BP recently published energy data through December 31, 2017, in its Statistical Review of World Energy 2018. The following are a few points we observe, looking at the data:
[1] The world is making limited progress toward moving away from fossil fuels.
The two bands that top fossil fuels that are relatively easy to see are nuclear electric power and hydroelectricity. Solar, wind, and “geothermal, biomass, and other” are small quantities at the top that are hard to distinguish.
Figure 1. World energy consumption divided between fossil fuels and non-fossil fuel energy sources, based on data from BP 2018 Statistical Review of World Energy 2018.
Wind provided 1.9% of total energy supplies in 2017; solar provided 0.7% of total energy supplies. Fossil fuels provided 85% of energy supplies in 2017. We are moving away from fossil fuels, but not quickly.
Of the 252 million tons of oil equivalent (MTOE) energy consumption added in 2017, wind added 37 MTOE and solar added 26 MTOE. Thus, wind and solar amounted to about 25% of total energy consumption added in 2017. Fossil fuels added 67% of total energy consumption added in 2017, and other categories added the remaining 8%.
[2] World per capita energy consumption is still on a plateau.
In recent posts, we have remarked that per capita energy consumption seems to be on a plateau. With the addition of data through 2017, this still seems to be the case. The reason why flat energy consumption per capita is concerning is because energy consumption per capita normally rises, based on data since 1820.1 This is explained further in Note 1 at the end of this article. Another reference is my article, The Depression of the 1930s Was an Energy Crisis.
Figure 2. World energy consumption per capita, based on BP Statistical Review of World Energy 2018 data.
While total energy consumption is up by 2.2%, world population is up by about 1.1%, leading to a situation where energy consumption per capita is rising by about 1.1% per year. This is within the range of normal variation.
One thing that helped energy consumption per capita to rise a bit in 2017 relates to the fact that oil prices were down below the $100+ per barrel range seen in the 2011-2014 period. In addition, the US dollar was relatively low compared to other currencies, making prices more attractive to non-US buyers. Thus, 2017 represented a period of relative affordability of oil to buyers, especially outside the US.
[3] If we view the path of consumption of major fuels, we see that coal follows a much more variable path than oil and natural gas. One reason for the slight upturn in per capita energy consumption noted in [2] is a slight upturn in coal consumption in 2017.
Figure 3. World oil, coal, and natural gas consumption through 2017, based on BP Statistical Review of World Energy 2018.
Coal is different from oil and gas, in that it is more of a “dig it as you need it” fuel. In many parts of the world, coal mines have a high ratio of human labor to capital investment. If prices are high enough, coal will be extracted and consumed. If prices are not sufficiently high, coal will be left in the ground and the workers laid off. According to the BP Statistical Review of World Energy 2018, coal prices in 2017 were higher than prices in both 2015 and 2016 in all seven markets for which they provide indications. Typically, prices in 2017 were more than 25% higher than those for 2015 and 2016.
The production of oil and natural gas seems to be less responsive to price fluctuations than coal.2 In part, this has to do with the very substantial upfront investment that needs to be made. It also has to do with the dependence of governments on the high level of tax revenue that they can obtain if oil and gas prices are high. Oil exporters are especially concerned about this issue. All players want to maintain their “share” of the world market. They are reluctant to reduce production, regardless of what prices do in the short term.
[4] China is one country whose coal production has recently ticked upward in response to higher coal prices.
Figure 4. China’s energy production by fuel, based on BP Statistical Review of World Energy 2018 data.
China has been able to bridge the gap by using an increasing amount of imported fuels. In fact, according to BP, China was the world’s largest importer of oil and coal in 2017. It was second only to Japan in the quantity of imported natural gas.
[5] China’s overall energy pattern appears worrying, despite the uptick in coal production.
Figure 5. China’s energy production by fuel plus its total energy consumption, based on BP Statistical Review of World Energy 2018 data.
If China expects to maintain its high GDP growth ratio as a manufacturing country, it will need to keep its energy consumption growth up. Doing this will require an increasing share of world exports of fossil fuels of all kinds. It is not clear that this is even possible unless other areas can ramp up their production and also add necessary transportation infrastructure.
Oil consumption, in particular, is rising quickly, thanks to rising imports. (Compare Figure 6, below, with Figure 4.)
Figure 6. China’s energy consumption by fuel, based on BP Statistical Review of World Energy 2018.
[6] India, like China, seems to be a country whose energy production is falling far behind what is needed to support planned economic growth. In fact, as a percentage, its energy imports are greater than China’s, and the gap is widening each year.
The big gap between energy production and consumption would not be a problem if India could afford to buy these imported fuels, and if it could use these imported fuels to make exports that it could profitably sell to the export market. Unfortunately, this doesn’t seem to be the case.
Figure 7. India’s energy production by fuel, together with its total energy consumption, based upon BP Statistical Review of World Energy 2018 data.
India’s electricity sector seems to be having major problems recently. The Financial Times reports, “The power sector is at the heart of a wave of corporate defaults that threatens to cripple the financial sector.” While higher coal prices were good for coal producers and helped enable coal imports, the resulting electricity is more expensive than many customers can afford.
[7] It is becoming increasingly clear that proved reserves reported by BP and others provide little useful information.
BP provides reserve data for oil, natural gas, and coal. It also calculates R/P ratios (Reserves/Production ratios), using reported “proved reserves” and production in the latest year. The purpose of these ratios seems to be to assure readers that there are plenty of years of future production available. Current worldwide average R/P ratios are
- Oil: 50 years
- Natural Gas: 53 years
- Coal: 134 years
The reason for using the R/P ratios is the fact that geologists, including the famous M. King Hubbert, have looked at future energy production based on reserves in a particular area. Thus, geologists seem to depend upon reserve data for their calculations. Why shouldn’t a similar technique work in the aggregate?
For one thing, geologists are looking at particular fields where conditions seem to be favorable for extraction. They can safely assume that (a) prices will be high enough, (b) there will be adequate investment capital available and (c) other conditions will be right, including political stability and pollution issues. If we are looking at the situation more generally, the reasons why fossil fuels are not extracted from the ground seem to revolve around (a), (b) and (c), rather than not having enough fossil fuels in the ground.
Let’s look at a couple of examples. China’s coal production dropped in Figure 4 because low prices made coal extraction unprofitable in some fields. There is no hint of that issue in China’s reported R/P ratio for coal of 39.
Although not as dramatic, Figure 4 also shows that China’s oil production has dropped in recent years, during a period when prices have been relatively low. China’s R/P ratio for oil is 18, so theoretically it should have plenty of oil available. The Chinese figured out that in some cases, it could import oil more cheaply than it could produce it themselves. As a result, China’s production has dropped.
In Figure 7, India’s coal production is not rising as rapidly as needed to keep production up. Its R/P ratio for coal is 137. Its oil production has been declining since 2012. Its R/P for oil is shown to be 14.4 years.
Another example is Venezuela. As many people are aware, Venezuela has been having severe economic problems recently. We can see this in its falling oil production and its related falling oil exports and consumption.
Figure 8. Venezuela’s oil production, consumption and exports, based on data of BP Statistical Review of World Energy 2018.
Yet Venezuela reports the highest “Proved oil reserves” in the world. Its reported R/P ratio is 394. In fact, its proved reserves increased during 2017, despite its very poor production results. Part of the problem is that proved oil reserves are often not audited amounts, so proved reserves can be as high as an exporting country wants to make them. Another part of the problem is that price is extremely important in determining which reserves can be extracted and which cannot. Clearly, Venezuela needs much higher prices than have been available recently to make it possible to extract its reserves. Venezuela also seems to have had low production in the 1980s when oil prices were low.
I was one of the co-authors of an academic paper pointing out that oil prices may not rise high enough to extract the resources that seem to be available. It can be found at this link: An Oil Production Forecast for China Considering Economic Limits. The problem is an affordability problem. The wages of manual laborers and other non-elite workers need to be high enough that they can afford to buy the goods and services made by the economy. If there is too much wage disparity, demand tends to fall too low. As a result, prices do not rise to the level that fossil fuel producers need. The limit on fossil fuel extraction may very well be how high prices can rise, rather than the amount of fossil fuels in the ground.
[8] Nuclear power seems to be gradually headed for closure without replacement in many parts of the world. This makes it more difficult to create a low carbon electricity supply.
A chart of nuclear electricity production by part of the world shows the following information:
Figure 9. Nuclear electric power production by part of the world, based on BP Statistical Review of World Energy 2018. FSU is “Former Soviet Union” countries.
The peak in nuclear power production took place in 2006. A big step-down in nuclear power generation took place after the Fukushima nuclear power accident in Japan in 2011. Europe now seems to be taking steps toward phasing out its nuclear power plants. If nothing else, new safety standards tend to make nuclear power plants very expensive. The high price makes it too expensive to replace aging nuclear power plants with new plants, at least in the parts of the world where safety standards are considered very important.
In 2017, wind and solar together produced about 59% as much electricity as nuclear power, on a worldwide basis. It would take a major effort simply to replace nuclear with wind and solar, and the results would not provide as stable an output level as is currently available.
Of course, some countries will go forward with nuclear, in spite of safety concerns. Much of the recent growth in nuclear power has been in China. Countries belonging to the former Soviet Union (FSU) have been adding new nuclear production. Also, Iran is known for its nuclear power program.
Conclusion
We live in challenging times!
Notes:
(1) There is more than one way of seeing that energy consumption per capita needs to rise, despite rising efficiency.
One basic issue is that enough energy consumption needs to get back to individual citizens, particularly citizens with few skills, so that they can continue to have the basic level of goods and services that they need. This includes food, clothing, housing, transportation, education and other services, such as medical services. Unfortunately, history shows that efficiency gains don’t do enough to offset several other countervailing forces that tend to offset the benefits of efficiency gains. The forces working against unskilled workers getting enough goods and services include the following:
(a) Diminishing returns ensures that an increasing share of energy supplies must be used to dig deeper wells or provide water desalination, to operate mines for all kinds of minerals, and to extract fossil fuels. This means that less of the energy that is available can get back to workers.
(b) Governments need to grow because of promises that they have made to citizens. Retirement benefits in particular are an issue, as populations age. This takes another “cut” out of what is available.
(c) Increased use of technology tends to produce a much more hierarchical workforce structure. People at the top of the organization are paid significantly more than those near the bottom. Globalization tends to add to this effect. It is the low wages of those at the bottom of the hierarchy that becomes a problem because those workers cannot afford to buy the goods and services that they need to provide for themselves and their families.
(d) Increasing use of technology can often produce replacements for manual labor. For example, robots and computers can replace some jobs, leaving many would-be workers unemployed. The companies that produce the replacements for manual labor are often international companies that are difficult to tax. Governments can try to raise taxes to provide benefits to those excluded from the economy as a consequence of the growing use of technology, but this simply exacerbates the problem described as (b) above.
(e) The world economy always has some countries that are doing better than others in terms of GDP growth. These countries are nearly always countries whose energy use per capita is growing. Current examples include China and India. If world resources per capita are flat, there must be others whose energy consumption per capita is falling. Examples today would include Venezuela, Greece and the UK. It is the countries with falling energy consumption per capita that have the more severe difficulties. Our networked world economy cannot get along without these failing economies.
Besides the issue of enough goods and services getting back to those with limited skills, a second basic issue is having enough energy-based goods and services to actually fulfill promises that have been made. One type of promise is debt and related interest payments. Another type of promise is that made by pension plans, whether government sponsored or available from private industry. A third type of promise is represented by asset prices available in the marketplace, such as prices of shares of stock and real estate prices.
The problem is that promises of all types can, in theory, be exchanged for goods and services. The stock of goods and services cannot rise very quickly, if energy consumption is only rising at the per-capita rate. Even if more money is issued, the problem becomes dividing up a not-very-rapidly growing pie into ever-smaller pieces, to try to fulfill all of the promises.
(2) With respect to oil, the one major deviation from its flat pattern occurred in the early 1980s, when world oil consumption fell by 11% between 1979 and 1983. This happened as the result of a concerted effort to change home heating and electricity production to other fuels. It also involved a change from large inefficient cars to smaller, more fuel efficient cars. After the 2007-2009 recession, there was another small step downward. This downward step may reflect less building of new homes and commercial spaces in some parts of the world, including the US.
High Street job losses near 22,000 in 2018
https://www.bbc.com/news/business-44676494?ocid=socialflow_twitter
U.S. Backs Off Trump Tweet on Saudis Helping Lower Oil Price
Saudis, U.S. now say oil supply discussed with no targets set
https://www.bloomberg.com/news/articles/2018-06-30/trump-asks-saudi-arabia-to-boost-oil-output-to-offset-high-price
Historically, KSA has never achieved more than 10.7 mb/day. Drumpf’s 12 million is laughable.
The WSJ is now saying, To Head Off Rising Crude Prices, It May Take More Than Calls for More Oil
Should I stop buying green bananas?
Starting just after 57:00 and continuing to about 1:10:30, a second generation hedge fund manager ponders the puzzling recent price action in oil. Do investors really anticipate a supply crisis in Cushing?
I could have gotten in some nifty alliteration had I written that he “ponders the puzzling price of petroleum”–I find alliteration annoys people less than punning.
I listened to the section you pointed out. What he says is that the markets are acting as if there will be a short-term outage in US crude oil that will be pretty much completely resolved by December. That is why he is suggesting that if you want to be “long oil,” you should buy December oil futures. They are significantly cheaper than ones with a closer date.
The question the hedge fund manager is raising is whether the size of the WTI differential really makes sense, if the cause of the short supply is the temporary outage of about 360,000 barrels a day of heavy oil from Syncude, which will presumably be resolved by the end of July. He thinks the dollar amount of the difference is too high to be explained by this outage. This article https://globalnews.ca/news/4296088/syncude-canada-outage-alberta-oilsands/ talks about the outage raising the price refineries will be willing to pay for the heavy oil, by cutting the differential relative to WTI. (Effect $10.50 to $12.50 per barrel.) It would seem like the higher price will pry some oil out of storage, so that there will not be a shortage in Cushing. Instead, the price will be high to prevent the shortage.
The hedge fund manager also talks about Iran and Venezuela, but I don’t see the connection. Their problems are not temporary.
The situation that the hedge fund manager seems to have forgotten about is the pipeline capacity problem in Texas. As a result, domestic production seems to be capped at 10.9 million barrels per day. https://www.eia.gov/dnav/pet/pet_sum_sndw_dcus_nus_w.htm Hopefully, this will be fixed by December or so, allowing US oil production to rise again. The fact that there is not enough pipeline capacity is cutting off production from shale in Texas, and temporarily keeping making it difficult to “grow” US oil production. US refiners, if they want to purchase oil from producers, thus have multiple problems, at least temporarily:
1. Texas production is acting like it is capped, so US production is not growing. This effect may eventually be greater than the Syncrude outage. Previously, it had been growing each month, by about 200,000 barrels per day.
2. 360,000 barrels of Syncrude are offline until the end of July.
3. Venezuela is seeing its production fall more.
These problems are making available US oil supply look more like the oil supply of the rest of the world. Thus, the differential to Brent is falling, and WTI prices are temporarily higher.
If higher production leads to lower prices, as appears to be both the expectation and the desire, then surely that would just make things worse for producers already increasingly burdened with debt which they cannot pay off with prices so low? As you have mentioned previously, Gail, we appear to have reached the age where no oil price is the right price.
Obama’s administration bombed Libya into the stone age. The Bush administration put Iraqi oil production into a state of turmoil. Iran is pas peak. Venezuela is collapsing. So, the Trump administration asks the Saudis to produce more because we blew up the other major oil producers. What a mess we have gotten ourselves into! So much for energy independence.
You make a good point. Functioning economies are needed everywhere–in oil producing nations and in oil consuming nations. Too many people (including government officials and peak oilers) have assumed that if the oil is in the ground, and we have the technology, we can get it out. This is not true. We need a lot of other things, including a functioning economy.
Americans grapple with recognizing facts in news stories: Pew survey
Only a quarter of the people polled were able to correctly distinguish between a factual statement and an opinion claim.
https://www.reuters.com/article/us-usa-pew-news/americans-grapple-with-recognizing-facts-in-news-stories-pew-survey-idUSKBN1JE1MF
+Baby Doomer, this is what happens after 6 generations of dysgenic fertility (circa 1870 to 2018). It’s the silent catastrophe ushered in by the Age of Contraception. The less educated outbreed the more educated and convicted criminals outbreed the law-abiding. The only silver lining is that church, mosque, and synagogue attenders also outbreed those who attend less, who in turn outbreed those who attend not at all. (And, yes, I understand not everyone will agree with me that this constitutes a silver lining.)
My favorite is the “panel of experts” that weigh in after some breaking news story. Panel of opinions is all it really is. Yet some folks view this as fact based news.
That article is depressing. Lots of dim bulbs out there. Unbelievable stupidity. Einstein was right: Only two things are infinite, the universe and human stupidity, and I’m not sure about the former!
The $6.3 trillion debt binge: American companies have never owed this much
http://money.cnn.com/2018/07/01/investing/stocks-week-ahead-debt-bubble/index.html
If they don’t keep borrowing, the economy tends to collapse, however.
Their borrowing is not of much benefit if they just use it to buy back their own stock. The economy only benefits from investments in productive capacity, not financial shell games.
Well stated Nehemiah!
So… just keep taking the drugs knowing they will kill you.
Instead of trying to wean yourself off the drugs onto something more wholesome.
Money or rather the issuance of currency should never have fallen under a few private banking cabals. It should always have remained the domain of goverment and not issued as debt. That would have prevented all of this from happening.
Alas, it was not to be. The criminal greed of psychopathic overlords was not corrected when it could have been. They won the day. Their cancerous genes were triumphant. Unfortunately, their progeny will be consumed in a blaze of radioactive fire along with everything else. Not much compensation for winning the game.
If the money can get back to non-elite workers, it can help bid up energy and other commodity prices. That can perhaps keep the system going a little longer. Of course, it will also tend to pull the system down, because buyers cannot afford the higher priced goods made with energy products.
TINA.
Once we shifted to the Scott Nearing way of life and stuck seeds in the ground… there was no turning back.
Destiny’s a bitch huh.
Very good article by David Korowicz, poster on Alice “the other Gail” Friedemann’s blog:
http://energyskeptic.com/2018/david-korowicz-a-study-of-global-system-collapse/
Didn’t the read the whole thing (it’s *long*) but his analysis seems by and large similar to Gail’s. The gist seems to be that increased complexity means more risk of rapid failure aka instadoom. I would argue that increased complexity means more risk to the part of the economy/growth actuated by increased complexity. Thus, in the years ahead there won’t be a staircase collapse with everything decreasing in tandem. Rather, a stepwise *metamorphosis* with each “step” representing one/more layers of complexity peeling off.
What the flipping flip?
Alice is quoting part of David Korowicz’s 2012 paper, “Financial System Supply-Chain Cross-Contagion: a study in global systemic collapse.”
The collapse won’t happen all at once. It seems to have started already. We really don’t know how far apart the steps will be. We have Venezuela on the way down, and Yemen and Greece not doing well. There are others that look like they could begin to have problems very soon, particularly the oil exporting countries who are not receiving a high enough price for oil to collect enough taxes to support their economies.
You can Venezuela, Brazil, Puerto Rico to that group. Germany and the UK are also showing signs of concern as well. But i’ve also held the belief that the collapse started in 2008. The Fed resurrected the global economy which bought us some time. Now there are more signs that the boat is once again springing new leaks.
Meanwhile Steve St. Angelo posted this new graph which should be worrying.
https://d3hxt1wz4sk0za.cloudfront.net/wp-content/uploads/2018/06/Global-Conventional-Oil-Gas-Discoveries-768×533.png?x65756
https://d3hxt1wz4sk0za.cloudfront.net/wp-content/uploads/2018/06/Global-Conventional-Oil-Gas-Discoveries-768×533.png?x65756
https://www.vaneck.com/uploadedImages/blogs/blog-images/conventional-oil-discoveries-2016.jpg
Gail,
Have you not heard of tipping points?
I was the one who put David Korowicz’s “Tipping Point” article up on The Oil Drum.
I am not saying that we can count on years and years of slow collapse, just that collapse has started already. We don’t know how far apart the steps will be; they could be very close together and pull the whole system down pretty quickly.
http://i.dailymail.co.uk/1/2017/03/16/03/wire-226143-1489634675-851_634x475.jpg
David K’s 2012 paper is quite fascinating and well worth the time to read. His theory is that, in a general economic contraction, if industry A cannot recover until supplier B recovers, and supplier B cannot recover until their supplier C recovers, and supplier C cannot recover until supplier D recovers, and supplier D cannot recover until supplier A recovers, then it will be very hard to resuscitate our advanced global economy that is dependent on global supply chains and, very often, a surprisingly small number of critical link in the supply chain. Sometimes everyone in an industry depends on just one supplier for a continent or the world. During the last financial panic, Ford urged Washington to bail out its main competitor, GM, because the North American auto industry depended on at least one shared supplier that would not stay in business if it abruptly lost GM as a customer–and there was no alternative supplier. Who knows how many similar situations exist throughout the global economy? The strategy of one or a few big players “cornering” various markets (reducing the diversity of the ecosystem, by analogy) makes this danger continually worse.
One conclusion from complexity theory is that when systems self-organize into a critical state, it becomes impossible to predict exactly when the next collapse will come, what exactly will trigger it, or how big it will be. It might be small, intermediate, or catastrophic. But you can discern characteristics of a vulnerable system, and we certainly live in one. We have dialed diversity (of suppliers, for example) down too low, and interconnectedness up too high. Complex systems are most stable when the “dials” are in the middle range rather than turned to extremes. And of course complexity needs energy to sustain. When less energy becomes available, complexity gets scaled down, often abruptly.
I disagree with all this nonsense that complex systems are necessarily fragile. They may be, but they can also be surprisingly stable, resilient, and long lasting.
Take for example life on this planet. We as humans are a subset of the global superorganism. At this point, I don’t see the divisions between what we call human activity and nature. It’s all one machine and self regulating and incredibly complex. And yet it’s been chugging along as a whole fairly reliably for billions of years. Species come and go but the superorganism continues.
Take any individual organism within the system and all would agree that the level of complexity is astonishing. The human body including the human brain are vastly more complex than much of our industrial civilisation and yet it doesn’t easily fall apart just because it is complex. There ususally has to be a very good reason, some exploitable weakness, an achiles heal for things to go wrong.
Remember… most human death right now is from heart disease. And a huge chunk of that is because people like to inhale toxic smoke. Many others ingest junk food instead of a healthy diet. Simple changes would stop many individuals from “collapsing.”
As a subset of the overall system, industrial civilisation has operated much like a cancer tumor with its wild growth trajectory. This too could have been corrected but at this point, any sustained damage to a vital “organ” or supply chain would be fatal much like with an individual human – very resilient within boundaries until pushed too far.
Human and other animal populations have taken massive hits at times from plagues or famine and have bounced back. Resilience is built into the system especially when you don’t favor any particular species. And even then, the superorganism could collapse to such a point that you are left with a dry, lifeless planet.
Kind of pointless when you think about. But it’s fun while it lasts. At least… for some.
The world ecosystem has evolved to have considerable redundancy in it.
It is obviously the result of self-organization through the flows of energy in that is open, from an energy point of view. Everything is temporary. Everything is designed to change and evolved, as the overall situation of the earth changes for many reasons (for example, fluctuations in its orbit, or more CO2, or passing objects, or changes in the energy output from the sun over time).
To me, the only reason the system can operate in the way it does is because there is a literal Higher Power, both giving power to all of the dissipative structures in the Universe, and somehow being behind the design of the Universe.
If humans design complex structures, they do not have the same characteristics. Fast profits are usually the goal, not resilience.
I think a lot of scientists are reluctanctly coming to the same conclusion although they may not refer to the self organising mechanism or the origin of all things as a Higher Power.
That’s why we’re looking for evidence of a Multiverse and discussing the possibility of Dark Matter and Dark Energy. These could all be attempts to escape the conclusion that we have one universe that has always existed and is imbued with the impulse that leads to intelligent life.
I agree that much of human activity of late appears to be toxic from our point of view but to be honest the planet and many other planets are far more toxic in their beginnings and we should consider that toxicity to be 100% Natural. Therefore, our temporary relatively small output of pollution is also natural since we are a product of the natural world and insignificant in the grand scheme of things.
If God has created us in His image then why are we so screwed up? Why are we not perfect and living in perfection as promised by the ancients? Or is paradise reserved for Heaven?
Why does DNA exist? How does complexity emerge from relative simplicity? How does life emerge from dirt? Is there an invisible code that permeates the entire universe? Are we the only tiny planet with life in the entire universe?
Misanthropes would love for there to be no trace of humanity on the planet but that would have meant that whales would have multiplied in the oceans until system collapse one way or another. Elephants would have multiplied and consumed all foliage in Africa. The same goes for many other dominant species. It all depends on the roll of the dice.
I believe we are the result of natural selection and that purpose is a human construct much like a squirrel has a sense of purpose when it collects nuts.
The natural directive of any branch of life should be to survive and to survive at all cost. Building thousands of spent fuel ponds around the world that could result in abandonment isn’t the smartest strategy for survival.
There are a lot of things that we don’t understand. If God spoke to us through the Bible, I expect that God also spoke to us, and continues to speak to us, in many other ways. We can’t expect the Bible or any other religious documents to be literally true. We can’t expect any view of any one person to be correct. But there can be collective wisdom in the views of the crowd. They can tell elected officials, “The approach you are using isn’t working any more.”
Religious leaders can say we need a balance between always looking out for ourselves and looking out for our group. Realistically, we can’t look out for everyone. Looking out for everyone can easily lead to overpopulation, and trouble for the entire economy.
I expect that the reason why “we are so screwed up” is because we are reaching limits of a finite world. We are like the mice and rats in How 1960s Mouse Utopias Led to Grim Predictions for Future of Humanity. Also, expectations were given to us, and the future has not lived up to our expectations. We saw the baby boomers living much better than their parents, and we expected that future generation would continue to show leaps in their standards of living. Instead, many younger people, especially the children of the elite, are having difficulty because they cannot match the achievements of their parents. Many of these children never marry. Recent immigrants tend to be the ones having children.
We probably are the only planet in the universe with life. If there is life elsewhere, it necessarily burns itself out quite quickly, for the same reason that our economy seems to be reaching an end.
On the other hand, the Higher Power that seems to have created all things, seems to have a way with managing complexity that we humans do not. Complexity produced by humans quickly leads to diminishing returns. The Higher Power can produce a Universe that continues for billions of years. We can’t be sure what the Higher Power has planned next. It is at least theoretically possible that the Higher Power has an afterlife planned for us. Otherwise, what we leave is whatever we have accomplished for the common good while were on earth. It is possible that there is a paradise in heaven. It is also possible that this is the “happy ever after” ending that a lot of people hope for. I find the story that there is hell for bad people implausible. It seems to be too close to what people on earth would hope for. Also, it is not clear that people are ever bad; more likely, they find themselves in circumstances that they cannot handle with socially approved actions.
I am a misanthrope mainly because I see us as a cancer… but also because we inflict a nightmarish existence on other animals (and each other)
https://www.animalsaustralia.org/features/60-minutes-the-hidden-truth.php
https://www.express.co.uk/news/nature/691843/animal-cruelty-dogs-puppies-burned-alive-fire-india-abuse-neglect-video
Gail. Thank you for your sincerity. It’s more than anyone could ask for.
I have a very open mind and never close any line of thought just in case. If I have to pray for one thing it’s that the Higher Power is gentle when it comes to the great balancing.
The Higher Power created Fentanyl… for a good reason
Re the fragility of complex systems, David Korowicz starts his essay with this quote from Yaneer Bar-Yam of the New England Complex Systems Institute:
“A networked society behaves like a multicellular organism…random damage is like lopping off a chunk of sheep. Whether or not the sheep survives depends upon which chunk is lost….When we do the analysis, almost any part is critical if you lose enough of it…. Now that we can ask questions of such systems in more sophisticated ways, we are discovering that they can be very vulnerable. That means civilisation is very vulnerable.”
That is a great quote. I like the point, “Whether or not the sheep survives depends upon which chunk is lost….When we do the analysis, almost any part is critical if you lose enough of it.”
I looked up the New England Complex Systems Institute. It is located in Cambridge, Massachusetts, and sponsors an annual conference. The next one is coming up July 22-27. Two of its speakers are Peter Turchin and Carmen Rogoff.
Yaneer Bar-Yam is the President of the Organization.
I opt to sheer the sheep. Does that count?
Some good points there, Tsubion. I used to make some predictions about when hard limits would likely kick in. They didn’t because the global economic system is so large that compensations can be made. This is only possible so long as just one or two or three series problems develop, like Greece going through the floor. But no system is ‘too big to fail’. There’s only so much propping up even a global industrial economy can do. When multiple systems fail like dominoes that’s when we see system breakdown. The take home lesson for us overall is that there’s likely to be more resilience to shocks than most people realize. We may muddle along for a few more years yet.
This has certainly gone on a whole lot longer than I expected… and could go on for quite a few years longer….
Yep. We’re surpisingly resilient within boundaries! Raise or drop the temp sufficiently and we’re toast. Squeeze a human enough and they’ll pop. But with all the trials over millions of years our species has done exceptionally well. So have the bacteria that lurk in our guts and on our skin.
The question now is whether our species or elements of it can adapt to rapid change in an environment where we have become entirely dependent on fossil fuel consumption and industrial machinery. We should have had a viable susbstitute strategy in place by now. The blatant lack of one is self eplanatory.
Instead of throwing in the towel we should be studying every possible means of survival and acting on it. But all I see is paths leading to dead ends and a comatose human population waiting in line for their dose of Fentanyl.
The movement is gaining steam!
We Want Fentanyl!
We Want Fentanyl!
Fentanyl for All!!
Fentanyl for All!!
We Want Fentanyl!
We Want Fentanyl!
Fentanyl for All!!
Fentanyl for All!!
We Want Fentanyl!
We Want Fentanyl!
Fentanyl for All!!
Fentanyl for All!!
Neil Young … if you are reading … feel free to take those lyrics and add music….
This has certainly gone on a whole lot longer than I expected… and could go on for quite a few years longer….
Holy cow! What’s next? Queing up to buy a Tesla self driving flying car?
Did someone slip something in your drink FE?
Day by day….
Trump ally Giuliani says end is near for Iran’s rulers
https://www.reuters.com/article/us-iran-nuclear-opposition-giuliani/trump-ally-giuliani-says-end-is-near-for-irans-rulers-idUSKBN1JQ0PA
Iran was one of my final bucket list countries…. it might not happen…
Old Musky Loins looking to cover some wetlands in Kent with a colossal array of solar panels – *just* what we need, lol.
http://www.dailymail.co.uk/news/article-5905675/Elon-Musk-build-worlds-biggest-battery-Britain-400m-solar-panel-plans.html
This is Green Nirvana how can the Green object?
Energy crisis warning as supply fails
As Tomago CEO Matt Howell notes:
And storage?
Renewable energy advocates tout battery storage as a solution to smoothing renewable power intermittency. In the context of smoothing residential power needs, a battery can supply a household for many hours, but Tomago draws around 917,000 kW every hour.
PUNCHLINE:
So, when you consider that even the worlds biggest battery in South Australia (100MW/129MWh) could only provide enough power to keep Tomago running for 9 minutes, the absurdity and over-simplicity of the storage comments become apparent.
http://www.ectltd.com.au/energy-crisis-warning-as-supply-fails/
Oh but those 9 minutes just to feel all warm inside.
Greens would have been better off buying buckets of green paint and literally covering themselves with it. Then everyone could easily identify them as the virtue signalling w*nkers that they are.
Would’ve saved them the cost of a prius or two.
Attention DPs…. notice what happens in this episode of The Twilight Zone… one person has prepared for nuclear war…. none of his neighbours have…
In fact the neighbours thought he was a bit crazy with his bunker up until the missiles threatened to rain down …
Remind you of… you? Surely you must have neighbours/friends/family — who refer to you as that f789ing nutbar who rants on about the end of the world… and plants vegetables….
I strongly recommend you watch this episode… because this is what is gonna happen when BAU ends… people will be pounding on your door… wanting in…. not just a few people… thousands…
It is a typical evening in a typical suburban community. At the residence of physician Bill Stockton, he enjoys a birthday party being thrown for him by his wife Grace and their son Paul. Also at the party are Jerry Harlowe, Bill’s brother-in-law; Frank Henderson and Marty Weiss, Bill and Jerry’s former roommates; and the wives and children of Jerry, Frank, and Marty. Bill is well known and liked by this gathering; he attended the State University with Marty, Frank, and Jerry.
Moreover, Bill has repeatedly administered to the health and well-being of each one of said guests and/or delivered their children. Everyone is especially friendly and jovial, even when mention is made of Bill’s late-night work on a fallout shelter which he has built in his basement. Suddenly, a Civil Defense (CONELRAD) announcement overheard by young Paul is made that unidentified objects have been detected heading for the United States. In these times, everybody knows what that means: nuclear attack.
As panic ensues, the doctor locks himself and his family into his shelter. The same gathering of friends becomes hysterical and now wants to occupy the shelter. All of the previous cordiality is now replaced with soaring desperation; pent-up hostility, searing racism, nativism, and other suppressed emotions boil to the surface. Stockton offers his basement to the guests, but the shelter itself has sufficient air, provisions, and space for only three people (the Stocktons themselves).
The once-friendly neighbors do not accept this; they break down the shelter door with an improvised battering ram. Just then, a final Civil Defense broadcast announces that the objects have been identified as harmless satellites and that no danger is present. The neighbors apologize for their behavior; yet Stockton wonders if they have destroyed each other without a bomb.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Shelter_(The_Twilight_Zone)
https://www.dailymotion.com/video/x5roosj
but but but…. say it isn’t so…..we’ve been brought up on ‘The Ant and the Grasshopper’.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=sxjNXlbVNXs&vl=en
You should be encouraging more Ants!
Prepping is futile
Myth: Well-prepared individuals, groups, and communities will survive our impending collapse and maintain healthy, fulfilling, and productive lives in its aftermath.
Reality: Those who survive our collapse will be those who can obtain sufficient life sustaining essentials—especially clean water and food—on a continuous basis, both during and after collapse. Those who store large quantities of these essentials and those who attempt to produce food, either individually or in communities, will be easy targets for the vast majority who have neither the foresight to store nor the skills to produce. No matter how remote or secluded your sanctuary, somebody will know about it; and they will come to call when they become desperate; and they will be well armed and devoid of compassion. You can prepare for a last stand, but you cannot prepare for post-collapse survival. Post-collapse Life Will Be Preferable to Our Industrial Lifestyle Paradigm
Myth: Industrialization has brought nothing but misery and degradation to the human race; our quality of life (and spiritual wellbeing) will improve substantially in a post-collapse world.
Reality: The post-collapse lifestyle awaiting the few who survive will, under the best of circumstances, share many attributes with pre-Columbian America. Unfortunately, the realities associated with subsistence level existence bear little semblance to the Hollywood accounts. Those who anxiously await our post-collapse world will be disappointed, assuming they live to experience it. The fact that nobody is opting to jettison the amenities afforded by an industrialized way of life in favor of a hunter-gatherer lifestyle today should be sufficient proof that our future way of life is not something to be anticipated. Industrialism is not inherently “evil” or immoral; it is simply physically impossible going forward.
Excellent summary … continue to post on a regular basis when the DP subject comes up.
Not that it will matter though …. any more than trying to explain to a Tesla owner that his car is manufactured and charged with energy produced from burning coal….
Stu pidity is incurable
1) keep mouth shut about your preps
2) have guns to kill enough to make your neighbors try a softer target
I remember when I was a kid… we used to raid the neighbour’s apple tree…. we also sometimes pulled carrots out of another neighbour’s garden…
We always did that at night …
We never got caught…
See, I knew it, the Canadians are not as squeaky clean as they claim to be. Just Americans with a high cold tolerance. Notice how FE get happy when it is winter in NZ. Bali must have been h ell.
Day time temps during ‘winter’ in NZ … are never below 0…. winter in Canada… particularly northern ontario… now that is hell…. as is 35 degrees and 95% humidity in Bali during summer
Why would you want to prep so you could be the sole survivor of the apocalypse? All that work just to be miserable and alone before you die of X, Y or Z.
The only reasonable way to prep must be on a community/regional level. If society goes down the drain then everything goes with it.
You may have read stories saying about how college students from the US differ from the world’s general population. Yet these college students are the ones who complete answers to studies published in academic journals. This is an article about the issue. https://www.lesswrong.com/posts/33YYcoWwtmqzAq9QR/beware-of-weird-psychological-samples
It turns out (according to a recent article) that one of the ways Western college students are different from people from other parts of the world (like Asia and Africa) is that they think about themselves, and what their future might be, more than others. Others are more concerned about the group that they are part of succeeding, because they understand that it is the whole group. At least, that is what I remember from a different article I read recently. I expect that having the command of large amount of energy products makes Westerns feel more powerful than others.
Yes, I have always thought it absurd that Americans are concerned with G.u.n control, but ignore the arms industry sending the same weapons overseas, and how they are just so concerned about inequality when their country with 6% of the world population consumes 25% plus of the worlds resources. Exceptional indeed Mr Obama etc etc
Worth reading regarding the issue you touch upon:
https://www.amazon.com/Geography-Thought-Asians-Westerners-Differently/dp/0743255356
See the description, it has an excerpt of chapter one
Thanks for mentioning this book. I don’t think I have seen it. I have seen articles relating to it, however.
Also a waste of time… I met someone who was organizing this sort of thing …. as I looked out from his hill top solar powered eco house… I could see a few towns of thousands within maybe 5km… I could see a larger city of tens of thousands within 40km…. (and everyone knows about these sorts of communities… they know that they are doing and why…. they know they are growing food)
And I said — so what will you do about all those people who will come looking for food…
He said — well we don’t have any guns here if that’s what you are thinking…
Not that having guns would help … when you are dealing with hordes who will have guns….
Sing Koombaya and Imagine… and it will be it will be….
A more delusional situation … I cannot imagine … what a total f789ing absolute waste of the minimal time that remains….
Crazy madness
Join my new group: FWOT – Future Warlords of Tomorrow. Start today in my correspondence course on how to organize local marauders, the best way to locate local Doomie-Preppers, how to subjugate useful locals through fear and intimidation 101, and other exciting topics!
BTW – it’s a multi-level marketing scam. Gotta start today to have a network in place!
When I lived in Bali and had a giant organic garden … and I realized we were not going to have another reoccurrence of the GFC rather we BAU was going to end permanently….
I remembered that the organic NGO that trained us had mentioned that when oil went over $100 rice farmers in Bali were beside themselves because they were pretty much all farming using petro chemicals… they could get an extra crop per year by doing this… however the cost of the chemicals was now more than what they could get from an extra crop….
They were desperate to get off the chemicals…. the head of the NGO regretfully informed them that IT WAS NOT POSSIBLE TO DO THIS WITHOUT YEARS OF SOIL REPAIR…
Of course you cannot just go fallow and try to repair an entire paddy system — or you starve…
So they were advised to recover small strips – perhaps 10% of the total at a time…. while continuing to farm the rest of the paddy with chemicals…
Thinking about that situation — I realized that all those farms in and around our village would be dead swamp land post BAU…
In a fit of desperation I attempted to organize a seminar to teach the farmers how to….. um… farm vegetables organically …. how to save seeds etc etc etc… I even offered to pay for seeds to get them started…
The big day came around …. and nobody showed up.
I then realized I was F789ed…. we are all F789ed….
Those farmers would be over my fence into the gardens within days of BAU ending… and they’d have me in the pot….
And there would be no way to stop them…. I would have food — they would not — they would be coming.
For those who believe in miracles — and that we will have food post BAU — READ THE CAPS above… a second time.
For those who think marauders will not be into your gardens… killing your barnyard animals… you are seriously f789ing delusional….
Of course we can have food. There will be plenty of people to eat! Geez, nothing but pessimism from you sometimes. That’s in day 2 of the FWOT seminar. /sarc
They probably refused the seeds because they were so excited about getting white meat in the pot!
“Why would you want to prep so you could be the sole survivor of the apocalypse? All that work just to be miserable and alone before you die of X, Y or Z.” – My thoughts exactly!
The Shelter is my favorite Twilight Zone episode. How should the ants deal with the grasshoppers, and how to cope with survivor guilt? I was always puzzled that even after the near holocaust of 1962, most people remained fatalistic grasshoppers. Noah is remembered by many but imitated by few.
Some thoughts related to Gail’s article: although a more interlinked world can all collapse together when it collapses, it does not collapse that easily. That is the paradox of interconnectedness. When the world’s then second largest economy collapsed in 1990, many commentators said the rest of the world could not fail to be affected, yet in fact the rest of the world continued on almost as though Japan did not exist. Not every failing country sets off a chain reaction. Perhaps the key in that case was that the Japanese financial system was relatively self-contained. Greece, OTOH, is strongly linked to the Eurozone, but its economy is very small.
Although a general descent into chaos as in Venezuela could potentially spell curtains for oil production, rising prices alone will not shut down production. The man on the street can scarcely afford to buy gold, platinum, or palladium, yet it continues to be mined. If oil becomes a luxury good, it means only the rich–and the government, especially the armed forces–will buy it. It does not mean production will cease because the Pentagon cannot afford to buy their product. The Pentagon will find the money for it, I guarantee it.
Inequality: extreme inequality has been a normal feature of civilization, and the reduced level of inequality we have seen during the industrial age is a historical anomaly. The industrial revolution itself took off when most people were surviving at subsistence levels. Historically, inequality has rarely led to revolution, except when accompanied by food shortages, and research sponsored by the UN indicates that is still generally the case. If you want political stability, preventing widespread hunger is far more important that fretting over inequality.
Energy consumption per capita: no surprise that it tends to decline when the economy contracts. OTOH, I would expect it to increase after the population rapidly contracts. During the two previous solar minima, the Maunder and the Dalton, world population has been estimated to have contracted 25% and 10% respectively. If something similar happens during the looming Eddy Minimum (yes, astronomers have already named it), then we might see a drop in energy prices and an economic revival for a few years following the dieoff.
On a general seizing up of the global economy: we have already seen this to a significant degree in the 1930’s (following an explosion in private sector debt in the 1920’s, combined with inflexible monetary policy by the major central banks). Today, both private and public debt are for the record books, the world is far more interlinked, and both energy resources and industrial metals are much more costly to extract. I should probably add aging populations and low birth rates to the list of burdens or headwinds. I conclude that another great depression would be much harder to emerge from than the last one.
‘When the world’s then second largest economy collapsed in 1990’
I don’t recall this happening…. but then my definition of collapse involves the power grid collapsing… food production and distribution ending…. petrol and diesel no longer available… etc…
I do not consider the Great Depression a ‘collapse’…
Cambodia under the Khmer Rouge was very close to a collapsed state…. but not quite
+Fast Eddy, I see your point, but as you say, Cambodia at one point came close to being a “collapsed state” (like Germany in 1945) whereas I specified a collapsed “economy” in the early thirties, followed by a stop-and-go recovery.
A grid down scenario is worst case. If it is not brought down abruptly by war, terrorism, or a CME, then I expect it to linger for a long time, although becoming increasingly unreliable as time goes by. The fear that marauding gangs will come for your food supply seems to presuppose a sudden and lasting grid failure. I cannot rule that out, but I don’t think it is the most likely scenario. OTOH, less likely does not mean remote. If you are preparing for the hordes, don’t think Mad Max, where the technology was too advanced for the conditions. Most will be afoot, so distance, mountainous terrain, or deserts would all be formidable obstacles. The flow of people like the flow of water or of electricity follows the path of least resistance. Ideally, it also would be better to be part of a small village, preferably walled, than to abide in isolated rural households. I have never understood why so many “preppers” who worry about this scenario are nevertheless determined to go it alone.
Having said that, to see an alternative path that we could potentially take to grid failure, go to youtube and look for a docudrama called “After Armageddon.”
Forget the individual. What pre-dated the industrial revolution was feudalism, whereby a few controlled, taxed, owned and enslaved the wider population to provide for their needs. Feudalism is inevitable in the aftermath too. What should fascinate us is the form this may take this second time around. A lot depends on residual population density. If this is really dramatic then we may more likely land up closer to pre-feudal tribalism.
Wrong.
Extinction is guaranteed
That’s your opinion, Eddy. None of us can know precisely. I think there will most likely be a residual population. Following huge volcanic eruptions most humans died in previous times. But it could also be that we’ve caused so much harm overall that the planet is uninhabitable for any mammal.
Regardless, in the phase out, if it is not just a bang, society will most likely be dominated by a new form of feudalism.
It is an argument – not an opinion. There is a massive chasm between the two.
1. Food. I have submitted hard facts regarding soil degradation due to petro-chemical farming — nearly 100% of all soil globally is farmed this way. It will grow nothing when the chemicals stop.
2. I have submitted extensive research regarding the amount of radiation that will be released when 4000 spent fuel ponds unplug. 56,000,000 Hiroshimas worth – to be precise.
There will be no next to no food post BAU
Whatever food there is will be poisoned by radiation. As will water and soil including the oceans and the animals that live in them.
Now nothing is 100% guaranteed…. but if there was an opportunity to make money off of being right on this ….
I would put every last cent I have on the extinction card.
some kind of feudalism is our normal structure of society—the last 250 years has been an anomaly which will be corrected as energy surpluses disappear
hi Chris…
extinction certainly is guaranteed down the road a few million years…
or perhaps very much sooner… who knows?
but you are correct about population density…
after The Collapse, there very well may be hundreds or even thousands of “tribes” remaining…
per Eddy, there may be many more mutants among those populations, but so what… each tribe will deal with mutants in a way that they consider “best”…
but the odds of any one of us being in one of those surviving “pockets” is near zero…
And for those whose concern is for their children … or grandchildren…..
They are dead meat… the most you can hope for is that they don’t suffer too much….
I hear Fentanyl is a good way to die…
After a hit of heroin, dopamine floods the brain, instantly giving users with a feeling of an intense amount of pleasure. This rush of euphoria feels very important to those who do not feel good in the first place.
https://www.verywellmind.com/what-heroin-effects-feel-like-22047
Let me wake you from your delusional state….
The financial system is going to collapse.
It will be caused by the fact that the cost to produce energy is too high — meaning there is not enough surplus energy for BAU to be maintained.
When that happens the power goes off permanently — the petrol and coal and gas stop — all factories and businesses grind to a halt — as does all food production and the chemicals required to grow food in our dead soil…
4000 spent fuel ponds switch to diesel generators … but when the diesel runs out they go up in flames.
That’s when you should reach for the Fentanyl…. perhaps mix it into some purple kool aid as a tip of the hat to Jim Jones….
any guesses as to timeframe? the Fentanyl probably has a shelf life, FE.
Again, I’m not sure your argument that spent fuel ponds cooling is dependent only one single line of defense of power backup (diesel generators) is correct. Usually, there are more modes and methods pre-planned at the site how to do it. However, I agree there eventually might be such a psychological outlier situation when even the first responders tasked with the NPP simply don’t show up and rather stay with their families. But again this to happen in synchronicity all over the world is also pretty low probability.
The ponds must be maintained at a specific temperature… keeping water cool requires energy … when BAU goes down there will be no energy available…
Any back up plan requires energy….
My cousin the engineer at the ontario plant only mentioned that they had pumps and diesel generators… that IS the final line of defence…
I doubt they have more than a couple of weeks of fuel on site… because the assumption would be that the fuel can be easily resupplied…
Nobody would believe that the electric power could ever go off permanently … if they did.. they would have never built these plants in the first place….
Look what happened in Brazil recently when truck drivers thought oil was getting a bit pricey.
Total national gridlock. Trucks blocking highways. Food, medicine, delivery grinds to a halt.
Workers WILL down tools the minute it’s not worth their while.
The spent fuel should have been dry casked many, many years ago. It’s a bit late now. Ironically, no one will spend the money on it.
I suppose we should have phased out nuclear years ago … and instead burned coal… that way the spent fuel could have sat in the ponds for the minimum 5 years or so … then been dry casked…
Or better still … we should never have built nuclear power stations to begin with.
Likewise the green revolution
But then try telling the yeast not to consume all the sugar.
FE, YES, five years then dry cask. As to temperature just keep the water from boiling away, keep the pool full of water. The temperature does not matter. In nuclear terms nothing changes from 0 degrees centigrade to 100 degrees centigrade.
If one can not keep the pool full of water throw the rods into a nature pool like a river or the ocean. If that is not possible take the bulldozer and bury the rods under dirt. Yes, they will burn but at least they will burn slowly and after five years they will be dry cask cool because the radioactive decay does not care about the temperature profile just time.
Actually no… the water has to be circulated at specific temperatures…. using sophisticated high tech gear….
I suppose you could dump the whole lot into the ocean … but that would poison the oceans with radiation killing all life in the oceans (which no doubt would have disastrous effects for the entire planet) … but of course the toxins would not stay in the oceans…
evaporation
ɪˌvapəˈreɪʃ(ə)n/Submit
noun
the process of turning from liquid into vapour.
A glimpse of what collapse may look like was the 1977 NYC blackout. From Wikipedia:
“1,616 stores were damaged in looting and rioting. A total of 1,037 fires were responded to, including 14 multiple-alarm fires. In the largest mass arrest in city history, 3,776 people were arrested. Many had to be stuffed into overcrowded cells, precinct basements and other makeshift holding pens. A congressional study estimated that the cost of damages amounted to a little over $300 million (equivalent to $1.2 billion in 2017).”
IN ONE DAY!
And … most people did not get involved in these riots … because they a) expected that the black out was going to end and BAU would continue so why risk prison over this … and b) the police were still on the job no doubt preventing even worse behaviours
When the masses recognize that BAU is done …. and the blackout is never ending … the 97 riots will look like the warm up ….. this is going to be a free for all with people looting houses… raping … killing… with NO police to stop them…
The same is going to happen in the countryside… where nobody is truly remote … food will quickly be scarce…and when the shelves are emptied… food will be front and centre on people’s minds… not looting a new tv from walmart…
DPs…. they will be coming … over the fence….
Eddy minimum!
Fantastic name huh Fast.
Euan has already covered this.
http://euanmearns.com/the-death-of-sunspot-cycle-24-huge-snow-and-record-cold/
The Globbal Wankers… will conveniently ignore this…
Just like Tesla owners will ignore the fact that their vehicles are charged by burning coal.
The human mind is very good at blocking out facts and logic
July 1st… hi adonis, how are you?
so halfway through 2018… BAU still going (of course) but a few more cracks in the IC…
THE major story of the year so far must be the monetary pressures that are causing big problems in Emerging Market countries…
Argentina, Brazil, Mexico, Nicaragua… and also a bigger country such as Italy…
this story has such major consequences for the near future of IC that the MSM seems to have no choice but to ignore it…
these 6 months have reaffirmed that the end if BAU will likely happen from the periphery inward to The Core countries…
so, in a way, The Core benefits from having a periphery that is economically stable, and the decline of this stability indicates that there are less years remaining of BAU within The Core…
THE major story of 2018…
“Freedom without Socialism is privilege & injustice, & Socialism without freedom is slavery & brutality”
— Mikhail Bakunin
And either one (or even the two together) without an understanding of the limits to growth in a finite world leads to TEOTWAWKI.
The misery in Venezuela, etc is inevitable, since the alternative is the misery comes to USA where people you know and care about will be affected, and eventually yourself.
For those which do matter, the misery happens in some other planet. They don’t care. They are well protected and will be looked after.
Like what Dennis says, tech is more advanced than many people realize now. They are not advertising, but the toys will be revealed when the time comes.
Do not assume the BAU is out of tricks. There will be quite a few surprises for those underestimates its great power.
BOE Warns of Growing Risks in Global Debt Markets
Bank of England sees threats to financial stability coming from unease over Italian debts and worries about borrowing in China.
LONDON—The Bank of England sounded an alarm Wednesday over global debt markets, saying it sees pockets of risk to the stability of the financial system in places ranging from U.S. corporate borrowing to risky loans in Britain to foreign-currency lending to emerging markets.
The BOE’s warning comes as the global economy faces multiple challenges, as major central banks led by the U.S. Federal Reserve step back from the easy-money policies of the past decade and as trade tensions escalate.
“The recent tightening in global financial conditions could be a precursor to a much more substantial snapback in world interest rates and more challenging bank, corporate and sovereign funding conditions,” BOE Governor Mark Carney said at a press conference, adding that growing protectionism “could sap some of the current strength of the global economy.”
The U.K. central bank said in its twice-yearly financial stability report that the risks to financial stability world-wide have increased in the past six months. Officials cited a range of threats, including renewed unease over Italy’s ability to pay its debts and perennial worries about borrowing in China.
They also voiced particular concern about the U.S., where corporate borrowing has ballooned to 290% of first-quarter earnings, according to BOE calculations. Rising indebtedness has been accompanied by looser lending standards, leading to a surge in high-risk lending, the central bank said, a large share of which is being parceled into securitized assets sold to investors world-wide.
Borrowers may struggle to repay their loans if interest rates continue to rise or global growth falters, the BOE said.
Officials voiced similar worries about emerging markets, where governments and the private sector have loaded up on dollar-denominated debt and now face a squeeze from both a rising greenback and higher U.S. interest rates. British banks’ exposure to major emerging markets excluding China amounts to around 15% of their total assets, the BOE said.
“Where borrowers have taken advantage of market conditions to raise their debt levels, an adjustment in market prices could expose a debt overhang, giving rise to risks to financial stability,” the BOE said in the report.
Its warning highlights renewed unease in policy circles over the risks of heavy indebtedness, which critics of central banks say they have helped fuel by pinning interest rates to the floor for years in an effort to revive sluggish economies. Still, central banks, including the BOE, take comfort from postcrisis reforms designed to ensure the banking system can better withstand unexpected economic and financial shocks.
The BOE reiterated that its stress tests suggest British banks are strong enough to withstand a disorderly U.K. exit from the European Union.
But Mr. Carney stepped up warnings that more work needs to be done—especially by EU authorities—on issues such as the legal framework for derivatives to prevent disruption to the provision of financial services in the event of an abrupt break. The U.K. is scheduled to leave the EU in March 2019.
https://www.wsj.com/articles/boe-warns-of-growing-risks-to-global-debt-markets-1530094618
https://imgur.com/a/9rxVdyx
I think that the issue is that debt needs to continue to rise, to keep the system going. If the new debt is really raising earnings, then the ratio to debt doesn’t necessarily rise very much. But if the debt really is doing very little (perhaps allowing the purchase of water desalination plants to provide very expensive water and solar panels to provide intermittent electricity), then at some point, businesses cannot keep adding debt, and the slowing debt creates a problem. Commodity prices tend to drop.
THE ENERGY CLIFF APPROACHES: World Oil & Gas Discoveries Continue To Decline
As the world continues to burn energy like there is no tomorrow, global oil and gas discoveries fell to another low in 2017. And to make matters worse, world oil investment has dropped 45% from its peak in 2014. If the world oil industry doesn’t increase its capital expenditures significantly, we are going to hit the Energy Cliff much sooner than later.
According to Rystad Energy, total global conventional oil and gas discoveries fell to a low of 6.7 billion barrels of oil equivalent (Boe).
I believe we are going to start running into serious trouble, first in the U.S. Shale Energy Industry, and then globally, within the next 1-3 years. The major global oil companies have been forced to cut capital expenditures to remain profitable and to provide free cash flow. Unfortunately, this will impact oil production in the coming years.
https://srsroccoreport.com/the-energy-cliff-approaches-world-oil-gas-discoveries-continue-to-decline/
https://imgur.com/a/SFvvAv4
https://twitter.com/realdonaldtrump/status/1013023608040513537
An email released by Wikileaks showed the Saudi’s couldn’t do this back in 2008..Because their oil reserves were overstated..
I guess well have to wait and see..
Saudi Arabian oil reserves are overstated by 40% – Wikileaks
https://www.theguardian.com/business/2011/feb/08/saudi-oil-reserves-overstated-wikileaks
Saudi Arabia has invested in mega projects that has brought 5 mmbpd of new production from 5 new giant oil fields. The project was put in place to compensate for falling production from old fields and to increase their spare capacity.
One of the oil fields was ment to be the new Ghawar and is a giant to the West of the old giant, but has been a disappointment so far.
He agreed… probably that it would be a good idea for the US, Trump, etc. – but not for him and he diddn’t say that it is possible… A statement / sentence without any meaning in which people project their wishful interpretation 😉
Is it too much to ask to expect the President of the United States to be able to spell “too”?
We need more “spell check” (or, in some cases, less spell check). Of course, spell check is not good for “to” vs. “too.”
A domino can knock over another domino about 1.5x larger than itself. A chain of dominos of increasing size makes a kind of mechanical chain reaction that starts with a tiny push and knocks down an impressively large domino.
Doomer pop
https://m.youtube.com/watch?v=nDFT2CRK2YM
Alone In The Universe…
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ShTm8MnUAjo
a philosophical song with very profound lyrics…
another great song:
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=w0shWISKpNA
ya think?
You have a weird music taste weirdo!
🙂
thanks!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!
https://mobile.nytimes.com/2018/06/30/opinion/democratic-socialists-progressive-democratic-party-trump.html
Its getting more complex out there……
‘About 75% of China’s remaining coal reserves are in water scarce regions that use 80 to 99% of their water for agriculture now. I question whether China will be able to shift water use to water intensive coal mining, coal generation of electricity, coal to chemicals, and eventually coal to liquids as governments become desperate to replace declining oil with a drop-in fuel.’
…and coming to a town near you…
‘Arizonans living near Almarai’s hay operation say their groundwater is dropping fast as the Saudis and other foreign companies increase production. They are now worried their domestic wells might suffer the same fate as those in Syria and Yemen. In January, more than 300 people packed into a community center in rural La Paz County to listen to the head of the state’s water department discuss how long their desert aquifer would last.’
http://energyskeptic.com/2018/why-world-leaders-are-terrified-of-water-shortages/
On September 22 of that year, Seche sent a stark message to the US State Department in Washington relaying the details of a conversation with Yemen’s minister of water, who “described Yemen’s water shortage as the ‘biggest threat to social stability in the near future.’ He noted that 70% of unofficial roadblocks were set up citizens angry about water shortages, which are increasingly a cause of violent conflict.” He noted that 14 of the country’s 16 aquifers had run dry.
When I visited Yemen I was told that a village kidnapped and held a foreign couple… because they had been promised a water pump by the govt … but the pump had not be delivered… so they were demanding a pump in exchange for the hostages… apparently the hostages were treated very well
Many recent articles say that water shortages will be a MAJOR issue in the coming years and decades and none of it has to do with climate change. Water is wasted by the trillions of gallons each year. In Florida alone, restaurants and where food prep takes place including coffee shops, the State requires that a low pressure faucet runs 24 hrs a day whether it’s needed or not. Multiply that by the tens of thousands of restaurants in Florida alone. Then of course there’s fracking which requires lots of water as well.
Gail gave one example of the fight for water between Georgia and Florida.
Scientists and experts alike are predicting that in the not too distant future, water will be more valuable than oil or gold.
Water may be more valuable than oil or gold, but the amount available to pay for it will be primarily determined by the paychecks of workers. All of the prices may slide toward zero, as jobs disappear.
all water is free until it hits the ground
But not on Mars.
oh it is
it’s fetching it that costs money
Where i work we got water coolers that hold a 5gallon bottle of “Spring Water”. I have to change out the empties for a full bottle. Them people drink that water like their like their life depended on it.
We need air in 3 minutes, water in 3 days, and food in 3 weeks, approximately.
Or else look out .
FE, our well traveled friend, you shine when you tell us the ground truth about the world we never see. Thanks.
The Chinese researchers with whom I have collaborated on papers seem to be very concerned about the water issue as well. They keep mentioning the large amount of water required in the process of mining coal and making it ready for use. Also, the large amount of water used for cooling towers when electricity is burned. With limited water supplies, coal that seems to be available may not be available. Published reserve amounts may be very much overstated.
Water is a big problem. I would put it on the second place after the energy, as our hygiene is dependent on it. You can clean the water using energy. When the energy declines, also the amount of available clean water declines, as many people are dependent on the surface water from rivers, lakes or dams that needs to be purified.
Basically, the lack of the clean water causes immediate decline of the population via pests in the warm countries and seasons. That is why cold countries, as lons as they have energy for surviving the winter, are healthier that warm countries where the quality of water is more easily damage.
quite correct
clean water in and wastes out didnt become possible until the invention of the steam engine and powered pumps
Inca and Aztec empires possibly had several million subjects each. I am not aware of anything so huge in the other continents related to stone age tech. This, despite Incas had a lot of horrible land, the Puna, kinda desert, and Aztecs had no livestock bigger than dogs. What they did is amazing.
That is why the Aztecs ate lots of human flesh. The so-called skull tower was just found, at the backyard of the Mexico City Cathedral. Apparently the Spanish built a cathedral to bury all evidence of the cannibalistic religion.
Potatoes can support a lot of people. Ireland in the 1830’s had a population density similar to China in the 1980’s, according to an old Nat Geo article I read one time.
This is why I have brought up using more starchy root vegetables, as well as squash, beans and other above ground vegetables with considerable substance to them. With the proper mix of these vegetables (and some fruits), it can be possible for a significant number of people to get a reasonable diet, without having to depend so heavily on meat (which is inefficient to produce) and grains (which tend to need a lot of energy-intensive processing). Rice may be better than most grains in that it doesn’t need as much processing. It is usually simply eaten boiled, rather than made into flour first.
As long as I can continue to get my fresh roasted All Press coffee beans and sugar with a dash of cream … enough power for my machine… and spare parts and cleaning tablets post BAU… I will be ok with potatoes for every meal…..
If not give me Fentanyl.
More ‘crappification’ as Western economies go down:
I bought some bags for my top-of-the-range German hoover, after re-using old bags until they fell apart – definitely lighter, flimsier and smaller than before.
I suspect pared down to the minimum, like the shrinking, thinner rubber gloves, wafer-thin matches, short-life butane gas cans, watered-down leather dye, etc.
New brake pads for my bike seem to wearing down rather rapidly, too, although I rarely have to brake.
‘Pound Shop’ quality comes to you, whether you want it or not…….
Wow, reusing the old bags, I’ve been there, but don’t do it anymore, that’s pretty hardcore man. I think FE should send you a care package from his container. 🙂
There are now vaccuum cleaners that don’t use bags. One of our sons gave us one for Christmas. Eliminates this problem completely.
I once bought a bagless vacuum cleaner…
to me, it was awful… I had to open it up and pour the dust and debris into a BAG!
and that process seems to let a lot of dust back into the air (hauling it outdoors helped a bit)…
I have major problems with breathing any small amounts of dust, so to me this “new” vacuum cleaner was a giant step in the wrong technological direction…
but, we are all different, and I suppose some persons will like the bagless type better…
As the contents are mostly dog hair, I empty that on to the garden beds as mulch.
The Don Quixote of Green-ness?! 🙂
The good news is, if there ever was a product you could by a life time supply of vacuum bags come pretty high on the list.
Very nice article Gail. What do you advise young people to do now? What do you think they do? Could you answer this question by taking into account the current circumstances?
Eat your vegetables and try to get a lot of sleep. Also, exercise regularly and avoid long lines.
Enjoy today, and the benefits we have today, as long as these benefits last. Don’t dwell excessively on all of the bad things that could happen.
If you live in one of the many countries whose birth rate is far below replacement rate, have children if you would like to, and can afford it. If you live in one of the countries whose birth rate is far above the replacement rate, hold off on children, and try to get your peers to do this as well.
Don’t worry about saving up for retirement. Spending it now is a better strategy. You might have been doing that anyhow. The good news is that you don’t need to feel guilty about this approach.
Be concerned about your own health. We humans have a tendency to eat overly energy-dense food if it is available, and a tendency to limit our own expenditure of energy by using private or public transportation systems. Doctors would like us to think that they can cure all ailments. In fact, quite a few ailments can be prevented by balancing energy in vs energy out in a way that the net energy added meets our own body’s needs for nutrients, fiber, and calories. Eating foods in the form that they are provided by nature, or with a little cooking (in water rather than oil), is to be recommended.
Don’t fill your brain with material from television and mass media. Spend time socializing with peers, or doing work to support your family. Television and mass media tend to fill a person’s brain with wrong ideas.
Be aware that if there are not enough energy products to go around, the problem is likely to play out as increasing wage disparity and increasing wealth disparity. This is an indirect result of the laws of physics. If you are one of the people who find themselves being marginalized, it is not your fault. It is the fault of the system. Also, be aware that leaders are likely to blame some outside group (or unusual group within the system) for the problems they are encountering. This is also the result of the physics of the system.
No matter how badly things are going, it is possible to look on the bright side. We have had the benefit of what is, in some sense, the most advanced period of history. Many of us have lived longer than people have lived in the past. No matter how little we have, we likely have more possessions than the hunter-gatherers. Most of us can optimize our living situations by sharing with others in a family situation. We can enjoy the company of others, no matter how little we have.
Another positive thought:
This is the most urbanised age ever – so the countryside is often totally empty of annoying people and one can get away from the madness.
Probably doesn’t fit the loving one’s family and friends, caring and sharing theme, but it works for me. And my dog. 🙂
I moved to the countryside in 2004, initially with some reluctance. Today, I couldn’t live in a city. The level of noise and stupidity is simply unbearable. And my dog is of the same opinion.
Gail and Kurt thank you very much for your suggestions. But what about education and school, standardized tests and jobs? I think It is inevitable that the education system will also be affected by this change. The education system is also enormously effective in young people’s lives. Young people have to work hard to be successful in tests and other exams. And young people are educated as if these (energy problems) don’t radically change. The energy problem will inevitably affect the education system as well. Maybe the things I talk about may be valid for future training of doctors. Of course, there may be no such thing as the future.
If energy consumption does not keep rising on a per capita basis, today’s education system will come to an end. Today’s government will also come to an end, as will today’s medical system. Obviously, the school can’t talk about the dire problems ahead.
Many techniques with little energy use were developed for use by medical providers, back in the day before today’s technology. My father was a doctor. Many years ago, he delivered babies, sometimes in the home of the mother. He said that this was because the welfare system did not pay for hospitalization of poor would-be mothers. He later taught himself how to hypnotize patients, and used this technique when delivering babies in the 1960s–also in providing first aid to those in car accidents. He was very aware of changes in patients’ coloring, and other changes that wouldn’t be considered as important today.
medical practice requires high end energy input.
without it, medicine as we know it must collapse
Then we can be like fish out of water. I am not sure but preparations can make things a little easier.
Change in coloring is the kinda thing AIs are good at. I will suggest we teach the AIs to do hypnosis but my peer seldom share my view of the AI future, they focus more on how to keep the large mega medicine corporations rich.
“Obviously, the school can’t talk about the dire problems ahead.”
It can, just won’t. All it has to do is say, “Here are the arguments and evidence on both sides.” Then open it up to class discussions or compositions. But ever since public schooling was invented in the 19th century, it has shunned controversy. That is a major problem with the education system (and politics).
Those running the show spent literally hundreds of billions on thing such as EV subsidies, recycling and ‘renewable’ energy to prevent the masses from getting spooked by the end of oil/cheap resources….
There is no way in hell they are going to have a ‘classroom discussion’ over these issues.
Are you out of your mind?
Learn to teach yourself. All the resources are out there. Those who continue to only learn what is spoon fed to them will no longer be considered educated.
“The education system is also enormously effective in young people’s lives.”
If you are referring to the American system, I would like to know what planet you are living on.
I guess I’m misunderstood. I mean the education system is the enormous influence on young people’s lives.
I don’t know American education system very well. I think that young people are significantly addicted to the educational system. At the same time, this problem is related to the industrial society. So I do not think the American education system is independent of these problems. Famous writer Ivan Illich mentioned these issues before. John Taylor Gatto says following regarding what American school does to children in “Dumbing Us Down”:
1.It confuses the students. It presents an incoherent ensemble of information that the child needs to memorize to stay in school. Apart from the tests and trials, this programming is similar to the television; it fills almost all the “free” time of children. One sees and hears something, only to forget it again.
2.It teaches them to accept their class affiliation.
3.It makes them indifferent.
4.It makes them emotionally dependent.
5. It makes them intellectually dependent.
6. It teaches them a kind of self-confidence that requires constant confirmation by experts (provisional self-esteem).
7.It makes it clear to them that they cannot hide, because they are always supervised.
As in many other industrial societies, students also have serious problems in America. Student loan debt and the idea of going to a better school, standardized tests are the first to come to my mind.
And, most importantly, it teaches them the NEVER, EVER, think critically and question what you are spoon fed.
Remember current events…. when you had to recant a story from the MSM…. if I recall that started in grade 1…
The media is the message. 12 years of sit listen obey. The message is clear.
I would add … if you become anxious and feel despair reading FW…. dont
True! Perhaps the OFW is primarily for people over 40 years old. And many of them may not be able to handle it either.
I am thirty.
But I never trusted in the success of our modern age living into the future, not since I was very little. Life has never failed to affirm my darker assumptions.
So maybe I’m a natural around here.
That is not to say I am per se a negative personality around others. Other people have described me as positive and funny; for the very reason that laughing with others and making others laugh is the very MOMENT I truly live, and feel alive;
What has OFW taught me? It has given me a marvellous summary and overview of essential points about our predicament, thank you for your efforts and clear language and clarity many times!
Also Fast Eddy and the others are now and then posting very interesting stuff, sign posts of what happens in our world, things I keep in the back of my head when I watch how things develop, things to keep track of, definitely.
So is OFW depressing? People nowadays find a way to depress themselves by outraging at the new offense du jour from the mass media every day. And otherwise they (my middle class peers) pursue their hedonism. But many people don’t feel well at all in our modern day and time, anyways. Don’t need no OFW to feel bad.
One other important point that OFW has inspired me to is to live in the moment, and pursue to seize every day. We academics, all our lives are ever so burdened with the constant thought and planning about our “future”, people keep telling me “you can do this until the end of your life…”, “imagine, then, in twenty years when you…” – they all speak so comfortably of the future as if they knew it, as if BAU were granted, but I don’t plan for such a “future” and I know why!
This over the top sincerity that tomorrow is going to resemble today is bordering on the psychotic.
kind regards to you,
and all others on this board!
Read my comment below maybe…
You don’t need OFW to feel anxious and depressed. But it can instill some clarity and help to live in the moment and seize very day, instead of planning for some “future”.
I had to look up the meaning of the word ‘future’ … 🙂
++++++++++++
I like Gail’s list but have reservations about the first sentence: “Enjoy today, and the benefits we have today, as long as these benefits last.” This can be read as ‘indulge while you still can’. Take those jet flights. Live it up. Even looking collapse in the eye I have trouble with being a willing party to acceleration of collapse. But I do agree that morbidly dwelling on what we have no hope of changing is not good for anyone’s state of mind.
Actually, a major problem is lack of demand for energy resources. Peak oilers have had the idea that we “run out” of fuels. This is not the right description of the problem. The price of fuels becomes too low for sellers of those fuels at the same time it is too high for buyers of goods made with the fuels, and operated using the fuels.
For example, many people cannot afford homes and cars, because so many other things (healthcare and education, for example) are so expensive. So they are not able to buy goods that heavily use energy products. This causes prices of energy products to be too low for producers.
If you can afford to use the energy products, you help keep the system operating by buying jet flights and other goods and services that use energy products. So you shouldn’t feel guilty. You are not causing the system to collapse sooner; you are helping keep it from collapsing. This is why the government is so interested each month in seeing whether consumer spending is sufficiently high.
Well that certainly puts our ethics into a negative feedback loop. To be ethical, we should do what governments and business do. Keep up our business-as-usual behaviours in order to avoid early collapse.
In which case I can’t criticise anyone or any behaviour, no matter their political station in life. Everything now just boils down to mathematics. Human choices are, at this point, irrelevant. Even doing what’s instinctively ethical has become mostly irrelevant, beyond complying with the legal system.
Unfortunately, that is the way it works. Makes those who want to be “green” very unhappy. Subsidizing recycling is a big waste of money also.
Most money/energy is wasted… (i.e. not used in the production of new energy)…. so I don’t think it matters a whole lot…
Consider the amount of energy involved to make a cable go round and round so I can go up the ski hill….
This reads to me as the ultimate in pragmatic fatalism. This is where ethics turns full circle, where we praise those individuals and corporations who are out there doing harm because in doing that harm they are at least delaying the sinking of the ship… even though the ship is due to sink no matter what.
This logic is also a bit like those who pragmatically argue that we may as well burn the planet anyway because in geological time nothing really matters.
Again, I can’t deny the logic but the comforting rationalisation just doesn’t sit well. The take home message is that most people should care less because their caring is stupid. That’s probably true too. But I still empathise with their caring.
Your belief gives an example of why we end up with two (or perhaps more than two) widely differing views of what should happen:
1. Continue BAU
2a. Take care of the poor people, by giving them more of the resources through subsidies or guaranteed income plans.
2b. Take care of the environment by encouraging wind, solar, EV autos, and recycling.
2c. Take care of the system by encouraging more efficiency, with devices such as self-driving autos and robots.
Continuing BAU is, in some sense, what nature would do. BAU is driven by what has worked, and what hasn’t worked, in the past, and by what the laws of physics are forcing the world economy to do.
Regarding 2a, communism hasn’t worked; it uses up goods and resources amazingly quickly, without a correspondingly large increase in the quantity of goods and services being produced. (Examples: Soviet Union, major oil exporting countries with big subsidies to citizens, including Venezuela, Saudi Arabia) Some co-operation is helpful, but communism is going overboard. Nature tries to bring the economy down before all of the resources are used up; communism (and other major income redistribution plans) tend to extract even more resources before the fall.
Regarding 2b, we know from past collapses (and from energy theory) that governments are among the most vulnerable parts of the economy. They are funded by energy surpluses, in the form of taxes. We can tell what programs are producing energy surpluses by the taxes that they are able to pay. Historically, fossil fuels have been big payers of taxes. Also, the increased productivity that their use permitted allowed workers to be more productive. Their greater productivity allowed governments to collect taxes to fund more and more elaborate programs. If wind, solar, EV autos, and recycling are to replace fossil fuels, they need to be able to be very cheap to produce, scalable, and able to pay high taxes. In fact, they seem to be huge energy sinks, despite some university studies that claim otherwise. Furthermore, governments are already in financial trouble from not being able to collect enough taxes. Encouraging wind, solar, EV autos, and recycling simply puts governments in worse financial condition, more quickly.
I should note too, that if energy is sufficiently cheap and abundant, it seems to be able to get back to non-elite workers as wage gains created by efficiency gains. Any type of energy that is high-priced will tend to drive more complexity, in the quest to use less of it, and thus push the economy toward collapse. The use of wind, solar, EV autos, and recycling seem to fail on this basis as well, when all costs (including balancing) are included. They themselves represent highly complex “solutions.”
Regarding 2c, encouraging more efficiency by adding new technology essentially becomes equivalent to encouraging more hierarchical organization. We know that hierarchical organization is what historically has brought economies down, because it badly reduces available tax revenue. A different way that the economy can become more efficient is by getting rid of current programs that require too much energy use (either by governments or corporations), such as pollution prevention programs and programs to protect the poor. These programs can perhaps protect governments for at least a bit of time from collapse.
Retirement programs in particular are seriously in trouble. Without enough energy, we know that historically governments have been among the most vulnerable parts of the economy.
As always your logic is impeccable, Gail. I don’t have a hard core belief and read everything with avid interest and radical doubt.
One facet interests me right now is the closing gap between the moral position of what has traditionally been seen as opposite ends of social spectrums. We saw this syndrome play out with the dalliance between Bernie (left) and Trump (right) supporter teams, both dancing in the street on Hillary Clinton’s demise. A remarkable event in US politics whereby entrenched traditional enemies united joyfully in a common cause. I’m seeing this syndrome again in the advocacy for increased energy supply as a moral (albeit temporal) solution to the human predicament, juxtaposed against those many who think we ought to slam on the brakes.
Again, I find this coalition of interest quite remarkable, though the division is not mainstream by any means. Throughout these threads there’s a visible contempt for all those earnest folk who have not gone into the collapse headspace and are still energetically pressing the rescue buttons. I don’t doubt the earnestness on both fronts.
I do think Our Finite World is a wonderful place to not only find hard facts, but to enable commentators (mainly blokes) to come to terms with their grief… even if they may not admit to this.
‘Throughout these threads there’s a visible contempt for all those earnest folk who have not gone into the collapse headspace and are still energetically pressing the rescue buttons.’
Every day I wake up … and the power is still functioning… I sacrifice a small animal of some sort… to appease the Federal Reserve…
They don’t have a rescue button … but they do have a delay button …. it continues to function .. some day it won’t…
When that day arrives… we will all go into a state of shock…. the unthinkable… will have arrived.
There are a few here on FW who believe this is the beginning of the Great Adventure (e.g. Jan)… but most of us recognize that is when the Gates of Hell swing open….
http://1.bp.blogspot.com/-UD-fIL773Og/UnTorP3_UxI/AAAAAAAAKR4/_KGxRRrrIUE/s1600/++++1+the-gates-of-hell-8476-1920×1200.jpg
Yes, sure, this is a definitely a blog site mainly for those who forecast a fateful post-growth collapse.
Would be interesting to find out how many are in this category these days. Back in the early 70s, after the Limits-to-Growth book was published a handful of environmentalists and intellectuals took up this baton but they were generally booed off the stage and labelled pejoratively as ‘doomsayers’ and such. In more recent times a very large slice of the mainstream environmental movement has shifted away from this position and now advocates an easy victory for sustainability, some even arguing that the Limits-to-Growth arguments were flawed. This has largely been cultivated by a widely held meme which argues that being optimistic is vital in order to counter destructive despair.
Despite this, my hunch is that the overall numbers of citizens who deep down know that we can’t avoid a catastrophic crunch has steadily climbed to now include a few million people worldwide. This includes some political leaders too. Disruption signs are everywhere. Mostly these people know this privately but it is deemed not good politics to say it aloud, so most don’t. (I’ve tested the deeper thoughts of activists along these lines.)
Yet we have to admit that this OFW collapse movement (if you can call it a movement) is still a frustrated small minority. None of us can be sure of it’s purpose, other than to perhaps prepare society for rapid change when it hits the wall. Or maybe just to compare notes with peers as we pass the time away.
Many millions understand that a massive collapse is coming…
But they do not understand they why… and that there will be no reset…
Why are we here?
Might I suggest we are here preparing for the funeral of BAU… we are monitoring the old ladies vital signs… day after day… waiting….
Madame Fast says the same thing…. she gets it … but it gets her down to think about it…
I have pretty much blocked those thoughts out by injecting my heart with frozen nitrogen on a daily basis….
Also … consider this … there are way too many people on the planet and not enough to go around… nothing you can do is going to change that…. just be thankful that you are on the winning side….
And… generally helping is not helping … giving handouts to the poor destroys incentives and throws the system out of balance…
My token gesture is to sponsor a couple of asian kids education here in NZ …. not even a drop the ocean but better than tossing spare coins into the Oxfam box at the check out
Keeping in mind the Oxfam people blow most of what you give on flights and hotels and raising more money to spend on more flights and hotels … and sometimes on parties with the people they are supposed to be helping
https://www.independent.co.uk/news/uk/home-news/oxfam-crisis-latest-sexual-abuse-vulnerable-people-ngos-report-charity-commission-haiti-prostitutes-a8206431.html
You are not accelerating the collapse by indulging … you are delaying it
I hear the call, both yourself and Gail are saying it is good to party on.
Because we have been told otherwise (because it makes us feel good to blue box cans and bottles… then jump into a two tonne heap of metal and drive to the mall to buy more stuff…) … this might not be intuitive….
There is a very amusing skit from a black and white movie addressing this issue…. I cannot locate it… but basically the businessman explains to the green groopie what would happen if people stopped buying stuff….
http://snbchf.com/wp-content/uploads/2013/01/DeflationarySpiral.png
I do accept that much of the response to the human condition will be totally futile, because it presumes that the sustainability battle can be won. But, I’m also amused by the irony that has come about whereby there seems to be almost no daylight between the position of those dedicated to collapse and those who have been rabidly bringing it about. ‘When the brakes fail press the accelerator.’ I think many corporates share that view. They do see the writing on the wall but their default is to keep it going for as long as it serves their purpose.
Who is rabidly bringing it about? Can you specify what actions ‘they’ are taking that is accelerating collapse?
https://blog.pawedin.com/app/uploads/2015/12/king-cobra-ready-to-kill.jpg
All humans, but variably… according to what they do by way of resource depletion and harm to natural systems. Corporate heads who advocate unnecessary consumption and who run industrial processes that hinge around the burning of fossil fuels. Everyone else to lesser degrees.
Still I find it interesting that those who are most into collapse theories eventually swing around to a nihilistic philosophical position, whereby there is no moral position. I think much of the ‘we should just burn coal and be done with it’ is a frustrated reaction to all those millions who are out there trying to ‘save the world’ so to speak. I can see where it comes from.
If you are asking who should swing from the gallows, that’s not my quest. Not will anyone ever be held accountable. Legal systems rely on a functioning society.
If you want to lead by example…. strip off your clothes… and run into the bush naked… live in a cave… and eat only what you find in the forest…
Obviously that is not going to happen — because we all like our warm/cool homes… grocery stores… doctors… roads…. tee vees… computers…. etc etc etc…
There is no middle ground… because if we want anything but living like an ape in the bush…. we MUST grow the economy…. we must consume ever more fossil fuels every years…
Otherwise we collapse — and we have kicked out all the rungs in the ladder that leads us back to sustainable living….
TINA.
Don’t you think that just about all consumption is unnecessary? Wasteful?
If we were to slash all wasteful consumption we’d end up with activities related to food and energy production … and nothing else.
Yes. Our natural state is as hunter gatherers. Beyond that consumption was unnecessary. There would have been some slack, but we took that to extremes.
Those millions that are trying to save the world….really aren’t. They are pretending to be green by throwing a few plastic bottles in a recycling can, from where it is sent around the world, using fossil fuels to China….or they are using cloth bags at the grocery store, all while they happily consume massive resources, and generate epic trash and garbage. They are, almost to a person, taking part in the willing destruction of our planet. That is the reality of it. Living comfortable lives at the expense of nature is far more important to them than truly saving the planet.
More accurate–they really can’t save the planet, no matter what they do. The laws of physics are in charge of what happens. There isn’t really much that people can do. Wind, solar, recycling are all mirages, in terms of what they can provide. Dropping out and living a hunter-gatherer existence might be helpful, but how many can really do that?
Green living…
https://image.shutterstock.com/z/stock-photo-indonesia-irian-jaya-asmat-province-jow-village-june-warriors-asmat-tribe-are-use-407834044.jpg
Total f789ing wanker who thinks he is living green
http://i.dailymail.co.uk/i/pix/2017/09/16/13/44584C4A00000578-4890494-image-a-6_1505564519473.jpg
“If you live in one of the many countries whose birth rate is far below replacement rate, ”
Gail, what about people who live in a country that *would* have birth rates far below replacement if short-sighted elites did not I insist on importing more than enough replacements (“reserve army of the unemployed” as Marx said) to make up for the low fertility of the native born? Should those people quietly acquiesce in their own replacement? It seems to me that the elites will not stop importing replacements until and unless the native born sharply increase their own fertility. Public policy indicates that the influential classes want more people and will stop at nothing to get them.
I am suggesting that people in Germany and other countries where there is a low birth rate have more babies, to try to stop the importing of workers from outside to keep the birth rate and workforce up.
Gail, you do realize, do you not, that Americans who came to this country prior to the 1965 Hart-Celler Act have birthrates very similar to the countries of Europe? 100%+ of US population increase is due to the Federal government’s immigration policy. By the same reasoning, don’t Americans also need to have more babies so the Feds will “stop the importing of [mostly low-skilled] workers from outside to keep the birth rate and workforce up?”
Zerohedge is so panicked about Ocasio-Cortez that they managed to squeeze ‘she’s not really working class’, ‘Bernie has 3 houses’ and ‘Venezuela hyperinflation’ memes into a single 400 word hit-piece.
https://www.zerohedge.com/news/2018-06-29/girl-bronx-ocasio-cortez-called-out-fact-check-actually-grew-wealthy-enclave
Zerohedge has Zerocredibility..lol
Zero credibility with you perhaps. How is your credibility looking?
Nuclear Power around the world
https://i.redd.it/f037i1h9m4711.png
Where there are reactors… there are spent fuel ponds….
I will continue my campaign to bring nuclear power to New Zealand.
btw here is full comic book if anybody want to read it
http://readcomiconline.to/Comic/Silver-Surfer-1987/Issue-35?id=11659
when ever people save the environment
it remind me of one of best comics book character quote
https://i.redd.it/1ri20ethmkvy.png
We can fix any problem if we just work together! Great narrative, but unfortunately not true.
https://twitter.com/NorthmanTrader/status/1012749814352760832
Wages per capita need to be rising by much more than they have been. Sven Heinrich points out that at least in the recent past, wages and salary disbursements has risen as labor markets tightened. A person might suppose it would It would also happen because of rising productivity (assuming productivity is really rising). The increase doesn’t seem to be on a per capita basis; thus it would seem to include several kinds of increases at the same time: number of workers, any wage increase to compensate for inflation, any wage increase to reflect growing educational level of the workforce, any wage increase to compensate for productivity gains, in addition to any increase because of scarcity.
Lack of wage growth is the reason that it seems unlikely that energy prices can spike very high, for very long.
Maybe the “record low” unemployment isn’t the full truth. Just sayin
Would love to see graph using shadowStat figure of unemployment.
+Ed, go to youtube and type in something like: John Williams interview.
interesting article about Venezuela over at the Saker blog. apparently what they are suffering is all induced by American interests
https://thesaker.is/venezuela-towards-an-economy-of-resistance/
here is the intro:
The Government of Venezuela called an international Presidential Economic Advisory Commission, 14-16 June, 2018 – to debate the current foreign injected economic disturbances and seeking solutions to overcome them. I was privileged and honored to be part of this commission. Venezuela is literally being strangled by economic sanctions, by infiltrated elements of unrest, foreign trained opposition leaders, trained to disrupt distribution of food, pharmaceutical and medical equipment. Much of the training and disturbance in the country is financed by the National Endowment for Democracy (NED), an “NGO” that receives hundreds of millions of dollars from the State Department to “spread democracy” and provoke “regime change” around the world, by boycotting and undermining the democratic processes of sovereign nations that refuse to bend under the yoke of the empire and its ‘allies’ – meaning vassals, afraid to stand up for inherent human values, and instead dance spinelessly to the tune of the murderous North American regime and its handlers.
Imagine, Venezuela has by far the world’s largest known reserves in hydrocarbon under her territory – more than 300 billion barrels of petrol, vs. 266 billion barrels, the second largest, of Saudi Arabia. Venezuela is a neighbor, just across the Caribbean, of the United States’ arsenal of refineries in Texas. It takes about 3 to 4 days shipping time from Venezuela to the Texan refineries, as compared to 40-45 days from the Gulf States, from where the US imports about 60% of its oil – to be shipped through the high-risk Iran controlled Strait of Hormuz. And on top of this, Venezuela, is a socialist country defending the rights of the working class, fostering solidarity, human rights and sheer human values, so close to the borders of an abject neoliberal and increasing militarized greed-driven dictatorship, pretending untouchable ‘exceptionalism’. Daring to stand up against the threats of boots and bombs from the North, is simply intolerable for Washington.
A real foreign imposed economic crisis is in full swing…
This is what is being attempted in Nicaragua – by the same players with the very same dialogue. The problem is, nearly everyone reading “international media” believes them.
What is actually happening (as I am informed by a local contact) is that the local people have now risen up AGAINST those protesting against the “regime” and and calling for it to resign in favour of “freedom and democracy”.
Armed, masked men (these local people) are ready … to STOP these neoliberals, supported by right wing bishops, from re-erecting the barriers that crippled the country’s economy. The exact opposite from “the story” in the media, what I would call “the narrative”.
Like in every country, the government in Nicaragua is not perfect but it has done a huge amount for the poor, bringing health services, infrastructure (electricity and water) and affordable public transport to the population, the majority of whom are poor.
If something goes wrong, blame someone else. This has been happening for ages. It seems to be the way the system works, in the absence of a religion saying “give the other person a break.” This kind of religion is only accepted when there really is enough energy that cooperation is a reasonable strategy. As the amount of energy per capita becomes inadequate, blaming others and fighting seems to become the standard work-around.
Soviet logic: if something goes wrong, blame ‘saboteurs’……..
Tesla too!
Venezuela was to collapse two years ago—- if one was listening to our media.
Obviously, someone is wrong. What is actually happening?
Haven’t a clue.
I read this a few weeks ago. It’s still functioning, but I don’t know either. Doubt it will last till the end of the year.
https://www.citylab.com/transportation/2018/06/venezuela-biggest-airport-is-in-free-fall/561875/
A lesson for the rest of the world regarding what may happen to other countries as well.
Number 1 crime on Earth is Failure To Cower.
Look no hands!
https://i.imgur.com/55RtTFw.gifv
The large angular momentum of the rapidly rotating wheels make bikes of all sort very stable.
no helmut, no child seat, texting, might as well let the child drive.
what could possibly go wrong?
This is what Dennis over at “Peakoilbarrel” recently said..
“Oil prices will rise and consumption of oil will adjust to available supply, the 1.2 billion personal vehicles turn over at about 75 million per year as old cars get scrapped, so about 16 years to zero ice vehicles if 100% of new cars were plugins, probably a realistic estimate might be 25 to 30 years to reduce fuel for personal transport to zero.”
“In addition, there will be a lot of opportunity for innovators in the EV, battery, solar, wind, and net zero energy home businesses. Also rail, light rail, building walkable neighborhoods, HVDC transmission are other opportunities.”
https://www.godlikeproductions.com/sm/c3549d16.gif
This is a bunch of non-sense, as you no doubt know. Too many things go wrong for this scenario to ever happen.
I think he will be correct about this:
“… probably a realistic estimate might be 25 to 30 years to reduce fuel for personal transport to zero.”
yes, by then “personal transport” will be zero…
I mean that EV “transport” will also be zero…
too bad… cars are amazing…
I am an optimist. Walking may still be possible.
LOL good one
Walking will be possible, but you will have to eat more to fuel the increased movement. There’s no free lunch.
Abortion could be banned in the U.S. within two years under new Supreme Court
https://www.marketwatch.com/story/abortion-could-be-banned-in-the-us-within-two-years-under-new-supreme-court-2018-06-29
Just what we need as we are approaching limits..More people…./s
We’ll be full on ‘Handmaids Tale’ in two years. This country is f***, escape while you still have the chance.
okay, I’m curious…
so what country are you moving to?
the don will get stronger every day.
soon there will be no one to stop him doing anything he wants, and the supreme court will rubber stamp everything
abortion rights will go….then what’s next?
gay rights, marriage equality, racial segregation back on the agenda—and so on unwinding everything as real fascism takes root
his policies will collapse the economy (which would collapse anyway) as the economy nosedives, the potus must take ”emergency powers”—so forget the constitution because in that situation the military will fall in behind whoever pays their wages—they have no choice—dissenters then locked up because it will be they who are responsibile for economic chaos
maybe not the handmaids tale precisely, but so close you wont know the difference
he is already set on the course of all dictators—world domination. Only this time he’s using economic muscle. Cut Iran’s oil out of the market to push the price up. and threaten any nation who break his emago—set up trade tariffs and so on—ie screw every other country not prepared to pay protection money
it will fail because the american economic system will fail—after that things are going to get very nasty.
embargo….there
With energy consumption per capita no longer rising, carrying capacity has to fall. The amount of energy available to fund governments and their programs has to fall. Don, and anyone who replaces Don, and anyone being elected to succeed Don is being selected to fit in with this scenario, by the laws of physics. In fact, government over throw becomes more likely, to achieve these goals. Of killing off of existing leader(s) to reach these goals.
The problem is not that anyone is necessarily “bad.” It is that the laws of physics run the economy of nations. We are forced to get along with what these laws of physics dictate.
Trump called the Saudi’s to see if they could increase production by 2 million barrels per day. Apparently the Saudi’s agreed to try to do that. Trump’s reasoning was the oil prices are getting too high. And, he probably wants to put the squeeze on Iran.
I see what you are talking about:
http://money.cnn.com/2018/06/30/news/trump-saudi-oil/index.html
I don’t know whether Saudi Arabia is really capable of increasing production by this amount. It seems unlikely, certainly for more than a brief period.
As long as I am entertained Don can do what he wants…. Mad Max 3.0
Don, held a nice parade for the winners of the America’s Cup race about 25 years ago. I went, t was nice. This is more than Hillary has done for me. So in 2020 Hillary versus Don v2.0 I will vote Don.
if the don keeps going the way he is—you may not have the opportunity to vote in 2020
and i do not jest
and if he goes as far as 2024—-welcome to the theocratic dictatorship of the USA
We are already getting more people. It’s called immigration and it remains quite high even under the Don. (Strangely, the most enthusiastic advocates of abortion-on-demand also seem to be the most enthusiastic supporters of high immigration levels. Perhaps they are just extreme libertarians.) After Roe vs. Wade, the number of abortions skyrocketed, but birthrates did not plunge. How can that be? Because many women became more lax with their contraception when they knew they could fall back on abortion. We see around the world that it hardly matters whether governments restrict this or that particular form of birth control. Women are not as dumb as some people seem to think. When necessary (or convenient), they substitute one form of birth control for another very effectively. That is why it is so hard for governments to raise national fertility. At best, they seem to advance the timetable for some births, without much effect on the lifetime TFR.
https://twitter.com/NorthmanTrader/status/1012741033459879937
Yes people just want frivolous to its possible fullest extent, hence SUVs on credit/loan to anybody with a pulse..
I felt it.. I feel it…
https://www.zerohedge.com/news/2018-06-29/bofa-it-feels-just-ltcm-and-1998-asia-crisis
Quantitative tightening is a real concern. It reduces the funds available to the world economy.
If it is done at the same time that short-term interest rates rise (as has been the case recently), then we also have a problem with banks finding their “bottom line” negatively affected because they tend to “borrow short and lend long.” They cannot use the interest rate spread to help their profits. With less profits, banks become less willing to lend.
And then there is the relativity to the dollar. If short term interest rates are higher in the US than in other countries, it tends to gather an inflow of funds from other countries, as the “hot money” looks for the highest yields. This causes currencies of Emerging Markets to fall, creating even more problems for Emerging Markets. People pull their money out of investments in Emerging Markets. EMs find it difficult to repay their dollar denominated debt, because local currencies are lower. Commodities such as oil are higher in local currencies, as well.
Edward Snowden describes Russian government as corrupt
https://www.theguardian.com/us-news/2018/jun/29/edward-snowden-describes-russian-government-as-corrupt
Guardian + Snowden, thanks, what a revelation, I did not know that, ..
the more important question remains, apart from stealing for themselves did they (elites – oligarchs – gov) at least somehow improved the living standard of their compatriots?
Well we know the answer both in tangible and relative domain, improved a lot..
The problem arising though, is it going to continue under the next gen of their leaders, as there are factions as elsewhere, different personalities and profiles.
Humpty Dumpty has been sitting on nothing but the “full faith and credit” of his believers in fantasy fiction. As the realities of global pollution, overpopulation, general overshoot and nuclear-weapons-based power-politics continues to grow, it looks increasingly likely that Humpty will have a great fall. And we all know the consequences thereof…
Is America headed toward a civil war? Sanders, Nielsen incidents show it has already begun
https://www.usatoday.com/story/opinion/2018/06/25/sanders-nielsen-incidents-suggest-new-us-civil-war-underway-column/729141002/
https://www.godlikeproductions.com/sm/custom/e31b3e94e1.gif
America clearly has the scaffolding of a civil war and is indeed headed for it, in a decade or so. Hurt feelings have rarely if ever played a part in any civil war. When it actually happens though it will be bittersweet primetime entertainment (for everyone else) that will make the Game of Thrones finale look like a low-budget art house short. For now there is only painful and boring anticipation, like with the Game of Thrones finale.
So please stop posting the civil war nonsense?
Tha car sharing fiasco
https://www.reuters.com/article/us-france-autos-autolib/paris-ends-autolib-electric-car-sharing-contract-with-bollore-idUSKBN1JH2CM
http://europe.autonews.com/article/20180622/ANE/180629937/paris-loses-its-reputation-as-a-mobility-trailblazer
“Autolib, which lets users pick up and drop off electric cars at charging stations around the city, “is one of the most challenging models” for car sharing, Cohen said. Infrastructure costs are higher because electric vehicles require charging stations. With one-way rentals, such stations have to be built at multiple locations. And cars remain out of service for hours while being charged — unlike conventional vehicles that can be rapidly hired out to other users.”
According to bio published in Forbes in 2000, the guy behind the conglomerate owning Autolib is named Bollore from ~200yrs old industrialist family, young protege of de Rotschild, cascade of holding companies, byzantine shell companies with minority stake holders by top European dynastic families, employing 150k plantation workers in western Africa at that time, ..
What a colorful personality indeed, and now Paris is littered with stinky interior “cars” used in this rental scheme which just collapsed despite subsidies and so on..
Some of those problems remain if people own their own rechargeable car. Cars need to be out of service for hours recharging. Charging equipment must be added, and the grid must take on the task, regardless of the hour of the day the charging is done. Then there is the problem of excessive depreciation when the car is sold.
What happened to JH Wyoming? Ever since he was duped by the media for that unverified gas attack in Syria..He took his football and went home..When I first came to this blog he was a nice and friendly liberal..And then over the next year, the media had turned him into a raging globalist Neocon arguing for regime change in Syria and war with Putin..Sad..
I’m still a nice and friendly liberal, but had a long list of things to do and found posting was wasting too much time, but do lurk while having cereal in the AM. So got busy re-supporting our back deck with pressure treated lumber. I found a way to do it all by myself using an electric joist in a plywood jig I designed/built. Took off the last 3 courses of decking, attached a thick eyebolt in the center of a beam, then used the lift to place beams just inside the old ones, then added 4×4 posts to temporarily support the new beams, then used a plumb bob to locate and set pier blocks (with straps), set 4×6 posts with hardware connected to beams. Crashed the old supports down below (and took that pile of dry rot to the dump) and presto, a new support system for our 50′ x 12′ back deck that overlooks a freshwater lake.
Then got busy preparing, then selling our aged Pontoon boat that was in the Marina. Sold quickly due to overwhelming demand (in spite of slow collapse).
Also in the midst of making these interlocking frames in metallic finishes for my huge rare collections of PSA graded baseball cards/coins. The first one is of graded B-ball coins from 1962-1971. 35 of them (5×7, all the size of silver dollars) and it should look really amazing! It has 4 Kouax’s, 5 Clemente’s, 4 Mantle’s, 3 Mays, 2 Rose, 2 Aaron’s. All the usual suspects, great players from that era. Will post a pic of it when completed. Many of them no longer possible to get at their grade level or higher. Then on to the display case for 68 Game/69 Decal insert cards, then the big Kahoona, the Nolan Ryan. Wow, that one will be absolutely gorgeous! Then 7 more custom cases after that. All to sell at auctions to add to our retirement account. Need the economy to hold together until all are sold.
Your portrayal of me baby boomer is wrong and unfortunate and only adds to my reasons for not posting, except for this post to set the record straight. Remember folks, in my opinion it’s better to find reasons to like one another than to knock heads.
Getting ready to head out of town with my wife for a big event for our business on the 4th of July. We’ll be riding in a convertible Corvette in a parade, followed our work being shown! More stuff to do and having lots of fun while BAU keeps on ticking – good luck to all with your constructive activities, JH Wyoming!
Thanks for replying. I apologize for Baby Doomer’s characterization of you.
I hope you have a good 4th of July celebration. Stop back in, if you have a chance. It is hard to know quite when things are “heating up” before there is a major discontinuity. I see that WTI is up to $74.37 and Brent is up to $79.42. China and India are both in worrisome states. And some banks are not doing well.
A Deck Story
The railings of our deck all shake to the touch. You walk over a few soft spots on the floor. The floor has never been painted or varnished, but is a nice weathered grey with numerous splits. My wife wants a proper deck, but we really can”t afford it, and I want to show that a beat up one that just barely keeps you from falling though is better. I like that I can do rough work on it, dribble paint about and nobody cares (or even notices).
One board rotted at the edge where it should rest on the supporting joist, causing it to detach and stick down. Yesterday, I decided to nail a small shim to the the joist, making for better contact with the defective deck board. The crawl space under the deck is unpleasant, and once I get under there I need an extended rest before crawling out again. As I pounded the shim into the joist, coarse powder from the rotten wood fell in my face and into my eyes.
sounds like even the termites would pass on your place
Probably. In this high desert, there are other reasons for their absence too. The rot chez moi is said to be dry rot.
Sounds rather as if every day you ‘walk the plank’, Artleads? 🙂
I apologize JH..My comment was very tone deaf..I miss your comments though! So don’t be a stranger..
He’s repairing the crack we made in his Cognitive Dissonance shield.
We may have answered the Fermi Paradox: We are alone in the universe
https://qz.com/1314111/we-may-have-answered-the-fermi-paradox-we-are-alone-in-the-universe/
Well, the speed of light is always dismissed by these people.
Probably not a good idea.
homo sapiens type of species maybe alone in the universe
but that does not mean that there are no other species on universe
here is ex
Ocean spray on Saturn moon contains crucial constituents for life
Nasa probe detected complex organic molecules in plumes of water and ice as it flew over Enceladus
https://www.theguardian.com/science/2018/jun/27/ocean-spray-on-saturn-moon-contains-crucial-constituents-for-life
There is a French novel titled ‘The Fermi paradox’ describing a collapsed post BAU world through a survivor testimony. It’s horrific : a world ‘a la Fast Eddy vision’, or like Cormac MacCArthy’s The Road.
http://www.gallimard.fr/Catalogue/GALLIMARD/Folio/Folio-SF/Le-paradoxe-de-Fermi
It first describes the collapse as a financial crisis. Nobody seems to know what really happens. Some peripheral countries face bankrupt, debt crisis, then everything comes to a grinding halt. Wages aren’t paid anymore, stores get empty, … well, you know the story.
So the guy who is a scientist, and also a tough guy, a combat sports trained and mountain climber expert manages to survive, first as member of a private militia in a French city that first manages (for a while) to organize itself as a medieval city did in the middle ages, and then as a lone survivor in a high valley of the alps where he avoids all contact with all other humans beings (the specie he fears above all others including bears and hungry wolves), where he finally becomes so miserable he decides to kill himself.
So why is the title ‘The Fermi Paradox’ ? During the first stages of collapse he joins a community of scientists desperately trying to build a civilization stronghold. They have a long discussion about the desperate situation of humanity and the Fermi paradox topic comes out. If the universe is that age and the Drake equation gives a large number of advanced technological civilizations, the probability for a civilization B to receive a message from civilization A is near to certain. We are B. This is the paradox. UNLESS all (or almost all) civilizations collapse and die in a very short time (200 years for instance) compared to the lifetime of their specie (300.000 years). So the messages sent to outer space (electromagnetic waves for example) by A are sent for a very short time (maybe 100 years), and can only be listened by B during a very short time. They are just pings. So the probability the timeframe for B and A to overlap so B can receive and recognize a message from A falls to near zero.
This is a pessimistic solution to the paradox …
I like Paul Chefurka’s take on the problem:
http://www.paulchefurka.ca/Fermi.html
Interesting. Almost the same idea developed in the book I tried to summerize here. Advanced civilizations die very quickly. But Paul Chefurka seems to believe exactly the same path has to apply : no advanced technology without stored low-entropy carbon based energy source (for dummies, this is named coal and oil, no ?) and then destruction by … you know, the controversial topic here. Very anthropomorphizing indeed (or “earthomorphizing” ?). He applies very strictly the idea that “the universe is the same everywhere”
That is sort of the way it looks likely to work.
If we can somehow find a temporary workaround that saves part of the population, then the rest of the population tends to grow rapidly and use up the energy resources available to it. Or it fails because of debt problems and wage disparity problems, long before climate problems become a major issue.
In fact, that is generally true. Climate change being the ultimate problem is still a conjecture. We know that all along, the problem causing collapse has been growing complexity causing wage disparity. This seems to generally reflect too little resources per capita. We just saw the example of the mice (later rats) in a cage with plenty of food seeing their populations grow for quite a while, level off, and then collapse. This is the same pattern. It had nothing at all to do with climate change. Climate change sounds like a good problem to warn people about, but it seems unlikely that it will be what causes collapse.
I also believe we would collapse long before the negative effects of a climate change could perhaps do. We will collapse either because of resources depletion, diminishing energy per capita, OR (inclusive or exclusive) because of a debt crisis when everybody will lose total confidence in the system (“I want my money back”).
In the book, the characters argue that humans mind mainly operate on a symbolic level. The idea is that the primary purpose for human projects, development of sciences and civilizations, wars, aren’t ressources (which are means), but symbols: religion, the prevalence of a nation, a race, or at individual level, a social position, glory, fame, which are no objective realities but symbols. The idea is that the symbolic level of human mind is in fact the condition of our development, the increasing complexity of our society, and that it also bears in itself the reason for its failure, the necessity of the collapse. I think it is the idea of the self-organized dissipative structure at the point of “criticicality” described by Francois Roddier.
Well, maybe.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=aR5N2Jl8k14
A Hedge fund type has speculated on what if Trump’s plan actually works? What if AI and reduced immigration works? Somehow it seems unreasonable that we already know everything about the universe.
At a DC ASPO meeting a group went to the Department of Energy to inform them that in essence the world was about to end and something needed to be done. Well, it hasn’t ended and maybe others were also aware of the issues and dealt with them.
A man with a few beautiful wives, a great deal of wealth and then a great deal of power maybe brighter than the pundits give credit. After reading the negative outlook prevalent here, to quote this man, “What do we have to lose?”
Different thread, reading “Undiscovered Self” by Jung; for me some insights into the developing social scene in the academy and elsewhere.
Dennis L.
The argument that CO2 is the limiting factor,….is the limiting factor in this paper. He would have done much better just mentioning resource depletion and pollution, such as discarding too much plastic into the oceans.
Thanks for the link. Few decades ago French movies opening (or ending) with titles ~based on novel available at “édition Gallimard” were usually sign of very good quality..
Sure ! Gallimard is the most famous and classic french book editor, it’s part of national patrimoine and publishes the aristocracy of french literature : Jean-Paul Sartre, André Malraux, Albert Camus, ….
The spent fuel ponds would spoil the ending
Oh yes the spent fuel ponds ! I saw an old friend who works as an NPP security expert, so I asked him the question : “what if the spent fuel ponds happened to not to be cooled anymore and boiled and … (because I know a certain Mr FE who says …) ” ? He just stared at me like it was the silliest question, wondering what I was thinking about. He just answered that it couldn’t never happen : it was monitored, there is redundancy (like you know, there are 2 pumps, and a truck can deliver the spare parts very soon … those guys even work on Sundays).
He just couldn’t consider an end of IC, JIT, this is out of the paradigm. Well, this friend is very cheerful, optimistic. We where enjoying a nice a w.e. where old university friends were meeting after ten years to celebrate a birthday. We were having good time, talking about our children going now to university, so I did’nt go further, I didn’t want to spoil this very nice party.
I’ve been there… I have a cousin who is and engineer head of safety at one of these plants in southern ontario … when I asked him about this he said it was impossible because after Fukushima they had installed additional redundancy including more diesel powered pumping facilities etc etc etc… so it would be impossible for the water to boil off..
I ran into the same problem when initially researching this … I finally got an answer when I pulled up a Harvard study re the impact of a terrorist attack on a pond….
Assuming a 50-100% Cs137 release during a spent fuel fire, [8] the consequence of the Cs-137 exceed those of the Chernobyl accident 8-17 times (2MCi release from Chernobyl). Based on the wedge model, the contaminated land areas can be estimated. [9] For example, for a scenario of a 50% Cs-137 release from a 400 t SNF pool, about 95,000 km² (as far as 1,350 km) would be contaminated above 15 Ci/km² (as compared to 10,000 km² contaminated area above 15 Ci/km² at Chernobyl).
A typical 1 GWe PWR core contains about 80 t fuels. Each year about one third of the core fuel is discharged into the pool. A pool with 15 year storage capacity will hold about 400 t spent fuel. To estimate the Cs-137 inventory in the pool, for example, we assume the Cs137 inventory at shutdown is about 0.1 MCi/tU with a burn-up of 50,000 MWt-day/tU, thus the pool with 400 t of ten year old SNF would hold about 33 MCi Cs-137. [7]
http://belfercenter.hks.harvard.edu/publication/364/radiological_terrorism.html
Let’s take 12 Chernobyls and x 4000 … round it to 50,000 Chernobyls of radiation ….
Now I am unsure if this scenario implies that the terrorized pond continues to burn … or that emergency measures are deployed to bring the pond back under control (e.g. bringing in diesel generators and spraying water on the pond)…
I am assuming it is the latter… because BAU would still be intact …
When BAU is no longer in play… the ponds burn .. and burn … and burn… for decades…. so the 50,000 is just a starting point…
Mother Nature may have trouble with this
“We are alone in the universe”
But not in the multiverse. There are other dimensions, right next to us. Think of our universe, metaphorically speaking, as one of many TV channels. Read “Passport to Magonia” by Jacques Vallée or any of John Keel’s books. Keel refers to “ultraterrestrials” – these entities are not from elsewhere in the universe but from right alongside us.
When Vallée went to interview some “contactees”, they complained that they’d been misquoted as saying they’d met “spacemen”. In fact, they said, to their own and Vallée’s astonishment, they were goblins. Yes, goblins! When you think about it, where did anybody get the idea for goblins?
I haven’t met any goblins, but I had a lucid dream one night (ate a lot of chicken at night – vitamin B6 is good for promoting lucid dreaming, but that wasn’t my intention) and met what might be best described as a fairy: a humanoid girl of maybe 18 to 22 years old, flying above me – but with *green* skin. Apparently it’s usual to meet other entities in lucid dreams (which form their own complex reality), who are aware and interact with you. Read the books of Tom Campbell. People may think me crazy – I would have thought myself crazy a few years ago – but I know there are one or two commenters here with knowledge of this stuff.
Vallée, BTW, started off in astronomy but went to work in the USA. He wrote the world’s first computer chat program in 1977 for the ARPANET (forerunner of the Internet). He calls himself a heretic among heretics, because the purveyors of the extraterrestrial hypothesis do not like him. If he finds a rational explanation for a phenomenon, he exposes it, and he is well aware of the games that the military-industrial complex and the CIA get up to. He knows that the crop circles in England were caused by the military testing their laser weapons from the sky:
http://www.ufoevidence.org/documents/doc1754.htm
Debt for US corporations tops $6 trillion
https://www.cnbc.com/2018/06/27/debt-for-us-corporations-tops-6-trillion-sp-global.html
Many of them would not be trainable in any case, coming as they are from populations bred for physical stamina and disease tolerance rather than intelligence.
http://cluborlov.blogspot.com/2018/06/barbarians-rampage-through-europes.html
I was not aware of such a breeding program…. are they immune to disease? I await the announcement of the first north african world cup winner shortly…..
Dmitri needs to keep in mind that it is the MSM that controls what people think and do…..
BTW – congrats on winning the Stanley Cup ….
Didn’t realise Orlov had removed his paywall. Thanks for letting us know.
In the comments section Orlov talks about people (well snowflakes actually, but I wouldn’t dare suggest you are one of those) being triggered by the lines you highlighted. It is clear from these additional comments that by bred he actually meant selected for by environmental factors rather than selected for by owners. “Bred” wasn’t the best choice of words for sure.
He alternates issuing free access articles with behind the paywall content, the latter probably with actionable info, lolz.
No actionable info.
You would think he could remove the paywall permanently
Dmitry Orlov
Ice hockey defenceman
Dmitry Vladimirovich Orlov is a Russian professional ice hockey defenceman currently playing for the Washington Capitals of the National Hockey League. Wikipedia
Born: 23 July 1991 (age 26 years), Russian Soviet Federative Socialist Republic
Height: 1.83 m
Nationality: Russian
Spouse: Varvara Amosova (m. 2016)
Salary: 1.75 million USD (2015)
This is the right Dmitry Orlov. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Dmitry_Orlov_(writer)
I think he has a computer software background, among other things. Also, a wife and young son in Russia. The article says, ” He has a BS in Computer Engineering and an MA in Applied Linguistics.”
He was born in 1962, which would make him about 56 years old.
Maybe the hockey guy is his son?
Honestly, I think Dmitry has gone a little overboard with the “pro Russia” message. Still read him from time to time as I like his collapse stories.
No doubt that is what he meant…. Hitler no doubt meant the same…
https://image.slidesharecdn.com/hitlersforeignpolicy-13195947179954-phpapp02-111025210604-phpapp02/95/hitlers-foreign-policy-24-728.jpg
I guess ZH is now running Orlov now that the paywall is off… that’s where I found the article… Orlov got a big bonus for winning the stanley cup so I guess he doesn’t need the paywall cash
+Fast Eddy, if the hockey guy were his son, then hockey guy’s patronymic should be Dmitrivich. Vladimirovich means hockey guy’s father was named Vladimir.
btw do russians not have barbarians in they backyard
called the Chechen
i remember some time ago when i was talked
with Russian soldier who came to india
he was saying even Russian government do not pissed
Chechen people after 2 wars with them
btw Chechens are very good looking
so are snakes and tigers.
yeah even bacteria
I would like to add her to my collection
https://i.pinimg.com/736x/a6/12/51/a612511b3cf12a4e51af034a514da001.jpg
Dmitry might bear in mind that when the Turks were slavers, they put Russians at the bottom of the list as ‘strong but ugly, thick and untrainable.’
Caucasians and Persians topped the list for beauty and teachableness.
Hitler did not have very nice things to say about Slavs… but none the less … he said them
First become aware of your own breeding program. Well, in your case, i think you have a clue. Tribalism stays, especially in a degrowth environment.
Dmitry always has a wealth of interesting observations expressed in a humorous way. For example:
Growth = Progress…
If progress is defined as not collapsing due to a deflationary death spiral.
Right!
Those energy charts are sobering indeed, showing the failure of renewable energy to markedly affect the world energy matrix. However, the situation isn’t quite as bad as the figures suggest. When talking primary energy we need to take into account efficiency of energy use. Burn coal or oil or gas to make electricity and two thirds of that energy is lost there and then… in the conversion process. By contrast, when using electricity (generated from wind, solar etc) nearly 100 per cent of that energy is utilised for purpose. Graphs that took this into account couldn’t look quite so alarming.
(I’m just being tidy here. Not saying the situation is at all good.)
“By contrast, when using electricity (generated from wind, solar etc) nearly 100 per cent of that energy is utilised for purpose.”
Technically true *if* the infrastructure required to utilise it is installed and consistent demand for it exists. The former if scaled up to FF-based levels would require enormous FF and other resource inputs, which would probably make the latter impossible as a consequence.
The thermal output efficiency of base load grid to electricity is like upto ~40%, the latest revision of wheeled individual transport (personal passenger car) efficiency measured in electricity to forward motion is ~89%. So that’s in reality like <35% combined overall efficiency. Which could be good or bad depending on perspective. However, more important are the overall terrawatts and cubic miles of oil needed, and that says the car must go away.. Some say it's impossible with legacy penetration to all aspects of life, I'd argue it could be chopped off, however under quite different societal setup, and as temporary "winning strategy" only at that in most areas anyway.
The renewable energy in charts showing data from BP and from EIA are both already “grossed up” to represent the amount of fossil fuel that would have had to have been burned to create this amount of electricity. IEA counts renewable energy without the “grossing up” procedure. This is an IEA chart showing renewable energy percentage.
https://gailtheactuary.files.wordpress.com/2017/12/iea-primary-energy-suppy-1973-and-2015.png
This is a BP chart showing wind and solar separately.
https://gailtheactuary.files.wordpress.com/2018/06/world-energy-consumption-to-2017-bp-fossil-fuel-other.png
Your criticism is only true of the IEA charts.
“Deutsche Bank’s US division has failed the second round of the Federal Reserve’s annual two-stage stress tests, designed to assess how well the sector could withstand another financial crisis.”
https://www.bbc.co.uk/news/business-44646775
“Below-investment-grade ABS are on track this year to account for its biggest slice of the overall sector since before the financial crisis. At the same time, the riskiest CLO notes are now a larger percentage of the market than they’ve been in two years.”
https://www.bloomberg.com/news/articles/2018-06-28/investors-dive-deeper-into-riskiest-abs-clos-in-hunt-for-yield
What can go wrong?
“Oil is poised for the longest run of quarterly gains in eight years as fears over global supply disruptions overshadow OPEC’s decision to ease its historic output curbs.
“Futures in New York were on course for a 13 percent increase in the April to June period, rising for a fourth consecutive quarter. Prices have rallied over 12 percent in the last two weeks as a tougher U.S. stance on Iran threatens to cut exports from OPEC’s third-largest supplier. Concern is rising that lower output from the Persian Gulf state will strain the producer group’s spare capacity at a time when the market is already grappling with shrinking American inventories, a Canadian oil-sands outage, as well as turmoil in Libya…”
https://www.bloomberg.com/news/articles/2018-06-28/oil-set-for-biggest-weekly-gain-in-11-weeks-on-disruption-risks
“Investor money is hemorrhaging out of global stock funds at a pace not seen since just after the financial crisis exploded.
“Global equity funds have seen outflows of $12.4 billion in June, a level not seen since October 2008, according to market research firm TrimTabs. Lehman Brothers collapsed in September of that year, triggering the worst economic downturn since the Great Depression and helping fuel a bear market that would see major indexes lose more than 60 percent of their value.
“The most recent exodus, which includes exchange-traded and mutual funds, comes amid worries that the much-touted synchronized global expansion is running out of gas…”
https://www.cnbc.com/2018/06/28/global-stocks-see-biggest-loss-of-investor-cash-since-the-financial-cr.html
Looks like something to watch!
These shortages have made gathering the day’s supply of water a tedious part of the morning routine for many families.
When water makes a rare appearance at Odalys Duque’s two-bedroom home, it’s usually at dawn and wakes her with a rattle at the bottom of a plastic drum. She then has to rush to align buckets, bins and pots in hopes of gathering every drop for her husband and two small children.
In mid June they’d had none for three weeks. Instead, they survived on what was left in a roof tank and what her husband could carry in paint buckets strapped on his shoulders from a well at the bottom of the sprawling hillside slum of Petare.
“It’s an ugly situation that keeps getting uglier,” said Duque, 32. “The little one cries when I pour the bucket of cold water on him, but at least we still get something. My family that lives higher up the mountain hasn’t had water in months.”
[…]
The situation governs much of Duque’s life. For drinking water, she waits for particles to settle at the bottom of plastic buckets and then pours the surface water into a pot where she boils it at least half an hour. For laundry, she’ll wash several loads of clothes and linens in the same dirty water.
Elderly people and children from neighborhoods even higher up the mountain knock on her door asking for water. “I always give them something, even if it’s just a glass,” she said.
The lack of access to clean water, as horrifying as it sounds in Latin America’s socialist paradise, is perhaps even more galling because of the $500 million in loans the country has received over the past decade from the Latin American Development Bank and the Inter-American Development Bank to upgrade its water-treatment infrastructure. Unfortunately for the people of Venezuela, none of it appears to have helped.
While water shortages threaten the population with malnutrition and other diseases as people are forced to drink unclean or non-potable water just to survive, Bloomberg recently pointed out another shocking development: The cost of a single cup of coffee in Caracas has eclipsed one million bolivars (equal to about 29 US cents) That’s about one-third of the average monthly wage in the country, which has slipped to roughly $1 thanks to the government’s frantic money printing.
https://www.zerohedge.com/news/2018-06-28/military-seizes-control-water-supplies-venezuelan-infrastructure-collapses
Now imagine you are a DPer…. you have set up a wonderful gravity fed water supply to your garden (as I did)…
Then you could become a water baron.
Actually, and to my surprise these do exist even in some of the most affluent European countries today, in fact one is sort of a global house hold name. But I doubt they would put up much resistance when the deeper gov/mil/security at some point starts looking around for the next top feudal career..
The baron employs guards that get to tax those who want water.
The challenge for the baron is keeping the guards from realizing he is useless.
Same as in many states today.
The sickness spreads
https://wolfstreet.com/2018/06/28/on-day-3-in-the-dow-walgreens-gets-hit-by-dropping-same-store-sales-offers-10-billion-in-financial-engineering-shares-plunge-10/
Buy stock back to raise prices. This should fix all problems.
this is not the biggest story of 2018, but just a “fun fact”…
fun fact: Bitcoin is down to $5,800…
I wonder how Venezuelas cryptocurrency is doing…
I found this chart. Volatile and heading downward.
https://coinmarketcap.com/currencies/petrodollar/
we are right at the halfway point of 2018…
what has been the biggest story of the year?
I have an idea, but I’m open to other opinions…
oh, can’t (won’t) resist…
BAU tonight, baby!
Oil prices spike 13% in a week. What the heck is going on?
http://money.cnn.com/2018/06/28/investing/oil-prices-trump-iran-opec/index.html
“I won’t slave for beggars pay.
Likewise, gold & jewels.
But I would slave to learn the way
To sink your ship of fools.”
— The Grateful Dead, Ship of Fools
From Wikipedia,
“People who have consumed ayahuasca report having mystical or religious experiences and spiritual revelations regarding their purpose on earth, the true nature of the universe as well as deep insight into how to be the best person they possibly can.[37] This is viewed by many as a spiritual awakening and what is often described as a rebirth.[38] In addition, it is often reported that individuals feel they gain access to higher spiritual dimensions and make contact with various spiritual or extra-dimensional beings who can act as guides or healers.[39]”
I read once that a skilled mathematician tried LSD type drugs and was able to solve a mathematical problem that he couldn’t understand normally. I think there is something to LSD and mathematical problem solving.
Also, one of the scientist that discovered the structure of DNA, said he took small doses of LSD to broaden his ability to think.
When I first heard of the connection between DMT and LSD and mathematics several years ago, I dismissed it as popycock. But I am not so sure anymore, there may be something to it. This is an interesting read regarding DMT and mathematics in the 60’s:
http://www.maps.org/news-letters/v18n1/v18n1-MAPS_8-10.pdf
I am at my most creative after half a bottle of red wine, and a big snort of ketamine…. chased with a couple of E pills…
Microdosing LSD and other psychedelics is a fad in the UK right now:
https://m.youtube.com/watch?v=Hbkgr3ZR2yA
This doesn’t sound all that different from psychiatrists prescribing drugs to help people in some way improve the quality of life they have. Or of emergency room and other physicians prescribing opioids so that people are less aware of the pain they have.
It seems like this has been going on for a long time. Native Americans used Peyote. In East Africa and the Arabian Peninsula, men chew khat (or qat).
A less advanced form of this is serving coffee for breakfast.
I knew a young girl in high school that fried her brain with lsd. Evidently had done it over 30 times and was only 16 years old. No thanks, I’ll wait until death for whatever “big reveals” there may be.
It’s a lot more too. Micheal Pollan has a new book out, but I haven’t read it yet. Ego death isn’t for sissies.
p.s I always like your comments
There has been three scientist’s who have won Nobel Prizes who have credited their discoveries to taking LSD..
We are like bugs stuck to the surface of a pond…. the only way to escape and get a broader perspective is via certain drugs…. or perhaps through intense meditation …. I am too ADD and lazy to meditate so for me it was the drug path
Maybe Hawking was right and the world we think we see and experience is a projection. And taking drugs lets us get a glimpse of the projector. How ironic would it be that someone tripping on LSD is more in touch with the “real” world!
The older I get and the more I read, the more I realize how incredibly complex and unpredictable the world is. One must always keep an open mind to appreciate all of what life has to offer.
When I had a glimpse of the projector …. and began to (I think) realize what was happening…. each time there was more clarity…. and it was frightening…. difficult to describe other than it was a massive machine… and I was an electron in it…. this world was exposed as entirely fake…. I stopped the experiments…. the fake world is far more appealing