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!
Sunday, June 21, 2026
Sunday, May 17, 2026
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:
The Institute's definition of “Planetary Solvency” is fascinating:
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:
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.)
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
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:
- Relying on excessively narrow, reductionist science, based on retrospective “proof-points”, without any capacity to cope with uncertainty and more sophisticated risk analysis;
- 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”;
- 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;
- 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”.
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.)
Sunday, April 19, 2026
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.
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.
Wednesday, April 15, 2026
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.
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.
Sunday, April 5, 2026
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.
Friday, February 27, 2026
The Compartmental Fracture of Art Berman
The Compartmental Fracture of Art Berman. Steven J. Newbury. Feb. 19, 2026.
The Imperial Arsonist, the Eurodollar Vacuum, and the thermodynamic reality of the geopolitical endgameAbstract
In a recent interview at Planet Critical, renowned petroleum geologist Art Berman masterfully diagnosed the terminal decline of global resources, confirming that growth as we know it is mathematically ending. However, when prescribing solutions to this biophysical reality, Berman’s analysis suffers from an ‘Intellectual Compartmental Fracture’—reverting to 20th-century political punditry, financial delusions, and the false comfort of a slow, manageable collapse.
Viewed through the Socio-Economic Thermodynamic Entropy (SETE) model, a starker reality emerges. The current geopolitical fragmentation—from the Ukraine conflict to the US tariff regime—is not the result of Russian or Chinese aggression against the global order. Rather, the United States, facing a collapsing Energy Return on Energy Invested (ERoEI), is acting as the Arsonist of Supply Chains. By utilizing its remaining kinetic mass and exorbitant financial privilege (the Eurodollar Vacuum), the US is executing a deliberate metabolic raid to cannibalize its allies, starve the periphery, and secure the remaining low-entropy gradients. As we cross the Resource Entropy Singularity, there is no fertile frontier to retreat to; we are a hyper-optimized, 9-billion-person system running out of the very fuel that sustains our biological carrying capacity. You cannot legislate entropy, and you cannot bribe physics.
The base speaks
For anyone tracking the geopolitical convulsions of 2026, listening to petroleum geologist Art Berman is a necessary grounding exercise. While the mainstream commentariat debates the psychology of leaders or the morality of alliances, Berman looks at the thermodynamic ledger.
However, in the recent interview, Berman provoked within me more questions than answers. I could have interpreted it as a masterclass in biophysical realism, validating almost every core tenet of the Socio-Economic Thermodynamic Entropy (SETE) model. He stripped away the Superstructural noise and confirmed that we are watching a global scramble for the remaining low-entropy gradients. But I had alarm bells ringing in my mind throughout the interview.
For example, Berman dismissed the idea that the US is operating from a position of infinite strength. Instead, he framed the current geopolitical aggression as a “race to the bottom.”
He noted that global production of the four pillars of modern civilisation (steel, concrete, plastic, and fertiliser) has peaked and is declining. Growth is mathematically ending. Therefore, Trump’s expansionist policies are not the whims of an empire building a new order; they are the ruthless resource grabs of an empire that realises the pie is shrinking. As Berman put it, “we’re fighting over what’s left.”
This is the Resource Entropy Singularity in action. The US is utilising its remaining kinetic energy (Ek)—the Armada, the tariffs, the coercion—to secure the physical resources required to survive the descent.
Except, he went out of his way to frame this as being at Russia and China’s instigation.
1. Russia, China and Europe
Berman argued that the current global fragmentation is driven by Russia and China aggressively moving to dismantle the “Liberal World Order” and establish their own spheres of influence, citing Ukraine as their “staging ground.”
This interpretation fundamentally misreads the strategic intent of Eurasia. It confuses the reaction of a cornered organism with the aggression of a predator.
When viewed through the Socio-Economic Thermodynamic Entropy (SETE) model, a completely different reality emerges: China and Russia were the primary beneficiaries of the globalised system. They desperately wanted to preserve it. The destruction of the global order—including the detonation of the Ukraine conflict—was a calculated, offensive move by the United States/NATO to artificially induce a Brittle Fracture in Eurasian integration.
The US didn’t retreat from the global system; it deliberately set it on fire. Here is the thermodynamic logic behind that arson.
2. The Apex Predator of Globalisation
Why would China want to destroy the global system? The short answer is: they didn’t.
Under the WTO framework, China had mastered the thermodynamic conversion of Western financial capital (Superstructure) into physical infrastructure and industrial capacity (Material Base). They were winning the game of globalisation.
• The Metabolic Strategy: China’s Maintenance Power (Pmaint) and Growth Power (Pgrowth) relied entirely on a low-friction global trade environment. They needed open sea lanes to import Heavy Sour crude and raw materials, and open markets to export low-entropy manufactured goods.
• The Belt and Road Initiative (BRI): The BRI was not designed to replace the global system, but to optimise it. It was a massive logistical undertaking to lower the Entropic Drag (Fdrag) of moving goods across the Eurasian landmass.
When you are the ‘Factory of the World’, your primary strategic imperative is stability. Wars, sanctions, and blockades introduce friction, delay, and energy costs. China had zero thermodynamic incentive to upend a board on which they were accumulating all the chips.
3. The Russian Vascular System
Similarly, the idea that Vladimir Putin launched the Ukraine war to ‘weaken Europe’ contradicts two decades of Russian physical infrastructure investment.
The Nord Stream mystery
Russia spent billions constructing Nord Stream 1 and 2. These pipelines were the vascular system of a grand geopolitical vision: the integration of Russian raw biophysical energy (natural gas) with German high-tech manufacturing and capital.
If this integration had been allowed to mature, it would have created an autarkic Eurasian economic bloc that simply did not need the United States. A unified Lisbon-to-Vladivostok economic space is the ultimate nightmare of Anglo-American geostrategy (dating back to Halford Mackinder’s “Heartland Theory”).
You do not spend decades building a multi-billion-dollar pipeline directly into the heart of Europe if your goal is to destroy European industry. Russia wanted to sell to Europe, not break it.
4. The Imperial Flip: From Architect to Arsonist
If Eurasia wanted the global system to continue, why did it fracture? Because the United States realised it was losing the thermodynamic war.
The US-led ‘Rules-Based Order’ was built on the assumption of American industrial and energetic supremacy. But as the domestic Energy Return on Energy Invested (ERoEI) of the US began to fall (masked temporarily by the debt-fueled Shale illusion), the structural reality shifted. The US found itself exporting inflation and debt, while China was accumulating physical mass (M).
When an Empire realises it can no longer win the game of production, it must change the rules of the game. It transitions from the Architect of Trade to the Arsonist of Supply Chains.
5. The Ukraine Wedge
The expansion of NATO and the arming of Ukraine was not a defensive posture; it was an offensive mechanism designed to force a rupture. The US needed a wedge to drive between Germany and Russia before the Eurasian integration became irreversible.
By cornering Russia in Ukraine, the US forced a kinetic conflict that mandated the severing of European-Russian energy ties. For decades, Russia had built energy ties to Europe and, in return, received access to the European market of high-quality manufactured goods and a guarantee of stable relations, despite historical animosity from some quarters of Europe and the discomfort derived from Russian oligarchic capital.
The physical destruction of the Nord Stream pipelines was the kinetic guarantee of this rupture. Europe was structurally severed from cheap energy, triggering mass deindustrialisation. European capital fled the continent and rushed into the US markets. The US successfully cannibalised its own allies to shore up its failing metabolic baseline (the Comprador Calculus).
6. The Weaponisation of the Superstructure
Having successfully amputated Europe from Russia, the US then turned its sights on China. The tariffs, the CHIPS Act, the blockade of the Strait of Hormuz, and the weaponisation of the SWIFT system are all deliberate acts of sabotage against the very global order the US claims to be defending.
The US realised that under conditions of ‘Free Trade’, its high-entropy, highly financialised economy could not compete with China’s highly optimised, state-directed industrial base.
Therefore, the US had to introduce Kinetic Entropy. By utilising its residual military mass (Ek)—its carrier strike groups, its control of maritime choke points, and its financial hegemony—the US is deliberately injecting massive friction into China’s supply chains. The goal is to raise China’s Fdrag so high that its economy stalls.
7. Intent
Russia and China are not the instigators of the collapse of globalisation; they are attempting to build alternative structures (BRICS+, INSTC) to survive a collapse that was forced upon them.
The United States is blowing up the global system for the same reason a retreating army burns the bridges behind it: if they can no longer extract the surplus wealth of the system to maintain their Imperial Mass, they will ensure nobody else can use it either. Ukraine was not a Russian plot to destroy Europe; it was an American shaped charge detonated on the fault line of Eurasia to keep the Imperial Core alive just a little longer.
It just didn’t go as planned.
In the early days of the Ukraine conflict, the Western political class was uniformly convinced that unprecedented financial sanctions would trigger a rapid collapse of the Russian state. This confidence was rooted in a famous neoliberal sneer: that Russia is merely a “gas station masquerading as a country”, with a GDP roughly the size of Italy’s.
Years later, the Russian economy has not only survived but out-produced the combined heavy industrial capacity of the NATO bloc.
How did the West get this so wrong? By falling victim to their own Superstructural delusions. They measured Russia using financial metrics (GDP, market capitalisation) rather than biophysical reality (thermodynamics, metallurgy, and aerospace engineering).
8. The GDP Illusion
Gross Domestic Product is a measure of financial velocity, not physical wealth. In a highly financialised Western economy, a significant portion of GDP is generated by rent-seeking: insurance, real estate speculation, legal fees, and financial derivatives.
When the West compared its GDP to Russia’s, it was comparing apples to anvils. Russia’s GDP is heavily weighted toward the extraction of primary resources, agriculture, and the manufacturing of heavy mass. In the SETE (Socio-Economic Thermodynamic Entropy) model, a billion dollars generated by a Wall Street hedge fund has zero kinetic utility in a physical conflict. A billion dollars generated by a Uralvagonzavod tank plant is pure Kinetic Potential (Ek).
9. The Combination of Exergy and Industry
The fatal miscalculation was ignoring that Russia possesses both the raw fuel and the engine.
• The Fuel: Russia has an absolute abundance of Exergy (oil, natural gas, coal, uranium) and primary materials (iron, titanium, nickel, fertiliser).
• The Engine: Unlike a true ‘petro-state’ (which must sell oil to buy manufactured goods), Russia retained and modernised a massive heavy industrial and aerospace base.
As observers are now realising, a nation does not build hypersonic glide vehicles, world-class air defense systems (S-400/500), and dominant electronic warfare suites if it is merely a “gas station”. Russia possesses a highly advanced, mathematically rigorous aerospace and engineering sector. They have the domestic capacity to forge the steel, machine the parts, write the targeting software, and fuel the vehicles without needing permission from Western supply chains.
10. The Failure of Financial Siege
When the West launched its economic war, it attacked the Superstructure (cutting off SWIFT, seizing central bank reserves, blocking technology exports).
But you cannot sanction thermodynamics.
Because Russia is biophysically autarkic—meaning it produces its own food, generates its own energy, and manufactures its own heavy industry—the financial sanctions simply bounced off the Material Base (M). The West discovered that controlling the global banking ledger is useless if your adversary controls the titanium, the wheat, the diesel, and the artillery shells.
11. The Return of the Real
The West’s shock at Russia’s industrial resilience is the shock of a civilisation that has forgotten what a real economy looks like. Trapped in the ‘Strong Enlightenment’ belief that financial capital magically creates physical reality, the US and Europe offshored their own heavy industry to China and assumed they could simply ‘buy’ whatever they needed.
Russia did not survive the Western onslaught because Vladimir Putin is a ‘madman’ plotting with Donald Trump. Russia survived because it operates a thermodynamically complete, low-entropy industrial engine. The West miscalculated because it mistook the map (money) for the territory (physics).
The Partition Paradox
When discussing China and the US, Art Berman proposed a likely endgame for the current geopolitical crisis: a global partition. He suggested the United States will consolidate a “Fortress America” sphere of influence over North and South America, along with Western Europe, while China will take “essentially everything else” (the Global South/Eurasia). Berman argues this partition makes sense because “China doesn’t want to destroy its markets.”
This conclusion contains a fatal, glaring contradiction: If the US successfully cordons off the Americas and Europe, it has just severed China from its primary solvent markets.
Berman is drawing lines on a map based on 19th-century geography, completely ignoring the thermodynamic flow of modern purchasing power. Here is why the ‘Partition’ scenario is not a stable equilibrium, but a recipe for Brittle Fracture.
1. The Consumption Imbalance
China’s colossal manufacturing base (M) was not built to supply just Eurasia and Africa; it was built to supply the globe.
The United States and Western Europe operate as the primary ‘entropy sinks’ of the global economy. They consume massive amounts of physical goods and pay for them with fiat currency (Eurodollars).
While the Global South has a large population, it lacks the per capita purchasing power to absorb the sheer volume of Chinese industrial output at the margins required to sustain China’s Maintenance Power (Pmaint).
If the US drops an economic Iron Curtain around the West, China is left with thousands of factories scaled for global demand, but restricted to a market that cannot afford their output.
2. The Eurodollar Vacuum Traps ‘Everything Else’
Berman’s assumption that China can simply pivot to “everything else” ignores the financial weapon the US has already deployed: the 10% Universal Tariff.
As we have previously established, the US tariff regime is a Eurodollar Vacuum. It forces the rest of the world to surrender their dollar reserves just to access the US market or service their dollar-denominated debt.
• The Insolvency of the Periphery: The Global South is currently being squeezed dry of liquidity by this US financial gravity well.
• The Trade Collapse: Because the countries in China’s hypothetical “sphere” are starved of dollars, they literally cannot afford to buy Chinese exports, nor can they easily fund Belt and Road infrastructure projects.
China cannot pivot its export economy to a bloc of nations that the US has deliberately bankrupted.
3. The Aesthetic Objection (Monroe Doctrine 2.0)
It is highly revealing that Berman—who explicitly states he is “not a fan” of Donald Trump—openly admits he “kind of supports” the US strategy to lock down South America (specifically Venezuela) under a “Neo-Monroe Doctrine / Fortress America” model.
This exposes a critical reality of the Western Superstructure: The Aesthetic Objection.
The Western intelligentsia despises Trump’s vulgarity, his unpredictability, and his trampling of the “Rules-Based Order.” But when the Material Base (M) is threatened—when the Imperial Core actually needs the heavy sour crude of Venezuela to keep its own lights on—the moral objections vanish. The liberal analyst suddenly embraces 19th-century colonial spheres of influence and raw resource grabs. They do not object to the plunder; they only object to the manners of the pirate.
4. Partition is Starvation
Berman is attempting to apply a 20th-century Cold War solution to a 21st-century biophysical crisis.
During the first Cold War, the Soviet Union was largely autarkic and did not rely on selling consumer goods to Ohio to survive. China, however, is the metabolic engine of the globalised system. For China, “Partition” does not mean “Separate but Equal”. Partition means being locked in a room with customers who have no money, while the US hoards the raw materials of South America, the consumer markets of the West, and the liquidity of the global reserve currency.
Therefore, China cannot accept Berman’s partition. Submitting to a bifurcated world where the US walls off the solvent consumer markets and seizes the resource periphery is an economic death sentence. This confirms our SETE terminal equation: because submission means starvation, China’s only viable physical response is to break the US blockade.
The ‘Nasty Oil’ Confession
When discussing the geopolitical scramble for Venezuela, Art Berman deployed a familiar industry trope. He dismissed Venezuelan reserves as “garbage,” stating: “It’s nasty oil... it is literally tar.” This is a classic financial valuation masquerading as a physical one. In the financialised energy markets, heavy sour crude is considered “nasty” because it is expensive to process; it requires highly complex, multibillion-dollar coking refineries to crack the long-chain hydrocarbons. Light sweet crude, by contrast, is cheap and easy to refine into gasoline, yielding higher immediate profit margins.
But physics does not care about profit margins. And just seconds after dismissing the oil as “nasty,” Berman’s biophysical training forced him to concede a massive structural truth:
“Refineries around the world need that kind of oil to blend with their lighter oil.”
1. The Limits of Light Sweet Crude
This concession is the smoking gun of the current geopolitical crisis. It completely dismantles the ‘Fungibility Fallacy’—the neoliberal assumption that a barrel of oil is just a barrel of oil.
The US “Shale Revolution” produced an ocean of light sweet crude. But you cannot run the logistics of a global empire on light sweet crude alone.
• The Diesel Deficit: Heavy transport, shipping, and agriculture run on diesel.
• The Asphalt Cliff: The maintenance of the physical built environment (highways, runways, roofs) runs on bitumen/asphalt.
Light sweet crude yields almost zero asphalt and insufficient middle distillates for heavy industry. To generate the Maintenance Power (Pmaint) required to keep an industrial civilisation from rusting and crumbling, you must have the heavy molecules found in Venezuelan Merey 16 or Iranian Heavy.
2. The Metabolic Raid
When Berman admits that global refineries “need” this nasty oil to blend with lighter grades, he is inadvertently explaining the exact kinetic movements of the US military.
The US is not aggressive in Venezuela and the Persian Gulf simply to put more generic ‘oil’ onto the global market. The US is conducting a highly specific metabolic raid. The Gulf Coast refining complex—the actual engine of the US physical economy—is starving for the heavy sour feedstock it needs to produce diesel and asphalt.
The oil might be “nasty” to a Wall Street accountant, but to the thermodynamic engine of the Empire, it is the only fuel that keeps the machine from tearing itself apart.
The Exergy Buffer: Why Small Shocks Break Fragile Systems
In another part of the interview, Art Berman noted that the last twenty years have seen an unprecedented concentration of ‘system shocks’ compared to previous eras, including the 1970s. He views this frequency as a primary driver of the current global geopolitical chaos.
However, Berman’s interpretation of ‘shock magnitude’ suffers from a blind spot. He is measuring the size of the rock hitting the windshield, without measuring the thickness of the glass.
In the Socio-Economic Thermodynamic Entropy (SETE) model, the impact of an exogenous shock is not determined purely by the size of the event itself. It is determined by the abundance of Exergy (useful, surplus energy) within the system.
As the global system’s Energy Return on Energy Invested (ERoEI) falls, it becomes thermodynamically fragile. In a low-exergy environment, previously low-magnitude events cause catastrophic, large-scale impacts.
1. The Exergy Buffer (The Thermodynamic Immune System)
To understand resilience, we must look at the relationship between Maintenance Power (Pmaint) and Total Exergy Input (E˙xin).
• High-ERoEI Systems (e.g., The 1960s/70s): When energy is cheap and abundant, E˙xin vastly exceeds Pmaint. This surplus creates a massive ‘Exergy Buffer’. If a shock occurs (like the 1973 OPEC embargo), the system experiences pain, but it has the surplus thermodynamic capacity to re-route supply chains, invest in new infrastructure (like the Alaskan pipeline or North Sea oil), and absorb the blow without structural collapse.
• Low-ERoEI Systems (e.g., The 2020s): As the Shale patch depletes and heavy sour crude becomes scarce, the global surplus vanishes. E˙xin shrinks until it barely covers Pmaint. The buffer is gone. There is no slack in the system.
2. The Loss of Slack: Why Everything is a Crisis
When a system has zero Exergy Buffer, it cannot absorb friction.
In a robust system, a ship stuck in the Suez Canal or a localised conflict in the Red Sea is a logistical headache. In a fragile, low-exergy system, it triggers a cascading crisis. Because the system is operating at the absolute limit of its energetic capacity, any increase in Entropic Drag (Fdrag)—longer shipping routes, higher insurance premiums, delayed feedstocks—cuts directly into the bone of Pmaint.
The system does not have the surplus energy to ‘work around’ the problem. Therefore, a minor supply chain disruption rapidly translates into empty supermarket shelves, massive inflationary spikes, and industrial shutdowns.
3. The Climate Analogy: The Fragile Baseline
The best way to understand this is through the lens of climate mechanics.
The destructive impact of a weather event is highly dependent on the baseline fragility of the environment. A Category 1 hurricane hitting a healthy, deeply rooted mangrove coastline causes minimal lasting damage; the ecosystem absorbs the kinetic energy. But if you take that exact same Category 1 hurricane and hit a coastline where the soil is already saturated, the sea level is elevated, and the protective reefs are dead, the result is catastrophic flooding and structural obliteration.
The global economy is currently operating on a flooded coastline.
Berman sees a high frequency of ‘crises’ over the last twenty years and assumes the world has simply become more chaotic. The SETE model reveals that the world isn’t necessarily generating bigger shocks; rather, the Resource Entropy Singularity has stripped away the Exergy Buffer.
4. The Illusion of Bad Luck
We are not suffering from an unprecedented string of bad luck. We are suffering from an advanced state of biophysical starvation.
When you have no body fat, a common cold can be fatal. The geopolitical panics, the tariff wars, and the supply chain breakdowns are not isolated ‘shocks’—they are the symptoms of an Imperial Mass that has lost its thermodynamic shock absorbers, rattling itself to pieces on the bumpy road of the energy descent.
The Compartmental Fracture
There is a fascinating psychological phenomenon that occurs when Western analysts confront the biophysical limits of our civilisation. They can accurately map the disease, but the moment they are asked for a cure, they suffer an ‘Intellectual Compartmental Fracture’. They prescribe the very thing they just proved no longer exists.
A perfect example of this occurred during this interview.
Midway through the discussion, Berman correctly diagnosed the global macroeconomic terminal condition. He noted that the global production of the four pillars of modern civilisation (steel, concrete, plastic, and fertiliser) has peaked. He explicitly stated: “The fundamentals of modern civilisation are at or past peak, therefore growth cannot be far behind it.” He understands the Energy Return on Energy Invested (ERoEI) is dropping below the threshold required to expand the system.
Yet, just minutes prior, when discussing Europe’s de-industrialisation, his biophysical framework collapsed into 20th-century political punditry. He chastised Europe for its green policies and declared: “Europe has to back off of its hate of fossil fuels and say look what do we want, do we want growth?... because we’re not going to have both.”
Wait. Growth?
1. The Phantom Lever of the 1990s
Berman’s prescription for Europe is to embrace fossil fuels so they can return to “growth.” But as Berman himself knows, you cannot generate economic growth simply by burning fossil fuels; you generate growth by burning high-ERoEI, cheap fossil fuels.
Where, exactly, does Berman think Europe is going to get these cheap fossil fuels?
• The North Sea fields are in terminal depletion.
• The cheap Russian pipeline gas—the actual thermodynamic baseline of the German industrial miracle—was blown up at the bottom of the Baltic Sea (a geopolitical reality the US engineered).
• The alternative is importing super-chilled US LNG across the Atlantic at a massive premium, which mathematically destroys the profit margins of European heavy industry.
You cannot generate “growth” on $15/MMBtu imported gas. Berman is telling Europe to pull the fossil fuel lever, completely forgetting his own thesis that the cheap energy reservoir is empty.
2. The Renewable Misdiagnosis (Simulating the Legacy Grid)
Berman’s confusion peaks when he addresses the failure of the energy transition. He correctly notes that renewables are currently a “rounding error” that have failed to displace fossil fuels. But he sounds distinctly muddled in this section because he fails to break down why they are failing.
The problem is not that wind and solar do not generate energy. The problem is the attempt to use them to simulate a legacy, on-demand fossil fuel grid.
• The ERoEI Cliff: To make intermittent renewables behave like a constant, baseload coal or gas plant requires massive redundancy, overbuilding, battery storage, and grid expansion. When you factor in the energy cost of this buffering, the aggregate ERoEI of the system collapses well below the threshold required to maintain modern industrial complexity.
• Material Blindness: Berman mentions materials elsewhere, but fails to connect them here. The sheer mass of copper, lithium, and rare earths required to scale this ‘simulation’ represents an ecological and energetic bottleneck that is never properly accounted for in mainstream models.
Because Berman doesn’t articulate this specific thermodynamic failure of the “Green Transition,” his analysis short-circuits. He sees renewables failing, so he reflexively points back to the fossil fuel lever, forgetting that the physics of depletion has already broken that lever too.
3. The ‘Strong Enlightenment’ Hangover
Why does a brilliant geologist make such a glaring macroeconomic error? Because he is suffering from a hangover of the Strong Enlightenment.
The Strong Enlightenment tradition—which birthed both Neoliberalism and Stalinism—is rooted in an anthropocentric, mechanistic worldview. It believes that human policy dictates reality.
Even when an expert like Berman looks at the Material Base (M) and sees that the fuel is gone, his Superstructural conditioning forces him to offer a “policy solution.” He cannot bring himself to say: “Europe is facing a permanent contraction because the physics dictate it.” Instead, he falls back on the familiar, comforting illusion of human agency: “Europe is contracting because they made bad policy choices about solar panels.”
4. You Cannot Legislate Entropy
Retreating to fossil fuels won’t save Europe either, because the specific grade and cost of fossil fuels required to sustain European Maintenance Power (Pmaint) no longer exist on the continent.
This is the Compartmental Fracture. Analysts can accept the ‘End of Growth’ in the abstract, global sense, but when looking at a specific geography like Europe, they revert to the delusion that “better management” can somehow out-legislate entropy.
If ERoEI is declining below the level required for growth, then no amount of “backing off the hate for fossil fuels” is going to save the European GDP. You cannot extract surplus value from a depleted well, no matter how politically pragmatic you decide to be.
The Financial Time Machine
In the postmortem of the ‘Strong Enlightenment’ worldview, there is no greater symptom of cognitive dissonance than a geologist who understands thermodynamics but still worships at the altar of the Federal Reserve.
When diagnosing the end of global growth, petroleum expert Art Berman made a staggering assertion. After correctly identifying that the physical pillars of civilisation (steel, concrete, plastic, fertiliser) have permanently peaked, he waved away the imminent threat of collapse with a single sentence:
“However, finance can buy you a lot of time.”
Huh?
This is an Intellectual Compartmental Fracture of the highest order. It is the belief that when the fuel tank runs dry, you can keep the car running by simply increasing the limit on your credit card.
Here is why finance cannot buy time at the Resource Entropy Singularity, and why attempting to do so guarantees a Brittle Fracture.
1. The Map is Not the Furnace
Finance is not a physical force. It is a Superstructural (S) accounting system—a ledger that tracks claims on physical energy and matter. You can add as many zeros to a central bank spreadsheet as you wish, but you cannot print a BTU. You cannot quantitative-ease a barrel of Heavy Sour crude into existence.
When Energy Return on Energy Invested (ERoEI) is high, finance is a useful tool for allocating abundant surplus. But when ERoEI drops below the threshold of Maintenance Power (Pmaint), finance loses its anchor to physical reality. To say “finance buys time” is to fundamentally misunderstand the relationship between biophysical flows and the economy.
2. The Thermodynamics of Debt
What does finance actually do when it “buys time”? It issues debt.
Debt is a thermodynamic claim on the future. It assumes that there will be a larger pool of Exergy (useful energy) available tomorrow to pay back the principal plus interest.
But Berman just admitted that the biophysical peaks have been crossed! If the physical pool of resources is shrinking, then issuing debt to “buy time” is mathematically suicidal. You are issuing exponentially growing claims on a thermodynamically contracting Base.
The result is not a slow, manageable “loss of complexity”. The result is hyper-inflation. As the volume of fiat currency expands to maintain the illusion of wealth, and the biophysical flow of goods and energy contracts, the currency breaks. The physical audit always clears the financial ledger.
3. How Finance Actually ‘Buys Time’ (The Vampire Strategy)
When Berman casually suggests finance can buy time, he is inadvertently describing the predatory mechanics of the US Imperial Core.
How is the US currently using finance to stave off collapse? Through the Eurodollar Vacuum.
By implementing a 10% Universal Tariff, the US is not generating new energy; it is using its exorbitant financial privilege to suck global liquidity and physical goods out of the periphery. It is forcing the Global South and Europe to starve so the Imperial Core can maintain its Pmaint just a little longer.
Finance isn’t buying time from physics; it is stealing time from the vassals. It is a zero-sum cannibalisation of the global system.
4. The Ultimate Delusion
Art Berman is a brilliant diagnostician of the Material Base, but when faced with the terrifying finality of his own data, he flinches. He retreats into the comforting Superstructural delusion that the magicians on Wall Street can somehow out-negotiate the laws of thermodynamics.
They cannot. When growth peaks because the cheap energy is gone, finance does not buy you time. It acts as an accelerant, masking the biophysical rot until the gap between the paper claims and the physical reality becomes so vast that the entire system undergoes a violent, instantaneous Brittle Fracture. You cannot bribe entropy.
The Angkor Wat Fallacy
When I was a moderator at PeakOil.com, I noticed a strange quirk that while geologists have a flawless understanding of the Earth’s crust, they occasionally harbor some truly wacky ideas about human ecology.
Petroleum geologist Art Berman attempted to soothe anxieties about the coming end of growth by redefining ‘collapse’. Relying on Joseph Tainter’s theory of the “loss of complexity”, Berman used the ancient city of Angkor Wat as his historical model.
According to Berman, when the empire fell, Angkor Wat didn’t instantly turn into a Mad Max wasteland. Instead, as the aqueducts silted up, the residents simply performed a “cost-benefit analysis”. Deciding the city was no longer worth the upkeep, they slowly packed up and trickled down the Mekong River to live in smaller, simpler communities.
Berman extrapolates this to the modern global crisis: Don’t worry, he implies, we aren’t facing a sudden cliff where billions die; we are just facing a slow, manageable downsizing where we voluntarily shed complexity.
This analogy is not just flawed; biophysically, it is insane. It suggests that 9 billion people are simply going to “leave” the industrial system—but where exactly are they going to go? Will their cost-benefit analysis conclude that they should simply stop eating?
Here is why the Angkor Wat analogy fails the test of modern thermodynamics.
1. The Closed System Problem (There is No ‘Outside’)
In the 12th century, the residents of Angkor Wat had a luxury that modern humanity does not possess: an ‘Outside’.
When the local urban carrying capacity failed, the population could physically walk a few dozen miles into a sparsely populated, fertile river delta and revert to subsistence foraging and agriculture. The surrounding ecosystem had an abundance of natural Exergy (solar energy, fertile soil, wild game) waiting to be tapped.
Today, the entire planet is Angkor Wat.
We operate in a hyper-optimised, closed global system. Every arable inch of topsoil is accounted for. If the global logistical grid (which delivers the diesel, the seeds, and the water) breaks down, the populations of megacities like Tokyo, Cairo, or London cannot simply “walk down the river” to farm. There is no empty, fertile frontier waiting to absorb 9 billion subsistence farmers.
2. The Haber-Bosch Cliff
Berman forgets that the modern human population is not a product of natural carrying capacity; it is an artifact of fossil fuels.
Roughly half the nitrogen in the bodies of the global population was synthesised in a factory using the Haber-Bosch process, which turns natural gas into ammonia fertiliser. We are literally eating natural gas.
When Angkor Wat’s aqueducts failed, the population lost a convenience. When the global fossil-fuel supply chain fails, the population loses its fundamental biological building block.
You cannot apply a “cost-benefit analysis” to starvation. If the Energy Return on Energy Invested (ERoEI) drops below the threshold required to manufacture and transport synthetic fertiliser, the Earth’s carrying capacity does not slowly “downsize” over a century. It drops off a cliff.
3. The Violence of Inelastic Demand
Berman assumes humans will rationally “shed complexity” like a household trimming its budget. This ignores the inelasticity of biological demand.
When a household is stressed, it cancels its Netflix subscription. When a biophysical system of 9 billion people is stressed by a lack of caloric input, it does not peacefully disperse; it turns kinetic. The loss of complexity is not a quiet migration; it is a violent scramble for the remaining low-entropy gradients (food, water, fuel).
4. The Comforting Delusion
Berman’s use of the Angkor Wat analogy is a psychological defence mechanism. It is an attempt to look at the terrifying mathematical reality of the Resource Entropy Singularity and make it palatable.
He wants to believe that because collapse was slow in a pre-industrial, low-population agrarian society, it will be slow in a hyper-connected, artificially sustained, high-population industrial society.
But physics does not negotiate. When you pull the plug on an artificial life-support system, the patient doesn’t slowly revert to a hunter-gatherer lifestyle. The patient crashes. Nine billion people cannot simply ‘walk away’ from the only machine keeping them alive.
Conclusion
I didn’t really want to write this essay. I’ve been a ‘fan’ of Art Berman since he wrote guest articles at ‘theoildrum’. However, I simply couldn’t allow this interview to go without making a few objections, despite how much I may have wanted to be agreeable.
It was quite painful to listen to, but instead of writing YouTube comments, I relieved the distress on these pages!
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