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I predict that the world economy will shrink in the next 10 years. I think that this is bound to happen because of energy and debt limits the world economy is hitting. There are a variety of other factors involved, as well.
In this post, I will try to describe the physics-based limits that the economy is facing, related to diminishing returns of many kinds. The problem we are facing has sometimes been called “limits to growth,” or “overshoot and collapse.” Such changes tend to lead to a loss of “complexity.” They are part of the way economies evolve. I would also like to share some ideas on the changes that are likely to occur over the coming decade.
[1] The world economy is a tightly integrated physics-based system, which is experiencing diminishing returns in far more areas than just oil supply.
When extraction of a mineral takes place, usually the easiest (and cheapest) portion of the mineral deposit is extracted first. After the most productive portion is removed, the cost of extraction gradually increases. This process is described as “diminishing returns.” Generally, more energy is required to extract lower quality ores.
The economy is now reaching diminishing returns in many ways. All kinds of resources are affected, including fossil fuels, uranium, fresh water, copper, lithium, titanium, and other minerals. Even farmland is affected because with higher population, more food is required from a similar amount of arable land. Additional-cost efforts such as irrigation can increase food supply from available arable land.
The basic problem is two-fold: rising population takes place while the easiest to extract resources are depleting. The result seems to be Limits to Growth, as modeled in the 1972 book, “The Limits to Growth.” Academic research shows that problems such as those modeled (sometimes referred to as “overshoot and collapse”) have been extremely common throughout history.
Precisely how this problem unfolds varies according to the specifics of each situation. Growing debt levels and increasing wage disparity are common symptoms before collapse. Governments become vulnerable to losses in war and to being overthrown from within. Epidemics tend to spread easily because high wage disparity leads to poor nutrition for many low-wage workers. Dr. Joseph Tainter, in his book, “The Collapse of Complex Societies,” describes the situation as the loss of complexity, as a society no longer has the ability to support some of the programs it previously was able to support.
At the same time the existing economy is failing, the beginnings of new economies can be expected to start. In some sense, economies “evolve,” just as plants and animals evolve. New economies will eventually replace existing ones. These changes are a necessary part of evolution, caused by the physics of the biosphere.
In physics terms, economies are dissipative structures, just as plants, animals, and hurricanes are dissipative structures. All dissipative structures require energy supplies of some type(s) to grow and remain away from a dead state. These structures do not “live” endlessly. Instead, they come to an end and are often replaced by new, slightly different, dissipative structures.
[2] Over the next 10 years, the general direction of the economy will be toward contraction, rather than growth.
There are many indications that the world economy is hitting a turning point because of rising population and diminishing returns with respect to resource extraction. For example:
[a] Debt levels are very high in the US and other countries. A rising debt level can temporarily be used to pull an economy forward without adequate energy supplies because it indirectly gives workers and businesses more spendable income. This income can be used to work around the lack of inexpensive energy products of the preferred types in a variety of different ways:
- It can allow consumers to afford a higher price for existing energy products, if the additional funds get back to customers as higher incomes or lower taxes.
- It can allow businesses to find more efficient ways of using resources, such as ramping up international trade or building more efficient vehicles.
- It can allow the development of new energy products, such as nuclear power generation and electricity from wind and solar.
What we are finding now is that these new approaches tend to encounter bottlenecks of their own. For example, oil supply is sufficiently constrained that the current level of international trade no longer seems to be feasible. Also, wind and solar don’t directly replace oil; electricity based on wind turbines and solar panels can lead to blackouts. Furthermore, diminishing returns with respect to oil and other resources tends to get worse over time, leading to a need for ever more workarounds.
If at some point, extraction becomes more constrained and workarounds fail to provide adequate relief, added debt will lead to inflation rather than to hoped-for economic growth. Higher inflation is the issue that many advanced economies have been struggling with recently. This is an indication that the world has hit limits to growth.
[b] Because of low oil prices, companies are deciding to cut back new investments in extracting oil from shale, and likely elsewhere.
Figure 1 shows that oil prices rise and fall; they don’t rise endlessly. They rose after US oil production hit its first limits in 1970, but this was worked around by ramping up oil production elsewhere. Prices rose in the 2003 to 2008 period and then fell temporarily due to recession. They returned to a higher level in 2011 to 2013, but they have settled at a lower level since then.
One factor in the price decline since 2013 has been the production of US shale oil, adding to world oil supply. Another factor has been growing wage disparity, as workers from rich countries have indirectly begun to compete with workers from low-wage countries for many types of jobs. Low-wage workers cannot afford cars, motorcycles, or long-distance vacations, and this affordability issue is holding down oil demand.
US oil production from shale is in danger of collapsing during the next few years because prices are low, making new investment unprofitable for many producers. In fact, current prices for oil from shale are lower than shown on Figure 1, partly because US prices are a little lower than Brent, and partly because prices have fallen further in 2025. The recent price available for US WTI oil is only about $62 per barrel.
[c] World per capita coal production has fallen since 2014. A recent problem has been low prices.
Transportation costs are a major factor in the delivered price of coal. The reduced production of coal is at least partly the result of coal mines near population centers getting mined out, and the high cost of transporting coal from more distant mines. Today’s coal prices do not seem to be high enough to accommodate the higher costs relating to diminishing returns.
[d] In theory, added debt could be used to prop up oil and coal prices, but debt levels are already very high.
Besides the problem with inflation, mentioned in point [a], there are problems with debt levels becoming unmanageably high.
Figure 3 shows US government debt as a ratio to GDP. If we look at the period since 2008, there was an especially large increase in debt at the time of the 2007-2009 Financial Crisis and the 2020 Pandemic. The debt level has become so high that interest on the debt is likely to require tax revenue to rise endlessly. The underlying problem is needing to pay interest on the huge amount of outstanding debt.
Putting together [a], [b], [c], and [d], the world has a huge problem. As the world economy is currently organized, it is heavily dependent on both oil and coal. Oil is heavily used in agriculture and in transportation of all kinds (cars, trucks, trains, airplanes, and ships). Coal is especially used in steel and concrete making, and in metal refining. We don’t have direct replacements for coal and oil for these uses. Wind and solar are terribly deficient at their current state of development.
The laws of physics tell us that, given the world’s current infrastructure, a reduction in the availability of both crude oil and coal will lead to cutbacks in the production of many kinds of goods and services around the world. Thus, we should expect that GDP will contract, perhaps for a long period, until workarounds for our difficulties can be developed. Today’s wind turbines and solar panels cannot solve the problem for many reasons, one of which is that fact that production and transport of these devices is dependent upon coal and oil supplies.
Thus, without adequate oil and coal to meet the needs of the world’s growing population, the world economy is being forced to gradually contract.
[3] Overall living standards can be expected to fall rather than rise during the next decade.
A recent article in the Economist shows the following chart, based on an analysis by the United Nations:
Figure 4 shows the trend in the Human Development Index as level in 2023-24. I expect that the trend will gradually shift downward in 2024-2025 and beyond. Modern advances, such as the availability of potable water in homes and the availability of electricity 24 hours per day, will become increasingly less common.
The Economist article displaying Figure 4 notes that, so far, most of the drop in living standards has happened in the poorer countries of the world. These countries were hit harder by Covid restrictions than rich countries. For example, the drop in tourism had a greater impact on less advanced countries than on rich countries. Poor countries were also affected by a decline in export orders for luxury clothing.
Outside of poor countries, young people are already finding it difficult to find jobs that pay well. They are often burdened with debt relating to advanced education, making it difficult for them to have the same standard of living that their parents had. This trend is likely to start hitting older citizens, as well. Jobs will be available, but they won’t pay well. This problem will affect both young and old.
[4] Governments will be especially vulnerable to cutbacks.
History shows that when overshoot and collapse occur, governments are likely to experience severe difficulties, indirectly because many of their citizens are getting poorer. They require more government programs, but if wages tend to be low, the taxes they pay tend to be low, too.
Unfortunately, the kinds of cutbacks being undertaken by the Department of Government Efficiency (DOGE) are very much necessary to get payments by the US government down to a level that can be supported by taxes. Regardless of how successful the current DOGE program is, I expect a huge reduction in the number of individuals on the payroll of the US government, perhaps by 50% to 75%, in the next 10 years. I also expect major cutbacks in the funding for outside organizations, such as universities and the many organizations DOGE has targeted.
At some point, the US government will need to reduce or eliminate many types of benefit payments made now. One approach might be to try to send many kinds of programs, such as job loss protection, Medicaid, and Medicare, back to the states to handle. Of course, the states would also have difficulty paying for these benefits without huge tax increases.
[5] Ten years from now, universities and colleges will enroll far fewer students.
I expect that university enrollments will fall by as much as 75% over the next 10 years, partly because government funding for universities is expected to fall. With less funding, tuition and fees are likely to be even higher than they are today. At the same time, jobs for university graduates that pay well will become less available. These considerations will lead fewer students to enroll in four-year programs. Shorter, more targeted education teaching specific skills are likely to become more popular.
There will still be some high-paying jobs available, requiring university degrees. One such area may be in finding answers to our energy and resource problems. Such research will likely be carried out by a smaller number of researchers than are active today because some current areas of research will be discarded as having too little potential benefit relative to the cost involved. Any approach considered will need to succeed with, at most, a tiny amount of government funding.
High paying jobs may also be available to a few students who plan to be the “wheeler-dealers” of the world. Some of these wheeler-dealer types will want to be the ones founding companies. Others will want to run for public office. They may be able to succeed, as well. They may want to study specialized tracks to advance their career goals. Or they may want to choose institutions where they can make contacts with people who can help them in pursuing their career goals.
For most young people, I expect that four-year university degrees will increasingly be viewed as a waste of time and money.
[6] In a shrinking economy, debt defaults will become an increasing problem.
A growing economy is very helpful in allowing financial institutions to prosper. With growth, future earnings of businesses tend to be higher than past earnings. These higher earnings make it possible repay both the borrowed amount and the required interest. With growth, there is little need to lay off employees. Thus, the employees have a reasonable chance to repay mortgage loans and car loans according to agreed-upon terms.
If an economy is shrinking, overhead becomes an ever-larger share of total revenues. This makes profits harder to achieve and may make it necessary to lay off employees. These laid-off employees are more likely to default on their outstanding loans. As debt defaults rise, interest rates charged by lenders tend to rise to compensate for the greater default risk. The higher interest rates make debt repayment for future borrowers even more difficult.
All these issues are likely to lead to financial crises, as debt defaults become more common.
[7] As debt defaults rise, banks tend to fail. This can lead to hyperinflation or deflation.
In a shrinking economy, the big question when banks fail is, “Will governments bail out the banks?”
If governments bail out the failing banks, there is a tendency toward inflation because the bailouts increase the money supply available to citizens, but not the quantity of goods available for purchase. If enough banks fail, the tendency may be toward hyperinflation–way too much money available to purchase very few goods and services.
If no government bailouts are available, the tendency is toward deflation. Without bailouts, the problem is that fewer banks are available to lend to citizens and businesses. As a result, fewer people can afford to buy homes and vehicles using debt, and fewer businesses can take out loans to purchase needed supplies. These changes lead to less demand for finished goods. This change in demand can indirectly be expected to affect commodity prices, as well, including oil prices. With low prices, some suppliers may go out of business, making any supply problem worse.
Regardless of whether bailouts are attempted or not, on average, citizens can be expected to be getting poorer and poorer as time goes on. This occurs because with a shrinking economy, fewer goods and services will be made. Unless the population shrinks at the same rate, individual citizens will find themselves getting poorer and poorer.
[8] Expect more tariffs and more conflicts among countries.
Without enough oil for transportation, the quantity of imported goods must be cut back. A tariff is a good way of doing this. If one country starts raising tariffs, the temptation is for other countries to raise tariffs in return. Thus, the overall level of tariffs can be expected to rise in future years.
Without enough goods and services for everyone to maintain their current standard of living, there will be a definite tendency for more conflict to occur. However, I doubt that the result will be World War III. For one thing, the West seems to have inadequate ammunition to fight a full-scale conventional war. For another, the nuclear bombs that are available are valuable for providing fuel for our nuclear power plants. It makes no sense to use them in war.
[9] Expect an increasing share of empty shelves, as time goes on.
High tech goods are especially likely to disappear from shelves. Replacement parts for automobiles may also be difficult to find, especially before an aftermarket of locally manufactured parts appears.
[10] Interest rates are likely to stay at their current level or increase to a higher level.
The high level of borrowing by governments and others makes lenders reluctant to lend unless the interest rates are high. It should also be noted that current interest rates are not high relative to historical standards. The world has been spoiled in recent years with artificially low interest rates, made possible by Quantitative Easing and other manipulations.
[11] Clearly, this list is not exhaustive.
The world economy has gone through two major disruptions in recent years, one in 2008, and one in 2020. Very unusual changes such as these are quite possible again.
We don’t know how soon new economies will begin to evolve. Eric Chaisson, a physicist who has researched this issue, says that there is a tendency for ever more complex, energy-dense systems to evolve over time. This would suggest that an even more advanced economy may be possible in the future.
Note: I am also publishing this post on Substack. At this point, it is still sort of an experiment. Comments sometimes don’t post well on WordPress. This will give readers a different option for viewing posts. Using Substack, my posts may reach a new audience as well.
Some of you may receive an email about my Substack post. I put in some email addresses back in January 2024 when I put up a post on Substack earlier. Subscriptions will continue to be free both places. This is a direct link to my new post. https://gailtverberg.substack.com/p/economic-contraction-coming-right
“A key advantage of renewable energy is that it can power the energy needs of mining operations in remote areas, where the cost of building the infrastructure required to hook the mine up to the grid network or building a conventional power station would be significant.” ?
https://www.wfw.com/articles/mining-renewable-energy-a-greener-way-forward/#:~:text=%22A%20key%20advantage%20of%20renewable,power%20station%20would%20be%20significant.%22
The first example given in this article is thermal solar energy, which is a whole lot less intermittent than electricity from solar panels:
This next example would not work in remote areas, without other electricity:
The examples given, other than the first one, would not work in remote areas without a whole lot of complexity (and even then, it is not clear that they would work). Because of these issues, the author proposes Virtual Power Purchase Agreements:
Thus, with enough financialization added, the author thinks that renewables will work off grid. I think that solar thermal energy might work some places, but otherwise, solar is an add-on to grid electricity.
Paul Craig Roberts asks very salient questions in his latest post: “Lenin’s Question Is the Question of Our Time”
tl;dr Putin wants to avoid a global war but is being pushed into war, so expect war!
https://www.paulcraigroberts.org/2025/06/05/lenins-question-is-the-question-of-our-time/
But how do you have a war, without adequate weapons? No one really wants a nuclear war, but those are mostly the weapons we have. And we need those warheads to power our nuclear reactors.
“Putin wants to avoid a global war but is being pushed into war, so expect war!”
oh WW3 blah blah blah…
there is a minor war right now, in a place called Ukraine.
what region will be next for that so-called “global war”?
I seriously doubt that Vlad the Great will start another war elsewhere, though the psychowoketards in The West are going innnsane with every year of failure to take down Russia, so who knows.
This article is very anti-Biden, but I can see the point:
https://realclearwire.com/articles/2025/06/04/a_warriors_homecoming_trumps_push_to_end_veteran_homelessness_1114377.html
A Warrior’s Homecoming: Trump’s Push to End Veteran Homelessness
“How MI6 Helped HTS Seize Syria
On May 12th, US ambassador to Syria 2011 – 2014 Robert Ford gave a talk to the Baltimore Council on Foreign Affairs. Over the course of his oratory, he issued a bombshell disclosure – in 2023, a British “non-governmental organisation” specialised in “conflict resolution” made him an extraordinary offer. They sought Ford’s personal assistance in transforming Hayat Tahrir al-Sham – the Al Qaeda and ISIS-offshoot that now claims to rule Syria – from ‘terrorists’ into politicians.
The NGO was particularly interested in rebranding Ahmed Hussein Sharaa, also known as Abu Mohammad Jolani, who is now Syria’s self-appointed President. Captured as a senior Al Qaeda commander in Mosul, Iraq in 2006, he was inexplicably released from US custody in 2011, just as the foreign-fomented Syrian “revolution” was brewing. Ford explained he met Sharaa on two separate occasions, first in September 2023, then in January 2024 after HTS had seized Damascus. Reportedly, he was completely unrepentant about his militant past:”?
https://www.kitklarenberg.com/p/how-mi6-helped-hts-seize-syria
According to the article:
There is a lot more in this article, as well.
Trump rejected Musk’s guy who was to head NASA and Musk is having a falling out
Guess whoever is behind Trump did not have confidence on Musk’s work, unlike some people who think he is a Messiah.
They would know better than some random person who never went anywhere space rockets.
Jared Isaacman… I was listening to him last night for a few minutes. He has the right idea, as he is saying lets do many inexpensive projects, and let a few fail. Forget about deep space combustion engines, and lets concentrate on nuclear propulsion instead.
Essentially, lets work on the tech, and get that viable before talking about grande plans. He makes sense.
Why does Donald Trump refuse to do his job?
Is trump running scared? Of who, of what?
There are a lot of big groups that need to be pleased.
Voters need to be pleased. Farmers need to be pleased. People who believe that the CDC always does right need to be pleased. It is not possible to take a 180 degree turn without getting a lot of people unhappy.
Let’s see. He campaigned as the Peace candidate but surrounded himself with Warhawks. He can’t do much about Gaza cause Miriam Adelson gave his campaign a couple hundred million. Can’t do much about Iran cause of Israel and Adelson. His warhawks are beholden to the Israel lobby.
He got too cute with his deal making and blew peace between Russia and Ukraine because of listening to his warhawks. Now it’s his war. Tariffs in this environment according to many economists was not a good idea. We’ll see if he can fight his way out of the mess he himself created.
it has largely devolved into a repeat of his first term – the permanent state is running the show
It is certainly looking that way. He had the chance to choose cabinet members twice who were anti-war but chose Keith Kellogg, a warhawk. Marco Rubio another warhawk who has shown an animosity towards Russia. Pete Hegseth is another warhawk.
He plays golf and is friends with Senator Lindsey Graham, Uber warhawk who is John McCain’s successor.
He tends to listen to the wrong people and that undermines his goals. It happened in his first term as well by picking John Bolton and Mike Pence and it looks like it is a repeat in his 2nd term.
Kevin expains that it is now the MIC’s turn to experience the pain of sanctions. Hey Lockhhed, I can move some crypto for ya.
Will be very interesting to see how this turns out and over what timeframe.
The title of this video is “Desperate companies are smuggling critical metals out of China as export rules tighten”
Even shipments to countries other than the US (for example, countries in Europe) are being held up because it is hard to show that they will not ultimately be shipped to the US.
Indian buyers are buying whole engines, rather than trying to buy the minerals separately, because of this issue.
Need to explain explicitly who is the ultimate buyer, and what they will be used for. China can decide whether or not to accept.
This is another way of shutting off markets.
You know one market that never gets shut off? The market for illegal drugs.
Drug addiction remains a serious problem that is widely underreported because many “elite workers” use them. Drug users usually don’t want their drugs confiscated.
There are old people alive today who remember a time where drug use was much less prevalent. Most of the literature online makes it look like drug addiction was always a significant social problem…the ancient Egyptians sailed to the Americas and took nicotine and cocaine back with them…. that sort of thing.
Did you have to do the Boxer war 170 years ago? this is payback for that, and it is in kind.
I doubt the large expanse of drugs since the 1950s or 1960s was started by the Chinese.
No, it probably was the CIA, but they piggibacked onto it.
China can’t win in a “regular” World War III, but it can do other things to try to bring the system down. (We have already had covid, which doesn’t seem to have been just a China plan.)
https://www.zerohedge.com/food/chinese-nationals-caught-smuggling-agroterrorism-fungus-americas-breadbasket
Chinese Nationals Caught Smuggling “Agroterrorism” Fungus Into America’s Breadbasket
We now know that introducing a new virus doesn’t work very well, for very long. A new virus can only kill off a small share of its victims, or it will have no place to spread to. Mutations over time allow viruses to spread farther and faster, but with less virulence.
Agriculture often uses selected hybrids with little variability. I don’t know how much difference this makes. If farmers used “seed saving” instead of hybrid seed, it would seem like the impact of the new fungus would go away quickly.
I remember very well the food crisis of the 1970s of the “blight” of Russia wheat crop.
In the 1970s, the Soviet Union faced significant wheat blight issues, particularly due to droughts and poor agricultural practices, which led to crop failures and a reliance on imports. The “Great Grain Robbery”, a massive grain purchase from the United States, occurred in 1972, but was followed by a five-year grain trade agreement in 1975 to secure higher prices for US grain, according to Cold War in the Heartland.
As a matter of fact the book “Shattering …makes the case of how bankrupt we truly are
Shattering: Food, Politics, and the Loss of Genetic Diversity Paperback – June 1, 1990
by Cary Fowler (Author), Pat Mooney (Author)
Large-scale agriculture has come to favor uniformity in food crops. More than 7,000 U.S. apple varieties once grew in American orchards; 6,000 of them are no longer available. Every broccoli variety offered through seed catalogs in 1900 has now disappeared. As the international genetics supply industry absorbs seed companies—with nearly one thousand takeovers since 1970—this trend toward uniformity seems likely to continue; and as third world agriculture is brought in line with international business interests, the gene pools of humanity’s most basic foods are threatened.
The irony of it all is the fact that when genetic diversity is needed develop a wheat variety to resist a blight, the industry takes the gene pool from remote, undeveloped villages in the third world that preserved their folks heritage and are not compensated at all for their efforts.
Having been in academia, I would caution that the above is likely simply a well-intentioned researcher just not paying proper attention to rules. Her official university work (postdoc) was on the fungus and she had to bring in these different strains to study them, and she didn’t jump through the proper hoops. She *already* studies this fungus at the university where she works, this was simply another strain. The presentation on ZH of this issue is false – this fungus already causes blight in the US for the last century.
You raise interesting points.
It was hard for me to see how this particular strain could be identified so quickly as so unusual. Zerohedge may not work hard to find out if there is some hidden story.
>> It was hard for me to see how this particular strain could be identified so quickly as so unusual.
The woman probably just told the investigators exactly what it was and where she got it, after initially lying because she was trying to avoid trouble.
I concur. and jumping through the proper hoops these days takes forever. you email the department in charge, they send an automated reply that they will get back to you at their earliest convenience. you call them, they do not pick up the phone. but the fungus needs to get into a fridge in a timely manner. zerohedge is as bad as any mainstream rag, totaly sold out and making a few pennies pushing the trump is great narrative.
I suspect this is US propaganda.
This is another possibility.
Two interesting stories from Zero Hedge Chinese national trying to smuggle in fungus to effect U.S. food security and Saudi wants to super size production… they are broke! China is in trouble too about to fall
I am afraid that a whole lot of countries are in trouble and about to fall.
Since every country is participating in growth-limiting projects like sustainability, the cor vid response ,and now embargos, they are all facing financial problems.
Sounds like you really hate the Chinese regime.
I have been saying that uranium prices don’t go up enough, for long enough, to encourage more uranium supply.
The WSJ has an article up. I would conclude that the problem is that regardless of the talk, adding more nuclear reactors doesn’t boost the need for uranium for quite a few years. Prices don’t jump up now, in response to something that only “might” be needed in the future.
https://www.wsj.com/finance/commodities-futures/why-trumps-nuclear-plans-have-so-far-failed-to-boost-uranium-prices-7154558d
Of course, it takes a many, many years to get new uranium production operating. There also need to be upgrading facilities. But neither of these can be built unless the market raises prices enough to cover the cost of all of these things, in advance of the time that the additional uranium is needed. The upgrading likely takes considerable fossil fuel use, also. If this is not available, there is a problem.
And somehow, someone needs to be paying for all of these proposed nuclear reactors. We in Georgia have been paying for years in our monthly electricity bills for the cost of the construction the nuclear power plants that are only now going into operation. In places where there is not a “utility” pricing method that allows a utility to collect money in advance of when the whole system goes into place, advance funding by future users of the system is close to impossible.
If we are adding nuclear, we really need to be adding a whole system, and this whole cost has to be paid for as we go along, instead of simply being added to government debt because governments are terribly indebted now.
There is also a different issue that is not brought up in the WSJ. There are hopes that uranium for the new nuclear power plants could be obtained by recycling spent fuel. If this should happen, the need for additional uranium could be brought way down. The availability of this option makes the need for more uranium mines less certain. This approach would also use fossil fuels, and it would need to somehow be financed in advance, probably without government funding.
While recycling has been tried in several places, so far, my strong impression is that it has not worked well. France has especially tried this approach. I am not sure that there has been a good cost accounting.
Ed says Russia cannot defend itself.
I am not in a position to say whether that is true or not, but in my opinion that is not relevant anymore.
The time to do so was in 1990s or as late as 2015 when Russia was much weaker and it still had resources.
10 years were wasted for nothing, and Russia’s resources are more depleted. Even if the West somehow gains its resources, which seem to be quite unlikely now, it is a moot point since the point of no return was crossed on around 2018-19.
Since then, no matter how some delusionists might try to deny it, humanity has entered a period of unstoppable decline caused by resource depletion.
This was just posted over at another website that confirms your statement in more detail
“zip on June 4, 2025 at 12:15 pm
Hello Pan some thoughts on ‘raw materials’
The tipping point of the “maximum transition” –
Why the raw materials weapon is an illusion
1. China is being framed as the enemy, but the real opponent is matter itself
In the world of political communication, threatening scarcity quickly becomes a strategic tool. China is said to be using its rare earth metals as a weapon against the United States and Europe. The Western media is full of warnings: production losses, geopolitical blackmail, a new Cold War – this time not with missiles, but with magnets. But beneath this threatening backdrop lies a more uncomfortable truth: it is not the Chinese who are putting pressure on the energy transition.
It is the raw materials themselves.
2. The illusion that has persisted until now is that of scalability. As if the wind turbine, electric vehicle, data centre and battery storage industries could be scaled up indefinitely, as long as the policy is favourable and the investments keep flowing. What is rarely mentioned, however, is that these technologies are built on elements that are by definition scarce, difficult to extract and, in many cases, hardly recyclable. The energy transition is eating away at its own foundations – faster than we can replenish them.
3. China controls 80 to 90 per cent of rare earth metal refining. But that does not make it an all-powerful player. The country itself is struggling with depletion, water stress, pollution problems and domestic industrial demand that is growing every year. Super magnets wear out. Motors age. And in many cases, recycling is hardly feasible, either economically or ecologically. Threatening export restrictions is therefore not an attack, but rather a form of self-preservation.
4. The Western fixation on China as a threat obscures a much more fundamental problem: the chains have become too complex to be controlled by any one nation. Covid and the semiconductor crisis have already proven this. One missing metal, one failed permit, and an entire production line comes to a standstill. The transition is not the sum of factories, but a fragile choreography of hundreds of steps spread across dozens of countries.
5. Once you realise this, the picture changes. China is not an enemy, but a mirror. It shows us how dependent we have become on physically unsustainable chains. Anyone who still thinks that “autonomy” is a matter of national pride is overlooking the fact that the planet itself is not cooperating.
We are at the moment of maximum transition. Not in the sense of success, but in terms of peak growth. What comes next is not acceleration, but an inevitable setback.
The question is no longer whether China has us “in a stranglehold”. The question is: what happens when the Earth’s grip tightens? Then the systems will grind to a halt, one by one.
6 Sector by sector: the silent implosion
– The automotive industry The transition to electric vehicles requires a complete reinvention of supply chains. Lithium, cobalt, graphite and neodymium are indispensable, but not available on a scale that can feed a billion vehicles. The EV promise was based on continuous growth; what remains is prioritisation, reuse and possibly even the end of mass mobility as a matter of course.
– Telecommunications and digitisation Every transmission mast, server and fibre optic cable requires copper, tantalum and super magnets. With AI, cloud storage and streaming, consumption is growing explosively – but the infrastructure is facing voltage spikes, material shortages and an energy imbalance. Digitisation will soon shrink, not because of policy, but because of physical shortages.
– Nuclear energy Supposedly the “backup” for the transition, nuclear power plants are major consumers of concrete, steel, rare metals and capital. Uranium reserves are finite, enrichment is energy-intensive and construction takes decades. The idea of a nuclear energy renaissance is coming up against the wall of time and materials.
– Wind and solar energy Without neodymium, dysprosium and silver, there would be no turbines or high-efficiency panels. The renewable promise relies on exponential expansion, but is hampered by limits in mining capacity, grid stability and the storage technology needed to make fluctuating generation usable.
-. The defence sector Missile systems, drones, communication networks: all heavily dependent on supermaterials that can often only be mined in a few countries. Tomorrow’s military readiness does not depend on budgets, but on rare alloys.
7. What follows is a world that slowly unravels. Not a sudden crash, but a steady erosion of certainties. A post-transition reality in which simplicity and deceleration are not moral choices, but material necessities.”
https://climateandeconomy.com/2025/06/04/4th-june-2024-todays-round-up-of-economic-news/
So, is the music stopping or just slowing or will it end in a “BIG BANG” or as Gail hints at, a divine intervention? Fascinating possibilities 💭…. Maybe all 3
Commenter “zip” makes some very worthwhile points. I like the statement,
“China is not an enemy, but a mirror. It shows us how dependent we have become on physically unsustainable chains.”
It is hard for us to see this. Our supply and demand system for pricing commodities doesn’t allow prices to rise sufficiently to allow the continued mining of scarce commodities. (Same issues as for uranium that I outlined in another comment.) With high prices, consumers cannot afford things like food. The whole system doesn’t work.
Funding of nuclear power plants doesn’t work. There are a whole lot of other things that don’t work, if we are trying to ramp up scarce resources.
Really difficult to see how humans are going to leave the planet Earth without using a lot more energy, per person, than we are currently using right now. I don’t see a few thousand solar panels in outer space providing that amount of energy.
The other side to the same coin is that the Western nations are like fat tattoed obnoxious drunkards in a bar spoiling for a fight and trying to threaten each other when they can barely stand up to begin with. The US, China, and Europe cannot afford to fight a major military war anymore and they know it. So alternative means like trying to destabilize economies, terrorism, sabotage, using proxies etc. Maybe lobbing a few missiles until those run out. The US has already punched itself out trying to bully Yemen and the Houthis. But for now, arming the Philippines and other proxies trying to maintain the Potemkin village of military might is already falling flat on its face as the US and Europe have run out of even junk weapons to send UKR.
Costly logistics, lack of trained / supplied military, and too much debt for the traditional continental land-based wars. I suspect Russia can effectively fight a war of attrition because it doesn’t have to project power beyond its borders and still has a ready supply of raw materials, even if it is not able to access them as efficiently as Western “powers.”
Whoever said that future wars will be fought with sticks and stones may be right.
Post on the huge problem that waste from wind turbines and solar panels creates at the end of their lifetimes.
Wasting Away in Wind-and-Solarville
Regarding solar energy:
Regarding wind turbines:
Several years ago, Steve St Angelo who runs the website SRS Rocco Report.did an expose on what happens when the turbines meet their end. He also noted the thousands of birds killed by these turbine blades each year.
Also, each turbine blade is slowly being degraded by flying dust in the air. Minute microscopic bits of fiberglass shower the landscape, contaminating it…almost forever.
Agree on solar and wind.
Were one to take the elemental C from a coal plant or a natural gas plant, put it in one place, how large a cube? Well, at 70% for a large coal plant, one would have a 299 cubic foot cube of C. For Natural gas, similar plant 217 Cu feet of C. Now, look at the CO2 volume. CO2 4700 cubic feet, for coal, 3550 cubic feet for natural gas. It can be compressed and that would increase the emissions about 6%. Love Copilot, it can do so much research and calculate answers leaving a trail which is subject to verification. It is not in this case a narrative. We shall leave out the heavy metals, particulate matter, SO2, NOx,Hg, etc. Gives meaning to “Not in my backyard.”
Going further, skipping the details, a similar number of turbines would have an annual volume of 6530 cubic feet annually buried carbon from the blades, about the size of a small house.
Leaving out the details and intermittency, solar has less waste than a coal plant over the life of panels.
Which do you prefer? Or does one curse the darkness? Waste not want not is a very difficult project.
There is something about a cubic quantity of elements which is so elemental. Think of a cubic mile of Pt
Dennis L.
What we are attempting to sequester is not “carbon,” but “carbon dioxide.” Its volume is hugely greater. Building the pipes to transport carbon dioxide away is an expensive project.
Solar panels tend to pollute the water supply where they are discarded. An article I referred to recently:
https://www.realclearinvestigations.com/articles/2025/05/15/wasting_away_in_wind-and-solarville_1110296.html
It says:
Just move our pollution problem to very poor countries.
Berman’s latest “Why Analysts Misjudge Oil’s Future”
Excerpt: My own view leans toward a more balanced path—roughly $66 in 2025 and $68 in 2026. The future isn’t likely to follow a clean curve. Instead, prices will reflect an uneasy push-pull between restrained supply and mounting geopolitical risk.
The problem with conventional models is that they reflect a world that no longer exists. Built on the assumptions of stable globalization—predictable trade, coordinated policy, and integrated markets—these tools now struggle to capture a fractured reality. The old frameworks can’t price what they can’t see: erratic government behavior, fragile trade flows, and rising geopolitical volatility. Markets are responding to uncertainty with bearish pessimism.
https://www.artberman.com/blog/why-analysts-misjudge-oils-future/
Art Berman sees oil prices as being mostly influenced by oil supply. He sees supply as tight. So, he says
” I see far more room for higher prices than most analysts are prepared to admit.”
I think oil prices are more influenced by the world debt bubble and how it holds up. It needs to keep inflating, to even keep prices level. The is part of the reason for Trump’s big beautiful bill. Keep the pork coming, and the additional debt will hold up demand.
But if the forces saying, “The debt is way too high already,” somehow succeed, or if the “bond market suddenly breaks,” then we could see a big drop in prices. On the other hand, if banks start collapsing, and Trump starts bailing them all out, then we could see prices of all commodities headed higher.
But prices can never stay high for long, because of affordability issues. So at most we get spikes in prices.
Will Russia be able to defend itself? My guess is no.
https://ibb.co/kg5bddK4
The elders want the freedom and democracy of yeltsin 90’s back .
I am surprised that dictator Putler : ) has lasted this long.
They want the gadaffi , soleimani etc treatment for him.
It is not clear that any country can defend itself. That would be a reason not to have an international WWIII.
Perhaps increasingly have civil wars. Some of them will be wars among different religious groups.
If the answer is really no then Putin will get sacked and a hardliner will take his place and at that point all bets are off. I’ve read today that France has OK’d giving nukes to Germany. It could be a problem since Taurus missiles supposedly are in Ukraine.
Who ‘cares’ about nuclear weapons?
These days, medium to large countries seem to have access to hypersonic missiles. Imagine the consequences of one of those striking Sellafield, Cap de la Hague, Hanford, Oak Ridge or the equivalent nuclear dumps in Russia. It potentially makes a country – or part of a large country – uninhabitable for decades. Probably 7-8 countries have establishments which are as full of radioactive waste as Sellafield or Hanford are.
Then go a step down in severity from the ‘reprocessing’ or ‘weapons’ plants. ‘Just’ hitting a nuclear power station would release more radioactivity than the (small) bombs at Hiroshima or Nagasaki did. 32 countries have ‘commercial’ nuclear power plants in use.
Overall, we may have bigger problems than worrying about nuclear warheads.
Ok, Dave, me worry….
The Nuclear Bomb is Back!
From the site Energy Skeptic
Preface. If you are not worried about nuclear war anymore, you should be. We have accidentally come close so many times.
You may not be nervous about Trump, but you should be. Here is some of what this book had to say about him, and there is more below:
https://energyskeptic.com/2025/the-nuclear-bomb-is-back/#more-15843
Trump is about to lose his fight with the deep state. Neocon warmongers are trying to bully him into war, both with Iran and to further support Ukraine. The Republican party members of the Deep State are sabotaging the budget with pork. Trumps presidency momentum hangs in the balance. IMHO he has to take bold action against the domestic forces arrayed against him
Regardless, we are on the verge of huge changes…unfortunately desperate wars…the 4th turning keeps on spinning as populations awake in Europe and civil war is on the horizon there.
Desperate Europe turns to facism where Russia will now face the nazis in Germany, France and the UK.
Hopefully, Putin and Russia can deal a serious non-nuclear response to Ukraine.
I guess keep on keeping on the way they are.
It is amazing the restraint they have shown. It shows Putin must have significant back and support internally.
“Who ‘cares’ about nuclear weapons?”
Well obviously a lot more people than you and they are all geopolitical experts, former Army commander and CIA analysts.
Me, I personally don’t care. Those hypersonic weapons are also capable of carrying nuclear warheads. I personally wish that there was a global nuclear war to rid the human race off the face of the earth. We truly deserve extinction.
Bravo Rodster,
We may be too extreme to be members
What does Extinction Rebellion want? The group describes itself as an international “non-violent civil disobedience” movement. It says life on Earth is in crisis and facing a mass extinction. It wants governments to declare a “climate and ecological emergency” and take immediate action.Apr 14, 2022
https://www.bbc.co.uk
What is Extinction Rebellion and what does it want? – BBC News
Yeah, Right…sure they will..hold on
Russia could obliterate Ukraine and hostile western backers with a snap of a finger, and I’m not even talking about nuclear weapons here.
But it doesn’t want to do that, for two reasons.
The first is that it honestly considers Ukraine and the Ukrainian people as its own, Russia cherrishes them and wants to do minimal damage. It sees the current situation as “Western powers took control of our brothers and are using them against us”.
The second one is that, contrary to NATO, it doesn’t want an all-out World War. Russia wants to keep it regional, Ukraine-only, and end it before it grows.
But, Ukraine and NATO don’t care, they are provoking and will provoke even more. They want Russia to attack a NATO member country, they want to escalate, they want to drag the US into this, they want no peace, they want to win no matter the cost.
And we know why. They want Russia’s oil, coal, gas, minerals, that’s what they’ve been wanting since the fall of the USSR. And also, doing that would kill China, as a bonus.
Thing is, how much will Russia take from this provocations? How much it can take? They’ll end up losing for real if nothing is done. But then, what should be done? I don’t have the answers.
Amen!
Probably yes. It has the largest military industrial base in the world, and also the most advanced. It is not escalating but could. It is not a win, IMHO, unless it also destroys the NATO bases in Poland, Romania and Finland.
Donald Trumpstein , the adelson errand boy, said that Putin was playing with fire just days before America backed ukraine drone attack .
Benjamin Butcheryahu said the same about Assad the night before their ISISr4el and CIA Qaeda headchoppers started their takeover of Syria .
Just saying…
Ukraine claims 40 planes, so we can assume maybe 4 or 5. Ghost of Kiev and all that. According to Russian sources, Russia loses ~100 soldiers a day, so a few civilians once a year is manageable.
Here are the Ukrainian losses, as claimed by Russia. About 1500 a day. If I understand what’s going on, this war will end in 2025 unless something big changes (NATO entry to the war, reduced mobilization age, etc).
https://mskvremya.ru/article/2023/1520-poteri-ukrainy-za-vremya-spetsoperatsii
And the ships in the black sea and the mediterranean .. ukies exagerate but the russians downplay everything now , this was not in their initial plan.
NATO no longer takes Putin’s red lines seriously. Maybe Prighozin was right after all .
They should have gone in with full force , take Kiev and unconditional surrender . They were left half way like in Syria , which after 2 years of operations , they let the American army cross the Iraqi border and seize the oil wells and wheat fields in the east of the euphrates , which coupled with sanctions , strangled the economy .
When liberating that area was more of a priority than Aleppo . Then they went on patrols in Idlib with Erdogan’s snake .
In the end the cripled Syrian state was left without its most resource rich region that sealed its fate , given arab sunni tendency to backstab when offered a good sum of petrodollars from the americans milking cows bedouins in the Persian gulf.
And by the way, russian civilians die every week now , cross border areas are bombarded with drones constantly.
I disagree on many counts:
>> NATO no longer takes Putin’s red lines seriously. Maybe Prighozin was right after all .
It’s less about “being taken seriously”, more about simply establishing facts on the ground.
>> They should have gone in with full force , take Kiev and unconditional surrender .
The long-term problem for Russia is that there are hostile elements among the Ukrainian population. If they “took” Kiev, they would have to fight an insurgency even if Z signed documents of surrender. Their current approach just kills everyone who picks up a weapon against them and is much more effective in targeting the hostile elements and reducing the long-term thread.
>> In the end the cripled Syrian state
Yes, a loss for Russian but moreso Iranian power. But Russia has to prioritize. Now it is a problem for the USA to resolve Turkey-Israel friction.
>> And by the way, russian civilians die every week now , cross border areas are bombarded with drones constantly.
True, but the war is not being won or lost on that score. Terrorism will not compel Russia to submit to USA/NATO/Ukraine.
typo: reducing the long-term *threat*.
There is no friction , its all theatrics for the peasants , like erdogan oscar performance about gaza.
One of The first things the Al-Jolani turcomongol gangs from central asia did after taking over Damascus is to disarm the palestinian militias.
Israel has already advanced past the golan whitout oposition and seized a very important aquifer , after demolising all syrian military infrastructure in their biggest Air operation ever
Turkey doesnt care , they are gonna share the spoils .
Israel biggest oil suplier is turkey’ s pet Azerbaijan trough Turkeys ceyhan pipeline. They collaborated militarily in Karabakh against Armenia , Azerbaijan used Israeli drones .
And finally , the helicopter crash of the president of Iran near the border with Azerbaijan , was not an accident if you know what I mean …
Even if you’re right, it’s the least of the issues we’ve discussed.
I also found Trump’s comments highly suspicious.
2 days and no one sent this link ?
https://thehonestsorcerer.medium.com/so-this-is-how-the-oil-age-ends-9b5c50c9864c
One quote:
That is an interesting way of putting the situation. I think the situation might also (or perhaps better) be described as a wage-distribution-getting-hollowed-out problem. Fewer and fewer people (especially young people) could afford stand-alone homes. Higher education debt, without higher wages to pay for this debt, became a problem.
The Honest Sorcerer describes the upcoming situation with more or less the declining EROEI view, with rising population added as an issue. Everyone gets poorer–much poorer by 2050. No mention of war, failing governments, or collapse.
Looking back now, the past is more distant than my future’s end. Looked at my grandfather’s sister, notice in paper regarding her 80th birthday celebrated working at a regular job in the sewing room of Lutheran Hospital. She started work at 7:00 AM and worked 5-6 days per week, this at 80 years. She found time for six children. Her home at that time was the same as her parents when she first came to the country although larger by one room, originally was two rooms, the outhouse had been retired. She passe at 94 after retiring at 90. Twenty grandchildren and 10 great grandchildren. It is interesting to see how active she was socially, Ladies Aid, VFW(three sons in WWII), Senior Citizens club and her church.
Perhaps we are not nearly social enough, it takes time. How did this woman find time for six children, work, church and ladies’ aid to boot? It seems to have been a rich life. There was much gossip in my youth and we did discriminate; the Lutherans and the Catholics, in my time this came from the pulpit. But, on the bright side no riots.
Does being part of a continuity of life give some peace? Will the woman who pilots an F-22 still be flying at 90? Some skills are interesting, but after all that effort to go supersonic, what skills and relationships does one have going forward?
Now, back to your regularly scheduled doom.
Dennis L.
( Hope Gail does not cut this off)
One word. Church.
She was part of a community. That helps.
In the old version, Ladies Aid had a Bible Study, led by the pastor. More recently, meetings would be led by women. Sometimes the groups have projects to help overseas groups. I was in group at one time that made very light weight quilts for people in Africa to use as room dividers or covers.
Sometimes, there were (and perhaps still are) smaller groups called “Circles” that met in homes of members once a month, doing some similar things, generally with coffee and some dessert served. These groups have been a way that close-knit groups of ladies are formed.
I had forgotten circles, my grandmother was in one. The family church was my grandfather’s church.
Mention is made of today’s young affording single family homes. As I have mentioned frequently, my paternal grandmother had a small apartment in our home, her bathroom was such she could do her business on the toilet and easily bush her teeth in the sink.
We have the internet which I suspect is a time sucker, but we have social groups such as this one. Reality has advantages, gossip is perhaps less harmful than instant news and on YouTube I am starting to wonder what is real and what is AI. Gail’s site is real. Gail started her own site, some pretty sharp and interesting people around here.
I like the place.
Dennis L.
Sorry forgot to put the link .
https://resourceinsights.blogspot.com/2025/05/the-lure-of-convenience-why-national.html
Britain is putting everyone’s data in a central place, for all government services. What could go wrong? Kurt Cobb has a good article. He makes a some good points. One is that electricity may be down for long time.
The first comment that someone makes to the post is
National Digital ID + Central Bank Digital Currency = tyranny.
Most of what is being discussed in this blog is not relevant to the average person. Most of what is being is too abstract for the average person.
What is relevant to the average person is competition. What the average person can relate to is competition.
Is all fair in love and war?
https://www.nytimes.com/2009/09/13/sports/13dreger.html
Can there really be any rules when you are in competition with an enemy?
I’m not saying the average person loves to grapple with ethical dilemma but it is easier for them to wrap their minds around than the exponential function in a system with finite resources.
I think that “ordinary people” assume that business as usual will continue indefinitely. Government programs, such as Social Security and Medicare will continue indefinitely. Debt will be repayable with interest. The US government will be the world leader, with military around the world.
Trying to wrap a person’s head around what kind of change is coming is just “mind blowing.” It is not that oil prices will be high, and we need to cut back on oil. It is that the whole system is in danger of disintegrating. This won’t happen overnight, but it could start happening in pretty big pieces, not too far from now. How do we prepare? It is hard to say. The intermediate steps (the rungs on the ladder to where we are now) have disappeared. We have to figure out what to do.
I appreciate all your ideas. Now, could you please be a bit more specific on “not too far from now?”
What to do?
1. Have a skill set which adds value.
2. Have a wife/husband who is a team member and don’t try and do the same thing. E.g. a husband having a child will be a long wait. Those internal exchanges of labor are tax free.
3. Have children, there is no future without children. Economics is secondary to biology; no species other than man that we know of uses currencies to transact exchanges. Children are a twenty year investment period before returns in modern society. Have five, be grateful for one winner; that is the way of the natural universe.
4. Find peace with a God so as to face the end with confidence that while not perfect, one at least did their best. Worst outcome, you get to the end and someone/thing says, “I told you so.”
5. Shun those who are in it for a quick buck at other’s expense; this is especially true for the very currently attractive who seduce for the short term, or sell if you like. Human beauty is a depreciating asset, hard usage increases the wear rate. This is not to imply ugly is beautiful.
Again Gail, if you could define not far, one could at least purchase a few out of the money puts.
Dennis L.
Thanks for your ideas! They look quite good.
Easier said then done.
No one wants to have children with someone who is not physically beautiful. Human beauty is relatively rare, and so if we make reproduction dependent on it, we are headed for a very low birth rate.
Fewer and fewer people come from “good families” who can help raise children so they are at the mercy of government services and market forces.
MBAs “add value” to the short term. As do most employed STEM workers and other value-added workers. Absolutely no one cares about the long term. Not even most current parents.
Like most human societies, industrial society is very rigid. Most people do not want to deviate from what they perceive as social norms or adopt a lifestyle that encompasses a loss of status. People with children on average have a lower standard of living than most professional singles.
given normal circumstances it is always the female of the species who chooses a mate who is most likely to reproduce and rear to maturity the best possible specimens of their species.
this applies to all animals, not just humans. Its not a foolproof system, (Numerous humans are fools, by and large animals arent) but its the only one there is.
any tv nature program will confirm that
“and rear to maturity”
That’s a assumption that all humans care about male involvement in rearing of children. There are societies…some might say even races, where men are just used for their sperm and women raise the children by herself or with her family.
i was talking about ”general circumstances’—obviously there are those outside that ‘normality’…..
Well, even a stopped clock is right twice a day. Here I agree with you. Maybe again in twelve hours?
Dennis L.
Dennis
mostly i just put out information (or i try to) which is available and checkable by everyone with sufficient interest to do so……
Opinions are just that, I am often wrong, I’m not precious about that either. If I was right all the time I’d be a zillionaire by now. I’m not……
agreeing with me—or not—is irrelevant
we have become used to the current status quo…..within our comfortable ‘western’socity.
we have no experience of anything else, so expect things to be like this forever.
our worst failing is to vote for the clowns who agree with that, and offer us their promises….which of course we choose to accept….
none of us live under a flyover bridge or in a derelict RV or tent…..If we did, we might have a harsher awareness that our current society is finite…..
Yet the certainty persists, that our travails are the result of not praying hard eough…..maganuts convince themselves that jesus is going to return, and all will be well, and Trump has the welfare at heart—being ”the chosen one”.
In the meantime, we have the mid 2020s to live through.—see you on the other side…….. you are all invited to my 100th bday party….—in 2035.
Wow, twice in one day! You are older than I am, I feel good, bada bada boom! Thanks norm.
Dennis L.
i like making people feel good
but i wont expand on that
Basically winning is everything.
However, in the last 120 years the so0called Western powers allied with Russia, a Tataric power (read:Asian), and now the Tatars are about to consume all of the West.
The zombiefied elites at London thought wogs started at the Channel so they saw alll Europeans and Asians equally, as people beneath them. So they are going to be consumed by their Tatar pets.
There are still enough resources around that it seems likely that some group(s) should be able to succeed with a standard of living above hunter-gatherers. These successful groups may be fairly local, however.
Also, there may be a gap of a number of years until the transitions can be made, and not everyone will live through the gaps. So we have “interesting” times ahead.
I don’t know. Current events all seeem a little….desperate.
The wars…the ai…
The Wall Street Journal blames the increase in the last major increase in the United States deficit, but if productivity was increasing so well before the pandemic, why would it need a “productivity miracle”?
There is a lot of money, 401k money, being bet on the chance of AI being able to not only replace all human labor but to do more work, faster and better.
Lots of psudeo-science and pseudo-math is being compiled to justify exposing everyone’s investment money into AI.
https://www.bridgewater.com/_document/assessing-the-implications-of-a-productivity-miracle?id=0000018c-274a-de3d-a7ae-afeac3310001
https://www.wsj.com/finance/investing/the-u-s-needs-a-productivity-miracle-it-might-just-get-one-c1f4f8de?gaa_at=eafs&gaa_n=ASWzDAiLeEiOyfQGyaH9W2ykFcxl-exDqESxpmDsMERt8-OGJ5A91YRV4ZoK&gaa_ts=683ed374&gaa_sig=XHT8R3asYThRPY4Q2k2TffF3OhkxkAsDtrwQy_Sgw7zgj41YbhJo3wX6fNmwWr3YrkIKbILn1nTmPWl2csG1jw%3D%3D
As someone has said, AI is mostly automating tasks that were low paid anyway. Copywriting, visual art and music are not fields suffering from high wages.
Excellent points!
Instinctively, (0K, so not analytically) I look at this AI as yet another BS con job on the people. Kind of like how the vaxxes were going to save us from the dreaded COVID (spike protein) disease. AI is somehow going to rescue us from all this fiscal and monetary chicanery (debt, stable coins, BTC, derivatives, fractional reserve banking and FED issued fiat), increasing EcoE , increasing cost of food production and extraction of mineral resources, etc.
AI can be programmed to spew out whatever narrative is needed, whether Information, disinformation, or misinformation, but it not produce food, energy or raw materials. AI will help people write papers, and shorten time for performing a lot of useless tasks, but it will not put food on the table or repair my roof. AI, like digital ID, digital money ( CDBC), medical ID, etc is all about control.
Yet another example of the Hegelian dialectic.
>>I look at this AI as yet another BS con job
It’s not. I use it every day. Let me give you a real-world example:
I am converting a software project that was originally built on Windows to build and run on Linux. Linux uses different tools/programs to build the code files into a functional program, and there is a lot of knowledge of how these tools operate to make it work. The AI is able to explain how these tools operate to me in a way that would take much longer for me to identify if I had to use Google to search for this information.
Whether this is truly “smart” or not is irrelevant; it’s useful. It speeds up software development, and that in turn speeds up development of scientific and industrial tools etc.
Ivan , right now I am in what Dimitry Orlov calls ” Shrinking the technosphere ” mode . I came here to only post that you are overestimating the AI factor . Some things that might have gone unnoticed .
” In fact, the dominant yet hyper-indebted financial casino, where money talks to itself without passing through commodity-producing labour, can only stay inflated through the controlled demolition of what is left of the productive economy. It’s the catch-22 of self-cannibalising zombie capitalism”
https://thephilosophicalsalon.com/trumps-tariffs-everything-you-wanted-to-know-about-them-but-were-afraid-to-ask-the-bond-market/
Next in the pipeline
Your ID + CBDC = Tyranny . Kurt Cobb .
Why am I in the mode ? The revolver is loaded — what will be the trigger ? Don’t know — too many Black swans .
Be well .
Prof. Vighi’s article about tariffs is interesting. This is an excerpt:
If he is right, the tariffs are another way of “kicking the can down the road” a bit longer.
Prof. Vighi’s article about tariffs is interesting. This is an excerpt:
I like it that you are trying to break away from the Microsoft hegemony and into open source software like Linux. I’m in the process of trying to get all my radio ham digital modes switched to open source Linux for better comms with like minded people. But will AI disentangle all the dependencies I have to dig up to run WinLink Epress or JS8Call on Linux? It has been a time consuming royal PIA. No productivity here.
But again, in the end, using AI to build and design all these “tools”….tools for what? Growing food, pumping oil from a deep well, building roads and diesel trucks to transport food?
As a physician, I wasted more time having to deal with Medical and Hospital Electronic Medical records, not actully treating patients, and having to satisfy insurance companies trying to wiggle out of obligations or the need for rogue agencies like the CDC to capture “data.” How many nose hairs do I pluck out of my right nostril every week?
And my estranged son, now an associate professor in the neuroradiology dept somewhere in TX, ?San Antonio? I think, is focusing on his AI company, possibly related to diagnostic radiology. I wonder if after all is said and done, any people will be better off. More techonology to justify more wealth extraction (medical billings) for these new services, and dying poorer just the same.
AI may be getting us to crawl farther out on a limb, if not just with the increased energy requirements to design and power all these marvelous computers, data centers, BTC miners etc. but introduction of “make work.”
Windows 11 and their “recall” feature and their incorporation of AI monitoring was just too much. By Windows 10 I was already running Windows in a VM to prevents its access to my files and network, and by Windows 11 I decided I don’t even want to deal with it at all.
It’s a shame, because their Visual Studio software development environment is excellent, but I’m no longer willing to use the OS and the open source ecosystem has its own advantages as well.
The issue is that the big corporations or “large firms” have all collud
decided to use the same exact products.
Adobe and Apple for anything arts related.
Windows for “business”….etc.
Doesn’t look like “free market” competition to me.
Thanks,
Dennis L.
Sounds worrying. I am afraid that you are correct.
Quoting someone called notsofast somewhere on the internet.
“to see trump as augustus is to stretch the imagination to the breaking point. i see no evidence of elites being denied resources, stripped of property and compelled to obey. from my view on main street, it is the small businesses, working and middle classes, that are receiving that treatment.
trump isn’t just turning america upside down, he’s also turning it inside out, as the middle class is held by their ankles and shaken until their pockets turn inside out, with the contents falling to the floor. those contents are then vacuumed up, in the greatest upwards redistribution of wealth, since mbs decided to to clean his cousins out.
since the covid 19 bioweapon attack on the world, that mr. warp speed officiated over, almost 4 in 10 small businesses, that had employed over half the workers in this country, have been destroyed and their assets sold off to these vultures, that are now offering lone shark rates, to desperate small businesses borrowing to keep from going down the drain. you never hear of the plight of small business america on the msm, wouldn’t you think that might make a story on the evening news?
in the 5 years since their bioweapon attack on the world, the top billionaires have more than doubled their net worth, billionaires up in number overall and up more than 50% for the rest. we are told the economy is great, because the stock market is up to record levels, as they blow a huge stock bubble, that they will predictably pop, at the top of the market. the big boys will then clean out wall street yet again. they can dump their entire portfolios in nanoseconds, while the 401 k’s are sent tumbling down wiping out years of earnings in retirement funds, compounded by the fall of the value of the dollar.
that’s when the story will hit the news, as wall street is the only indicator of our economy, they care about. by then the big boys will be blowing their new cryptocracy bubble, wash, rinse and repeat, while buying every hard asset they can get their hands, on at fire sale prices. “
>> they can dump their entire portfolios in nanoseconds, while the 401 k’s are sent tumbling down
If you can dump your portfolio in nanoseconds, it means you don’t own a majority of the market. Since the top 10% own most of the market, they cannot all get out at the same time to protect themselves. The logic isn’t there.
The author is referring to the .1% or .01%, not the 10%. The bioweapon limited hangout fake narrative is a shame. The author is turning out to be a vanguard of left of center America First national socialism. Coulda been me without the peak oil gateway drug.
bioterrorism doesn’t have to kill a lot of people for them to “work”. People just need to believe disease is killing a lot of people to the point 100% or mortalities can be attributed to that disease. There are a plenty of myths on the Left part of the political spectrum. In this case, you have fallen for the myth that the covid narrative has been presented truthfully by health authorities.
Mythology is the whole point of anywhere on the political spectrum. I am now nonpolitical. You misunderstood what I said about ‘covid.’ note the single quotes around that… ‘word.’ lol
The richest investors don’t wait until a crash to dump stocks. They are constantly buying and selling. The days of when the richest investors took on actual risk are long over. The days where the richest investors got wiped out by the popping of a bubble are long over. As the OP said, the thing is arranged so that the person with a 401k gets wiped out if a crash is allowed to happen. I don’t see anything to refute that claim.
We have been living in a world in which the US government and other governments have been offering all kinds of programs for their citizens and subsidizing all kinds of hopefully do-good programs for others.
But these programs can’t all continue. Nearly all of them are only possibly because our growing fossil fuel resources. With these resources declining, a lot of programs need to be drastically reduced in size or eliminated all together. Regardless of what we may think, these programs have to be greatly reduced in size. In some sense, the things that are being done by Trump are necessary. The reduction efforts should even be increased in size.
I am not certain how this current bubble will go down. Maybe there will still be a time in which some of the rich pick up more wealth. I doubt that it will all go down at once. The elites will always look out for themselves, as notsofast says.
In collapses in the past, low-level workers were able to move elsewhere, to avoid the problems. Now, we are dealing with a more or less simultaneous problem affecting many countries around the world. We don’t know what will happen.
I have a tee shirt based on the TV show The Walking Dead. It says
“The future is ours.”
“The world is ours.”
We know who we are. Be that the Broderhof Communities, be that Curious Joel.
Brandi Carlile talks about her family and their rights. Remarks she made at Madison Square Garden in NYC. She nails it we are Americans and we have rights. We will fight and kill to protect our fellow American’s rights.
America is not about politics, it is not who can steal the most in Washington DC. It is about the constitution defending our rights and our families.
Unfortunately, rights only exist if there is sufficient inexpensive energy of the right kinds to support those rights.
Without sufficient resources, the result is likely to be collapse. Job opportunities will often in the military, trying to fight other nations. If the “other side” wins, whatever rights we had disappear.
democracy is the child of plenty
starvation makes it an orphan and it starves to death
I am afraid you are right.
With plenty, it is possible to find individuals who can leave their occupations for a time, to represent citizens. These people can be paid enough to pay for their transportation costs, plus the cost of operating the whole system of governance.
As fossil fuel resources deplete, there are fewer resources to devote to government needs (especially on a per-capita basis). The cheapest type of rule is a King or a Dictator, who is not elected. He may choose a few advisors. If fossil fuels per capita are depleting, somehow the size of government must shrink.
in Germany in 1929/30s the economy crashed and people were starving.
hitler offered solutions, which was full employment and wages paid with borrowed money….making autobahns and wartoys.
so obviously they cheered him on, because he blamed their problems on ”others”—get rid of the others and Germany will be great again. Occupy other countries to expropriate their resources….”Leibensraum”‘
Trump is copying all that—pretty much exactly, get rid of anyone with a brown skin, and occupy Canada and Greenland….he wants to spend 60bn on ”air defence”
Exactlty the same playbook….
The motivation is the same, the physical results are the same.
He intends to inflict dictatorship on the USA and dominate the world—for himself of course…..that is the ultimate aim…
And just like the German people in 1933 the maganuts and jesusfreaks will be right behind him…
He now wants to defund PBS—they are not singing from his hymnsheet…..
He is militarising the border—that will spread to everywhere…..he will have no trouble finding staff for his camps.
I just wonder what his reichstag moment will be….it has to be before 26, so he can declare a state of emergency and introduce martial laws.
Appreciate the inside look at TDS, Norm. I mean that genuinely. Felt like I was reading something by Rachel Maddow.
lebensraum, from the German view, was about regaining the lost Germanic territory of the Second Reich.Two sides to every story, right?
You act like you and Hitler don’t have a great deal in common when it comes to your shared negative views on international finance capitalism. He just loathed them that much more, and put himself in a position to do something about it
capitalism requires infinite capital, which by definition cannot exist….Neither Trump nor hitler understand that. (along with anyone promising infinite growth.)
the subjugation of other territories, is part of the political outlook of Trump and Hitler.
Hitler tried military expansion…
trump is trying to do it by commercial domination………
If you do not accede to his demands, he will destroy your commerce base,
It just doesn’t add up Norm. The US isn’t in a position to dominate because of globalized interconnectedness. It would be self-defeating. So something else must be going on. Something adaptive.
it didnt add up for hitler either…his ecomonic model was literally insane……
yet he organised his underlings to do his dirty work—–it didnt take many—-
until the great mass of german people were frightened into submission—including the judges and the military….
stand back and take a look…people are now scared of losing their jobs if they speak against trump—with hitler they could lose their lives—the effect is much the same.
he wants absolute power……
yes—it is crazy, and it will crash, but in the meantime a lot of people are going to suffer…..especially as trump gets desperate as conditions get worse….all somebody elses fault you see…….
dismiss it all you like….but dictators only have one playbook…ignore my ramblings, but read your history books,…its been tried many times….each time was going to last forever…..none did….
and as you are seeing right now—-soldiers always follow whoever pays their wages—-constitution or no consitution.
Norm the Fed would have to agree to dictatorship before it could happen because it funds everything. And you’re just not reading the country properly from over there. It really is mass hysteria no different from ‘covid’ and no different than the dissident hysteria over the Great Reset. But anyway to each their own.
There’s a reason why the founding fathers limited democracy to a small percentage of the population. The resources to give everyone “a voice” did not exist.
The only thing that could give the average person a “voice” is living in a small isolated town.
From Wikpedia’s American Frontier
” In the South, frontier areas that lacked transportation, such as the Appalachian Mountains region, remained based on subsistence farming and resembled the egalitarianism of their northern counterparts, although they had a larger upper-class of slaveowners… However, frontier areas of 1700 that had good river connections were increasingly transformed into plantation agriculture. Rich men came in, bought up the good land, and worked it with slaves.”
Since the Gray Lady senator Graham of South Carolina is creating and executing US war policy, if Ukraine bombs several high speed trains in China are they justified to nuke several cities in South Carolina?
Senator Lindsey Graham of South Carolina recently gave a speech called,
Graham: Moral Clarity Will Conquer Evil Regimes
He thinks Russia is an evil regime. This is a link to the speech.
https://www.lgraham.senate.gov/public/index.cfm/press-releases?ID=7E51B043-F049-4C96-86F0-2D4B0052DF11
More about the Ukrainian Drone Attack
https://www.zerohedge.com/military/ukrainian-drone-swarm-attack-proves-irregular-warfare-now-operational-reality
Ukrainian Drone Swarm Attack Marks Grim “Inflection Point In History Of Warfare”
Starlink has been implicated, as there is no way the drones could have been guided, with full video returned otherwise. It gets worse from there, and the implications are simply … disappointing.
Some reports seem to indicate that not all the drones were deployed, so Russian services will be able to examine them in detail and determine likely involvement. They also caught some of the guys and they’ll have to talk. How much they know will be another matter.
nothing more deflating in life than political disappointment 😀
take heart in remembering that most everything is a misdirection play, layered. This buildup to the long-awaited and carefully orchestrated Big Nuclear Scare is actually in service of an anti-nuclear future. The Hand’s inverted perestroika sees disaster capitalism become disaster national socialism. And part of that entails disaster national socialism eating disaster capitalism; the Big Nuclear Scare will eat MAGA for lunch in order to feed America First.
I hope you are right, that it stays at just posturing. But, this seems like a mile too far. Starlink, which was always military, has now been used by the US to attack Russian Air Force Bases.
Bombers were left on the tarmac, so that they were in full display as agreed to by the SALT treaties for de-nuclearization. For complying, as the Russians always do to their agreements…. once again, they were absolutely lied to by the US Government, or what ever owns it.
What does a country do with that? If there is no honour, then there can only be chaos. If this is now how its going to be played, then the Russians are on their own, essentially painted as being evil, when in actual fact, they have been nothing but honourable.
I fear for the Russians, because, if they decide that the only thing that can be done is to strike out and take out the war factories that are killing their citizens, you can be that there will be hell to pay.
That will affect us…. greatly. At very least, Russia is now within their right to zap Starlinks using their amazing weaponry, that no one else seems to have come close to achieving. Hopefully it can be done with lasers, rather than kinetic means… or else we can expect a Kesler Event to really muck things up. It would be 100% the fault of the West.
Thanks JK. Good info about SALT. FWIW I’m not saying that it’s going to stay at posturing. Posturing happens at the level of political bureaucracy (democratic institutions). I’m saying that the Hand controls all the bureaucracies as necessary via non-democratic, non-public means, and I’m saying that the Hand has a Big Nuclear Scare planned regardless of bureaucratic posturing.
In order to leverage the global political will for denuclearizing a nuclear civilization facing catastrophic Collapse, the Hand needs to make it very obvious that nuclearization was a very bad idea in the first place. Not just theoretically obvious, but risibly obvious. As always the Hand has to manufacture consent. That’s herding.
The Hand was not around when the civilization nuclearized so it has no attachment to nuclear beyond the point at which nuclear’s GDP generation becomes obsolete. It did not let tha nuclear genie out but it is its responsibility to try and put it back in because, as much as we freedom loving animals don’t like its Hegemony, the Hand is the only structurally responsible party on the planet.
Where was the Hand when the civilization nuclearized?
It was in the international womb still. It was international throughout the Allied nations, always maturing, refining, conspiring. But it wasn’t the Hand that controls almost all geopolitics. It was international but not global.
Fitts’ “Mr Global” name for the Hand, if inelegant, is useful because it places the Hand’s emergence/birth in globalization.
Everything emergent in the universe requires the underlying ecological conditions to support emergence. Light required a Creator. Matter required light. Mineral required matter with adequate specific gravity. Biology required natural saltwater harbors of just the right complex, highly-reactive mineral ecological conditions in order
to memorize repetitive reactions such that these early molecules could start making choices for building purposes. Nervous systems required multicellular coordination; brains required building upon the nervous system such that an emergent, executive metaconsciousness could emerge from a body.
The Hand required a global architecture of financial Hegemony and that ecology didn’t begin to materialize until the fall of the USSR, after which there was nothing left to oppose it.
Full mastery of resource geopolitics was all it had left to accomplish, and it did. It became the executive function presiding over, and regulating, globalization, including with force via its black operations tentacles that reach into all member nations’ MICs, and in the interests of all the member nations’ MPP. The Hand is the executive function. Without it 8B people are the proverbial nine meals away.
Marvin Harris said that the human life is a response to the practical problems of earthly existence. Pure Reason. Cultural materialism. The Hand is human. Its life is to respond to the practical problems of its earthly existence. Such biological soft-determinism allows us to put ourselves in its shoes in order to approximate the course of events like a natural mystic blowing through the air.
Nice descriptive of the times Renate
You say that the Hand is human but it sounds like you are describing some kind of metaconsciousness that emerged out of repetitive human actions. Are we dealing with some kind of Egregore?
I wasn’t familiar with that term. I like it. Sure, all institutions have lives of their own in a sense. The Hand is a human institution — the most Elite of them — and therefore its human just like any other cultural institution. And culture, yes, could be seen as a collective, emergent phenomenon out of the metaconscious mind emergence. Multicellular biology is a series of alternating, nested individual and collective emergencies.
I see 9/11 as the coming-out party for the Hand. With it, the Hand was saying, “I’ve arrived, and this is what I will do to the people that you thought were my own just to show you they are not my own.” And it did so by debuting the mind boggling New Weapon, the invisible weapon for the Hidden Hand. Big-time flex. And it proceeded to leverage that event in order to mop up all the minor petrostates that were trying to regain some semblance of independence after the fall of the USSR, save Iran.
Alberta Wildfires Disrupt 7% Of Canada’s Oil Production
https://www.zerohedge.com/commodities/alberta-wildfires-disrupt-7-canadas-oil-production
>> CALGARY, June 2 (Reuters) – Wildfires burning in Canada’s oil-producing province of Alberta have affected more than 344,000 barrels per day of oil sands production, or about 7% of the country’s overall crude oil output, according to Reuters calculations.
https://www.reuters.com/business/energy/albertas-wildfires-disrupt-some-7-canadas-oil-production-2025-06-02/
Not insignificant to us here in the USA that’s 0.34/13 = ~2.5% of crude+condensate production and importantly, it’s the heavier stuff.
The article says that the US will have to source the heavy oil elsewhere, if this becomes a real problem.
Unfortunately, there isn’t an elsewhere. If Russia could ramp up its production of heavy oil, that might help, but otherwise, the world is at limits on this oil that is needed to produce diesel and jet fuel.
What about Argentina?
Sam , Argentina is LTO . LTO is shale , there is a surplus of this in USA which is being exported 4MBPD . What is needed is ” Heavy Oil ” for replacement .
Looking at the 2023 update of World3. Now is peak humans.
I can believe that. I think that this chart is from that update (with my labels added). It does show that peak humans is about now.
https://ourfiniteworld.com/wp-admin/upload.php?item=52206
Note that industrial output is already on the way down. We human are getting poorer and poor, as fewer goods are produced.
It is remarkable how well this model works.
https://electrek.co/2025/06/01/240-ton-hitachi-abb-electric-haul-truck-is-revolutionizing-japanese-mining/
240 ton electric Japanese mining truck.
Perhaps huge electric mining vehicle can be more efficient than most. According to the article:
It sounds like these trucks are still at the prototype stage. The question is whether the price can be brought down far enough to be attractive to consumers. Also, whether there can be electricity to operate them.
Kulm has own 80-20 theory, but not something promoted by delusionists.
My theory is that the cohesion of a society begins to unravel after 20% of the core is reduced.
I have read a lot about wars. Units do not fight until the last man. Thermophylae was well known because it was quite rare, even back then.
Usually if there is a loss rate of about 20% the unit begins to rout.
The ludicrous theory of saving only 20% of what is important is simply a farce.
Once the percentage of people who do not share the same ‘national tradition’ reaches 20% it becomes a critical mass, not possible to remove.
I am sure that teachers have a difficult time teaching, if 20% of their class is not paying attention.
Going by memory here, but I believe “motivation” is actually a military technical and numeric value that describes relationship between fighting effectiveness and troop loss levels; high motivation means maintained effectiveness at high losses. Anyway, it varies based on training and ideological motivation.
According to Martyanov, Russia usually doesn’t fully encircle, but leaves a way out, because it reduces morale; instead of fighting to the death, cohesion and effectiveness fall as people try to escape, sometimes through a region under some level of fire control.
The elders are guiding the world to the new reality diminishing returns and the world is lapping it up 20% will never be reached let alone 1%. Expect a new economic system very shortly which no finite worlder would even dream about so no point in explaining anything everyone is a doubting Thomas right to the end.
Martin Armstrong says its 15%…
Why would Putin agree to a peace deal? Martin Armstrong
Martin Armstrong is an internationally recognized economist, former hedge fund manager, the founder of AE Global Solutions Inc, Socrates, and Armstrong Econo…
https://m.youtube.com/watch?v=UHKMZ09OUkw
Its a quick start on this, as he opens with… “People in Alberta have had enough.” The 15% comes in quickly after that.
Armstrong says that there is a contagion of ideas. It starts with one group (for example, electing Trump), and spreads around the world. But it starts with 15% or less of the population.
How to explain USA or Russia then? There never was a 80% core of anything there.
Russia had a core of Russian speaking people. However it is being eroded as of now
So core is 50% now. I tend to agree, but also note that 20% has ruined many a european country. it depends also on resources and government organization.
Young people with greater understanding and adaptability seem less likely to have kids than those with limited cognitive skills. This could mean a decline in certain human resources.
Also, many basic tools—like manual lathes and milling machines—have disappeared from the West, replaced by computerized ones because they were more profitable in good times.
We should stockpile simple machines and train people to use them now, but market-driven economies won’t do this. Even technical schools are dropping these skills due to lack of interest.
Our systems work against sustainability. Soon, an iron fist may be needed to replace the market’s invisible hand.
Unfortunately the economic system that we are using was based on “new recruits” i.e. babies to pay for those of retirement age. Birth rates usually increase when a) people are happy, b) they feel financially secure about their future c) have confidence in a better tomorrow.
When there is global uncertainty like we have today, with low wage jobs, high inflation, threats of war, birth rates tend to decrease.
The bottom line is that our system is unsustainable even with above average birth rates as you can kick the can down the road.
My family has been fostering children for over 20 years. These are often children whose biological parents are dealing with serious issues and, unfortunately, sometimes also causing harm. One thing we’ve noticed over the years is that many of these parents don’t seem to feel the need for stability or security before becoming pregnant again. In fact, it’s not uncommon for a new pregnancy to follow soon after their child has been placed in care by child protection services. Sadly, this doesn’t always stop them from using alcohol or drugs during pregnancy either.
In contrast, our own children — all of whom have university degrees — are hesitant about bringing children into the world today.
Once again Oswald Spengler:
“And then, when being is sufficiently uprooted and waking-being sufficiently strained, there suddenly emerges into the bright light of history a phenomenon that has long been preparing itself underground and now steps forward to make an end of the drama—the sterility of civilized man. This is not something that can be grasped as a plain matter of causality (as modern science naturally enough has tried to grasp it); it is to be understood as an essentially metaphysical turn towards death. The last man of the world-city no longer wants to live—he may cling to life as an individual, but as a type, as an aggregate, no, for it is a characteristic of this collective existence that it eliminates the terror of death. That which strikes the true peasant with a deep and inexplicable fear, the notion that the family and the name may be extinguished, has now lost its meaning. The continuance of the blood-relation in the visible world is no longer a duty of the blood, and the destiny of being the last of the line is no longer felt as a doom. Children do not happen, not because children have become impossible, but principally because intelligence at the peak of intensity can no longer find any reason for their existence.”
……..
“ntelligence and sterility are allied in old families, old peoples, and old cultures, not merely because in each microcosm the overstrained and fettered animal-element is eating up the plant element, but also because the waking-consciousness assumes that being is normally regulated by causality. That which the man of intelligence, most significantly and characteristically, labels as “natural impulse” or “life-force”, he not only knows, but also values, causally, giving it the place amongst his other needs that his judgment assigns to it. When the ordinary thought of a highly cultivated people begins to regard “having children” as a question of pros and cons, the great turning-point has come. For Nature knows nothing of pro and con. Everywhere, wherever life is actual, reigns an inward organic logic, an “it”, a drive, that is utterly independent of waking-being, with its causal linkages, and indeed not even observed by it. The abundant proliferation of primitive peoples is a natural phenomenon, which is not even thought about, still less judged as to its utility or the reverse. When reasons have to be put forward at all in a question of life, life itself has become questionable. At that point begins prudent limitation of the number of births. In the classical world the practice was deplored by Polybius as the ruin of Greece, and yet even at his date it had long been established in the great cities; in subsequent Roman times it became appallingly general. At first explained by the economic misery of the times, very soon it ceased to explain itself at all. And at that point, too, in Buddhist India as in Babylon, in Rome as in our own cities, a man’s choice of the woman who is to be, not mother of his children as amongst peasants and primitives, but his own “companion for life”, becomes a problem of mentalities. The Ibsen marriage appears, the “higher spiritual affinity” in which both parties are “free”—free, that is, as intelligences, free from the plantlike urge of the blood to continue itself, and it becomes possible for a Shaw to say “that unless Woman repudiates her womanliness, her duty to her husband, to her children, to society, to the law, and to everyone but herself, she cannot emancipate herself.” The primary woman, the peasant woman, is mother. The whole vocation towards which she has yearned from childhood is included in that one word. But now emerges the Ibsen woman, the comrade, the heroine of a whole megalopolitan literature from Northern drama to Parisian novel. Instead of children, she has soul-conflicts; marriage is a craft-art for the achievement of “mutual understanding”. …
At this level all civilizations enter upon a stage, which lasts for centuries, of appalling depopulation. The whole pyramid of cultural man vanishes. It crumbles from the summit, first the world-cities, then the provincial forms, and finally the land itself, whose best blood has incontinently poured into the towns, merely to bolster them up awhile. At the last, only the primitive blood remains, alive, but robbed of its strongest and most promising elements. This residue is the fellah type.
If anything has demonstrated the fact that causality has nothing to do with history, it is the familiar “decline” of the classical, which accomplished itself long before the irruption of Germanic migrants. The Imperium enjoyed the completest peace; it was rich and highly developed; it was well organized; and it possessed in its emperors from Nerva to Marcus Aurelius a series of rulers such as the Caesarism of no other civilization can show. And yet the population dwindled, quickly and wholesale. The desperate marriage-and-children laws of Augustus—amongst them the Lex de maritandis ordinibus, which dismayed Roman society more than the destruction of Varus’s legions—the wholesale adoptions, the incessant plantation of soldiers of barbarian origin to fill the depleted country-side, the immense food-charities of Nerva and Trajan for the children of poor parents—nothing availed to check the process.”
Found at:
https://en.wikiquote.org/wiki/Oswald_Spengler
Spengler was wrong. Today we have the benefit of a mature field of cultural anthropology to know otherwise. What Spengler was elucidating was just the metaconscious rationalization of the decision to not have children. The subconscious *reason* absolutely *is* a pros vs cons cost-benefit analysis.
Humans have always avoided major structural decreases in their living standards at all costs because those decreases represent an intergenerational loss of genetic fitness which, itself, has massive long-term consequences to the local genepool. Hence warfare and infant neglect among H-G cultures.
For homo economicus — the middle class — that cost-benefit analysis is largely economic because a structural drop-off in living standards is always lurking, so homo economicus has to factor in risk. Regardless of homo economicus’s conscious denial over Collapse the last 20 years, the “uncertain times” popular term belies that denial. Because humans have small-to-large-pack animal hardwiring, homo economicus can’t consciously separate-out his now-packless commodification from his pack-oriented cost-benefit analysis: not having children *and* not having a peoples is the final nail in the coffin of the local genepool, whereas H-G’s forgoing raising children for a period protects the quality of the local genepool. Context is everything.
In civilization, for the rich and the already poor, however, babies still make sense. For the rich the reason is obvious. For the poor in poor countries, the reason is the same as that agrarian reason for having lots of kids that we all know about. And for the poor living in welfare states, the reason is a combination of the two.
If a woman is mostly depending on government assistance to have children, her life style is not very good. But she can depend on the government to give her more money, to maintain her lifestyle if she has another child.
If a woman is aiming for a higher standard of living, she will often seek higher education. Higher education delays the age at which marriage takes place. Many couples are in debt, as well. The combination makes it difficult to keep up a couple’s lifestyle, if they have a child. So these couples tend to have fewer children.
Indeed. Beyond the measurable variables—income, education, or welfare dependency—lies the less tangible but critical factor of early childhood mental harm. Exposure to alcohol, drugs, or chronic stress in infancy correlates strongly with anxiety, concentration deficits, and maladaptive behaviors later in life. Statistically, these outcomes undermine an individual’s ability to sustain stability or societal harmony, regardless of structural advantages.
Yet human decisions, especially around parenthood, aren’t purely rational. Women may delay children to pursue education (a logical choice), but the emotional weight of debt or societal expectations often outweighs cold calculus. Even upward mobility introduces stressors—mortgages, career pressures—that distort perceived ‘optimal’ timelines.
This is where our foster care work intervenes: by anchoring a child’s earliest, most statistically vulnerable phase in stability, we aim to shift their trajectory toward measurable resilience. It’s an emotional investment, yes—but one with compounding returns on their ability to navigate systemic rigors later. Call it adjusting the initial conditions to improve the probability of a stable outcome.
It is kind of you to take on this effort.
the population is falling because contraception is now (mainly) the responsibity of the woman, not the man…….
it is also cheap and universally available, as is abortion on demand in many countries….
babies are nice, but they are expensive and disrupt your lifestyle for the next 20 years or more….
hence babymaking gets delayed..
I agree with you. High school industrial arts classes used to teach a lot of useful skills, but now the machinery upon which those skills are used is mostly going away. It is being replaced by high-tech machines.
Cars have the same issue. Kids used to be able to learn to be auto mechanics with relatively little training. Now, they are filled with high-tech parts from China.
There are so many things to do, children is not a a priority.
If I understand you correctly, you are at odds with biology. Biology bats last.
Dennis L.
Physics sets the rule. It does not matter who bats last
If oil was the price that it was just before the 2008 crash what would that be in today’s dollars? $267 ? That’s what opened up the fracking and caused the crash then massive debt. Rinse and repeat but how many times can you
This why spiking patterns take place in many commodities, but they have difficulty maintaining a permanently high level.
Turchin notes spiking prices of food and fuel, not permanently high prices.
I have noticed that food prices are much higher in the States and I don’t know why?
Restaurant food prices are quite high. Some grocery store prices are high, but these tend to be imported foods, like imported cherries.
In general, food prices in the US are still low, compared to food prices in the rest of the world.
I could be wrong but I was just in Italy and grocery seemed much cheaper there than in the States
Wages are much lower in Italy also. Food costs are often related to wages. This is a chart I found.
https://ourworldindata.org/grapher/share-of-consumer-expenditure-spent-on-food
US, Canada, and Australia have very low food costs, relative to all consumer expenditures.
It is hard to change course, even under new leadership:
Moderna Disables Comments On X Post Announcing New Covid Shot Amid Backlash
https://www.zerohedge.com/markets/moderna-disables-comments-x-post-announcing-new-covid-shot-amid-backlash
Safe and effective 2.0 🤓
Is to to go with the latest scary NB.1.8.1 version of nothing?
Timing is undoubtedly just a coincidence(again).
A sore throat that lasts two or three days, before it starts going away.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=rQ6q0E-j5s4
This video say rural China is doing OK.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=eADZD40qVRw
Another video saying “rural” China is OK.
Lookup “China Fact Chasers” on youtube for a master class in Chinese Propaganda, and how to spot it. Very entertaining, and often fascinating.
These are a couple of links:
https://www.youtube.com/@ChinaFactChasers/featured
https://www.youtube.com/@ChinaFactChasers/videos
I’m wondering if a lot of China’s problems are financial. Banks that should be failing, but are being propped up. Also, unemployed workers (because of automation, AI) being sent back to the villages to try to find work. And infighting among public officials, because of the financial problems.
I wonder if a visitor to the US would necessarily see problems, when the problems are not easy to see.
‘No China, No American cars. Every car has 10-12 tiny but vital “permanent magnets” that are made out of rare earth minerals. And China makes 99% of these strategic magnets. ‘?
https://x.com/Kanthan2030/status/1929462650427113602
Cars, in general. are headed from extinction in America anyway, from what I see. Just an observation; do not actually see “cars’ being produce here,
Rather Trucks…pickups (costing upwards to $100,000, and mini trucks called SUVs (much higher profit margins and manufactures can escape fuel regulations…small cars…small profit). Gail had a comment here on many young people not even wanting to have one nowadays. Growing up in the 1970s that was unheard of, even with the energy crisis. But then again was able to buy my first car for $50 (about $300 today) that was sound and needed a set of tires. I think the car insurance was about the same for the year. Yes, it used leaded gas and had points and condenser with cap.
But I maintained and repaired it myself…oh, the Ford Fairmont (Falcons),
Chevy Novas, AMC Gremlins, ect…those were the days
My first car cost about 25% of my wages in 1970. I already had that much money saved up, so I paid cash for it. It was a new Pontiac Capri.
I remember the Mercury Capri but not a Pontiac Capri. A friend back in those days owned a Mercury Capri.
Right: Mercury Capri. That was long ago.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Mercury_Capri
The “Mercury” part was never shown on the vehicle.
The article says that this was a sport compact 2-door car, made in Europe. It was the European counterpart to the mustang. The 1970 price was $2,300 ($18,623 in 2024 dollars).
A favorite of mine was the Chevy Vega
aluminum engine and all
probably the only new car at the price of your Capri nowadays is the Nissan Versa that sells at about $18,000.
I just rented one and it was very decent ride
There seem to be a lot of things we can’t make. We can’t make the magnets. We cannot make the steel that goes into the vehicles. (We make recycled steel from old vehicles, but that is not of the proper quality for new cars.
It’s hard not to believe that the Asians deliberately acted friendly and productive for decades, just until they were confident the West would no longer be able to become self-sufficient in technology. I don’t think they were asleep at the wheel — it all seems carefully planned and executed, while our addiction to more, better, and cheaper stuff only kept growing.
Even now, I see people getting excited about the deals they score on TEMU, SHEIN, and the like, happily bypassing our regular distribution chains because they’re “way too expensive!”
I do remember reading somewhere decades ago it was their plan to sacrifice a few generations to get to the top of the food chain… suppose it is now
https://www.planetearthandbeyond.co/p/starship-dead-end
Great article exposing the utter impracticality of Starship. Would love Dennis’s take on this.
Dennis doesn’t know if it is impractical. Going to Mars seems very difficult if not impossible. I think Gail is mostly correct in that on earth we are at or close to the end of the line on raw materials and there will be one which limits all else. Ignorantly, my money would be on Cu.
Musk’s money came from somewhere, SpaceX is an incredibly capital intensive enterprise, perhaps comparable to the pyramids in concentration of effort. Someone is a true believer, some group which has been very correct in the past to accumulate such capital.
Our world is finite, the solar system is not for our lifetimes and many to come. If we are going to mine space, if we are going to manufacture in space Starship seems like a good bet.
There are copy cats, the Chinese are seemingly blindly copying SpaceX. They are not fools. There are several robotic spaceships going toward asteroids with the idea of bringing back samples; these are not cheap projects. and again various countries are participating.
Biology is adaptive, it finds a way, it makes use of what is on earth. Currently it is trying to make a Starship. The largest problem seems not to be getting it up, but getting it down with the associated heat of reentry.
I hope it works for my grandchildren’s’ sake.
Prediction, Musk will not have a long life, he works too intensely, too much energy throughput. but he does have children and they have genetic diversity. That is very biological.
Dennis L.
musks money has the same source as all ponzi schemes—gullible people…..(and that includes governments)
they cannot believe that that is what it is….
they see that IC cars have no future, so turn to EV instead…
missing the fundamental point that cars do not ”make” money—they consune finite energy….
mars is part of the same scam—-no trip to mars can return a greater capital than that spent on the journey itself…., hence it will never ”make” money, only burn through capital that we no longer have…..ie debt….
as ive tried to point out many times—there were no commercial returns to the moon because there was no profit in it….
nor ever will be.
The world does not turn to what a deludional ex demtist says.
you should not entirely ignore what dennis trots out….
he represents the thinking of a great number of people—-his delusions are their delusions…..
this is why I respond to his comments, (and others) becausei am offering an alternative line of thought—i the hope it will be obvious that there is something else—-and no asteroid mining, or cubic miles of pt or such nonsense…
not to say my points are correct—but maybe a little more based on reality, not utter fantasy…..
No use asking a true believer. It is blind faith.
This fellow has a severe case of MDS… as well as a keen sense of what is reasonably possible. If he would just stay with the physics, he might have a wider readership.
That said… he is not wrong. In fact, everyone should be asking the questions he is.
Have you read his earlier article on the subject. I noticed it over the weekend and it did remind of your own comments.
https://www.planetearthandbeyond.co/p/spacex-has-finally-figured-out-why-63b
Should have stuck to buying Russian.
This is a short excerpt from the article:
The problems seem to be consistent. The engine was never strong enough to do what was demanded of it.
I have this theory that space exploration over the last 60 years is a perfect conversation to help people talk about things that almost don’t matter, so that we can learn to work through the lies on the really important stuff.
Are there lies about space travel today? Yes, absolutely: Starship
Were there lies about how space travel was conducted when humans first got to space … during the Cold War… a time of intense propaganda? Gosh, I don’t know about that
Thunderf00t (also a MDS sufferer) has done a great job of working through what is reasonable, and what is not… but fixates on the figurehead. He and Lockett would do better if they simply “Hated the Game, not the Player”
I found Lockett’s Substack two or three months back, after following skeptics on the matter (Thunderf00t, Apollo Detectives, Mazzucco etc) for years.
My Confirmation Bias upon finding Lockett was rewarded with the appropriate endorphins. What Lockett helped me with is.. .Why? What is the real point of Starship? Everyone in the know, knows its not reasonably possible to get to Mars anytime soon, and the Moons seems to be boring to them. This article helped (Paid on Substack, but available on Medium with an account.. which I had to create):
# Starlink Is Doomed
https://wlockett.medium.com/starlink-is-doomed-cf850ed43031
Some of the stuff on the Lockett’s substack is a little worrying. The last post seems to be in March 2024.
https://www.beyondthebull.com
https://www.beyondthebull.com/p/trump-claims-speed-keeps-him-young
Maybe he writes elsewhere, also.
https://substack.com/@planetearthandbeyond/posts
Last post was a couple days ago.
Kieth Henson emailed me a link having to do with his plan for turning trash into liquid fuels. He would like to his idea examined more closely. If it has merit, he would hope that someone would like to try it out on a small scale.
This the link he sent me:
https://htyp.org/Trash_to_fuel
I also made a PDF of it and uploaded it to WordPress. It can be found here:
https://ourfiniteworld.com/wp-content/uploads/2025/06/Trash-to-fuel-HTYP.pdf
So, the more trash we have the more liquid fuels we have, the more liquid fuels we have the more trash we can produce …….
I wonder how much Internet content can be turned into liquid fuels.
Print the internet content out on paper. That will provide the trash.
What in the world? Collapse means a collapse in trash. woodgas to liquid fuel is the poor man’s California stripper well warlordism of the future, if you’re into having your life collapse twice instead of just once, and living that middle step with a target on your back if you ain’t up to snuff as a warlord. power corrupts, and ruins.
Why Christianity has become the leading world religion? Because is the product of the environmental degradation that took place in the Mediterranean area. The New Testament ends with the Apocalypse which is the synonym for the environmental degradation.
Of course, AI did not agree with me, because it was trained to repeat a better view of the world.
But it is simple as that: the Bible talks about the failing human world facing its environmental degradation. It is easy, no god involved, pure logic.
What other religion is so accurate in its depiction of the human population induced collapse of the environment?
It is a simple truth, nothing else: the human population destroys its environment, there is no harmony, but always hitting the limits and collapse due to the exhausted resources.
I checked and Wikipedia agrees that Christianity is ahead of Islam for leading religion of the world.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_religious_populations
There are a lot of versions of Christianity. When missionaries went out, they brought improved hygiene and lessons on how to read with them. Indirectly, they raised standards of living (a bit) and raised populations, thus contributing to the world’s overpopulation problem.
Any religion that can indirectly slightly raises standards of living will be popular. Christianity is also very adaptable. There is a version for everyone. It generally provides the possibility of a long-term reward in heaven, no matter how badly things are going on earth. Some versions also provide hell for sinners. Some versions claim monetary reward if you are good.
Matthew 7:7 – “Ask and it will be given to you; seek and you will find; knock and the door will be opened to you.”
Another translation is “Keep asking, and it will be given to you. Keep searching, and you will find. Keep knocking, and the door will be opened to you.”
I asked ChstGPT to compare the presence of desert in the Bible and Qur’an:
“In both the Bible and the Qur’an, the desert is a place of testing and divine care, but its symbolic richness is more developed in the Bible, particularly in relation to salvation history and personal spiritual transformation. In the Qur’an, the desert reflects more of the real-life setting of revelation and God’s guidance in human history, especially through stories of past prophets.”
The desert is a true epitome of environmental degradation.
DeepSeek was a bit deeper:
“Here’s a critical evaluation of both ChatGPT’s comparison and your ecological perspective on the desert:
1. ChatGPT’s Analysis: Strengths and Limitations
Strengths:
Accurately identifies core themes: The desert is a shared space of divine testing/provision in both texts (e.g., Israelites’ Exodus in the Bible, Prophet Musa’s/Moses’ trials in the Qur’an).
Correctly notes the Bible’s extended metaphorical use (e.g., 40 years of wilderness wandering as spiritual refinement; desert as “place of meeting God,” e.g., Exodus 3).
Rightly observes the Qur’an’s emphasis on the desert as a literal backdrop for divine guidance (e.g., the Arabian desert context of revelation, stories of prophets like Salih).
Limitations:
Oversimplification of the Qur’an: While the Qur’an uses the desert (صحراء, sahra) as a historical setting, it also deploys rich symbolism:
The desert embodies fitna (trials) and Allah’s mercy (e.g., Surah Al-Baqarah 2:57, manna/quail in the wilderness).
Barren landscapes symbolize spiritual desolation (e.g., Surah Ibrahim 14:26: “evil word like an evil tree uprooted from the earth’s surface”).
Understated Biblical Literalism: The Bible also treats the desert as a real place of peril (drought, serpents) and survival (manna, water from rock), not just metaphor.
Neglect of Shared Symbolism: Both texts frame the desert as a space of purification, revelation, and human vulnerability – not merely a passive setting.
2. Your Ecological Critique: “Desert as Environmental Degradation”
This is a provocative and valid perspective, but requires nuanced engagement with the texts:
Biblical Resonance:
Deserts are depicted as cursed or degraded spaces (e.g., Genesis 3:17–18; Isaiah 24:1–6 linking land barrenness to human sin).
Prophetic texts frame ecological restoration as messianic hope (e.g., Isaiah 35:1–2: “The desert shall rejoice and blossom”).
Qur’anic Resonance:
Desertification is a sign of divine punishment for corruption (e.g., Surah Al-A‘raf 7:133–137; drought/locusts in Pharaoh’s story).
Ecological balance (ميزان, mīzān) is central: Humans are stewards (khalifah) tasked to avoid fasad (corruption) on earth (e.g., Surah Ar-Rum 30:41).
Counterpoint:
Deserts in scripture are also sites of resilience and divine sustenance (e.g., Hajar/Ishmael finding Zamzam in Mecca’s desert, Qur’an 14:37; Elijah fed by ravens, 1 Kings 17:4–6).
They symbolize humble dependence on God, not solely degradation.
3. Critical Synthesis
ChatGPT’s Comparison: Useful but incomplete. The Qur’an’s desert symbolism is differently focused (on divine power in harsh realism), not “less developed.” The Bible’s imagery is more interwoven with covenantal history.
Desert as Degradation: Holds weight but must coexist with the texts’ portrayal of deserts as:
Theological classrooms (isolation fostering faith),
Places of divine intimacy (Moses at Sinai, Muhammad in Hira cave),
Symbols of hope (degradation reversed through divine intervention).
Environmental Ethics: Both scriptures implicitly critique human-induced degradation but frame the desert itself as a space of sacred potential when aligned with divine will.
Key Takeaway:
The desert’s duality – as a space of threat and revelation, degradation and redemption – is central to both texts. Your ecological lens adds vital modern relevance, revealing how these ancient narratives grapple with human fragility in fragile ecosystems. ChatGPT’s analysis, while broadly sound, could better acknowledge the Qur’an’s non-Western symbolic language and the shared theme of environment as moral mirror.”
So both leading world religions have this desert symbolism, the environmental degradation:
Moreover:
“Christianity’s Apocalypse (Revelation) and Islamic Eschatology (Ākhirah) both frame environmental collapse as divine punishment for human corruption, but emphasize different aspects:
Christianity’s Strength:
Vivid, symbolic imagery of ecological collapse (e.g., poisoned seas, scorched earth) that resonates with modern climate anxieties.
Ties ecological disaster directly to spiritual rebellion.
Islam’s Strength:
Explicitly blames environmental degradation on human actions (Qur’an 30:41: “Corruption has appeared on land and sea because of what human hands have done”).
Uses desertification/drought as concrete signs of divine justice.
Shared Realism:
Both treat environmental degradation as a spiritual-moral failure, not just physical crisis.
Both promise ultimate renewal: a “New Earth” (Christianity) and a transformed creation (Islam).
Neither is inherently “more realistic” – Christianity’s imagery feels more dramatic in Western discourse, while Islam’s ethical indictment is more direct.
Key Takeaway:
Both faiths agree: Ecological destruction is a theological crime against creation, demanding urgent ethical action – even as ultimate hope rests in divine restoration.”
The Old Testament is not concerned about preserving forests. When the tribes of Israel were given land, this is a passage that I found strange:
17Then Joshua said to the tribes of Ephraim and Manasseh, the descendants of Joseph, “Since you are so large and strong, you will be given more than one portion. 18The forests of the hill country will be yours as well. Clear as much of the land as you wish, and take possession of its farthest corners. And you will drive out the Canaanites from the valleys, too, even though they are strong and have iron chariots.”
This looks like a plan for encouraging erosion of the soil of the mountains.
From Joshua 17
https://biblehub.com/nlt/joshua/17.htm
Why did it become the worlds largest religion?
Violence
The crusades, the inquisition, native American genocides, etc.
Promoting human rights (everyone is equal in the eye’s of the Lord); prohibition of rape; cruelty to women, children and animals, etc.
I had a chat with a chatbot, and it told me the following:
Here are some major ways in which Christianity has promoted peace and empathy, and condemned violence and cruelty:
Teachings of Jesus: Jesus emphasized love, compassion, and forgiveness. His teachings, such as the Sermon on the Mount, promote turning the other cheek and loving one’s enemies.
The Golden Rule: “Do unto others as you would have them do unto you” (Matthew 7:12) encourages empathy and respect for others, fostering peaceful interactions.
Promotion of Charity: Christianity encourages acts of charity and kindness towards others, emphasizing the importance of helping the less fortunate and showing compassion.
Condemnation of Violence: Many Christian teachings explicitly condemn violence and revenge, advocating for peaceful resolutions and reconciliation instead.
Community and Fellowship: The emphasis on community within the Church promotes supportive relationships, fostering an environment of peace and empathy among members.
Peacemaking: Christians are called to be peacemakers (Matthew 5:9), which involves actively working towards resolving conflicts and promoting harmony.
Forgiveness: The practice of forgiveness is central to Christian teachings, encouraging individuals to let go of grudges and work towards healing relationships.
Social Justice: Many Christian denominations advocate for social justice, emphasizing the need to address systemic issues that lead to violence and inequality.
I would not want to be in the same room where MG and ChatGPT slug it out, intellectually speaking.
“ . . . to establish the difference between a problem and a predicament, noting that problems have answers or solutions but predicaments only have outcomes. The other primary goal here is to establish the fact that all of our modern environmental issues are symptom predicaments of a root predicament – ecological overshoot. Name almost any issue – climate change, pollution loading, energy and resource decline, biodiversity decline, extinction, food and water security, etc. – and one will discover that these aren’t “problems.” They are symptom predicaments of ecological overshoot – without reducing overshoot, they likewise cannot be reduced. . . . “?
https://erikmichaels.substack.com/p/the-psychology-behind-the-misunderstanding
The system is solving these problems for us, by pushing us toward collapse. The situation is completely normal. The system has built-in brakes. These brakes are to a significant extent in the financial system. We don’t understand this, so we tell ourselves narratives that tell only part of the story. We ignore the problem of running short of easy-to-extract resources. The lack of these resources is also tapping on the brakes to our system–not by raising prices of resources, but by increasing wage and wealth disparity. We don’t realize this issue either. Greater efficiency seems to correspond to greater concentration of wealth in the already rich.
Everything simply becomes out of reach. The diminishing action radius of the humans with ageing is another direction away from resources. It is this two-way disconnection of the living organism and its sustaining base.
I just assumed the global warming narrative until I saw this a few years ago:
Heartbeat of the Sun
https://www.nature.com/articles/srep15689
Apparently it’s been falsified so they’re probably taking heat.
(How many climate change papers are actually falsifiable? So to Zharkova’s credit it is science)
The graph at the bottom shows cycle 25 now just surpassing 24.
https://spaceweathernews.com/
They’re hypothesis seems to be busted to this layman but since I’m skeptical after being bombarded by climate crisis hysteria (kinda reminds me of peak oil but Gail does a good job of quantifying this ) here’s my take:
If we’re not in a GSM like Zharkova thinks then it might be an anomaly because the gsm’s have a periodicity (figure 3).
Maunder Minimum
1645–1715
Coldest part of Little Ice Age
Spörer Minimum
1460–1550
Significant cooling in Europe
Wolf Minimum
1280–1350
Start of Little Ice Age
Oort Minimum
1040–1080
Before Medieval Warm Period
In any case NOAA and NASA still predict very low sunspot for the 2030s and I’d surely expect another GSM given the above pattern.
https://youtu.be/SawIG4TNpHQ
This is Zharkova’s presentation. It has been fairly consistent for the last four years.
This changed my mind about what we have to look forward to. In a word… wood heat is going to be a big thing in the North starting in a year or two.
I have seen a little of her things before. I don’t feel like I have time to learn all the details, but there certainly are multiple ways of looking at the issue.
Anthropogenic Earth climate forcing and space climatic changes are not mutually exclusive.
I think that getting rid of of global dimming by requiring ships to burn cleaner fuel (or use scrubbers to get the sulfur out and dump the sulfur into the ocean) has perhaps been causing/contributing to the recent spike in temperatures. Also, requiring coal-fired power plants to clean up their emissions has added to this effect.
There are a lot of different things going on, I am afraid.
Yeah the dimming decrease has definitely coincided with the recent spike in temps that came on top of already rising temps. That’s obviously causation. Yep lots of things going on. Best case I suppose would be another temp spike from industrial collapse causing a collapse in dimming that nicely offsets a solar minimum in Western Oregon.
Years ago, I recommended John Kerr’s The Inconvenient Skeptic as an excellent introduction to climatology. Interestingly, I couldn’t find many links to it a Google. I suspect they don’t want to promote it. But it is still available and affordable at Amazon.
https://www.amazon.com/Inconvenient-Skeptic-Comprehensive-Earths-Climate-ebook/dp/B006009P8W/ref=sr_1_1?crid=RB9339JQRJGN&dib=eyJ2IjoiMSJ9.SiYIT8MZH8CM4NCxqPIVuQ.80Gr6jCspshOKHcoBo9yWosihd8E0qZxH1VhZ_fY5CI&dib_tag=se&keywords=The+Inconvenient+Skeptic%3A+The+Comprehensive+Guide+to+the+Earth%27s+Climate&qid=1748910827&sprefix=the+inconvenient+skeptic+the+comprehensive+guide+to+the+earth%27s+climate%2Caps%2C243&sr=8-1
Now, I have a new recommendation, Climate of the Past, Present and Future: A scientific debate by Javier Vinos.
https://www.amazon.com/Climate-Past-Present-Future-scientific-ebook/dp/B0BCF5BLQ5/ref=sr_1_2?crid=UQ1ZR19ORTI7&dib=eyJ2IjoiMSJ9.ixtMSyIac6QaoNgwwDXLq_tSe38i_CrewYchjBBukulO3cSR5CkmDlwp6aOEzN_KKqLgFBY3x7Kn9_A-d7FsYZA80vgVyWT6v7OJKZz9XULB63kno5MNVcQzZ__YCbxp-0BPAbq5St9qPzKo-Nkg9iH7Zy5FIBJrOy9LUnGIqycPyMoHwzTKVda0Zg07j3QhNABi3ch6CYYkwJcGG6a4jCymKGw1ooTwqL2_b74wCFg.hKQRjfvFeUW7dDcJMBWWzAjCkCVoRt42VcQpSEUtvSo&dib_tag=se&keywords=Javier+Vinos&qid=1748911064&s=books&sprefix=javier+vinos%2Cstripbooks-intl-ship%2C237&sr=1-2
Although the hardback version is a bit more expensive than Kerr’s book, it’s chock full of information, research reports, conjectures and copious graphs that make it a good coffee table book for those who prefer to read books while drinking coffee rather than just looking at the pictures.
Javier explains how and why the Earth goes into and out of glacial periods, the overwhelming importance of changes in obliquity (the tilt of the Earth’s axis with respect to the plane of its orbit) in determining when glaciations commence, and how on a much shorter timescale variations in the rate meridional transport of heat between the tropics and the poles (MT) determine whether the temperate regions are cool (as in the Dark Age cool period and the Little Ice Age, or warm as in the Roman, Medieval and Modern warm periods.
He even has a bash at trying to explain how even shorter-term changes in solar output (11-year sunspot cycles and variations in the strength of successive cycles) affect the climate, leading him to disagree with Valentina Zharkova about our prospects for entering into a grand solar minimum over the next few years.
Javier is a Spanish native and this is reflected in his English prose, and his preferred style is rather dense, at the academic paper level, so while this book isn’t in the science for dummies category, it has the merit of being concise, with very little or no equivocation or beating about the bush.
I believe all the chapters appeared originally as articles published at Judith Curry’s site, where Javier is a regular. It’s an amazing book, revolutionary, mind-blowing, thought-provoking, and enlightening. Despite some genuinely funny word choices, I rate this book as excellent.
Spoiler alert: According to Javier, the ice core and seafloor sediment records indicate that for the past million years, glaciation has always commenced when the Earth’s obliquity drops below 23º. It is currently 23.44º and falling. It will reach the “tipping point” of 23º in about 3,000 years, prompting the next glacial period and reach its minimum tilt of 22.1º approximately 9,800 years from now.
Thanks Tim. Where’s he at on anthropogenic forcing?
Excellent question!
Javier acknowledges that anthropogenic greenhouse gases (mainly CO2) are a significant “climate variable” over a centennial timeframe, but in this they are vying with solar variability and oceanic oscillations, which are equally significant. He also points out that model-based climate “forecasts or projections only consider a very limited number of variables and the rest are assumed as invariant. This necessary simplification means that with increasing time the chance of a forecast being correct decreases even if the variables considered were correctly projected. The future is, after all, unknowable.”
Looking ahead, Javier argues that atmospheric CO2 levels can be expected to level off mid-century based on two major factors: projected changes in global demographics that will reduce emissions, and increases in carbon sinks that will increase absorption.
We don’t hear a lot about these carbon sinks in the MSM, but he contends that CO2 sinks over land areas have increased in efficiency due to the “greening” of the planet. More greenery = more CO2 absorbing plant mass = more CO2 absorbed. He quotes estimates that in 1960, 40% of anthropogenic CO2 emissions were taken up by land plants while today, that ratio has risen to 50% despite much higher anthropogenic emission levels. The main result of putting all that CO2 back into circulation has been to expand the biosphere.
Javier hypothesizes that with the aging of the human population and its eventual decrease, coupled with the increasing efficiency of carbon sinks due to the higher CO2 level, anthropogenic warming will stabilize at about 1.5ºC above preindustrial levels.
As far as I can remember, he doesn’t say much about land use changes—which are well known to affect climate at the local and regional levels, and he doesn’t speculate about global economic collapse or running out of hydrocarbons in the short term—concerns that are never far from the minds of most people who comment at OFW. Accordingly, his speculations concern a scenario in which economic BAU is sustainable until the end of this century.
Thanks very much Tim. Sounds like a great book. His contention that greening is causing a rise in land-baded carbon sinking is interesting, and that he can put a WAG on the increase, at 10pc. I would have thought that industrial development during that timeframe would’ve canceled-out, at the very least, any greening, along with other negative aspects like the upsetting of forest fungal respiration and whatnot. Does he go into that particular topic at length?
Tim by “that particular topic” I meant the greening topic in case it wasn’t clear.
He doesn’t go into the details of what may be causing “greening” in the book. That in itself is a big subject that could have taken up a chapter on its own.
I’m not sure precisely how he gets his estimate, but he reads the relevant scientific literature and keeps up to date with the latest research result with the sort of enthusiasm that lesser mortals reserve for following stock prices or batting averages. There are between 50 and 100 references to scientific papers for each of his chapters.
But in short, records have been kept of anthropogenic CO2 emissions, and we can get a good idea from calculating from these records that these emissions have been growing for most of the past century. We also have a good idea from fairly precise measurements that atmospheric CO2 levels have been growing since around 1950.
From these records and measurements, we can calculate the annual CO2 airborne fraction = the ratio of CO2 that remains in the atmosphere relative to the total anthropogenic emissions of CO2 released over the course of a year.
Over recent decades, the CO2 airborne fraction has shown an increasing trend. This means that a larger proportion of emitted CO2 is remaining in the atmosphere rather than being absorbed by natural sinks.
This is not surprising in itself. Assuming the sources and sinks were roughly in equilibrium before humans started interfering with the balance in a big way, pumping out more CO2 than the sinks could absorb would be expected to cause a backlog.
But what is surprising, to someone who hasn’t considered the situation and simply absorbed the establishment narrative, is that, based on observational data up to now, the rate of increase for the airborne fraction of CO2 is generally slower than the rise in total emissions, and suggests that the sinks have been absorbing a relatively higher percentage of the emissions over time, at least in recent years.
If the sinks were not growing, they would have been absorbing a relatively lower percentage of emissions, since emissions have been growing.
Javier noticed that logically, the only way the sinks could be absorbing a relatively higher percentage of emissions in a period when emissions were increasing, would be if the sinks were also increasing their capacity to absorb CO2. He doesn’t go into the how’s and why’s, but simply notes that this is what the data implies.
Javier was talking about why sinks are taking up more CO2 from the atmosphere in the comments at Euan Mearns’s blog in 2018. I found this exchange while searching for an online version of the book—which doesn’t seem to be available.
https://euanmearns.com/global-co2-emissions-forecast-to-2100/
Perhaps my explanation about the airborne fraction above is less than crystal clear. I myself don’t understand it precisely.
It may be more accurate to say that the rate of increase for the airborne fraction of CO2 is generally slower than the rate of increase in the amount of total emissions.
This indicates that the proportion of CO2 absorbed by the sinks is increasing relative to the emissions, meaning that the sinks are effectively capturing more carbon.
Javier doesn’t go into why this is happening, but one obvious factor is that plants photosynthesize more efficiently as atmospheric CO2 levels rise, producing more biomass.
Thanks again. But isn’t he, then, overlooking the fact that the oceans are taking up more CO2 all the time. Remember about 10 or 15 or 20 years ago how apparently the oceanic carbon sink feedback loop kicked-in and the oceans started acidifying more quickly?
And from his relevant comment under Mearns’ article, he seems to imply that the oceans are shedding CO2 due to warming:
“Due to warming the oceans release ~ 16 ppm/°C,”
If oceans were shedding CO2 then there’d be nothing else to look to but greening, as he is. But oceans aren’t.
That said, am I misunderstanding his position — or the science — because it seems to obvious a mistake for him to make?
Russia experiences their version of Pearl Harbor. I’ve no doubt that it will be Game On! Prepare accordingly.
https://www.armstrongeconomics.com/world-news/war/natos-proxy-ukraine-attacks-all-of-russias-strategic-bombers-igniting-wwiii/
Near the beginning it says:
I can see how this was designed to make Russia very angry.
Apparently Armstrong Economics has some kind of model predicting turning points of various kinds, and this event fits right in with a turning point. I don’t know anything about the model. Does anyone else?
“I don’t know anything about the model. Does anyone else?”
From the little I understand is that he says that he learned that we live in a world of cycles, and the cycles have a timeline of around 8.6 years and his computer models, that.
That is just a simplistic view as I also have trouble understanding how he accurately comes up with those dates that correlate precisely to major events.
He claims that his computer predicated three years in advance, a civil war breaking out in Ukraine in 2014. He also predicated the 1987 stock market crash a couple of years in advance, down to the exact day.
There’s a book on his forecasts and it is dubbed “The Master Forecaster”.
https://www.amazon.com/World-According-Martin-Armstrong-Conversations-ebook/dp/B0F3NH52C1?crid=3QZV6FZ175J7W&dib=eyJ2IjoiMSJ9.EZs5zpjhoTTlmKraZdV8GBODzT99-Q3fSIabaA-rp6a2qfafDq0D0dXvbt1oW1XRnQiCAMsSbMa28fe1aGgg2bgiGbPh9TEih17cR9TuuQw.V0mnhT_uZRbfHf9Zy8RHd8gMLbI25KBMz8kEWVkzogU&dib_tag=se&keywords=the+world+according+to+martin+armstrong&qid=1747082727&sprefix=,aps,137&sr=8-1
Predicted not predicated. A typist brain fart 🙈
Wow! Astrology may work on similar principles.
Zerohedge story about what happened:
https://www.zerohedge.com/military/ukrainian-drone-swarm-attacks-hit-russian-long-range-bombers
Ukraine Launches Massive Drone Swarm Attack On Russian Airfields, Trump “Not Notified In Advance”
Maybe the retaliation will be against Europe, rather than the US. We can hope.
All very dangerous of course. This will force Putin’s hand, specially internally. Even the other day members of his cabinet were criticizing him (medvedev and Lavrov specifically).
The Hand has Ukraine collapsing and Russia cake walking (like Al Nusra in Syria) all the way West to secure the rest of the aging Soviet nuclear powerplants, which was the express purpose of the war in the first place.
“This will force Putin’s hand, specially internally.”
That is the real danger indeed. London based Alexander Mercouris who recently visited St. Petersburg sensed that there’s a growing impatience with Putin holding back as NATO and Ukraine continue to attack inside Russia.
If Putin is sacked, expect a hardliner who will not hesitate to escalate things and god knows if it will go nuclear. This is the danger of not approaching a conflict as if it is a war. It is something Dr Paul Craig Roberts warned Russia could happen and it could.
Putin knew this as well as Lavrov but they were more concerned about Western acceptance by the media. Both Putin and Lavrov knew this was a proxy war even before 2014 when John McCain and Victoria Nuland were handing out cookies and sandwiches along with $5 billion to use Ukraine as cannon fodder. They chose to look the other way.
It is why I think if Putin is sacked, Medvedev could replace him and he is the equivalent of McCain, Bolton and Nuland.
I don’t think this will “force Russia’s hand” … I will bet that Russia just keeps doing what it’s been doing: grinding the front down, but with no power outages across all of Ukraine, no blowing up the bridges, no widespread destruction of civilian infrastructure or civilian deaths. A “humanitarian war”.
… and now, no Kerch bridge.
was any damage done? the clip i see shows the explosion, but no consequences. for me the real issue is how it was still possible to access the site to deploy the explosives.
Traffic has resumed. But it must be clear to all that from now on it is going to be asymmetric warfare, I expect at least two years. Not happy about these developments. I just lost another two days of work at my farm due to non-existent internet. Fortunately the animals feed themselves.
remind me which oblast you are in? why would internet go down? i only saw that power went down in Zaporozhye.
Yaroslavl. Not so sure it was a drone attack because I could not pay insurance for one of the tractors, and I could not pay electricity for one of my farms. Those are all offices with fiber connection. It probably was a regular internet attack. Just the same, asymmetric warfare every day, lots of time wasted.
Let’s not forget Nudelman buying Chechen mercenaries to kill (mass murder) trade unionist to kick the coup off.
In many fields a plus does not contribute to a good, healthy and long life as it promises to do – in living standards, mobility, healthcare, communication, degrees. Being warm in winter on 2sqms or on 20.000sqms does not make a difference, for example. Call it diminishing returns.
We dont have the right tools or even scales to measure this. Instead our mechanisms are very much based on keeping up what we have identified as success strategies. For example, in economy, a lot of knowledge is not natural law and neither has it been generated by experiment, but it consists of “recipes”, how to do it. If the resource situation changes, they are looking for substitutes according to their recipes, they seldom do a reevaluation. In car manufacturing, they are replacing fuel by electricity instead of rethinking mobility concepts in general. I see a little advantage in the tinyhouse movement but it is far from being enough.
Next to this “stickyness” of success strategies, there is the aim to keep up power. This also blocks the development of new strategies and procedures.
What is more, success strategies for the future are not success strategies in the present. For example in meat production there is nearly no way to avoid soja, if one wants to stay competitive. Without cheap soja, including fertilizers, crop protection and transport, which all translates to cheap oil, other breeds would be needed, than can be grass fed. For a transition we would need a larger stock. There is nothing now, thow, which would pay the investment.
This makes it so difficult to transfer achievements into the new time and this will lead to bottlenecks in a lot of fields.
I agree that it difficult to change our way of thinking. That seems to be what these deep cycles are about. They lead to major changes.
I don’t understand “soja.” Is that another name for soy beans? Or is it something else?
All these Pareto stuff, promoted by Romanian born engineer Joseph Juran in 1940s, is so 19th century-ish.
There are no 20%. Too much. That is a theory floated by those not exactly part of the elite but think they are smarter than the normal population to try to put themselves into the top 20%.
Throughout human history it was always 1:99, or at most 5:95. The normal before the start of the Great War was 4:96.
Which is why the current civilization, which has chosen the wrong 20 (20% of human population are in hopelessly poorer zones and the rest at least enjoy a modicum of modern civilization) which is unsustainable.
Without the screwups of Gabby Prncip, Joe Gallieni and Chucky, along with a bunch of morons doing ‘their duty’ and committing crimes against Civilization, the structure would have continued and all these wastage of resources for 75% of human population would not have taken place.
In other words, as I have said before, the people of Camboge (no killing field since it would still be part of France) would still be walking barefoot today with no shirts.
A higher state of civilization can only be reached when it grows vertically. Instead it grew horizontally, supporting too many people who do not exactly add anything to it.
Maybe the 80:20 ratio doesn’t work for everything.
Close enough is good enough.
Dennis L.
I dont see that! To construct one personal computer for one Prince is not posdible. To lay one transatlantic cable to connect two people is unpayable. To extract oil and ship it across the world to fuel the emperor’s lamp is impossible. The railways, the highway road infrastructure, large panels of glass, industrial metals all require masses of customers.
Cristobal Colon sailed for two peopls, Fernando and Ysabel.
Yes, historically true.
What if one has Optimus-3 robots at one’s command? What is the economy then? If the only economic cost is the energy to run the robot and not the additional stimuli such as cars, women, etc. what does that do to the economic cost?
There is no economics without biology, if this becomes purely inorganic with minimal to no friction of human needs, what does it all look like, where does it all go?
Exploring deeper, is there a cosmic sentience of which we are not aware? Hmmm, that is being discussed, sort of sounds like God of old. So, does God do economics? If one made/is part of the universe, not much need to explore it. What then?
As one progresses up this chain, oil becomes so yesterday.
Dennis L.
In an industrial society 80/20 is fairly accurate.
pre oil
98% of people worked the land and produced the basic support-energy
while 2% enjoyed the fruits of their labours
that is your equation—give or take
Okay, assume true. How would it have worked without the 2%?
Dennis L.
then you would have had an aboriginal situation.—ie….no society
I bet it is more than that. There were sailors, fishermen, soldiers, traders, and all manners of craftsmen working wood, iron, glass, clay.
All of them dependent on land or sea, not mythic starships
makes no difference drb—even Michealango and Da Vinci had to eat……
And fishermen were energy producers just like farmers, but on water instead of dry land
That applies to all craft trades, soldier, blacksmiths… kings…..you name it.
traders consume energy, they do not produce it.
Roughly 2% were supported by the other 98%…..
Either it is 98% or it is not. I say it is not.
ok …ok..
lets say 97.5%—-then you can jump up and down—and say—–see….i told you so
worldwide 98% has not been true for at least 4000 years. There are many videos showing population and city development on youtube. In a place like Italy, in the deepest of dark ages, around 800, it probably plummeted to 95/5, but just because there was a downswing.
To some extent your thesis is untenable. there has been civilization for 5000 years, and civilization is by definition a place and time where the agricultural population percentage goes down, so that armies and priests and craftsmen be developed. and it is where civilization exists that the most people live. I think you should look up some history prior to the re-discovery of the steam engine, you really have the debate skills of a five years old.
it’s ‘debating’ skills of a 5 year old
not ‘debate’ skills of a 5 year old.
Actually, it can be either “the debate skills of a five year old” or “the debating skills of a five year old”; both forms are acceptable.
Norman, if you had corrected drb’s erroneous use of a plural ‘s’ after ‘year’, you would have won a cookie.
As it is, you are now leading in the competition for June’s Gramma Nasty of the Month award.
Why can’t you accept that not everyone is a native English speaker and that instead of being criticized for their trifling mistakes, they should be congratulated for making themselves understandable?
I don’t expect your German, Russian or Swahili is shit hot either, is it? Mine certainly isn’t.
I am not talking about the 2%. I am talking about the 18% who try to include themselves into the top crust.
Kulm, it is known that it is the middle class that makes revolutions. you are not going to function without people making metal tools. so all types of empires did take these in consideration.
the lifestyle of the top 18% is made possible only by indebtedness to fossil fuels…..
without FF we eventually go back to 98%–2%
Anyone seeing any Auroras in their night sky?
Sun very active
https://services.swpc.noaa.gov/images/aurora-forecast-southern-hemisphere.jpg
“George Kaplan on May 30, 2025 at 11:03 am
Here are a few thoughts on oil production. A bit long – please delete if too much.
Development projects are getting scarce following the drop in discoveries since 2015. By 2027 at latest I think we’ll see accelerating global production decline.
In the Gulf of Mexico there may be a small annual increase this year, depending somewhat on how damaging the hurricane season is, but from mid 2026 production will fall maybe by as much as 10% per year (again with a lot of noise from hurricane disruptions and occasional damage resulting in longer unplanned outages).
Norway, Mexico and Kazakhstan are producers of similar size to the Gulf that have, also similarly, held a recent plateau but are likely to start rapidish decline from 2026. Kazakhstan completed its last brownfield development in January and has nowhere to go but down. Norway is ramping up Johan Castberg and has one final new greenfield project, Yggdrisil, due in 2027, but every other medium to large field is in decline, in particular Johan Sverdrup has reserves to production ratio of 5 years so is losing on average 20% per year, which alone will be higher than the initial Yggdrisil addition. Mexico aggressively developed two medium sized onshore fields but they peaked mid 2023 and the country has been declining again.
Oman may be in a similar position, It has a number of giant oil fields, mostly developed in the seventies and eighties. It originally peaked in 2000 at a million barrels per day and then lost 50 thousand barrels per day (kbpd) per year until redevelopment in 2007. It peaked again in late 2022 but has been declining (also at about 50 kbpd per year) since and with no new oil projects planned.
The problem these and many other countries have, including those in OPEC, is not just an absence of new greenfield projects following the collapse of discoveries since 2015, but also that they have exhausted most of their brownfield opportunities for accelerating production of reserves (technically this is mostly because their reserves now have low proportions of “probable” that can be revised up to “proven”) .
There are 13 mid range producers such as India, Egypt, UK with 200 to 1000 kbpd production, all now in continuous decline with a combined output of about seven millions barrels per day, and losing a combined 250 to 300 kbpd each year, which may be slightly accelerating.
Part 2
Nigeria and China were declining quite quickly a few years ago but have added production more recently, however both appear to have plateaued again and are likely to resume (possibly accelerating) decline. Angola has predicted that its production will decline fairly rapidly (15 to 20% in some years) starting around 2027 but things depend somewhat on the start up and performance of two remaining planned FPSOs (one due late this year and a smaller one in 2028).
Brazil and Guyana have FPSOs with large design throughput but short plateaus (two or three years) and rapid declines (10% or more), so they have to continue bringing on new projects even to maintain production. By late 2026 Brazil will have reached a peak plateau, which will be very bumpy because the FPSOs tend to have frequent planned or unplanned shutdowns, and will be in decline by 2029 based on latest development plans. Guyana is likely to be declining by 2028. Suriname has a large FPSO due in a couple of years. It is intended as a hub but there haven’t bean other major discoveries so far.
Namibia will not see any production for a few years; new discoveries in other frontier basins in the Mediterranean Sea and north west Africa have been gas. Argentina shale oil is growing slowly. If Venezuela suddenly changed to a regime allowing western companies to dictate it would probably take 15 years to rebuild the oil industry.
Before Covid and the Ukraine invasion there were a couple of articles that suggested Russian oil would soon start declining. It relied on western skills and technology for a lot of its frontier (Arctic) fields and to get the best out of its ageing Siberian wells. That’s gone now but it’s difficult to know whether that contributed to recent large drops, or they were mainly demand driven. However it seems a gentle continued decline is more likely than a recovery.
A quarter of Canadian C and C is conventional light and heavy oil, which peaked in 2015, but condensate has been increasing quite rapidly recently and bitumen has been rising but may be flattened out by Autumn. I don’t know of any new greenfield oil sands projects and incrementing production from existing projects is difficult (there are some developments but they are in the 10s of kbpd range). However the oil sands projects have about 50 year plateaus and need a lot of natural gas (partly why condensate production has been increasing) and that may be the limiting factor sometime in the thirties.
Part 3
I don’t think any of the reserve or spare capacity claims of the big five OPEC producers can be believed and I’d expect, with such mature fields, their main problems will be around water handling rather than oil availability. Saudi offshore production has aquifer support but onshore it uses water injection: produced water is recycled and oil depletion is replaced with seawater injection. As the fields age the water to oil ratio rises (e.g. in old UK fields the water cut is above 95%), which means that to maintain production water handling capacity and high pressure pumping needs to be continually added.
Kuwait has been declining but recently had a multi-billion barrel discovery. Its fields mainly rely on aquifer support and the produced water is quite toxic and corrosive. Iraq has been declining quite quickly and is awaiting a large development from TotalEnergies to provide seawater injection and produced water handling – at the moment much of the pressure support uses river water, which is a problem given the growing drought conditions. There have been previous attempts at this development but the endemic corruption and high security costs have so far been insurmountable.
The largest impact on oil supply will be how the light tight US basins will decline, which is highly dependent on prices and costs as these are low EROI developments (and increasingly so as the tier one drilling locations are exhausted). But note the shortages that are now beginning to show up concern diesel and the LTO fields are fairly short of middle distillates so their decline may not be the biggest oil supply impact to global economies. EIA is due to issue the 2023 US reserve estimates in June, which will give a clearer, if a bit out-of-date, view of things. These are from E&P reports and fairly reliable – it’s likely these will show remaining reserves are now declining (i.e. production is greater from additions from new development plans – this is geological not price based).”?
https://climateandeconomy.com/2025/05/30/30th-may-2025-todays-round-up-of-economic-news/
Skimmed only, seems very thorough.
We are out of stuff on earth, looking harder probably won’t work.
Plenty of stuff around us, space, plenty of industrial energy in space.
Spaceship earth is designed for biology, it evolves. We don’t really understand that system except it is emergent.
We most likely already have our cubic mile of Pt, it is near the center of the earth; much easier to find more in space and drop it down the gravity well. Our near future is H. Solar photovoltaics are now $.07-.08/ watt. The main problem is pollution when they wear out. Maybe Starship, blast old ones into space, Jupiter seems convenient.
It might be hypothesized a world without oil is so very difficult the doomers keep looking for the counter example to prove it ain’t so. I am a believer, it is so; looking harder won’t change that. Starship is a chance.
Dennis L.
I think that world oil price makes a huge difference in what gets developed. If world oil price would go up, new techniques would come out that would allow more production from existing fields. If world oil price goes down, investment will fall off.
Back in the days when I was writing for TheOilDrum.com, there was a site that would add up all of the known developments around the world above a fairly low threshold. This approach didn’t work very well. There was a lot going on that was not explained by obvious news items.
One thing that You wrote about that does not get much emphasis it’s that the high oil price caused the 2008 crash. Not the housing debacle. I believe in today’s process that it would be about $ 260 a barrel is that correct? That would surely crash the system. I am not sure how block chain it’s going to work. Maybe it will give us a jubilee to start over for another 20 years
Something to worry about:
https://www.zerohedge.com/commodities/alberta-wildfires-threaten-oil-sands-output-energy-experts-closely-monitoring-inferno
I see my post is up at Zerohedge. They linked OurFiniteWorld.com, rather than to the particular article, so the link doesn’t show up here.
https://www.zerohedge.com/geopolitical/diminishing-returns-threaten-world-economic-stability
Link on Zero hedge says:
“Current economic indicators… suggest an impending downturn that will affect global living standards and government stability.”
May I suggest for many it is not impending, it is now and papered over with debt which is non repayable. This is essentially consumption of existing resources without maintenance of same. Think of large, US cities.
Dennis L.
Population is already collapsing due to low birthrates – ref South Korea and Japan as leaders in this regard. All (or at least most) Western countries are well below replacement too.
Strangely enough, humans don’t breed well under stress and effectively what is captivity (aka city life).
There are also credible videos asserting that the population of China is somewhere in the range 700-900 million, not 1.3B.
The point here is that resource availability can fall without collapsing things, because demand will be falling too, due to reduced population.
People sense that things aren’t going well and choose to have only small families. This does cushion the problem.
It also creates a different problem. We currently have the system set up so that older people can “retire” at a certain age, and the younger people will pay part of their wages to care for the older people .
This arrangement works well when the economy is growing rapidly, and there are not too many old people. If actuaries assume that this same pattern will continue indefinitely, they will provide much more generous benefits than the economy can really provide.
If young people are really quite poor, and there aren’t very many young people, old people will have to work as long as they are able. In fact, this is pretty much the way the system always worked, until fossil fuels let us think that we were much richer than we really were. We promised too much to citizens for the long term. In order for reduced population by the young to work, benefits for old people will have to be cut back.
You often say Gail, that the economy is a self-adapting system. Absolutely many are going to continue to get poorer, but for many fortunate Westerners, that’s from a high, material starting point.
My money is on a whole bunch of, as yet unknown, things happening that will keep the party going for a lot longer than we expect.
As you say, there’s likely some sort of divine imperative to do that, although Satanic forces are doing their best to cause chaos and distress.
“My money is on a whole bunch of, as yet unknown, things happening that will keep the party going for a lot longer than we expect.”
I think that will probably be the case. AGI, if it happens, will change almost everything. Even the AI we have can change a lot.
One example is a way to use cheap solar to heat any carbon source in steam to make syngas. Gail has griped for years about how worthless intermittent renewables are. Here is how you use it.
https://htyp.org/Trash_to_fuel
This method, based on 1860s technology and cheap solar electricity can produce synthetic diesel at about the same price as oil out of the ground.
But, at the same time, I think we’re in a situation where most work may cost more than it yields.
That is an interesting way of putting the problem. You may be right. Trying to grow food supply at home, without a way to keep animals out (I saw two deer in my front yard yesterday) is a losing battle.
a ladyfox and presumably her family, (she always takes food away in her mouth) have adopted me…..
11pm on the dot, she turns up for her supper every night…….
I enjoy her brief company.
The Offering Perimeter is a method I have applied to gardening midst deer in non-hunting zones is to grow an outer perimeter of deer favorites (lily, viola, violet, dahlia,azalea, rhododendron,hibiscus, morning glory, clematis), then a boundary that deer avoid (Garlic, onion, lavender, marigolds, oregano, thyme, rosemary, verbena, bee balm, lamb’s ear)and grow the rest inside that area.
I am not doing much gardening now. I’m afraid I don’t have room for using your approach. It sounds like a good idea, if you have the room.
Thanks for that idea.
Pesticides and GMOS are your friend.
Well, turn your yard into a deer plot and get a rifle! 😉
If I were The Hand, I would lower birth rates worldwide to far below replacement levels.
I would create AGI
I would create AGI level robots.
I would create many large acreage arcs. Say a minimum of 20 miles by 20 miles. Well supplied with PV and batteries. Electric farming equipment.
Has anybody visited Ted Turner recently?
AGI = Adjusted Gross Income???
Artificial General Intelligence
Ed, looking at electric faming equipment. A farm of 30K acres in AU has gone autonomous tractors, 90 hp diesel if I recall. Have the batteries be easily exchanged and one has partially solved the intermittency issue. Yes, I know Au is diesel, but 30k acres is a big farm.
They seem to manufacture their own tractors, GPS for farm equipment is now open source.
Dennis L.
Maybe we do not need a lot of young people to feed the old people?
One isolated case, without proper examination, does not prove anything
They can claim theu msnufacture their own equipment. Do they make all of the parts themselves? I seriously doubt it
kull,
Not doing everything yourself is called teamwork. We work as groups, Superman is a myth, it takes groups of troops not one man with a spear.
Dennis L.
Then it is no more than an assembly center, dependent on BAU, just like everything else.
The Great Madness:
A Victory for the American Plutocracy
Scott Nearing
[1917]
“The plutocracy and the democracy cannot exist side by side. If the plutocracy wins, dollars rule; if the democracy wins, people rule. There can be no alternative and no compromise. During the past three years of struggle, the democracy has lost every move. The power of the plutocracy has been strengthened immeasurably. “
we cant do without wages
simple really
available at
https://www.cooperative-individualism.org/nearing-scott_great-madness-a-victory-for-the-american-plutocracy-1917.htm
Thank you, Ed, for posting. Both Helen, his second wife after Nellie, and Scott had remarkable lives together and separately.
She grew up in an economically comfortable family of theosophists[3] and was a lifelong vegetarian.[4][5] She graduated from Ridgewood High School and studied the violin internationally.[2] As a young woman, she had a romantic relationship with Jiddu Krishnamurti.[Wikipedia
Scott was a a “progressive” and paid the price of such during that eventful period.
I visited with Mrs. Nearing at their Forest Farms Homestead several occasions in Harborside, Maine.
It’s still there open to the public.
https://goodlife.org/
The mission of The Good Life Center is to perpetuate the legacy of Helen and Scott Nearing.
The Good Life Center, through its programming and preservation of the historic Forest Farm homestead, advocates for simple and sustainable living skills, social and economic justice, organic gardening, and the non-exploitation of animals and the environment.
There best known book is “Living the Good Life”, sometimes called the “back to the land movement” of the 1970s
You lost me at “the last 3 years”. Did you mean the last 112 years?
He is writing about the run up to WW1. But the words seem to apply to the run up to WW3.
“Laws were passed; commissions were appointed; regulations were imposed. Most of the laws were violated; most of the commissions were captured by the plutocrats and most of the regulations were evaded. Still public opposition rose stubbornly and surely.”
Elon is doing a heck of a job.
Yes, eerily similar pattern has emerged again
More like some people somewhere desperately want history to repeat itself.
Ed, I looked up where that quote from and it makes the previous statement even more true.
Wars are political but not just in the way we are led to believe where it is JUST about conflict with external enemies. Elon and Bernie Sanders must have internal bipartisan enemies in the U.S. that they hope conflict will eliminate. Wars America are involved all seem to be international on scope, almost global. Global means on home soil. Everywhere means evertywhere.
As I recall, income correlates very well with IQ. It is worse than one thinks, like marry like. Always Pareto.
Dennis L.
There is no evidence that the oil market is undersupplied currently. Nor are inflation-adjusted prices excessively high. Talking about coal without mentioning that there has been a huge effort to demonize coal by environmentalists is irresponsible. You have a hammer (energy), and everything looks like a nail. There are a lot of explanations for current trends like tariffs, as well as slowing growth. At least put a few qualifiers around your conclusions.
Richard in confining your view to just the oil *market* supply and demand dynamics you are defending the health of the supply side from the demand side instead of defending the health of the supply side on its own merits.
Outside of the market dynamics sits the market size itself. Total supply/production. Continual total supply increases of the master resource are ultimately the only thing that matters to economic growth.
Supply and demand are closely joined at the hip because the cheapest place to store oil is in the reservoir, unpumped. Total supply peaked in late 2018. Yearly averages of demand have massively declined since 2020 and, concomitantly, so has supply… in a global economy that requires growth in order to be healthy: that decline in supply is objectively an undersupply. That’s the Big Picture. Undersupply and even weaker demand, which keeps nominal prices low and the real cost lowish for now. At some point nominal prices will get even lower but real cost will rise rapidly, and imo that is the future from here on out
we don’t do economy here, because it is the dismal science generating dismal nobels (the nobel has been given to cretins). just physics.
If there’s a ton of easy oil to be had, why don’t they just produce it like gangbusters to get the economy rockin and rollin? We could double the size of the economy overnight!
Oh, what’s that? It’s increasingly hard to get so now we’re blowing up rocks miles underground to access the last drops? And we’re steaming oil out of sand in Alberta? How curious that we’re doing that when we have so many giant untapped oil fields under our feet.
My bet is Cu will be the problem, not oil.
Dennis L.
The economy is very interconnected. The Invisible Hand seems to move the shortage of oil over to a shortage of wages, particularly for young people. It is not that we have plenty of oil; it is that we have shut many buyers of oil out of the market with low wages. They don’t take overseas vacations either.
The market works strangely. It needs narratives with a little bit of truth in them. It needs people to think that they are doing the noble thing by not having a car, or not having many children. Yes, if we actually are able to get all of the oil out that many people would like, it could perhaps cause climate change. But the real issue is a shortage of oil.
Respectfully disagree: The real shortage is children.
Dennis L.
Women left the household role for work. Did that result in fewer children? Yes, I think it did. So why did women really leave the home for the workplace?
I thought all these economists and demographers chanted that as industrialization advances and families become wealthier, the number of children declined. Not as many children needed to work the farms like in the old days. Better health care, more longevity.
Or was it women liking their new empowerment and not wanting to be bothered with children and BCP and sexuak freedom- until it was too late?
But now are women working out of necessity, needing two wage earners to support a household, even when the family is still intact? A drop in fertility due to simple unaffordable cost of living and raising kids?
But but I thought as people got wealthier, there was a natural decline in number children from wealth, not poverty. Poor people have lots of kids. It looks like it now works both ways. If you are wealthy, you have fewer children. If you are poor yet living in a developed country, you are having fewer children. Can’t afford them- only if you live in a subsisidized society or 3rd world country.
What about effects of divorce and splitting up households resulting in lower living standards for the newly split households?
Too many variables, contradictions, and cross currents to make any sense of this.
Here we go again.
Every time someone brings up birthrates people just repeat headlines or anecdotes.
Women are discouraged from being mothers.
Low birthrates are stated goals of many organizations around the world. If someone tries to raise birthrates in a low birthrate country, they would be attacked by the dominant culture for being a cult leader and for wanting to take women’s rights away.
“Too many variables, contradictions, and cross currents to make any sense of this.”
You’re trying to make it confusing to keep people away from the true reasons.
It’s culture.
Dennis
Mao tse tung also said that…..
infinite people chasing finite resorces reaches a level of bonkersness previously untouched even by your standards…..
Jay Hanson- we have a longage of people
OPEC+ oil producers stick to their guns with another big hike for July
https://www.msn.com/en-us/money/markets/opec-oil-producers-stick-to-their-guns-with-another-big-hike-for-july/ar-AA1FQ4rZ
Trump will like this. It will lead to lower oil prices and help prop up economies around the world for a while longer. It will help economies everywhere, except perhaps for OPEC+ countries. They will have difficulty getting enough tax revenue to support their economies. The covid restrictions of 2020 also led to very low oil prices. Probably not as low this time around–unless a major recession ensues, but with lower oil prices, the chances of a recession goes down.
I think the horse trading was release of some producer funds held in US banks.
I feel like its three main purposes are probably to provide political cover for deflation and also cover for the not-100-years fracking peak, and for picking up the slack from the geological fracking collapse. I’m also assuming that the OPEC ‘increase’ isn’t actually an increase, it’s just the removing of some or all of their cuts.
Even better! we will shower compliments on you when you visit, we will announce a 400 K increase, and you give us back some of our funds at citi. then they keep pumping the same.
Yeah totally in some ways it’s even more of a clown show than Biden’s. I couldn’t believe it when I saw the Saudis play Trump’s YMCA gay anthem at the end of the love fest. Bono was just on Rogan. Hand’s busy hazing everybody in sight, and with a purpose. Hand be in the mf zone. That means it’s crunch time.
https://www.youtube.com/shorts/lpkfgwXo-u0
I like how the AI has them writhing and flopping on the floor at the end because it doesn’t know how to maintain spatial-temporal continuity.