‘Deep State’-approved technocrat sat in the Oval Office and executed this strategy—intentionally blockading global energy straits, starving allies and adversaries alike, and levying a 15% extraction fee on the entire planet to save the American core—it would destroy the ideological legitimacy of the American project forever. It would expose the ‘Strong Enlightenment’ narrative of universal liberal progress as a predatory lie.

The Institutional Mass requires a Linguistic Heat Shield. They need an ‘Avatar’ who draws all the fire.

This is why the Deep State hasn’t ‘fixed’ the Trump problem this time around. In his first term, the global system still technically functioned, and his erratic behaviour was a threat to the extraction machine. Today, the machine is broken, and his behaviour is the perfect camouflage for a controlled demolition.

Let me be explicit about what this does not mean. There is no secret committee of evil masterminds in a windowless room pulling the Avatar’s strings. The permanent bureaucracy is not omniscient, nor is it unified. The behaviour I am describing—the tolerance of chaos, the exploitation of unpredictability, the willingness to let the Avatar absorb the backlash—is emergent, not directed. It arises from the sum of countless local optimisations: a trade official calculating tariff revenue, a naval officer enforcing a blockade, a financial analyst hedging diesel futures. Each actor is rational within their own compartment. None sees the full thermodynamic picture. The system does not need villains to produce brutal outcomes. It needs only compartmentalised cognition and a shared Gr​ imperative to survive at any cost.

If there were evil masterminds, they would never have chosen such an extreme, self‑destructive strategy. A rational cabal would preserve the Asian supply chain—because they would know the US needs those microchips. The fact that the system is burning its own dependencies is the surest proof that no one is at the wheel.

Crucially, acknowledging this dynamic does not mean Trump is secretly a calculated genius playing 4D chess, nor does it absolve him of the “madness” his critics diagnose. If anything, the opposite is true. The Avatar function works best precisely because the madness is genuine. A rational actor pretending to be unhinged would eventually break character when faced with the sheer scale of the biophysical destruction they were unleashing.

A man who genuinely believes his own messianic AI-generated portraits, and who authentically views complex geopolitical blockades as personal real-estate negotiations, is incapable of breaking character. His “hyper-irrationality” isn’t an act; it is a naturally occurring resource that the Institutional Mass is currently exploiting to its absolute limit.

When Trump attacks the Pope or demands “100% unconditional surrender” from foreign adversaries, he performs a DDOS attack on the analytical capacity of the global public. Intellectuals like Jeffrey Sachs take the bait perfectly. They spend hours dissecting the “narcissism” and “incompetence” of the man, utterly blind to the cold, mechanical extraction of global exergy taking place in the background.

When the European grid fails, and when the Global South bankrupts under the weight of the dollar vacuum, the permanent bureaucracy will simply point to the Oval Office and say, “We are so sorry. We tried to stop him. He was a madman.”

The Component Singularity

However, the ‘Deep State’ has made a fatal miscalculation. They believe they can manage this thermodynamic amputation using the ‘software’ of AI models and Executive narratives. They believe in the Imperial Noble Lie: “Short-term pain for long-term gain.”

But you cannot decouple the global routing table without triggering a Component Singularity. A modern John Deere combine harvester in the American Midwest is a rolling data centre, entirely reliant on microchips and sensors forged in the hyper-integrated Asian supply chains they are currently starving of diesel.

The political class believes they can fix the physical absence of these components with fiat subsidies and patriotic speeches. They are about to discover that while you can replace a geopolitical narrative with a new script, you cannot replace a blown Engine Control Unit with a Truth Social post.

The ‘mad king’ is playing his role perfectly. But when the tractors finally stop running, the hallucination will shatter, and the brutal laws of thermodynamics will be the only authority left on the board.

Newbury: The Negentropy Trap

The Negentropy Trap: How to Co-opt the Laws of Physics. Steven J. Newbury. Apr 07, 2026


As is the established routine in these essays, I am utilising the variables from my SETE 2.0 model.

There is a moment in a recent interview with Warwick Powell, an adjunct professor discussing his new book on ‘thermoeconomics’, that perfectly exposes the psychological trap of modern economic thought.

While attempting to sound authoritative on the physical limits of the global economy, Powell is asked to define the First Law of Thermodynamics. He stumbles. He says: “Energy doesn’t get created or dissipate or disappear. It just changes form.”

Every high school physics student knows the actual definition: Energy can neither be created nor destroyed.

Why did an academic writing a book on thermoeconomics structurally refuse to say the word ‘destroy’? Because it was an act of subconscious, ideological self-preservation. In the orthodox economic worldview, capital and value are never truly ‘destroyed’; they are merely reallocated, depreciated, or transferred to another party on a perpetually balancing ledger. The system is taught as a closed loop of perpetual motion. If Powell allows the concept of permanent, irreversible physical destruction into his vocabulary, his entire geopolitical thesis falls apart. He cannot compute the death of the system, so his brain literally censors the word.

Currently, a dangerous new linguistic virus is spreading among dissident economists and analysts. As the global supply chain fractures, it has become impossible for serious commentators to ignore our limits. We often speak of the ‘paper barrel’ in oil markets, or simply the price of oil, but that is merely a symptom of a much deeper, systemic pathology.

The true deceit is that all modern markets have completely divorced themselves from biophysical flows, relying instead on the ‘price versus physical shortage’ fallacy. The orthodox mind assumes that the financial ledger accurately discovers physical scarcity: if energy is depleting, the price should theoretically rise smoothly until the market incentivises a substitute.

But this assumes the consumer’s ability to pay exists entirely independently of the energy being consumed. In biophysical reality, exergy is the ability to pay. As the global ERoEI plunges, the mounting thermodynamic cost of extraction cannibalises the Effective Circulating Power (Peff​) of the broader economy. Long before the price of a barrel can reach the heights required to profitably extract the final, low-quality dregs of the earth, the economic engine stalls. Industrial demand is destroyed, the consumer goes bankrupt, and the price of oil violently crashes.

The financialisation (αf​) apparatus looks at this collapsing price and hallucinates ‘abundance’ or ‘market equilibrium’, completely blind to the terrifying reality: the price fell precisely because the physical shortage just starved the host. Financialisation is not a physical reality; it is a linguistic and mathematical construct. It is an ideological hallucination that treats debt—an abstract ledger entry that can theoretically compound to infinity—as if it were physical exergy. When the sovereign bond market rolls over trillions of dollars, or when equities price in thirty years of unbroken future growth, the system is hallucinating. It is assuming that future generations will possess a larger surplus of physical exergy to pay back today’s borrowing.

Because this structural delusion is finally colliding with the physical wall of declining resources, the orthodox intelligentsia has co-opted our vocabulary. They use words like entropy, Energy Return on Energy Invested (ERoEI), and the material substrate to accurately diagnose the collapse of the hyper-financialised American Empire.

But they simultaneously argue that rival powers—specifically the Eurasian bloc and China—are solving this crisis by deploying ‘negentropy’ to push back the chaos and achieve ‘Energy Sovereignty’.

They are wearing the skin of biophysical economics to camouflage the continued acceleration of the exact same expansionist algorithm. And it all hinges on their desperate need to believe that ‘negentropy’ can magically delete the entropic debt they are creating.

The Illusion of Negentropy vs. The Reality of Exergy

The trap rests entirely on the deliberate conflation of two concepts: Negentropy and Exergy.

Since the mid-20th century, economists and sociologists have bastardised the concept of ‘negentropy’ (negative entropy), treating it as a quantifiable, order-generating force. They treat it as a substance that technology, human ingenuity, or ‘information processing’ can manufacture to run the Second Law of Thermodynamics in reverse. If you build a hyper-efficient solar grid, forge a seamless AI logistics network, or write a more elegant piece of code, the orthodox mind believes you have created ‘negentropy’, effectively deleting the physical chaos of the universe.

But in biophysical reality, the metric that dictates civilisational survival is Exergy—the actual, physical capacity of a system to do useful work.

The iron law of exergy is that in every real-world process, it is strictly and irrevocably destroyed. If you burn a gallon of diesel to transport a ton of grain, the energy hasn’t disappeared, but its utility has been permanently annihilated. You cannot collect the exhaust heat from the atmosphere, compress the scattered carbon molecules, and use them to power the truck tomorrow. You cannot delete the resulting entropy; you merely degrade high-quality, dense energy (like middle distillates) into low-grade waste heat and material disorder.

By leaning on the linguistic loophole of ‘negentropy’, the orthodox mind avoids acknowledging the terrifying truth: every ‘solution’ they build permanently depletes the finite reservoir of available work on this planet. Powell couldn’t say ‘destroy’ because if exergy is permanently destroyed in every transaction, you cannot out-innovate a plunging ERoEI. You cannot print ‘negentropy’ on a central bank ledger to offset the loss of heavy sour crude.

The Boundary Problem: There is No ‘Outside’

This brings us to the fatal flaw in the ‘Multipolar’ thermoeconomic narrative.

To create local order—to build a gleaming high-tech city, a complex financial ledger, or a massive fleet of electric vehicles—you must export a colossal amount of high entropy ‘outside’ your local system boundary.

The throughput-maximisation (Gr) political economy survives solely by drawing artificial lines on a map. It builds its ordered, wealthy core and dumps the massive thermodynamic cost into the periphery. Historically, the Global South has functioned as this invisible entropy sink, absorbing the toxic tailings from lithium mines, the atmospheric carbon, and the ecological devastation required to keep the Imperial core pristine. This is the shared DNA of the Strong Enlightenment twins. Historically, both Stalinism and Neoliberalism operated on this exact anthropocentric, mechanistic assumption: that the biosphere was an infinite sink for their externalised entropy.

China’s current state-directed model is doing the exact same thing on an even more accelerated industrial scale. But in physical reality, the Earth is a closed thermodynamic capsule. There is no ‘outside’. You cannot externalise a cost in a single, closed system; you are simply polluting the life-support system you rely on to breathe. The concept of ‘negentropy’ blinds these analysts to the fact that they are just bailing water from the stern of the ship and pouring it into the bow to keep their feet dry.

The False Dawn of the ‘Multipolar Saviour’

Because they believe ‘negentropy’ can offset physical limits, dissident economists point to the BRICS nations and the rise of the ‘Petroyuan’ as our salvation. They argue that by forcing oil to be traded in Chinese currency, the American Imperial wealth siphon (α) will be broken, ushering in a fairer, multipolar world.

This is a textbook case of Metabolic Decoherence. It is the delusion of attempting to solve a biophysical famine by rearranging the banking architecture.

These analysts ignore the structural mechanics of global trade, specifically the Triffin Dilemma. To operate the world’s reserve currency, a nation must flood the globe with its own liquidity by running massive, permanent trade deficits—buying far more from the world than it sells.

China’s entire political economy is fundamentally incapable of doing this. It is a Gr engine entirely dependent on suppressing domestic consumption to subsidise a colossal, export-driven industrial base. The Chinese Communist Party relies on this export dominance to maintain peak employment and Institutional Mass (MI). For China to supply the world with the trillions in Yuan needed to buy global oil, it would have to dismantle its own export machine, deliberately deindustrialise, and become a massive consumer of foreign goods. Doing so would instantly annihilate its domestic stability. The ‘Petroyuan’ is a macroeconomic impossibility; it attempts to move the Triffin parasite to a host biologically incapable of surviving it.

It would make far more sense to create a non-national currency for this purpose, as was originally proposed by John Maynard Keynes at the 1944 Bretton Woods conference. Keynes understood the Triffin trap and proposed the ‘Bancor’—a supranational unit of account—specifically to prevent any single nation from acquiring the imperial siphon that the US eventually corrupted the system to secure. Today, the smartest architects within the BRICS network understand this history. While Western media hyperventilates about the Yuan, BRICS engineers are quietly attempting to build distributed, non-national settlement ledgers tied to commodities to avoid recreating the American dilemma in Beijing.

But here is where the thermodynamic reality crashes the multipolar party: even if they successfully build a digital Bancor, it is still just a ledger. Changing the denomination of global trade from Dollars to a fairer, non-national architecture does not conjure a single extra barrel of heavy sour crude out of the ground. It does not reconnect the financial markets to the biophysical flows. The capital-intensive ‘Green Transition’ they champion is not a thermodynamic cure; it is a massive, final pulse of exergy consumption. Building parallel renewable energy grids requires staggering upfront injections of high-density fossil fuels. It mathematically accelerates our trajectory toward the Resource Entropy Singularity—the point of no return where depletion becomes overwhelming and irreversible.

The ‘Dimensional Leap’ Hallucination

If the Eurasian ‘Multipolar Saviour’ narrative is a thermodynamic illusion, the American counter-strategy is an even more spectacular hallucination.

Recently, a highly sophisticated observer of my work articulated this agenda brilliantly. He argued that Washington’s current extraction of global liquidity and apparent self-cannibalisation is not the thrashing of a dying beast, but a deliberate ‘Dimensional Leap’. Realising that the biophysical manufacturing base is depleted, the Empire is deliberately abandoning it. They are taking the rotting Snowpiercer of the old industrial economy, uncoupling the passenger cabins, and burning them as firewood to provide launch thrust for a ‘Silicon Spacecraft’1 strapped to its roof.

The strategy is to transition from a heavy, physical empire into a pure digital ‘Admin’—an AI-led network federation that monopolises bits (compute, open protocols, evolutionary speed) while leaving the exhausting friction of atoms to the BRICS.

He is absolutely correct that this is Washington’s agenda. His error is believing the laws of physics will allow it to succeed. This is the absolute pinnacle of the Negentropy Trap. It is the ultimate Strong Enlightenment dualism: the fatal belief that the mind (information) can be severed from the body (thermodynamics).

Bits are made of atoms. You cannot measure a cloud-based operating system without measuring the exergy required to run it. The ‘cloud’ is not a mist floating above the earth; it is the most exergy-dense, physically heavy infrastructure humanity has ever attempted to build. It is a hyper-industrial complex of reinforced concrete, cooling towers, and silicon foundries. A single gigawatt-scale AI data centre consumes the total output of a nuclear reactor. It requires billions of litres of fresh water, mountains of mined copper, ultra-complex ASML lithography machines, and a massive, unyielding physical baseload just to keep the servers from melting.

Furthermore, in biology, metamorphosis requires a highly stable chrysalis and a massive surplus of stored energy. The organism seals itself off and uses its accumulated fat reserves to reorganise its cellular structure. The Empire does not have a surplus; its Maintenance Power (Pmaint) is failing under the weight of a plunging ERoEI. Burning the passenger cabins to fuel the rocket doesn’t launch the rocket—it just burns the train down before the launch sequence is complete.

Crucially, if you surrender the atomic layer, you cannot rule the digital layer. You cannot upload an Empire’s consciousness to the cloud if your geopolitical rival controls the diesel, the copper, and the raw exergy required to forge the silicon and run the backup generators.

This is where the observer’s thesis accurately captures China’s tactical advantage. By monopolising the atomic friction, Beijing ensures they hold the physical kill-switch to America’s digital ‘cloud’. This strategy of hyper-industrial consolidation will undoubtedly work for China in the near term. It grants them the immediate geopolitical upper hand. But it only works until it doesn’t. Consolidating the world’s remaining exergy into a hyper-efficient manufacturing engine does not reverse the global plunge in ERoEI; it merely builds a more efficient engine to drive into the exact same Resource Entropy Singularity.

The Thrashing of the Beast

Because the system cannot execute this impossible quantum tunneling through the physical wall, it thrashes. Inflationary pressures tear through the biophysical flows of the economy as the global baseload of exergy drops.

We see this acutely with the recent implementation of the US 15% universal import tariff. As I outlined in The Dollar Vacuum and followed up in The Imperial Noble Lie, this is not standard trade policy; it is a desperate, structural vacuum. The American core is utilising this tariff to violently suck eurodollars out of the international market to fund the staggering roll-over of US Treasuries—the bare minimum required to maintain its Institutional Mass. When the imperial core demands this tribute, it strips developing nations of the capital needed to import their own fuel, fertilizer, and food. This creates a catastrophic dollar shortage, jacks up global funding costs, and effectively strip-mines the global periphery just to keep the lights on in Washington.

And how do the subordinate nodes react? Look at Westminster. Despite possessing the capacity to implement defensive, reciprocal measures to protect their own metabolic baseline, the UK political establishment remains entirely timid. Out of deep ideological subordination to the US, they voluntarily allow the UK’s remaining financial and physical surplus to be siphoned across the Atlantic. They actively facilitate the destruction of their own Effective Circulating Power (Peff) rather than defy the hallucinated ledger.

Tactical Decoupling: Hiding in the Entropic Shadows

The Empire has updated its Information Siphon. It no longer relies solely on assassins; it uses algorithms. It encourages its academic class to use the language of thermodynamics, provided they strip it of its fatal conclusions.

If you threaten the throughput-maximisation algorithm today by implementing carrying-capacity-aware (GK) protocols, you are targeted for ‘economic sabotage’ or starved of credit by the global banking architecture. Capital structurally flees from physical boundaries, punishing any node that prioritises biophysical survival over exponential yield.

How, then, do we build the GK lifeboats while the Stitched Beast violently thrashes in its death throes?

We must achieve thermodynamic invisibility. A lifeboat cannot directly fight a starving Gr giant; doing so simply draws kinetic and financial attention. We must operate in the ‘entropic shadows’—the physical and economic spaces that the central authority no longer has the exergy to police or exploit.

This requires deliberate metabolic decoupling. It means establishing localised, closed-loop exergy flows that do not register on the Empire’s financial ledger. It means prioritising direct trade in use-value rather than exchange-value, utilising mutual credit systems, and building resilient bioregional food and energy networks. It means implementing physical rationing protocols before the central authority attempts to seize local resources to feed the core.

We cannot allow the vocabulary of our survival to be hijacked by the architects of our collapse. The lifeboats will not be built by inventing new mathematical epicycles like ‘negentropy’ to justify infinite growth, nor by hallucinating a digital escape velocity. They will be built by accepting the hard physical boundaries of our closed system, and stepping off the expansionist ledger before it drags us over the edge.

Radagast: Deus ex machina

Deus ex machina. Rintrah by Radagast. Apr 4, 2026.

I think the best argument the “technology is going to bail us out” bro’s have, is that there isn’t really a realistic alternative anymore. We can laugh of course when Mr. Musk says we’ll have a city on Mars, or when Aubrey de Grey says we’re going to live for centuries.

But I think the reality is that you need a kind of collective mythos, to motivate people to get out of bed in the morning. If you think things are bad now, wait until most people have nothing left to motivate them to get out of bed in the morning. In the past people did things for their community, their church, maybe their nation. Those things are all dead and something needs to fill the void.

Why do anything at all, in a world where everything has already been done? Most people don’t have it in them to be great artists or prophets, they need to derive a sense of purpose from something bigger than themselves.

There is of course the deep green narrative, that our lives serve a purpose because we strive to keep the planet habitable for non-human species. But this is not really a narrative you can build your life around, due to the dead grandfather principle. You know who never eats meat or wastes water? Your dead grandfather in his grave.

Humans naturally need more to give their lives purpose than the quest to avoid being a burden on the non-human world. Humans want to transform the world, they want to leave their mark on it. The reality is that the limits to growth narrative just doesn’t work to unify people.

Alexander King wrote: “In searching for a common enemy against whom we can unite, we came up with the idea that pollution, the threat of global warming, water shortages, famine and the like, would fit the bill.”

Well, it hasn’t worked. We’ve tried for over thirty years to get some sense of unity around the threats we face during the 21st century, but there is nothing good that came forth out of it. This is what Europe wants, to live within natural limits. The rest of the world just doesn’t want it.

“Have one child, don’t fly, don’t eat meat, don’t drive a car and do this for the next 100 years or so until we are living within planetary boundaries again” is just not a message that people get excited about. It’s the Greta Thunberg narrative, the little child prophetess who had her hand kissed by Juncker, but note how even Thunberg has now stopped preaching it.

People want to see how far we can take this progress thing. The American elite peddle the God from a Machine narrative. And like I said, nobody really has an alternative anymore. Eric Schmidt, former CEO of Google, believes the God from a Machine will solve climate change for us. He thinks we should just abandon the climate goals altogether, because we’re not unified enough to achieve them.

When it comes to AI, you can still believe what you want to believe. There’s always a chart you can find that lets you believe what you want to believe. And sometimes, you can even use the same chart as your opponents! AI can now do tasks that take humans a week! If you’re alright with 50% success that is. If you need 80% success, we’re stuck at five minutes. So which one is it? Nothingburger or God from the machine?

Personally, I can’t really believe the nothingburger narrative anymore. I’ve toyed around with it enough to say that this is something meaningful. But American techies are not yet content with what they have given birth to so far. They want the God in the machine that solves all our problems for us, something far smarter than any of us.

But I have to ask: If we pull off their wildest dreams, is it going to be enough? Imagine you’re sitting in an airplane and the engines stop working because you ran out of fuel. There’s no force on Earth that’s going to save your life. Your money means nothing. It no longer matters how smart you are. You are now just a powerless subject to the laws of physics.

And I fear the same thing will happen with the AI project. You can build something far smarter than us humans. But what is it going to say to us? Well, I asked Claude today what we can do about climate change. Read it for yourself if you want. It’s not a very hopeful message. I doubt a smarter AI has a more hopeful message to offer.

I think the sort of people excited about AI as a solution, are the sort of people who have spent their whole lives living in situations where intelligence was a solution. But if you went to school in the ghetto, intelligence probably wasn’t a solution to your problems. It was something you had to hide.

I think there are just problems that can’t be solved through intelligence. The overshoot problem is probably one of them. Some problems require a fundamental value transformation. But that value transformation has failed, it hasn’t happened, you don’t have eight billion little Greta’s today.

For what it’s worth, the biological Deus ex Machina, the virus that brings a sudden halt to the modern developed way of life, hasn’t emerged either. The monkeypox epidemic has been declared over in Congo, the bird flu went nowhere, SARS-COV-2 isn’t doing anything too interesting either. Excess mortality in most of the developed world has returned to normal, although my own country is a strange outlier.

But I fear that I’m wrong, that nature is in fact powerless to reign in human greed after all. The last orangutans will end up grounded to a pulp as palm oil in your peanut butter, the last rhino will be mercilessly hunted down by impotent Chinese businessmen for its horn, the Amazon forest will go up in smoke. And there won’t be anything that grinds it to a halt.

For generations, people watched their children die and wondered: Why is God indifferent to my suffering? Why do the innocent have to suffer, without having done anything wrong? And I think that is my error too. I expected there must be justice in an indifferent universe. But there is none. And we’re not going to be saved from ourselves either.

When everything else has failed, you might as well put your faith in the God from the Machine. I’m not sure though, how the God from the Machine is going to give Mars an atmosphere, or restart its dead core, or allow you to travel faster than the speed of light to some other solar system.

No, I think even with the God from the Machine, you’re going to be stuck here on this rock. I would be more optimistic, if I saw the prerequisite steps emerge. Before you expect a city on Mars, you would first expect to see floating cities here on Earth, along with cities on Antarctica and cities on the ocean floor. The costs are much lower, the rewards are much higher (think of the minerals to be found on the ocean floor). But none of these stepping stones seem viable yet and there’s no reason to expect we’re just going to jump over them.

This is not what people want to hear. “You have the mentality of a loser” Zero HP Lovecraft sneered at me. I think I am just realistic. You’re going to have to solve your problems here on Earth, whether you like it or not. And if the only solution to your problems is something nobody wants, then what is the God from the Machine supposed to offer you?

High tech totalitarianism. This seems to be the only way this thing can now end. You’re forgiven for thinking “they” are just going to kill us all, if that’s what you expect. Yuval Harari gets up there on stage at the World Economic Forum, lamenting the birth of a “useless class” of people, whose existence serves no purpose to him and other high status white males, as they are no longer employable due to AI. At some point, when the resources grow scarce, the people who own everything will increasingly start to wonder why they have to keep the rest of us around.

I always hoped for a plot twist. “It can’t just be this.” I thought to myself. I mean, can you blame me? When you look at someone like Mark Zuckerberg, who sets up some website in college and ends up running the globe, can you really accept that this is just how things work, that a handful of people who lucked out once get to keep accumulating more wealth?

He’s really not that smart, the Metaverse proves it. But it seems like these people, these handful of American tech moguls, can no longer lose. And the rest of us, can no longer win. It’s a giant game of Monopoly that is dragging on for too long. But no, they insist we have to keep playing: “You have to see this, I am about to unlock the God in a Machine!”

Well, I say, bring it on. I don’t fear the machine anymore. No, now I want to see how far they can push this. I expect your God in a Machine will have this message for you: No brain is big enough to land an airplane that’s out of fuel.