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The Energy Institute recently published its updated energy report, the 2025 Statistical Review of World Energy, showing data through the year 2024. In this post, I identify trends in the new data that I consider worrying. These trends help explain the strange behaviors that we have been seeing from governments recently.
A major hidden issue is that prices never seem to rise high enough, for long enough, to prevent production of fossil fuels and other mineral resources from declining relative to what is needed for the world’s rising population. Reserve numbers appear plenty adequate but, because of affordability issues, we cannot actually extract the resources that seem to be available. We should expect declining production because low prices drive more and more fossil fuel and other mineral producers out of business.
[1] The world’s per capita affordable supply of diesel has been declining, especially since 2014.
Because of it is high energy density and ease of storage, diesel is important in many ways:
- Diesel powers a substantial share of modern agricultural equipment.
- Diesel is the fuel of the huge trucks that carry goods of all kinds.
- Diesel powers much of the world’s construction and earth-moving equipment.
- Diesel (and other similarly energy-dense but less refined fuels) allows long-distance transport by ship.
- Diesel is widely used in mining.
- Diesel powers some trains, provides backup electricity generation, and powers some irrigation pumps.
Figure 1 suggests that the supply of diesel started being constrained during the 2008-2009 recession. The decrease became more pronounced starting in 2014, which was when oil prices fell (Figure 12). In fact, this downward trend since 2014 continued into 2024. The constraint in diesel production/consumption comes through oil prices that fall too low for the producers of diesel. If prices rise, they don’t stay high for very long.
If there isn’t enough diesel, cutbacks in some applications will be needed. One new workaround for the inadequate supply of diesel seems to be a reduction of international trade through tariffs. If goods can be produced closer to where they are purchased, then perhaps the economic system can accommodate the declining availability of the diesel supply a little longer.
It should be noted that jet fuel consumption is also constrained. The type of oil used is quite similar to diesel. Transferring the transportation of goods from trucks and ships to jet aircraft is not a solution!
[2] Copper supply seems to be constrained.
There has been much discussion of transitioning to the use of more electricity and less fossil fuels. This would require both a greater build out of electricity transmission systems and more use of electric cars. Each of these uses would require more use of copper. Electric cars are reported to each require 40kg to 80kg of copper, while cars with internal combustion engines use only 20kg of copper. Building charging stations for all these cars would further add to copper needs, as would adding new transmission lines to carry the higher total electricity supply.
Figure 2 shows that even with the expected increase in demand for copper resulting from a shift toward electrification, total world extraction of copper has remained relatively flat. A major issue is that it takes a very long time to build a new copper mine. Worldwide, the average time to new production is 17.9 years. For this reason, a temporary increase in price cannot be expected to drive up production very quickly. If diesel is used in extracting copper, and diesel’s consumption is constrained, the restricted diesel supply can also be an issue in expanding the copper supply.
The new tariffs on copper, announced by President Donald Trump, seem to be intended to drive industries that use copper to look for substitute minerals. With a very long lag, the tariffs might also lead to an increase in copper production. Tariffs have more staying power than volatile price changes. There doesn’t seem to be a quick solution, however.
[3] Platinum extraction also seems to be constrained.
Platinum currently has a wide variety of applications, including use in catalytic converters, jewelry, medicine, and industry.
Some people are also hopeful that platinum will enable the wide use of hydrogen fuel cells to help meet the world’s demand for electrical power in a way that doesn’t require burning fossil fuels.
One issue mentioned in the lack of growth in platinum production is persistently low prices. New mines will not be opened unless it is clear that production will be profitable. Another source indicates that the largest producing country, South Africa, has been having problems with electrical supply and rail transportation. These problems, in turn, seem to be related to South Africa’s dwindling coal supply. Its peak coal production took place in 2014. We should not be surprised if South Africa continues to have problems producing platinum in the future.
[4] Up until this report, the Statistical Review of World Energy has used an optimistic approach to quantifying the benefits of intermittent renewable electricity.
The traditional method of evaluating energy products involves analyzing the amount of heat produced in combustion. In past years, the Statistical Review of World Energy used a method that essentially assumed that the intermittent electricity produced by renewable sources (including hydropower) completely substitutes for the equivalent dispatchable electricity generated by fossil fuels. I think of this as the “wishful thinking” methodology.
The current methodology gives renewables less credit, recognizing the fact that intermittent sources substitute primarily for the fuel that electricity generating plants would use. It is becoming increasingly clear that intermittent power doesn’t work very well on a stand-alone basis. Many types of workarounds, including batteries and backup fossil-fuel generation, are required to supplement it.
The new methodology gives about 22% more credit to nuclear power than the old method. Nuclear power can be counted on 24 hours per day. Also, like fossil fuel generation, it provides the necessary inertia (the energy stored in large rotating components such as generators, which allows the power system to maintain a steady frequency) to keep electricity moving through transmission lines. Without sufficient inertia, electrical outages similar to that recently experienced in Spain, are likely.
The revised methodology seems to align better with the methods used by the US Energy Information Administration and the International Energy Agency. In the past, it has been confusing with major agencies using different methodologies.
[5] With the new methodology, there are significant changes in patterns from past reports.
With the new methodology, the percentage of energy generated directly by fossil fuels is higher than many of us remember from past reports. Now, the portion of fossil fuel consumption that comes directly from fossil fuel generation has been reduced from 94% in 1980 to 87% in 2024. Using the old methodology, the fossil fuel percentage in 2024 would have been 81%.
Figure 5 shows the history of non-fossil fuel types of energy, as percentages of total world energy supply. It should be noted that even these types of energy require some use of fossil fuels. Such fuels are used in the initial construction of the devices, for their maintenance, for energy storage, and for transportation (or transmission) to where the energy product is used.
Figure 5 shows that the share of energy produced by “Nuclear” hit a peak of 7.6% in 2001, and it has been declining ever since. “Hydroelectric” has grown a bit over the years relative to world energy supply.
“Geo, Biomass, Other” as a share of world energy supply has been relatively flat in recent years. It includes biomass in the form of ethanol and biodiesel, which are non-electricity forms of renewable energy. It also includes electricity from geothermal generation, and from burning wood chips and sawdust.
The only real “winner” in recent years has been “Wind + Solar.” As of 2024, this category amounts to 2.9% of world energy supply. It certainly cannot, by itself, power an economy like the one we have today. Section 7 of this post explains a bit more about this issue.
[6] The sad state of nuclear generation deserves a discussion of its own.
There seem to be many factors underlying the substantial decline in nuclear electricity, as a share of total energy supply, between 2001 and 2013:
- There were three major accidents at nuclear power plants, leading to worries about the safety of nuclear generation (Three Mile Island, 1979; Chernobyl, 1986; and Fukushima, 2011).
- The pricing scheme for wind and solar generally gives “priority” to wind and solar. This leads to negative wholesale prices for electricity at some times, and very low prices at other times, for nuclear power plants. This pricing scheme tends to make nuclear power plants unprofitable. I expect that this lack of profitability has been a major issue in the recent decline of nuclear generation.
- There doesn’t seem to be enough uranium produced to support much more nuclear generation than is used today. The US has been using down-cycled nuclear bomb material, but that is now becoming exhausted. See my earlier post.
- Uranium prices never bounce very high for very long. If prices were a lot higher over the long term, more uranium mines might be opened, and more uranium extracted.
- Opening a new mine often involves lag times of 10 to 15 years, making any ramping of uranium production a slow process.
There is also the issue of financing any shift to nuclear electricity. Upfront costs are huge, but nuclear power plants (with proper fossil-fuel-based maintenance) can operate for 60 to 80 years. As limits on fossil fuels are reached, building all these plants, using large amounts of fossil fuels, seems likely to reduce fossil fuels energy available for other uses. This makes financing a major challenge.
[7] The recent annual rising trend of 0.2% in per capita consumption of energy looks vulnerable to disruption by any economic problem that arises.
A major reason why energy consumption keeps rising is because, as population rises, there is a need for more food, housing, and transportation for this larger population. The consumption of energy products allows people to meet these needs. In fact, every aspect of GDP depends upon energy consumption.
Figure 7 indicates that world energy supply per capita rose between 1965 and 1979. It remained relatively flat between 1979 and 2002 and then rose quite rapidly until 2008. Since then, its growth rate has again been essentially flat. Fitted trend lines show what these growth trends have been:
I have written recently about the huge US government debt increase since 2008 that has tended to prop up both the US and world economies. With all this “support” since 2008, the fact that world per capita energy consumption growth has only risen by 0.2% per year is frightening. With the high level of debt, there is a danger that there will be another major recession that could bring huge financial difficulties. At some point, higher debt levels become unsupportable. Thus, what is really an energy crisis can “morph” into a financial crisis.
The types of events that have brought energy consumption down in the past are quite varied, as shown on Figure 9. Note that the lows keep getting lower. There is a danger that another recession-type event could come along and push the world economy toward a long-term downtrend in energy supply per capita.
[8] China plays a huge role in the world’s energy consumption. As resource limits are hit, China has the potential to pull the world economy down with it.
China energy consumption (Figure 10) follows a very different pattern from world energy consumption (Figure 6).
There are several important things to notice about China’s energy pattern:
(a) China’s energy consumption is heavily dominated by coal.
(b) There was a sharp expansion in China’s energy consumption, starting about 2002. This is related to China joining the World Trade Organization (WTO) in December 2001. On Figure 8, we noted 2.0% annual world per capita energy consumption growth between 2002 and 2008, which was far greater than in either the period before 2002 (at 0.2%), or the period after 2008 (at 0.2%). This shifting pattern was largely driven by China’s spurt in energy consumption after joining the WTO.
(c) China’s energy consumption has been growing more rapidly than that of the rest of the world. This is closely related to China’s becoming the leading manufacturer for the world economy, at the same time most of the wealthier countries have been moving manufacturing to lower-cost areas (ostensibly to reduce CO2 emissions).
(d) China’s energy consumption now plays an outsize role in the future of the world economy. In 2024, China consumed 27% of the world’s energy supply. This is more energy than that consumed by the US (16%) and the EU (9%) combined.
(e) With this energy dominance, any stumble in the world’s supply of fossil fuels and other mineral resources will affect China.
One area where China is running into limits is with respect to oil supply. China imports most of its oil. Comparing 2024 to 2023, China’s total oil consumption decreased by 1.4%. Its diesel consumption decreased even more, by 2.8%.
As the leading manufacturer of the world, China has been consuming huge amounts of minerals such as copper. This Copper Council report seems to indicate that China uses about 56% of the world’s copper supply. If there is a shortage of copper, China will be affected.
We can look at energy consumption growth on a per capita basis. Not surprisingly, China’s rapid growth has pulled down per capita energy consumption growth elsewhere.
The pattern shown in Figure 11 is disturbing. Outside of China, energy consumption per capita has been falling for a long time. The rest of the world, to a significant extent, has lost its ability to manufacture the goods needed for its own people. China’s energy consumption per capita is now reported to be on a par with Europe’s, but China, too, faces issues as it encounters resource limits of many kinds.
No wonder there is conflict among nations! Every country would like limited resources. If one country has more, other countries will get less.
[9] Inflation-adjusted oil prices have bounced around, rather than following a consistent upward pattern. This limits their long-term impact on production.
Commodity prices of all kinds seem to be influenced by many temporary situations, including debt availability and concerns about war. Higher prices do induce short-term changes that can influence supply of some energy products. For example, when oil prices are high, more production of diesel can economically be achieved by “cracking” long molecules of very heavy oil to produce shorter diesel-length molecules. When oil (and diesel) prices are low, this conversion process starts to be money-losing.
Thus, as we saw in Figure 1, diesel production increased between 1994 and 2008, in line with rising oil prices (Figure 12). Conversely, diesel barely held steady between 2008 and 2014. After 2014, when oil prices were clearly lower, diesel production fell significantly.
A major problem in creating greater mineral supplies for the long term is that new mines of all types take many years to develop. So does opening a completely new oil field. Prices tend not to stay high enough, for long enough, to encourage opening new mines and new oil fields. We see this pattern repeatedly, in diverse areas, including oil, copper, platinum and uranium, holding down the supply of these mineral resources.
Over the long term, affordability seems to play a larger role than rising demand in the prices of commodities, holding prices down. As a result, it is low prices that seem to lead to the falling production of commodities.
[10] Conclusion
This analysis confirms what I have shown earlier: The world economy is hitting energy limits in many ways.
I have written about the world’s diesel and jet fuel shortage in the past. Updated data from the 2025 Statistical Review of World Energy confirms that the world’s diesel supplies are not rising sufficiently to keep pace with world population growth. I believe that the shortage of diesel, and perhaps of oil in general, underlies the push toward more tariffs. One effect of tariffs may be to reduce the amount of long-distance shipping.
The 2025 Statistical Review of World Energy includes data for a few minerals that will likely be used if there is a transition away from fossil fuels. Of the minerals shown in the report, copper and the platinum group seem to be the most limited in supply. The relatively flat production at a time when demand should be expected to be rising gives us a clue that limits are being reached. Unless someone can figure out a way to get prices to stay at a significantly higher level, low supply of these minerals is likely to remain a long-term problem.
The overall energy supply does seem to still be rising slowly, but progress in transitioning to non-fossil fuels is painfully slow. We hear much talk about ramping up nuclear electricity production, but my analysis suggests that such a transition will be difficult, at best.
There is a great deal more analysis that can be done with the new data. I expect to be looking at this data in more detail in future posts.
Men acting for Wagner Group convicted of arson on Ukraine-linked London warehouse
https://www.theguardian.com/uk-news/2025/jul/08/three-men-found-guilty-over-london-arson-attack-on-ukraine-linked-firms
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https://www.theguardian.com/world/2025/jul/17/fire-destroys-main-stage-at-belgiums-tomorrowland-festival-on-eve-of-opening
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These were just two recent fires. Further back the Notre Dame cathedral burned – is Quasimodo still homeless? – and the Copenhagen Stock Exchange building burned down. I wonder if Russia has been behind all or most of these, to punish the West for aiding Ukraine. Asymmetric warfare, cyber attacks, etc. Now we hear about that plane crash in India. Is anyone disputing that Putin may be behind it?
why would russia have an interest in burning any of these buildings except the first?
Good point!
You never know. Hamas attacked a music festival. Such attacks dampen morale.
And you never know maybe Quasimodo is still homeless because Hamas attacked a music festival.
Hamas was ‘allowed’ to attack a music festival?
What is it that people don’t understand by “less than 5 minutes”? “October 7 Was An Inside Job – documentary (2024) by John Hankey
Agreed, was allowed to attack it. Just as 9/11 was allowed to happen. And in 2006 Netanyahu said, “9/11 has been very good for Israel” – a perpetrator gloating. A more intelligent person would have kept quiet.
Contrary to popular opinion in some corners…income for working Americans is not going down. A large percentage of Americans are high income earners. High income jobs are rife in joblistings. Everywhere you go, everyone is looking to hire a high income worker.Wages aren’t sticky. Wages are just going up for workers who are in demand. 50% of the U.S. have high income workers. The other 50% are just immigrant workers taking advantage of all the opportunity and freedom the U.S. free market system has.
I don’t think the split is 50% /50% at all. Maybe it is, in certain high paying industries, which you are more familiar with.
Instead, a whole lot of young people, and a whole lot of others, do not find jobs that pay enough, relative to what their education should provide.
“relative to what their education should provide” That is the rub. Go to a CC, take electronics technology, 2 year degree, MN $15K, right parental income, free. Salary $75K start plus overtime, $100K. No debt, hire today. Mechatronics is similar; jobs in industry good pay, benefits, dirt under fingernails.
Not sure how a dentist would ever break even, tuition is often $40k/year, and now you want to eat as well? Additionally, currently need four years of undergraduate education. Nutz.
Pharmacy school, no CC in highschool, 8 years, nutz. $148K average salary. That is a job AI is looking at.
Not easy, but millions want to come to US, can’t be all that bad.
Talked with a youngish man at the local UHaul, buys houses, fixes them up, lives in them two years and sells them. We were both renting trucks, can’t own for what one can rent.
Start young, one house per year, 20 years and not all that bad.
Dennis L.
Yes people want to come but that only means it is better than the hole they are leaving.
Is that hole, the one made by our bombs?
We didn’t have this issue before we started dropping the bombs.
Made we should stop dropping the bombs.
The bomb is the food surplus dumped in their countries;
which eliminated local agriculture; which caused dependency on foreign imports.
This situation is sustained by the huge population increases the dumping of food surpluses into their countries caused many years ago.
This creation of dependency is often called “economic development”.
White people in America didn’t understand this but sending food to places where NATO is unpopular is feeding their enemies. Eventually, the enemies will outnumber NATO and NATO will be forced to kill them all or be killed. Israel understands demographics is destiny. They saw how a raw numbers allowed a less skilled group of soldiers with inferior technology to overwhelm French forces in Hispanola. They are pushing the Palestinians out to avoid that.
“The bomb is the food surplus dumped in their countries”
I have heard this many times. They need their own agriculture to grow the food for the population.
Also, many years ago, missionaries came to Africa. My relatives went to Madagascar, off the coast of Africa. They taught the people about cleanliness. They started bringing basic medicines when they became available.
The unfortunate problem that resulted was that the population exploded. More children lived to maturity. This was part of the food problem in Africa as well.
I do not believe electricians are paid 75k-100k.
And flipping houses is also passe. No one can compete with those with big pockets. I have seen someone trying to do it. Gave up after being outbid for 12, twelve, straight times.
Once again more delusions.
What do you smoke ? Asking for a friend . 60% don’t even have USD 1000 for an emergency .
https://www.cbsnews.com/news/saving-money-emergency-expenses-2025/
Those are other 50% I mentioned. 50% of Americans are high income workers. Instead of joining the “middle class” most upwardly mobile people are joining the wealthy class. In America, being wealthy is normal. If poverty was normal, it’d be discussed a lot more on the news, in politics, and in entertainment.
IG , ” If poverty was normal, it’d be discussed a lot more on the news, in politics, and in entertainment. ”
You are joking . MSM is not news but advertisement ,entertainment and BS loaded .
That’s a very vague statement do you have some actual evidence 🤷
The United States started WWII by imposing an oil embargo on Japan and a trade embargo on Germany, which forced them to expand to secure their needs. They had become too technologicaly advanced for the US to allow them to continue on their path.
A member of the Russian Parliament said that the US has just started WWIII after Trump announced a trade embargo on all nations who buy Russian oil.
Sounds about right, if it walks like a duck, quack likes a duck and flys like a duck… that’s what my impression all the drama started..it will and is leading to a world wide military engagement that will lead to mass upheaval.
Anytime a superpower is being dethroned from perch of domination this is the result… unfortunately we are no longer using bows and arrows , swords and catapults but high tech weapons of mass destruction.
Just saw the old 1964 classic movie ” Fail Safe” with Henry Fonda, Walter Matthau, Larry Hagman. Dom Deluise regarding the tragic events when folks don’t “get along”
During the Cold War, U.S. bomber jets are equipped with fail-safe boxes that instruct pilots when and if to attack. When an attack order is inadvertently administered due to a system malfunction, the President of the United States (Henry Fonda) must scramble to fix the mistake before the bombs are dropped on Moscow. He manages to stop almost all the bombers headed for Moscow, except for one determined pilot who manages to complete his mission, with deadly consequences.
Yossy, you’re ignorant af
When Spain started to run out of silver from their worlds largest mine. They sent Columbus to go pirate the world. When the UK started to run out of sterling – they tried to pirate the whole damn planet.
When countries industrialize and reach a certain point they always start invading their neighbors and expanding. With the one exception of the USA due to its outrageous amount of natural resources and small population.
Spain was ruled by Hasburgs, the most inbred bloodline even recorded in History. Just viewed a series of videos about the degeneration of the genetic deformities that resulted in keeping the royal family “pure”, horrible. The other foreign powers need not overthrow, the royals unwittingly did it themselves
What Happens When A Royal Family Inbreeds for 16 Generations
https://m.youtube.com/watch?v=KbHfcrEmCxI
This is the shocking true story of 16 generations of systematic inbreeding that destroyed a dynasty. From mighty emperors who ruled half the world to a final king who couldn’t even chew his own food.
I assume this 0.1% will not drive us to the singularity.
Kulmie feels otherwise, can he chew his own food?
“Yossy, you’re ignorant”
Somewhat harsh. You are both wrong, whilst simultaneously both being correct(in part).
The history is complex, but WWII was really just act II of a long planned game by the corporation(you both need to drop the lie of the nation state. No such thing exists in the west). Like in the act I, the ‘British’ first sent huge amounts of troops and equipment, not to Europe, but to Iran(Iraq in act I) and so guess where we’re going for act III?
It wasn’t the yanks that were concerned about German engineering excellence in the 1930s. That boat had long sailed. It started(as far as I’m aware) in 1895 at a high level meeting in a country within London, when the choice of action was first voiced and so events put in motion.
Consider this, at the height of the ‘British’ empire, very much an empire of the seas(that’s why we are governed by maritime law, as is the US. Pirates & Privateers), the East India Corporation(correct name) had a larger standing army and navy than the ‘nation’ that supposedly controlled it. Who’s the real power?
There’s a book that might interest some by Jim Macgregor and John O’Dowd called Two World Wars and Hitler. That’s a lot of reading, so a write up
https://paulcudenec.substack.com/p/adolf-hitler-and-the-zio-imperialist?utm_source=profile&utm_medium=reader2
You will notice lots of mention of The City, but little to no mention of their correct title.
“We are a uniquely diverse organisation, with a role that goes beyond that of an ordinary local authority. We have our own government (the oldest in the country with origins pre-dating Parliament)”
https://www.thelondonarchives.org/about-us/the-city-of-london-corporation
Not just pre-dating, it’s London branch has been there well over a thousand years. Willelm the Norman confirmed this in a nice bit of needlework and a book, which unbeknown to most, gives every city in the land the same rights and also confirms common law as the overriding law of the land. Unfortunately, we are not a sovereign nation and so no one apart from the corporation gets to enact these rights(and many others), whilst the rest of us get shafted with their perverse maritime laws(again, same in the US).
These are your owners(the organisation, not the place), just a very visible fat white hand grabbing everything in sight and a population now so dumbed down they’ll believe anything and not even notice when a complete 180° turn happens the next day.
As I have written before, World War I started at the time of Peak Coal in the UK. Wages were way too low for miners, because the selling price of coal would not rise high enough.
World War II started at the time of peak hard coal in Germany. People were on the edge of starvation, leading them to look for rich scapegoats. Jews were a handy group to scapegoat. Taking wealth from the rich Jews and their places of worship didn’t provide much more food.
Japan desperately needed oil supplies, but I am not sure about the details.
https://ourfiniteworld.com/wp-admin/upload.php?item=43221
Yes peak coal around 1905, which they knew well in advance and planned accordingly. Germany was building a railway to guess where at that time(Iraq, you’ll no doubt be unsurprised to hear), as they knew what was coming their way. That railway is now known as the Orient Express and it’s true history erased.
The starvation was an effect of how the ‘victors’ treated them.
The Versailles Treaty and The League of Nations(more on them at the bottom) were the cause and the only cause.
Jews were Jonny come lately concerning groups to blame.
As Martin Niemöller wrote, first they came for the Socialists, Communists and Trade Unions(if they were Socialist, they killed themselves first and act II never happened. Hurrah), then the gypsies and the gays. When everyone else had been disappeared, they set about the Jews. Looks very much like a list that a corporate fascist would make.
For a decade before the outbreak of act II Wall Street(corporation) and The City(corporation) reduced all investment in every single country in Europe except one. Guess who and that investment went up by a staggering 48.5%.
If you’re unsure who, raise your arm 48.5° and it will be clear.
Japan certainly did need oil and not just oil, but that was always part of the game(control of Asia) and the game has always been absolute ownership and control.
They think they have the tools at last to take the final step, but anyone with any sense knows that’s singularly stupid.
So, it’s back to South Western Asia and then a big scrap amongst ourselves, if history is any guide.
The League of Nations and a certain revision of history
https://substack.com/@mirala/note/c-127791715?utm_source=notes-share-action
Nothing is as we have been taught.
Today China is connecting the EurAsian continent with rail and just reached the Persian Gulf region by connecting Tehran Iran.
Israel and the US just bombed Iran.
Do you have links saying “Israel and the US just bombed Iran”? I found links saying that Israel bombed Syria today, but not Iran.
Yossy meant that Israel and the US recently bombed Iran, not that they did so a few minutes ago.
when a nation promises infinite growth, if there are insufficient indigenous resources then that nation must beg, buy borrow or steal it from elsewhere.
there are no alternatives.
all nations eventually find themselves incapable of using the first 3 options….
so they resort to option 4…if they can.
Jews didn’t really horde food. They may have helped centralize food production but local farmers can over-farm and deplete soil all by themselves.
What bothers me with the Jews’ narrative that they were scapegoated for their success in banking is that it encourages a confusion of finance with real wealth. Real wealth involves ownership and control of resources necessary for human survival. Were a significant number of Jews involved in price gouging of items that resulted in people dying around the world in the 1930s?
There’s a lot we don’t know about the Great Depression but it doesn’t seem like it was a great time to accumulate wealth for Jew or Gentile alike.
I have heard that WWI was about the oil rich Persian Gulf region. If I remember correctly the German empire wanted to cooperate with the Ottoman empire and connect Germany with the Persian Gulf through rail.
The British empire, or the City or the Company won WWI.
London and New York are today the central nodes in the western banking cartel. The banking cartel is intertwined by ownership and they own the multinational cooperations and half of the global trade.
They finance the think tanks who write the US foreign policy that the Congress and White House rubber stamp.
This what Russia and China are faced against.
Seems reasonable to me, but I’d put this
“The banking cartel is intertwined by ownership and they own the multinational cooperations”
the other way around, although that’s maybe splitting hairs, as each is the other.
I use the term “corporation” because it has the historical context in so many ways(banks probably more so admittedly), but mainly because it’s the modern system of belief in the West(they stole all our traditions and taught emptiness, which a bank alone can not do), although we call it democracy and hide it behind a multitude of bs. Nothing could be further from the truth, but try telling that to one of the faithful.
Strange part of the world, the (mostly)hive mind of the West.
My knowledge of history is not very good. I didn’t realize
“The United States started WWII by imposing an oil embargo on Japan and a trade embargo on Germany”
I am certain that this is not what was in US textbooks.
Yossy is correct but victors write history .
https://library.fiveable.me/key-terms/history-japan/us-oil-embargo
I think that Yossy has raised an important point that is not taught in schools.
What Yossy explains could be true and along with the peak coal problems. Embargoes and tariffs are ways of fighting a war.
er….
Japan invaded Manchuria in 1931, they needed coal to fuel their war industries
They invaded China again in 1937, to support their expansion regime, they used American steel and oil to do this, and paid for it with their loot of expansion into Chinese territory….
Roosevelt could see quite clearly that the Japanese empire would go on expanding as long as American resources powered it.
American Industry was quite happy to make profits from Japenses atrocities.
the Roosevelt cut off their supplies. He was a decent man of principle….The current orange messiah would not have done that.
The Japanes ”honour code” would not allow them to retreat…. hence pearl harbour…..
oh—and ww2 was well under way, courtesy of their buddy hitler.—who did everyone a favour by bringing the great depression of the 30s to an end.
That gave the world 80 years of ”democracy”….lol…
which is now sliding into oblivion, because we have no surplus resources to support it.
(A brief history of the 20th c)
The Japanese saga sounds like a principled trap.
It sounds almost like green lighting the Iraqi invasion of Kuwait.
i was just relating documented info on what happened from 1931 onwards
if you choose to add odd connotations to it, that’s something for you to deal with…no concern of mine…
Norman, during the 19th and early 20th centuries, several Western powers had “slices of the Chinese melon,” referring to the various concessions and spheres of influence they established in China following the Opium Wars and other “unequal” treaties. The main countries involved were:
United Kingdom: Gained significant control over Hong Kong and various treaty ports.
France: Established concessions in cities like Shanghai and Tianjin and had influence in southern China.
Germany: Acquired territories such as Qingdao (Tsingtao) and other concessions.
Russia: Had interests in Manchuria and the northern regions of China.
Japan: Gained control over Taiwan and influence in parts of Manchuria following the First Sino-Japanese War.
United States: Although it did not have formal colonies, it promoted the Open Door Policy, advocating for equal trading rights in China.
These powers all negotiated unequal treaties that allowed them to establish these concessions and exert influence over Chinese trade and politics.
From the mid-19th century until the early 20th century when the Qing dynasty fell, the British actually operated the Chinese Customs Service (as they called it), and it was staffed mainly by British bureaucrats in towns and cities all over China.
While the Chinese Nationalists, who were Western imperialist lackeys, focused on the threat posed by Japan, Mao emphasized the broader struggle against imperialism. He believed that the internal class struggle within China was as important as the fight against foreign invaders, and he knew well that the Japanese were not the only foreign invaders. .
Now, Norman, you can insinuate that the Japanese were nastier than the British in China if you like. But before casting stones at others who came late to the party and were merely attempting to replace one imperialist system with another, altogether less oppressive imperialism, hang your diehard imperialistic head in shame at what your own country did in the Orient.
stick to what you know yossy
avoid stepping in bs
I suppose that counts as a devastating rebuttal in your world, Norman.
A.J.P. Taylor argued that the Second World War was the result of a series of miscalculations and accidents. He emphasized that the war stemmed from the complex interplay of national ambitions and failures in diplomacy, particularly the inability of the major powers to manage their rivalries effectively.
Actually, Taylor argued about a lot of things. He believed that the Treaty of Versailles and the political landscape of the 1930s created conditions ripe for conflict, but he downplayed the notion that the war was an inevitable consequence of Hitler’s aggressive policies. Instead, he viewed it as a product of historical contingencies and the failures of statesmen.
Putting Taylor’s perspective to one side, the historical record is clear that the United States imposed an oil embargo on Japan and a trade embargo on Germany, although the context and timing differed for each.
In the case of Japan, the U.S. began restricting oil exports in response to what the US viewed as Japan’s aggressive expansion in Asia (shorthand for the plan to replace Western imperialism with Japanese imperialism), particularly after Japan’s invasion of China in 1937. This embargo was part of broader economic sanctions that aimed to curb Japanese military activities.
In the case of Germany, the U.S. implemented trade restrictions as part of its “neutral” stance in the early stages of World War II. These measures included limitations on specific goods and were influenced by what the U.S. viewed as the Nazi regime’s aggressive policies and actions in Europe, such as Hitler’s efforts to do for the Germans what Woodrow Wilson had done for the Poles, Czechs & Slovaks, Southern Slaves, Lithuanians, Latvians, Estonians, Finns, Hungarians, and Ukrainian: consolidate their ethnic homelands into one state, much to Kulm’s chagrin.
These embargoes were significant in contributing to tensions that ultimately led to WWII. So yossi would seem to have a point, don’t you agree?
Barbara Kingsolver wrote “Demon Copperhead”, a retelling of Charles Dickens’ David Copperfield (which now has to be called as “The Personal History of David Copperfield, because of David Kotkin who used the book’s protagonist’s name as his stage name) set in a Redneck country.
First, Kingsolver, despite of claiming a redneck background, is not one. She was born in Annapolis, MD, where her father, a physician, was apparently working for the Navy. She graduated from DePauw university in Indiana, a liberal arts college, something few Rednecks even thinking about.
To try to make the protagonist’s life correspond to the life of the protagonist in Dickens’ book, Kingsolver has to add some unlikely plotlines; he is given not one, but two chances.
In the Dickens book, David Copperfield is no lower class. His father, who dies before the book starts, was a solid member of the gentry; however his mother, little more than a trophy wife, managed to squander everything, but still had enough to make a Murdstone to marry her and take whatever remaining of her properties.
After a stint in the factory Copperfield returns to his grandaunt, who was rather well to do, and manages to become an attorney, shunning Agnes Wickfield (whose father, his grandaunt’s lawyer, being ruined by an office manager) because she added nothing to his social status, and marries Dora Spenlow, whose father was a partner in a major law firm, entering the ranks of upper middle class. Both Dora and her father are killed off quickly, and Copperfield manages to spend 3 years sojourning in Europe before returning to England to marry Agnes, who was an old maid by than and had little prospect to marry otherwise.
To make the story follow the Dickens book, Kingsolver gives Demon a few chances. He even gets to enjoy middle class life for a while, hooking up with the daughter of a hardware store owner (the equivalent to Dora in that book), although to get the story going they spend all of her inheritance on meth before she overdoses and he moves back to the house of the Coach where he reunites with the character corresponding to Agnes in the Dickens book.
In reality , Demon would be joining the Army, sent to Iraq or something, and would return with a damaged face and an arm or leg missing, and spend the rest of his short life on drugs.
But what can be expected from a book written by a non-redneck imagining a redneck life? At least Dickens based his book partially on his own experience, and Kingsolver just tried to mimic the experience but could not hide the fact that she was a nonredneck trying to fake being one.
Did it ever occur to you that Kingsolver was not trying to mimic the experience of a redneck but she was framing it for people who are not poor or white? She is a wealthy woman and most of her readers seem to be other wealthy women. Wealthy women care very little about rednecks and if you look at the reviews carefully, it seems like she is mocking rednecks.
Hypatia was the smartest person in the entire world around the year 400.
She ran what was remaining of the Alexandria Library, and a chief opponent of Archbishop Cyril who wanted to get rid of the last vestiges of paganism.
Long story short, he and his band of religious nuts, the equivalent of rednecks in these days, mobbed Hypatia and lynched her (yes I know it is an anachronism but that was what they basically did so).
As a result civilization stagnated for the next 1,000 years.
=====
I personally have dealt with some rednecks, and have judged that they are incapable of thinking, emotions, or any kind of human traits. For all practical purposes, they are little better than apes. I won’t even get started upon the denizens of third world, who are another story I won’t deal today.
Some people think their lives are important, but they are not. “American” lives. LOFTLMAO.
Sam Pekinpah made a zombie film called Straw Dogs.
https://youtu.be/yXkqGVfm1mo?si=ZkIGSDYzENPRlPw8
He had to set the stage in England because otherwise the rednecks would get upset since it showed the rednecks in their true form, nonhuman zombies. In the end, although the Dustin Hoffman character had killed off all of the zombies, it is unlikely that self defense would be honored, since he is a foreigner(the setting is such that he moved to England to avoid the Vietnam War) and he would spend the rest of his life in a prison.
I can sympathize with your exasperation with the “rednecks”—are we still allowed to use that nickname?—white, rural, working-class Americans. But some people argue that their problem is that they exhibit too much emotion, rather than two little.
It’s probably the Scotch-Irish in so many of them, although the American experience has tended to water this down in comparison with the pure unadulterated Scotch and Irish some of whom are known to exhibit instant hostility at the sound of a middle- or upper-class English voice. But when you’ve had to deal with the English gentry as long as they have had to, I can quite understand their attitude.
Pingback: A victim of its own success
This is a link to a short article that Tim Watkins posted yesterday, which quotes my paragraph near the beginning:
Watkins shows an image with ever lower spikes in oil prices.
https://consciousnessofsheep.co.uk/files/2020/11/Michaux-oil-price-trend-reproduced-1536×1006.jpg
He says,
That’s cool, Gail, and apropos… It would be nice to see Micheaux and Watkins pay respects to Steve Ludlum’s visionary Triangle of Doom charts that he started publishing about 13 years ago. Micheaux ‘s chart is just the Triangle of Doom extended, and his superimposed annotations are reworded Triangle of Doom annotations. I would be surprised if neither of them are aware of the ToD, especially after me repeatedly referring to them here which imo is ground zero for peak oil commentary given your status. I’m all for the creative commons, to be sure, but paying respects to one’s forefathers is both common decency and the ever-important exercise of culture building.
http://www.theoildrum.com/node/10119#comment-973081
We all have been working on this for a long time. I met Steve Ludlum, years ago. I think of him as an orchid grower. He was looking at a lot of details about the economic system. I have corresponded with Simon Micheaux numerous times.
The Triangle of Doom is not my concept, so I haven’t talked about it, that I recall.
You need to have the right monthly price data. I am not sure that it is inflation adjusted. I let others talk about the issue.
No it doesn’t look adjusted to me which makes sense since it cuts off before the major inflation anyway. I had forgotten until now that he talked about growing orchids. Working as a drywaller. High school dropout was my favorite detail.
I am leery of using graphs from a specific period to “prove” something. I think it might be a somewhat stronger statement than is really true for the long run.
I just see it as an accurate, technical representation of the deflationary economic undertow. That finance capitalism has defied our expectations for 11 years since the price action dropped out of the bottom of Steve’s original ToD exactly when he forecasted it would, doesn’t change that for me.
His chart is essentially a visual of supply and demand in a zero-sum world in which both supply and demand have to keep robbing from each other until both find themselves on a tightrope, after which the Hand start intelligently cannibalizing what can be cannibalized, and in what order, so that a new, lower-level triangle can be navigated, as evident from Micheaux’s chart. And the high inflation period was the great cannibalization before the storm.
It’s just the long, drawn-out period of “energy deflation,” as Steve referred to it, before the culminating arrival of dollar monetary deflation. In hindsight we’ll see it as the catabolic period of Collapse.
Netanyahu Warns Trump That Iran Is Days Away From Releasing the Epstein Files
“Intelligence says Iran has reached 60 per cent enrichment of the clients on Epstein’s list, and there’s no telling what sort of destruction will be caused when they reach 90 per cent,” Netanyahu told Trump while tapping his nose.
https://theshovel.com.au/2025/07/16/netanyahu-warns-trump-that-iran-is-days-away-from-releasing-the-epstein-files/
Strange how Trump has changed his tune, or maybe not, if you have seen some of the pictures of him with tarted up little girls(hands all over them).
Have a look at his social media post from 2023 in the below
https://www.normalisland.co.uk/p/epstein-islanders-vote-to-block-release
He’s clearly as innocent as Clinton, Blair(little boys) and Andrew(who payed a woman he had never met £13m and gave her a ski chalet, all because they didn’t know each other).
Remember this?
https://x.com/TiffanyFong_/status/1945554782325723430
First time I have seen that one. I look forward to his support tying themselves up in knots trying to rationalise it, or all the photos of him being very Biden like in his handling of young girls. Unlike Biden, who preferred the innocent look, Trump seems to like the whore look(probably makes it easier to tell himself “she was asking for it” as if that was any kind of justification).
A couple of the milder ones at the bottom of this
https://cloudwoods1.substack.com/p/the-child-sex-us-president-and-his
If you bother to look around, there’s one’s of him getting a lap dance from a barely pubescent girl(it’s said he had a stain on his groin area when the child was released) and ones of him with both hands groping a similarly aged small childs bottom(I really do mean groping).
He’s 100% pee-doh-file.
Rape the white children and bomb the coloured children. He’s a perfect fit as US president. The corporation marches on and everyone pretends not to notice.
I don’t see anything wrong with gentrification.
It’s the natural state of life in cities.
When you look at the history of cities, you’ll see that they have always been centers for income and wealth generation.
They were made by the successful for the successful. If non-successful people have a problem with that, They can follow the advice of Fergie and take their broke selves home. Cities are not places for people who don’t have money.
To Mars and beyond!
cities do not generate wealth….
they only regurgitate what comes in from outside
Cities are products of complexity. They allow closer contacts among people who operate businesses, and those doing research. They allow complexity to grow, and thereby allow the growing spiral of greater energy use and greater complexity.
agreed Gail
But no city can function without external energy input, neither can it produce net energy output without those inputs…..
Right. Cities grow as energy from outside grows. The book “Against the Grain” by James C. Scott, makes the point that easily stored energy in the form of grain is what allowed early cities to grow. Cities did not grow well in areas where the primary food was root crops because these were not nearly as easily transported and stored.
Eating and drinking without paying in Eastern Slovakia:
Deepl:
“KOŠICE. They came, ordered food and drinks, sat down, and then left without paying. This incident, which took place at one of the establishments in downtown Košice, is reportedly not an isolated case. Several restaurant, pub, and bar operators have reported similar incidents.”
https://kosice.korzar.sme.sk/c/23519000/objednaju-si-zjedia-vypiju-a-utecu-kosicke-podniky-trapi-partia-neplatiacich-zakaznikov.html?ref=mnt
We get such stories in Japan too. Some people have been sent to prison for eating meals in restaurants and then leaving without paying. One story recently involved a 40-something-year-old guy, who was raised by a mother who worked in night time entertainment industry and whose birth was never registered.
He didn’t go to school but lived at home through his teens and learned about the world mostly through TV. When he was in his late teens, he left home and worked casually in various jobs with no ID. One day he got injured and had no health insurance or unemployment insurance.
Leading a very precarious life, he was often hungry, and it is so easy to get food by walking into a cafe or restaurant and ordering it…..
I think this will be his second time inside, and the sentence is 18 months, but he will be fed, and the authorities are now promising to fit him up wiht a proper ID in the form of a residence record.
Here in the United States the trend is people not paying in stores like Walgreens and CVS, causing mass closures in cities like San Francisco.
It’s not considered a crime and the thieves only get issued a citation, not arrested there. No longer are employees bothering to even stop them at the door. Some low income Neighborhoods are now without any Drug stores or grocery stores, leading to hardship for law abiding citizens.
Another symptom of Collapse…
https://m.youtube.com/watch?v=LEuoSmW4DRw&pp=ygUYd2FsZ3JlZW5zIGNsb3Npbmcgc3RvcmVz0gcJCc0JAYcqIYzv
Walgreens Closing 5 San Francisco Stores Citing Chronic Robberies
Black people haven’t paying in stores for decades. That is why there are “food deserts” in black neighborhoods and why any business that open in them have to deal with a high degree of theft and robbery. The L.A. riots started over conflict between convenience store owner groups of very young people that would steal frequently. I wonder if they convenience store owners had “insurance” that would cover all that theft in the 1990s.
When people cannot afford the basics, stealing becomes a possibility. Going to a restaurant and then disappearing without paying the bill is way of stealing that would seem to have a low probability of getting a person put in jail.
Of course, if a person does get in jail, that is not necessarily all bad, if their option otherwise would be to not have enough food, and go without housing.
Presumably the folks who eat and leave without paying look fairly prosperous, or the restaurant would worry about even serving them.
The current ruling parties in Slovakia even relaxed the rules for prosecution, so such deeds are not punished. There is not enough policemen anyway.
The policemen are probably committing this crime as well!
How Canada’s oil sands transformed into one of North America’s lowest-cost plays
“CALGARY, July 16 (Reuters) – Giant shovels, driverless trucks and a dog-like robot have all helped Canada’s oil sands companies including Imperial Oil and Suncor become some of North America’s lowest-cost oil producers, driving down overheads even as the worst inflation in a generation pushed U.S. shale costs up.
As the global oil industry enters a downturn due to economic uncertainty related to U.S. tariffs policy and OPEC+ pumping more barrels, Canada’s oil sands industry finds itself in a position of strength.
In the years following the oil price crash of 2014-15, international oil majors including BP, Chevron and Total sold their interests in Canadian oil sands. At the time, they classified the Canadian operations as among their more expensive, and therefore less profitable, projects worldwide. They directed their capital to cheaper oil production, and favored U.S. shale for its quicker drilling time and returns.
Since then, new technology and cost-cutting efforts have driven meaningful improvement in the industry’s competitiveness that make oil sands among the cheapest producers, according to a dozen industry insiders and a Reuters analysis of the latest U.S. and Canadian company earnings.
https://www.reuters.com/business/energy/how-canadas-oil-sands-transformed-into-one-north-americas-lowest-cost-plays-2025-07-16/
” , according to a dozen industry insiders and a Reuters analysis of the latest U.S. and Canadian company earnings. ”
Who are these dozen industry insiders and your analysts — all sitting in Bengaluru or Hyderabad .?
Purely pump piece .
There is no spare capacity . Period .
” OPEC has already released its June report.
For now, as a preview, they didn’t reach 411,000 barrels, although they were close.
During the month of June, the 22 OPEC+ member countries produced a total of 349,000 additional barrels.
Since April 1, a key group comprised of Saudi Arabia, Russia, Iraq, the United Arab Emirates, Kuwait, Kazakhstan, Algeria, and Oman has been implementing an agreement to return to the market a total of 2.2 billion barrels per day that were previously cut.
Among these eight countries, Saudi Arabia was primarily responsible for the increase, adding 173,000 barrels per day, followed by the United Arab Emirates with 83,000 barrels per day and Kazakhstan with 64,000 barrels per day. ”
There is no oil yo be found also . FUBAR .
” The replacement rate of new oil discoveries has barely reached 15% in the last decade. But not only is nothing being discovered, it’s not being searched for either.
The amount of seismic surveys is measured in square kilometers analyzed to try to find oil and gas pockets. Little by little, the reduction in surveys has plummeted, so not only is oil not being found, but for the future, the prospects for trying to find more crude are plummeting.
https://geoexpro.com/at-the-start-of-the-next-super-cycle-or-halfway-to-rock-bottom/
This observation seems to correspond with a global trend when looking at overall seismic acquisition activity over the last ten years, as Graeme illustrated in various ways through the work done by his colleagues at Westwood Global Energy Group and Seisintel.
In 2015, around 400,000 km² were surveyed; In 2024, it stood at just over 200,000 km².
“The industry is in a tough game,” Graeme said at the outset, “and these figures are probably the reason why the business is struggling.”
So the question is: are we now at a tipping point toward increased surveying activity in the coming years, or is this a matter of continued decline? ”
Quark .
I am not sure that the issue is that we need to “find” more oil to extract.
We know about a huge amount of oil “resources” that cannot be profitably extracted using today’s technology at today’s prices. If we could figure out different technology (for example, using sunlight as a heat source to “melt out” heavy oil in a very efficient manner), we could perhaps actually use some of resources that we currently know about. People have tried burning some of the oil in place to heat other oil being extracted, if I remember correctly.
We also know about a whole lot of coal under the North Sea that cannot be extracted and burned (profitably, at least) with today’s technology. In theory, it could be burned in place to provide electricity which might be used to power parts of Europe.
Another issue is that even when we do extract oil using standard approaches, a significant share of oil is left behind. Any technology change that can ramp up the portion extracted, without raising the cost of extraction, would be helpful.
///////We also know about a whole lot of coal under the North Sea that cannot be extracted and burned (profitably, at least) with today’s technology. In theory, it could be burned in place to provide electricity which might be used to power parts of Europe./////
coal cannot ”provide electricity”—–it needs the intermediary of water, steam and transmission elements
not available in situ in a coalmine
There was never enough to go around.
The real tragedy of this scrapping the bottom of the oil drum, so to speak,
is the devastation of vast tracts of wilderness to convert to oil goo that not only renders the land without life but pollutes the water table, which fracking also does. But it’s worth it for us now, so we can cruise along our freeways in SUVs a little while longer….and we call ourselves intelligent….
https://m.youtube.com/watch?v=CKQ3Cq7kYZo&t=3s
Oilsands pollution ‘vastly underestimated’: study | Front Burner
2,685 views · 1 year agoFront Burner | Daily Podcast CBC News
This is a possible issue I keep mentioning. There is a huge amount of very heavy oil in place. If there is really a way of getting costs down, it could push the world’s diesel supply problem down the road for some time, perhaps a few years.
interesting piece on Norwegian democracy
https://mail.google.com/mail/u/1/#inbox/FMfcgzQbgJQhbFfTMcVlDqJcnVHWjNnL
Norm this link does not work 🙁
thats odd ed—i just opened it from that link and it worked for me without any problem.
We could read it, if we had your email sign on credentials.
I advise not to click. In my case it opened my gmail spam folder. It is clearly a gmail link, so no articles are going to be there.
thats very odd drb
its a genuine link that i read regularly, some first class info.
Called the Hartmann Report—well worth looking at every day
no that link is a gmail link. it starts with mail.google.com.
That poor geriatric. 🙁
Men bad, women good. Same old.
I read the article, but I searched for it online. Your link, btw, it’s broken, you have probably sent the link from your private mail.
The author describes the country as a paradise because nobody goes bankrupt from medical bills. College and trade schools are free. Wages are high, and high taxes on the rich ensure that public services are well funded.
But it is not thanks to democracy, and we all know it. It’s because they had discovered ancient sunlight under the sea. More than 30 billion barrels of oil for a nation of 5 million inhabitants!
And in fact, the real reason is not mentioned at all in the article. The words petroleum, oil or hydrocarbon are totally missing!
But they have been better than the rest of all the other nations that have discovered hydrocarbons, that’s is absolutely true. In fact the Norwegian ruling class it’s the only one that I truly admire.
agreed…
as ive said numerous times—-democracy is the child of plenty, hardship makes it an orphan and it starves to death.
Norway also has benefited from hydroelectric electricity.
Fossil fuels enabled both hydroelectric and Norway’s oil and gas extraction, and the country’s resulting wealth. No wonder it can have a welfare state for everyone.
Back over a hundred years ago, my ancestors left Norway, essentially because of famine. Population had grown too high for the non-fossil fuel resources of the country.
Reante, please write a book. You are exceptionally intelligent.
Very kind of you Ed thanks but no thanks! 🙂
There’s no money in it, unless it’s a book of Poetry
If there’s no money in Poetry, than there is no poetry in money
Quote of Robert Graves
Dec 16, 2020 — The quote illustrates the idea that poetry is not financially rewarding, and pursuing money often lacks the beauty of artistic expression
For some reason this has kept in my brain all these years
Gail your article says resources are not extract-able because they are too expensive. I would say we have a bonfire of the vanities. It is not Klum’s 99% that need to be crushed it is the top 90% of consumption that need to be crushed. The luxury yacht fleets of the US Virgin Island, of Monaco, the military fleets of US, EU. The private air fleets of the wealthy. It is time for the working class to take owner ship of the world for the benefit of ALL humankind.
Until we have a computer model that shows us where the money goes I am willing to assume too much goes to war for the rich and toys for the rich and suppression of the working class.
Gail opened this with diesel and I believe that this paper/book by Lars Larsen has been discussed here; scares the daylights out of me…The End Is Near…No One is Getting Out Of Here Alive.
book review: The End of Global Net Oil Exports by Lars Larsen (2024)
https://un-denial.com/2024/07/29/book-review-the-end-of-global-net-oil-exports-by-lars-larsen-2024/
Larsen’s conclusion is that 2027 is the most probable year that diesel imports will become unavailable to all countries except China and India.
Diesel shortages will break everything that matters. Given our extreme $88 trillion global debt, complex global supply chains, and 12,100 nuclear weapons, it is impossible to predict how the collapse will play out.
But I expect food will be at the epicenter.
In about 3 years from now.
I wonder if this explains why most leaders seem to be losing their minds?
PS. Gail is mention in the above article review…
The model of Larsen depends heavily on the Export Land Model of Jeff Brown, saying that countries that have oil for export will see their exports decline faster than their oil production. This is because their own citizens will tend to use more of their own product.
I can look at this, but it is not clear to me that it is true, especially recently. I can look at the data and try to see if I can see. I think exporters reduce their exports because oil prices are too low. They have been having trouble with low prices, in the years since Jeffrey Brown came up with his model.
I am not sure that I want to go through all of the assumptions in the calculations in the book, but some of the assumptions seem iffy to me.
Distribution of oil from which diesel is made is quite different from the distribution of oil in general. It is disproportionately made from heavy oil, like that from Canada and Russia. Venezuela’s oil would be useful for that purpose, if the price would ever get high enough that extraction could rise to a reasonable level.
Countries with a lot of heavy oil to export tend to have financial problems because the market won’t give them a high enough price for the exported oil. They are not ones I would expect to give their citizens more cheap oil to operate their vehicles. I would expect them to disproportionately get involved in wars, and that uses a lot of diesel. So maybe they do use more diesel themselves, but because the country is poor, not because they are rich.
It seems like it would be difficult to figure out, without knowing a lot of things that are not easily available.
Thank you for your initial initiative of the premise of his collage of material assembled. It does make a lot of sense and Mr. Larsen is pretty much certain of his conclusions.
We shall see, said the blind man
In the last post I has commented a 97% drop in sales of Jaguar . Now a 37% sales crash in Italy and crash in Renault . A utomotive manufacturing in West Europe is over . Now only Czech , Slovakia , Hungary and Romania remain .
https://ceinterim.com/italys-auto-crisis-and-stellantis-production-decline/
https://www.zerohedge.com/markets/renault-shock-profit-warning-sends-shares-crashing
Western Europe, with its dependence on imported resources including oil, is doing terribly.
The first article says, regarding Stellantis in Italy, says:
Renault, in the second link, gave an unexpected lower profit warning, sending its stock price down 17%.
The decline in passenger car output is, I suppose, an effect of this concept of Net Zero.
Something that I have been “noodling” for a while but no real answer is Net Zero, and how Net Zero will affect crude refinery production. For clarity ~ I do not believe in this Climate Change Emergency or this Net Zero policy,… but put that aside for one moment.
Most countries now ascribe to Net Zero with targets of between 2040 to 2070.
If you follow the crazy logic of Net Zero, then at some point [between 2040 ~ 2070], all refineries will have to re-classify their gasoline production from *valuable commodity* to *waste product*. Worse than that, when Net Zero turns gasoline into a waste product, refineries will have to do a work-flow analysis on how they will *dispose of their gasoline waste* in an environmentally way.!
Given that most crude oil refineries are on an economic knife-edge right now, how on earth can any refinery commit to the logic of Net Zero, when a large (%) of their output goes from *profitable* to *technically*, a hazardous waste ?
Am I missing something?
What you are missing is that the powers that be can come up with some very creative stories to tell. I don’t think that in 2040 or 2070, anyone will remember plans made back in the 2020s.
I am guessing that refineries in the UK will all be closed within a few years, with or without this policy. Oil production in the North Sea is declining, and the UK is increasingly able to afford to import other oil to operate its refineries. The gasoline story was made up, to make people think that there really will be gasoline available in 2024 or 2070 in the UK. Perhaps walking will be the main method of transportation.
We somehow need a totally new system, if there is to a civilization in UK in 2040 or 2070. Perhaps the population will be very much lower then. Perhaps somehow, the self-organizing economy will come up with a new type of organization that sort of works, for a much lower population.
There’s no doubt that the humans who survive will rewrite history, to suit their own psychological needs.
What is happening in the U.S? Are care sales up?
100 years ago—Ford shovelled raw materials in at one end of his Rouge plant, and shot cars out of the other end, and employed 80000 workers to do it.
He paid them a wage high enough to buy the cars they were making.
As long as the price of raw materials stayed low, Ford workers could buy cheap cars on $5 a day.
It was the infinite profit mill.
Until cheap raw materials were no longer available, and workers demanded higher and higher wages.
Which is where we are now.
The American dream is over folks…
Unfortunately
It is not clear to me that we have a very good picture yet on how car sales are trending. June US car sales were up over a year ago, but last year’s results were depressed by computer problems. There was a pull ahead effect on sales in April and May, because of fear of the tariffs. So sales in the first half were “strong.”
https://www.theautochannel.com/news/2025/07/05/1550485-us-auto-sales-june-2025-results-from-nada.html
For your info on US Sales ,
https://wolfstreet.com/2025/07/02/despite-ugliness-at-stellantis-nissan-tesla-new-vehicle-sales-in-q2-rose-to-the-best-q2-since-2021-but-june-stalled/
Peak car sales world were in 2017-18 .
Have you seen the woke new jag campaign to rebrand their imagine?
https://m.youtube.com/watch?v=hyPjtwFrmhs&pp=ygUQSmFndWFyIGdvZXMgd29rZQ%3D%3D
You go woke, you go broke’: Jaguar sales crash massively following rebrand
27,106 views · 13 days ago…more
Menzies Research Centre’s Freya Leach has discussed luxury car company Jaguar’s massive collapse in sales by almost 98 per cent in Europe following last year’s woke rebrand.
“There also seems to be a bit of an anti-woke theme tonight, and you know, if you go woke, you go broke,” she said.
“Last year, Jaguar set the record for the worst rebrand in history, and now their sales have collapsed by 98 per cent in Europe.”
@pale_saint
13 days ago
Gayguar has a very limited market
A woke rebranding could be an issue.
I think what is being underestimated here, is the influence of government regulation. In the U.S. , love it or hate it, hiring quotas for protected classes are legal. In countries without hiring quotas, most American businesses would be hesitant to make an ad campaign like this without the support of the U.S. government.
In countries where hiring quotas for protected classes are legal, firms face pressure, in the form of legal challenges from “ngos” to adhere to hiring quotas by hiring the acceptable amount of people from the most underrepresented group be accused of discrimination. This is an added cost to business that distorts how workers are hired and fired.
At some places, many hire many underrepresented people, but fire them within a year because they can’t meet unrealistic goals. Some places respond by outsourcing. Government intervention is underestimated.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=dZ98778f880
Jensen Huang one of the most optimistic people in the world.
AI will save the world!
If ” intelligence ” can be ” artificial ” then a ” girl can be a little bit pregnant ” . 🤣🤣
AI is the new bipartisan trans mythos. But scaled up JUUUST a little bit lol. Rinse and repeat.
It is time for the world’s 99% to accept that there will be nothing for them.
A common theme at this blog is jobs are important.
The cold truth is that if there are not enough jobs population will shrink accordingly, and only the upper class and their scions will survive.
The tale of Noah’s son Ham is a metaphor of this. After the Flood (it does not matter whether it was real or not), they had no slaves, so Ham’s son Canaan was made a slave for a minor transgression, and other family members, who had treated Canaan as part of a family till the morning, now treated him as a slave.
The time to treat the world’s 99% as humans has ended and they will be treated according to their value in civilization, which is not too much.
Human slavery substituted for having fossil fuels as slaves, long ago. Unfortunately, it is likely to come back. People are willing to work for practically no salary, rather than starve to death. Today, in rich countries, we have no understanding of slavery.
It is not clear who will make it through this challenging time. In some sense, it is the “best adapted.” Those aren’t necessarily the 1%. They may turn out to be the physically strongest. Or the most adaptable. Or the ones who can develop the best narratives to tell to others. Or the ones with the most leadership ability.
“People are willing to work for practically no salary, rather than starve to death.”
Up to a point perhaps.
In the UK the increasing number of young people unwilling to work (for slave wages), are turning the social security system into an unsustainable ticking time bomb.
Well, maybe if they are beaten that may change their expectations..
Italy: Chinese workers, incl. undocumented workers, in supply chain of luxury clothing co. Loro Piana subjected to violence, 90 hour workweeks & EUR4 hourly wage;
https://www.business-humanrights.org/en/latest-news/italy-chinese-workers-incl-undocumented-workers-in-supply-chain-of-luxury-clothing-co-loro-piana-subjected-to-violence-90-hour-workweeks-eur4-hourly-wage-incl-co-comment/
In July, it was reported that luxury clothing company Loro Piana (part of LVMH) has been put on judicial administration over the abuse of Chinese workers in its Italian supply chain.
A factory producing Loro Piana-branded jackets allegedly subjected ten Chinese workers, including five undocumented workers, to 90 hour and seven-day workweeks for payment of just EUR4 an hour. The workers slept in rooms inside the factory. The employer was reported after he attacked a worker who asked for unpaid wages. The worker required 45 days of treatment after the violent attack.
The court in Milan found Loro Piana “culpably failed” to oversee its suppliers to pursue higher profits. Reuters reports that Loro Piana subcontracted work through two companies that had no manufacturing capacity to Chinese-owned factories in Italy.
Loro Piana faces no criminal probe, but it will be monitored for a year, although the administration may end earlier if the company shifts its practices in line with requirements.
In a statement, the company blamed a supplier for subcontracting work and said it had ended its relationship with the supplier.
Several other luxury clothing brands have been linked to migrant abuse in Italy in recent years, including Valentino, Dior, Armani, and Alviero Martini (see more here and here).
Yes, we are excellent are shifting the blame….
Sounds terrible!
The beatings will continue until morale improves.
“SophieSpring97
@SophieP25397
·
Jul 6
The UK spends 10.8% of GDP on welfare while France spends 23.8% and Finland spends 25.7%”?
https://x.com/SophieP25397/status/1941892423333916994
Or those who can survive on a nearly vegetarian diet.
A bit of crunchy roasted rat added will balance the meal, per Fast Eddy
Which Countries Eat Rats in 2025?
https://worldpopulationreview.com/country-rankings/what-countries-eat-rats
I don’t know about rats, but skewered guinea pig is pretty popular in Peru. Road side stands all over the place and is on the menu at restaurants.
“In the Indian state of Bihar, the Dalit people are known as “rat eaters” and tend to the crops of wealthy landowners in exchange of the right to eat any rats they catch in the fields.”
That’s your feudal wet dream huh kulm? 👍
I do not know about rats, but here every farm has cats. My first two farms the cats came and established themselves without us doing anything about it. (the first has no heating, so she had to find a good spot. The second one has like six cats). But for mice control the most effective ones are guinea fowl, which hunt at night but provide also meat.
The problem is we do not know who the 99% is. Once bombs start flying, current oligarchs can find themselves almost immediately in the 99%. My money is on current 1% to mostly lose their position, and new warlords to emerge. Once they emerge from whatever shelter they might run into reasonably well organize bands and tribes, and they have no band and no tribe.
History shows that the unhappy 99% will tend to attack the privileged 1%, when things go badly. Because of this issue, It is probably best for the privileged 1% to keep that fact hidden, as much as possible.
Hmm, keep your head down and your butt well protected.
Dennis L.
I googled whether the families of Lucullus and Crassus (famous oligarchs whose names remained in both english and italian as synonyms of opulence and ostentation) made it into the medieval nobility after the end of the roman empire. these are the types of guys Kulm favors. Google says Lucullus probably not, Crassus unknown.
The 1% are surrounding themselves with AI and marginalized groups (symbolically none of them want to live in warzone) to give themselves legitimacy. The “story” seems to go, that they may not be very popular but they don’t need the 99% because of technology and have a diverse loyal group that will defend them.
They are really counting on AI and robotics to deliver them independence from the 99%.
“Religious people often prefer to be right rather than compassionate. Often, they don’t want to give up their egotism. They want their religion to endorse their ego, their identity.”
—Karen Armstrong
That has nothing to do with religion.
A lot of secular people have that attitude towards things they are passionate about.
https://oilprice.com/Energy/Energy-General/The-Oil-Boom-No-One-Wants-to-Talk-About.amp.html
The oil boom that no one wants to talk about? Could we be wrong about oil ?
That is called ‘drop in a bucket’
This is important. OPEC’s own internal model recognizes a base annual decline rate of 5.5%, as revealed this week. It’s the first time I’ve seen that number. So let’s calculate what it means. That’s at least 1.5 million barrels per day of natural decline per year, not including Russia or the U.S.
Let ’s zoom in on this. Russian production is barely stable under sanctions, with limited access to Western technology, and a war that shows no sign of ending anytime soon. Iran has been exporting ghost barrels under shadow diplomacy, but despite the current ceasefire, one war or one angry tweet from Trump could vaporize that supply and send us back to where we were two weeks ago: on the brink of a major Middle East war. And the U.S.? The shale boom is dead. Production growth is over. So, long live the shale bust. Shale! Here’s the part no one is discounting: US base decline rates are 30-40%. New wells are being depleted fast. Traditional fields are depleted. Private operators are being tapped and sold, and public companies are being financially disciplined (read: scared). DUC? They’re done. Growth? It’s over. ————————————————- Why does this matter? Well, it gives us relevant numbers. If OPEC says they’re at a 5.5% decline, that means depletion is taking its toll on production. When, after 2026, almost all of their reserves are developed and younger fields are expanded (as Saudi Arabia is doing and the UAE and Kazakhstan have done), natural decline will start to put downward pressure on their production. But 1.5 million barrels per day per year is an outrage, to which must be added the decline of shale oil (without new locations, it reaches an average of 30% per year) and the already evident decline of Russia. The rest of the world, as has been demonstrated many times, is in terminal decline.
Yes, we’ll experience a couple of years of false abundance, and starting in 2027, the math is very clear. If you have a decline of 4 million barrels per day and add almost no new production (2030), the collapse of global oil production will be inevitable. Of course, we don’t see it now, because we’re under the false sense of security provided by the growth of shale oil for 15 years. But if this trend has come to an end, there’s nothing that can prevent the forced decline in global production. And it will be unexpected, because no one is saying so. There won’t be a sharp decline that will quickly warn us that something is wrong, but from 2027 to 2030, the drop will be slight and can be masked with restrictions.
In short, the roadmap is proving to be accurate, unfortunately. And the new peak in 2026 will make the subsequent decline, which no one will expect, even more painful.
Bad times are coming, and probably wars of all kinds.
Good luck, we’re going to need it.
Thanks to Quark .
As goes Ghawar so goes the world .
” Saudi Arabian data is a state secret.
The last official communication was during Saudi Aramco’s IPO in 2019, indicating that Ghawar had a maximum capacity of 3.8 million b/d.
An independent entity, which provides payment reports, estimates Ghawar’s production in 2023 at 3.06 million b/d, much lower than Rabas’s estimate. I doubt that the development of Manifa (which relies on a Saudi-developed refinery, because no one wants to take over Manifa’s oil) is currently viable. And it certainly wouldn’t compensate for Ghawar’s terminal decline.
https://www.offshore-technology.com/data-insights/global-top-ten-oil-producing-fields/
1. Ghawar
Ghawar is located in the Eastern Province of Saudi Arabia. This crude oil field is owned and operated by Saudi Arabian Oil Co. The field produced 3.06 million barrels per day (mbd) in 2023 and recovered 69.13% of its total recoverable crude oil and condensate reserves, reaching its peak production in 1980. Peak production was approximately 5.56 million barrels per day (mbd) of crude oil and condensate. According to GlobalData estimates, production will continue until the field reaches its economic limit in 2081. The field currently accounts for approximately 3.95% of the world’s daily crude oil and condensate production and is expected to recover 39,713.12 million barrels of crude oil and condensate.
quarkJuly 13, 2025, 5:20 PM
Ghawar’s decline between 2019 and 2023 is projected to range between 4% and 5% annually, and is likely to increase. If the decline in 2019 was around 4%, it is possible that it will reach 5% by 2025.
Thanks to Quark .
On any of these fields, if the price were to rise to say, $200 or $300 per barrel, there would be high priced technology that could likely pull out more of the oil in place. For example, instead of water flooding, chemicals could be used to try to extract more–something of this sort has been tried in China.
It is the fact that oil prices tend to stay low that leads to the declining production.
Could it be that this is a circular argument? A guess is all the chemicals would increase as fast or faster than oil production. Pumping water down a hole requires getting oil out of the hole and when more energy is put into the hole than recovered from the hole it becomes interesting only in as much as the resulting oil is very useful compared to say were coal used to generate electricity to pump water down the hole.
Tough to beat a gusher.
Dennis L.
I think you are right. Prices never seem to rise high enough to suggest this as a solution.
The reason that oil prices stay low is because high prices destroy demand this lowering prices. High prices can’t pull more oil out of the ground. Steve Ludlum’s Triangle of Doom. Any price spike is too short for investment purposes and just results in prices overcorrecting to the downside.
whatever the price of oil happens to be—it is we the customer who has to pay the that price….
the delusion persists in some quarters that ”we” will always be willing to pay that price…
but….
we do not pay for oil in real terms using money…
the real-terms price for oil is paid for in surplus energy—-irrespective of what your local currency happens to be…. (money is only a unit of energy exchange)
so…
if oil went to say.– $250 a barrel, roughly 4x what it is now, the oil would not have 4x the surplus (energy) to enable the average Joe to buy it.
Why not?—because the amount of ‘surplus’ energy in a barrel of oil is fixed—-so the producers would have to produce 4x as much, and 4x as much use would have to be found for it, so that the status quo would be maintained.
The same thing happened in 1974 when the Saudis quarupled the price of il—they were forced to quaduple their output in order to maintain thei ‘status quo’.
Problem is–we do not now have the volumes available to do that.
Is there the possibility that the post-2026 decline in production could be somewhat less drastic if there are two changes? These would be the end of the Ukraine war and return of Russian production, and the development of much greater production from Venezuela which has the second highest reserves and is severely underperforming at present?
No .
Venezuela needs a whole lot higher prices for the extraction and processing to be economic (and also to provide the tax revenue that the government needs to succeed to provide adequate government services).
Basically you are saying that WW3 is now unstoppable. I don’t disagree. Davidina is not going to be happy to see that 5.5% yearly rate. That is a 43% drop in 10 years.
It’s interesting that Doomberg had also forecasted plentiful oil supply for decades to come.
I’ve been conditioned to think that energy underpins economies, and that debt is an artificial construct whose ability to service depends on oil, when in fact could it be the reverse; ? That all this supposed exploration and extraction, righteous environmental concerns now be damned, is a desperate attempt to raise money needed to service debts and political promises?
In other words, like the tail wagging the dog, could it be that debt service will drive the world into a frenzy of accelerated oil depletion, aggravated by ever more wasteful green energy schemes, which are only another form of financialization, ie., wealth extraction/transfer.?
Saudi and the OPEC need money, just as the children working the open gold and cobalt mines in the Congo need money, so they dig.
No one can admit that prices don’t always go up. At the same time, there do tend to be breakthroughs in technology from time to time, even without higher prices. So it is easy to forecast that future production will be higher.
To me, the proof is in looking at actual trends, especially on a per-capita basis. If there is already a shortfall, that is worrying.
Also, peak crude oil (not per capita) was in November 2018. We have not been able to break that record.
These little bits of new production will help offset declines, but without seeing actual evidence that we are getting overall increases in important amounts (such as crude oil and diesel, per capita) we live in worrisome times.
Sam , crap .
Guyana will increase production by 200000 barrels maximum .
Namibia is still in the exploration stage and trial stage .
Brazil is a nett oil importer like Mexico . Indonesia .
AI Overview
While Brazil is a significant oil producer and exports crude oil, it also imports refined oil products, making it a net importer of refined products. Brazil’s domestic refineries sometimes struggle to process all the types of crude oil produced, necessitating imports of specific refined products like gasoline and diesel.
Here’s a more detailed explanation:
Net Exporter of Crude Oil:
Brazil is indeed a net exporter of crude oil, meaning it exports more crude oil than it imports.
Imports of Refined Products:
However, Brazil’s refineries are not always able to produce all the refined oil products (like gasoline, diesel, and jet fuel) that the country needs.
Reasons for Imports:
This can be due to several factors:
Refinery Capacity and Type: Brazilian refineries may not have the capacity or the ability to process all the different types of crude oil produced in the country.
Specific Product Demand: Brazil may import specific refined products to meet its domestic demand, even while exporting other crude oil.
Profitability of Exports and Imports: Sometimes, it’s more profitable to export certain types of crude oil and import others, depending on global market conditions and transportation costs.
Example:
In 2023, Brazil exported a significant amount of crude petroleum, primarily to China and the United States. However, during the same year, Brazil also imported a substantial amount of crude petroleum, mostly from Saudi Arabia and the United States .
UAE is nothing .
In the meanwhile decline rates are going to be 4 MILLION barrels per day . Get a parachute and safe landing .
Thanks for the posts ravi!
I know that the US has significant refining capacity, so it essentially sells refining capacity to other countries besides Brazil.
I know that in the past, Mexico has exported some oil to the US and imported refined products later. I haven’t checked to see whether this is still the case. For example, making low-sulphur diesel was not a service that Mexican oil refineries were set up to handle.
Great summary Gail! Always love your graphs. So relevant.
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So Kaya is now saying that the US needs to pay for part of the weapons to be sent to the Ukies. Meloni says she will not buy US weapons. Ursula will not reciprocate tariffs, creating immediate negative reactions from certain european trade organizations. Now this is an alliance.
“ because total US inventory
4:57 of all Patriot missile batteries right now is between 50 and 60. So
5:03 essentially, he’s committing to giving a or selling a third to Ukraine when
5:09 Israel’s demanding it, Taiwan’s demanding it, South Korea is demanding it. So we’ve got all these other demands
5:16
out there that, you know, we’ve got demand that exceeds supply and then just the operational use
5:23
of these missile batteries. Let’s say that he is sending 17.
5:29
That means those 17 will carry a minimum of let’s see 160. So a minimum about 280
5:37
missiles cuz you know 16 missiles per per unit. Um well, when a when you’ve
5:45
got an inbound Russian drone, a Garand drone or a ballistic missile, each
5:53
Patriot missile battery has to fire a minimum of two and more often it’s been
5:59
like four. So if if Russia fires four missiles and
6:06
or Iran drones, that means they will use up all the missiles that came with that
6:12
one launcher. Well, that means you’ve got to come up with you make sure that they have more than just 16 available
6:18
per launcher. Maybe you want to say, let’s have enough so a launcher could fire four times at that. Uh well,
6:26
there’s the problem. Lheed Martin only makes 700 of those maximum per year. The
6:32
number is closer to 600. Russia over the last
6:38
five of the last six days has fired each day in excess of 500
6:45
missiles and drones into Ukraine. So what’s what what Trump is offering is
6:53
a band-aid for an arterial wound. just you know it’s it’s an symbolic gesture
6:58 means nothing . . . “?
What the military industrial complex can’t profit through creation of trillion-dollar B2 Bombers and enormously costly and complex weapons, will now have to convert to mass production of cheap drones (and anti-drones.)
It’s a new version of Jevon’s paradox. Whereas there are for now “savings” in fighting wars with cheap drones, these savings will eventually be consumed by the explosion in numbers of their production.
10,000 drones = 1 F-35
Drb, this is my view:
Meloni is just palying the shell game, because she has also said that more Italian companies will move to US to please US.
So, I think she meant “no (additional) weapons than the ones agreed so far”.
Kallas occasionally criticizes US, like when it happened that she criticized Vance, but all ended in a soap bubble.
Ursula said she will not reciprocate tariffs, but for the moment, then, I’ve read on Sole24ore that EU will reciprocate something ridicolous on Bourbon (drunk by total 4 cats in EU) and on Boeing, which we are obliged to buy anyway, 😀 , so it is like using the hammer to hit our fingers.
So, considering that europeans able to actively protest on EU suicide decisions are by now only 4 cats (same number, but not the same drinking Bourbon), I think that we will go on looking EU slowly suffocating itself in agony.
With business progressively closing, with native Europeans dying and disappearing for various reasons, with migrants not integrating in the system, but in some way making the system go on and happy to live in a country where they have lower probability to die in early age or where they are simply not shot while walking, with junk tv debates and foolish cooked propaganda programmes for native Europeans still alive and with boiled brain and with migrants watching tv on internet in their own languages.
With very low percentage of people voting, but politicians no problem with that, on the contrary…
Not forgetting young people listening to music on headphones while walking, playing with smartphone when still, drinking aperitives when seated, loving females if female and loving males if male (if native Europeans).
The curtain for what we knew as old Europe closes, slowly and inexorably.
I think that’s all.
Oh I know… we have really nowhere to go.
Europe
The Balkan tribes are the oldest Europeans and the only ones who survived the Ice Age in Europe. They are the ancestors of the Germanic and Scandinavian tribes. Y DNA I
The rest are Talibans, IndoEuropeans from Afghanistan, Pakistan and Iran. Warriors and fanatics who arrived to Europe after the Ice Age. Y DNA R
The British population is Celtic (Taliban), but speak an AngloSaxon (Scandinavian Germanic) language. The language has then spread and the world is today speaking an old European Stone Age language.
The Irish are Africans. North Africans, but still Africans.
(I do not buy ‘everyone is from Africa’ theory. But the Irish are Africans.)
As I guess that you both have some relation with European dna heritage and I have the impression that you are close to understand some points, but completely miss others, I suggest you two books to improve a little knowledge about your origins and of other neighbor groups.
The above without any pomposity, I’ve been recently suggested too by an University Professor of Antropology.
They are two books very updated with most recent scientific researches.
https://www.amazon.com/-/es/Los-indoeuropeos-los-ori%CC%81genes-Europa/dp/8424914716
https://www.amazon.de/Auf-Spuren-Indoeurop%C3%A4er-neolithischen-Steppennomaden/dp/3406688241
For whatever reason no English translators will touch these, since a lot of the ‘whites’ in USA are Irish, southern Italians and (among Hispanics) southern Spanish, precisely out of the Hajnal Line and were not considered to be whites before the Great War.
Trump’s foreign policy is based on the neocon think tank paper Project 2025. The paper talks about the “Division of Labour” between the US and Europe, where Europe increases defence spending to 5 percent and takes over the war in Ukraine, so that the US can concentrate on the Middle East and China. The paper also talks about the need of a ceasefire in Ukraine to build up the Ukrainian army and restock European and US depleted arsenals.
Trump has now made a statement that nations who buy Russian oil will face 100 percent in US tariffs if Russia doesn’t accept a ceasefire in 50 days.
The US is still in charge in the world.
The question is what China and India will do?
What about ignoring it?
Seems like the USA is getting its ass handed to it on every front. “The US is still in charge in the world.” – I don’t see things that way at all. Time will tell. But perhaps we agree that US adversaries/competitors are more lacking in initiative than seems rational.
Meaning the victims refuse to fire a shot to defend themselves? It is odd.
Maybe they know the US is superior and all they can do is die slowly.
If they have to die maybe they should go out fighting?
Or, they can surrender. They can maker their young sons conform to the standards of the NWO and their young daughters can be play toys for the rich.
Yes, possibly.
Another alternative is that they know the US is a dying empire, but still dangerous and prone to lashing out. A “nuclear-biased nation”, as Martyanov likes to say.
Or maybe their understanding of USA power hasn’t caught up with the facts, with its diminution.
Ivan, it is possible that Trump can not beat his enemies, they are far too strong. But erratic behavior does weaken them. In retrospect the Iran affair could have been much worse. Instead inconsequential bombings of deserted facilities, bombastic claims of utter destruction, and now we are waiting for the definitive destruction of Tel Aviv and the downing of a dozen F-35.
Yes it could have been worse. I’ve seen recent reports that there are plans to start giving Ukraine ballistic missiles, but no confirmation so far. Hopefully sanity prevails.
Hopefully. On the cheery side, we get to measure accurately the intelligence of the elites.
The US has the initiative. The US forced Russia to enter the war in Ukraine. It is not a war that Russia wanted to enter.
The US is now forcing China and India to make a decision to either standby or abandon Russia. I’m sure they are looking for a third option.
North Korea seems to be the only country in the world the understand alliances.
We will have to wait and see.
Some of Trump’s actions are just bluffing. This threat may be also.
The US is very good pushing nations into corners where they have no other option than to fight.
” pushing nations “?
“Since the end of World War II, there have been 248 armed conflicts in 153 locations around the world.3 The United States launched 201 overseas military operations between the end of World War II and 2001,4 and since then, others, including Afghanistan and Iraq. “?
https://ajph.aphapublications.org/doi/full/10.2105/AJPH.2013.301778
Yossy, that may be correct.
But, not considering myself who loves US, I can tell you that if you travel the world for business you can easily realize that, differently than the past, people now are aware of that.
Expecially after many recent events happened with US involvement, Afghanistan, Lybia, Syria, Covid, mRNA Vaccines, Passports of vaccination to travel, Ukraine, Gaza, Iran, Tariffs etc. etc.
So, differently than the past, people now are (I would not say happy, but) indifferent if US will suffer problems like the ones it creates.
All the so called US’ allies are watching US like suddites were watching the naughty Pharaoh.
Someone could say ‘who cares’, but someone could see ‘an issue’ on that.
I see translator views in a different sense what I meant.
So, to say it better, correct phrase is:
‘Not considering things about myself, because I’m a person who actually loves US’
I wish America would say who cares? We have many issues at home, time to turn all our attention to those issues.
Dennis L.
If you think ‘who cares’, you also need to stop ruining all the other gardens out there.
Otherwise, directly or indirectly, everyone will act to destroy yours.
Maybe, but thinking back to the first half of the twentieth century, Europe seemed to love war, large scale war and powers that be in the US got us into that mess.
Complicated world.
Dennis L
Not being argumentative. Looking back at the sixties and seventies, those predicting the imminent demise of oil production were just wrong.
Have no idea about Trump; one can hope even if he is wrong what he does works.
Benefit of doubt; he has a very demanding job, he is literally spending the last of his life for it when he has a beautiful wife, good looking son and wonderful homes working for what he believes in. We could do worse.
Dennis L.
India will do nothing. It is a vassal of the American empire. Although it is part of the BRICS, it is also part of the QUAD for the confinement of China. Furthermore, it is a major part of the Cotton Road, which is intended to replace the Chinese Silk Road. Many large manufacturing companies are in fact relocating to India, abandoning China.
The project is called IMEC – India-Middle East-Europe Economic Corridor.
The Cotton Route will start in India in Mumbai, whose port is controlled by the Adani Group, reach the United Arab Emirates by ship, and from there, by rail, it will cross Saudi Arabia and Jordan to reach the port of Haifa in Israel, which is also 70% controlled by the Adani Group. So, Indians at the beginning and Indians at the end. BRICS? They are a political entity, not a military alliance. And are the weapons that decide the fate of the world, as has always been throughout the history of the human race.
Gian, IMEC is a non starter, a pipe dream. BRI will not be stopped. They started running the Iran-China railway(reduces travel time from 30-40 days down to 15) less than a week before the kiddie killers launched their unprovoked attack(no coincidence) on Iran(who could wipe them out in under a week).
India is doing no more than sealing its own fate as a backwater, unless they get rid of Modi. As for production moving there, what will they make, where will they get the raw materials and energy supplies?
Then there’s the little problem of who exactly are they going to sell to.
They understand full well the game we are trying to play and have encouraged us to place ourselves in such a position. It’s only our over developed arrogance that refuses to see the trap of our own making.
To paraphrase an old Chinese saying “why defeat your enemies army, when you can defeat his strategy”.
Anyone that thinks Europe can contain Russia, while the US beats China, really should put the propaganda down. It won’t happen, because it can’t happen. They dominate every field from raw materials, all the way through to development and production.
BeiDou is just one example and despite the tales we have been told, Iran has been integrating with Chinese technology for years. We can’t compete with this
https://youtu.be/JoDLZzupYWs?si=scALrtWnHr-bsSc2
It seems India is happy to remain as a backwater.
By that way it can enjoy the benefits both ways.
Yes Gian, with the little point that India without raw materials from China and energy resources from Russia can do little, but, above all, with the second little point that Indian products have not the same range of offer like Chinese ones and, concerning same sectors of products, Chinese ones are simply of another planet of quality and reliability.
The latest on the status of India . Very latest . India has pivoted to China . In the last 4 weeks the defense minister , the finance minister and now the foreign minister have been to Beijing , The cover is SCO meeting , Brics meeting etc but a lot of behind the curtain stuff . Primarily the Chinese act of stopping of perma magnets to India has crashed automotive production . Second the Modi crony Adani is desperate to secure the supply of solar panels for the ” green energy ” project or else he will be broke and crash the stock market , India cannot come to a trade deal with Trump because he wants removal of tariffs on agriculture and diary products . If India allows this it means the slaughter of 450 million engaged in farming . So India is playing something crazy . They argue that American diary products are not ” veggie ” . Why ?Because American cows are fed animal grind and if this diary produce is allowed to be imported in India it will hurt Hindu sentiment . India knows there is going to be no trade deal . Trump in the meanwhile has claimed for brokering the peace in the Indo -Pak skirmish which is making Modi appear weak and as a coward in domestic politics . During the skirmish only Israel supported India . Even long time ally Russia kept aloof . India is now isolated in South East Asia . India has a USD 100 Billion deficit with China and only a USD 16 Billion surplus with USA . The QUAD ( USA , Japan , Australia , India ) as a bulwark to China is defunct . Modi is on his way out on 17th September when he turns 75 years and the bureaucrats are now in a course correction mode by courting China . They are trying frantically for a meeting between Xi and Modi before he retires . Modi’s visit to USA in February was a disaster as Trump in his usual style insulted him .
NATO threatens India . The West is getting the message on the pivot as I have explained .
https://www.dw.com/en/nato-chief-warns-india-brazil-china-over-russia-trade-ties/a-73292180
That is: former colonizers go on treating all the others like suddites.
And it is very funny to see that Europeans, that has fully become lately US suddites, go on treating their old suddites in the slavery way.
When I was in the army for one year (it was mandatory at my time) this process was called ‘nonnismo’, maybe translated with ‘hazing’.
It was the typical behaviour of the simple soldier who tried to treat like a slave his new comrade who had just joined the army.
They are ridicolous.
If I were in some way Asian (of any Country) I would hate them.
India was always for itself, so no one really trusts it.
Absurd , In a country where 800 million survive on free rations . USD 70 ,000 for a Tesla . FUBAR .
https://x.com/Gizmodo/status/1945164302706528511?ref_src=twsrc%5Egoogle%7Ctwcamp%5Eserp%7Ctwgr%5Etweet
True. But does anything coming from the US make sense anymore? Selling 70K$ cars in India, declaring drone dominance in a sophomoric video below (I am glad they did in on the WH lawn, those drones could have broken some expensive china indoors), or placing in Ukraine missiles that could be nuclear tipped when they are detected by the Russians. video of Hegseth doing his little demo
Status of US drone building sounds dreadfully low. We need parts and materials from China.
I suspect AI will change all that. What we might consider is cutting back the non science departments of our universities; too many of the faculty have a religious belief in old narratives which are ready for the dust bin of history.
Dennis L.
Maybe I posted the wrong link because usually firefox after a couple of refreshes gives you the correct video. The sophomoric one is
Hopefully, the electricity is reliable enough for charging. Also, I wouldn’t expect a huge number of these vehicles.
Can anyone give some economic blogs? I’m particularly interested what is going on in Europe right now.
Maneco64 on tube is good.
BTW, anti immigrant riots in Spain. By ‘the far far and very extreme right’ of course.
About 6 months ago we had a program on msm about living in northern Europe. A Dutch woman took care of a camp for hikers in the ‘summer’ on Spitsbergen, 550 kilometers above Norway, Northern Icesea. The reporter asked: will you keep doing this in coming years? (about 3 months a year, for the rest she worked in the Netherlands).
She said: Probably not. I keep hearing ‘f*ck off to your own country’. That wasn’t the case 10 years ago. 27% foreigners on Spitsbergen.
The tentacles of de-growth are sometimes hard to discover. Until they grab you and make you live your whole life in one year.
EROEI is a bitch . Hideaway posts here occasionally but I have been reading his work from a long time . The destination is the same as is Gail’s for IC — collapse . The routes may be different but the destination is the same . I observe some new commenterers which is a healthy sign . All are welcome . All here understand ” Collapse is personal ” . Nothing bad happens until it happens to you . Who cares about the Gaza or the Ukies ? Where are the protesters and flags that appeared in parking lots in Western Europe when Putin started the SMO ? All fooking back to BAU — how to milk the elders for the weekend party or where do I stash my weed in my car id the cops pull me over ? FUBAR .
https://un-denial.com/2025/07/12/by-hideaway-eroei/
I am afraid I am still not a fan of EROEI. Timing is terribly important, and EROEI ignores it. Traditional EROEI is “at the well-head,” and what is really needed is “delivered EROEI.
Different types of energy are not at all equivalent. Intermittent electricity from wind and solar are not very valuable. All of the energy used to make wind and solar is of different types (generally more useful) than the output. The return on the investment is very delayed, meaning that funds must be borrowed for a long time, in order for the investment to hopefully pay back, but these interest payments have no “cost” to the system.
Kevin will humor you all on this one. We are getting to the point where everything is a clustertuck in the land of freedom and opportunity. At least the F-35 took years to become one. How can they possibly make up ground, lacking not just expertise but also supply chains?The elites seem unable to think rationally.
Or, the Elites are smarter than you realize. Or the Elites are not who and what you think they are. The global Elites that run non-public Degrowth Agenda for the whole world cannot have the American imperial hegemon of the Age of Growth be in good fighting form because it needs America to be at the height of decadence and corruption or else civilization would have collapsed already. Not even the Hand can have its cake and eat it, too. Besides, having the imperial nation weak for Collapse is a wise insurance policy against it’s going rogue. The two wars are partly about intentionally depleting the arsenals of the imperial Western militaries ahead of Collapse. Smart.
“The two wars are partly about intentionally depleting the arsenals of the imperial Western militaries ahead of Collapse. Smart.”
Good point.
I expect that locally, people with firearms will run out of ammunition pretty quickly, also.
Note to self:
Time to add some more 7.62×39, 5.56x 45, and 7.62x 51 to my stash. Like cars, there will be plenty of cars lying around, but will there be enough gas to run them? Guns in the US are everywhere. The question is, will there be enough ammo to chamber them? It was rumored that 20,000 rounds were fired in Viet Nam for every rice farmer, VC or ANV soldier killed (although admittedly a lot was suppressive fire). Here in the US, handguns and rifles have more new designs than shoes and clothes.
All cynicism aside, the US doesn’t make anything because income from financialization gets taxed at favorable long-term capital gains rates, whereas earned income from work and actual production gets taxed at punitive higher rates. There are no environmental concerns, workers’ disability, and high wages to worry about. Of course, the manufacturing jobs will get shipped overseas. Now add the US dollar’s exorbitant privilege as world reserve currency since 1944 Bretton-Woods, the FED since 1913, and a legalized counterfeiting scam via the fiat debt-based 10:1 fractional reserve banking system with big corporations and banks getting first dibs on the printed currency before it devalues (Cantillon Effect) and decreased requirements for collateral and you understand why the American worker (former middle class) doesn’t stand a chance.
The inability of economies to grow to overcome this parasitic drag due to the stagnation of the once plentiful and cheap energy and the wide wealth disparity means that indeed, the fight over resources has begun in earnest.
Great comment though instead of the fight over resources beginning in earnest id call it the great zero-sum reallocation of resources has begun, by the Elite Hand, and in the favor of nuclear armed and powered countries, as already partly evidenced by the huge energy backdoor bailouts to the albatross nations I’ve mentioned in the past.
To Gail’s and your point about running out of ammo, as usual I take a bit of a contrary position: how many firefights can a man without numbers actually get in before he’s dead? No matter how good he is. Not many. And running through ammo by spraying bullets around in a firefight is, to me, a clear sign of weakness imo. And warning shots shouldn’t take more than one or two bullets. My two cents on that. But I should prolly still pick up some more ammo as it’s open season on my sheep right now because of what the second super dry year in three years has done to my pastures.
You are correct about actual ammo needs. An individual won’t fire 10 rounds before getting picked off when he opens the door to throw out a bag of waste from his indoor potty once the water and sewers aren’t working. Not a very glorious way to die trying to defend your home.
A lot of people may have to stop driving because they can’t afford gas. Even if the price goes lower, if the economy tanks and one has no income, then one can’t afford gas at any price. Hungry people will congregate at the local supermarkets and wait for those who still can afford to drive and buy food. It will be like “jugging,” the act of lying in wait at an ATM and following the person who makes the withdrawal to his home and then robbing him there, only in the above scenario, the robbery will occur in the grocery store parking lot. The shopper will be followed home and robbed there- but only if the robbers can afford the gas! Guards may get posted at the grocery store entrances to protect the store owners, but once out in the parking lot, well, shoppers will be on their own.
I see public-private rationing systems being implemented before things get as dicey as you’re describing for a collapsing private marketplace. But things will get increasingly dicey besides, from here on out, despite an emphasis on law and order politics. Nature of the beast.
A wise comment i once heard on this scenario…use the biggest, baddest rifle you can to win and survive your first fight. ie, 308 over 5.56. Worry about more ammo after that.
Yet 5.56 is the NATO round. It’s that sweet spot that optimizes accuracy and power against a human-sized target. It takes flinching out of the equation.
You are quite the optimist, but hopefully you are right.
Quite the structuralist, rather. Humans are metaconscious: if we must use systems theory to know that Collapse is coming the we must use metasystems theory for understanding Elite response to Collapse.
Metasystems theory. I just made that up. But that doesn’t mean it’s not an obviously real thing. It’s just a specific instance of emergence. What Replenish called an egregore the other week. Look, someone else made it up before me:
https://jeet.ieet.org/index.php/home/article/view/36#:~:text=Metasystem%20transitions%20are%20events%20representing,%2BA3%3DB).
But that does not tell the whole story because in retrospect these people showed incredibly poor judgement in the past. like setting up shop in China or starting a war in Ukraine. And that does not make me optimist about their future decision making.
Globalization is peak MPP for industrial civilization and couldn’t have happened without fully exploiting Chinese wage arbitrage. That’s good judgement. The pros outweighed the cons, by far. Starting in the Ukraine war happened after the Limits to Growth, right when globalization needs to be broken up into regional trade networks in order to save energy, and right when the albatrosses in China and India and Turkey needed to be propped up with massive backdoor Russian energy bailouts under war cover of the Western price caps and sanctions. Ukraine cannot maintain its aging Soviet nuclear power stations during Collapse but Russia can – and it’s Russia’s legacy responsibility besides. The war breeds nationalistic political sentiment all around, and nationalisms are the logical outcome of the reverse engineering out of globalization. That’s all an awesome, complex judgement by the Elites. And the war is dragged out in time with the homestretch of economic Extend and Pretend. Ditto the Gaza and Iran warmongering that ultimately is designed to end Zionism because Zionism and Collapse don’t mix if the Elites want to maximize their personal MPP (chances of survival).
The Elites aren’t political. They’re farmers. Animal laboratory technicians. They only use politics to obscure their farming practices because they’re farming humans and not sheep. If we are to understand their geopolitical decision-making we have to figure out how the geopolitical changes benefit a non-public Degrowth Agenda that seeks a Glide Path Option for the catastrophic Collapse of a nuclear civilization.
The monster backdoor bailouts to China and India and Turkey are a dead giveaway. They’re the single best example imo that the Elites are dealing with Collapse as constructively as they possibly can despite all of the outrageous horrors of the collateral damages that they’ve decided cannot be avoided. Such damages are nothing new to them. The stick, as represented by war and manufactured crises and false flags including the plandemic which is greatest false flag of all-time, is always a more powerful motivator than the carrot (which during Growth the carrot is just money and post-Growth becomes populist political ‘victories’ which is less about money and more about psychological ‘victories’). The stick is now in ascendancy and whenever the stick is in ascendancy the follow-up carrots must get bigger and sweeter or all hell breaks loose. The climax of this herding operation over the edge and into Collapse is presumably The Big Nuclear Scare which is the wielding of the biggest stick of all-time, and which will be closely followed-up by the biggest, sweetest political carrot of all-time in the form of the national socialisms. How ironic that the ‘nazi socioeconomics should become everyone’s favorite lifeline to lead them through a Collapse trajectory that scares them to death. But herding is always based on irony, which is the operating principle behind both the carrot and the stick. Irony is the misdirected expectation.The carrot leads one in the opposite direction from where one consciously wants to go. The stick makes the direction in which one does not want to go suddenly and unexpectedly preferable. Isn’t it ironic?
As sheep farmers during Collapse, if we see an existential threat heading towards our farm, we may see fit to get the sheep into the barn as soon as possible. And without a sheepdog. And with sheep that are on lush spring pasture and not wanting for carrots or anything else but for spring to last forever. Our only option is to go ape-shit on the sheep in order to get them to understand that going into the barn is a better choice than not going into the barn. And we also know that we have to quickly make an effort to restore some trust with the sheep for a couple minutes as soon as we get them in the barn, otherwise the carrot loses all power for weeks or months, depending on the animal, until the trauma has faded. So we give them treats and soothe and groom them with the daily phrases and low intonation of voice so that they know that we’re all in the same boat of belonging again.
I like your “Glide Path Option” phrase for what the elites are trying to do.
Regarding the backdoor bailouts for Turkey, India, and China, could you explain further? I know that Turkey was experiencing a lot of economic distress in 2018, and seems to be having great difficulty now, but I am not aware of what backdoor bailout you are referring to.
Also, India and China were greatly helped by the Kyoto Protocol, and the narrative about shift industry to other countries, so that local CO2 emissions could be reduced. This action greatly helped both China and India. Is this what you were thinking of, or something more recent?
as i’ve tried to explain
economic stabilty/growth/prosperity/democracy is only possible when energy surplus is available to a majority….
This is where the ‘American Dream’ came from—there is no other source or reason for it, No politics, no ‘super intellect’ not capitalism,—just vast cheap surpluses…..
Right now, those surpluses are being removed from that majotity, and given to a smaller and smaller minority.
So the ‘dream’. turns into a ‘nightmare’—– and no political voting is going to change that…
We have collectively decided to take our profit from the planet at any cost, with no regard for our future.
we are finding out to our cost, that the planet itself has other ideas.
Thanks Gail. The glide path option phrase was one that came up in my corner of the peak oil community back in the day. Don’t remember who coined it. Thought I’d break it out again.
The backdoor bailout term I repurposed from the original Obamacare legislation that was widely recognized in the financial blogosphere as a bailout under political cover and, hence, backdoor bailout, for the struggling healthcare industry; by mandating that another 20M (or whatever) people be covered under a fascist co-optation of ‘universal healthcare,’ the ponzi scheme was kept afloat with young new entrants who didn’t need much healthcare, if any.
The post- Turkish currency crash of 2018 and onwards should have forced an extremely energy dependent Turkey to have to import less natural gas and oil than before the crash, yet Dork of Cork, a shrewd commenter at Economic Undertow, noticed after a couple years that Turkey’s natgas imports had jumped 20pc since the crash(!) and its oil imports had remained steady. This is impossible without a backdoor bailout and no other obvious macroeconomic explanations, and as far as I know, Dork never was able to track down an above board explanation. We also know that Turkey’s been a recipient of cut-rate Russian fuels since the price caps and sanctions, which brings us to China and India.
As you know, China and India have been the two biggest beneficiaries of the Russian sanctions. China getting super discounted oil that they can pay for in yuan and India getting surplus super discounted oil that they were able to pay for in rupees and dirhams (UAE) and roubles, which also enabled them to upsell refined Russian crude to the EU at inflated prices in order to bailout their current accounts.
This stuff doesn’t happen in a purely self-organizing system because it’s just too good to be true. It’s the smart Degrowth Agenda’s pseudo-market rebalancing/redistribution of resources to too big to fail nuclear countries that I always talk about. They have to be prioritized under any smart Collapse agenda; nobody would disagree with that notion even if they couldn’t get past the idea that a covert Degrowth Agenda is purely hypothetical. To me the proof is in the pudding.
Those things make sense. Thanks!
this looks like post facto justification and I have trouble believing it. Specially since this all knowing Hand seems to have its base in finance. Specially since I know some suspects members and I do not give them the same intellectual respect you seem to give them. It was manufacturers who benefited the most, and are also getting screwed now.
I do notice that the MPP as currently formulated has an interesting ambiguity. Over what time scale does it work? A majority of people in the world would rather sacrifice so that 20 years from now their children will be better off. And members of the Hand are immune to it?
Though perhaps for not much longer given Trump’s 50-day notice, the Russian energy backdoor bailouts to the albatrosses are still ongoing, so the justification is not post facto retroactive and you say.
Most detective work is, yes, post facto. But the best detective work is a combination of retroactive and predictive, and that work is context dependent because it requires a serial crime; ongoing criminality. In order to stop future murders, Poirot has to pattern past murders in order to try and triangulate future murders. Which is why I put myself out there in making so many specific predictions, because if those predictions generally track true then it eliminates the plausible deniability of retroactive justification. I predicted both the Ukraine and Zionist wars in advance, and those are just the two biggest examples. And the predicted Ukrainian example even shows that I predictively triangulated a future war that resulted in the backdoor bailouts that you are now saying is lost facto justification when in truth they are part of the prediction! 🙂 My whole HTOE framework (Horsetrading Theory of Everything) within the Non-Public Degrowth Agenda, which I haven’t talked about here since my previous residency here, has always made clear that Russia’s reclaiming of all of Ukraine was part of the Hand’s reallocation of fossil fuels in service of prioritizing nuclear nations, and that is exactly what these backdoor bailouts are doing. If these bailouts stop we will know that globalization is about to collapse, so Trump’s 50-day notice may be a signal for insiders and also for outsiders with eyes to see like us.
The MPP is a dynamic of soft-determinism (Marvin Harris’ “cultural materialism”). Yes the members of the Hand itself — the absolute pinnacle of the hypercompartmentalized Elite ranks, which natural law tells me number fewer than a couple hundred people or so (Dunbar’s Number) — care for their children and their legacy but the MPP is non-negotiable or Collapse happens, risking their children. And by the time that the potential Limits to industrial growth became known in 1970, globalization was already in motion and turning away from it would have caused collapse. Soft-determinism. Civilizations must always intensify or Collapse, and it is in the either-or that the softness lives: you’re locked into something you’ve committed to but you still have a realistic say over how that commitment plays out, for better or worse, like marriage.
I highly doubt that you personally know any members of the Hand given how few they must number. The Hand cannot afford to be a sprawling bureaucracy. I’d also submit that the members in general are not necessarily paragons of intellectualism but moreso they would be highly experienced CEO types that delegate systems theory work out to the compartments below them. That said, if I were one of the big shots within the Hand, I would be recruiting at least a few true polymaths into the Hand itself for whom there is no substitute, because the polymaths down in the compartments — even the compartments right below the Hand — don’t get to be privy to the entirety of the Degrowth Agenda because keeping to Dunbar’s Number is the only way to maintain the high-functioning capacity necessary for operational success.
As I have said many times, the system itself seems to be self-organizing. There seems to be a Higher Power or God behind the scenes, leading the 200 or so oligarchs in what they need to be in order for them to have the power they do. The system only has a particular amount of goods and services to distribute. It keeps readjusting itself, perhaps without any direct intervention by the oligarchs. For example, oligarchs may have realized that the winners from the low oil prices would include China and India. Their focus was on other aspects of the change, like how it might affect Russia.
Totally Gail, even though I sometimes argue against the self-organizing principle when I’m talking in the context of the Hand’s industrial civilization being a managed/hierarchical system, within that management dynamic itself there is self-organizing. Everything the Hand does has to be in accordance with natural law — hence the Dunbar number they must surely hew-to — and that is my way of saying what you said, which is that the 200 or so oligarchs must be led by a higher power or god. And I assume that they feel exactly the same way with their all-seeing eye symbolism and their lore around being illuminated/enlightened.
Absolutely there are strong positive feedback loops of self-organization running through the civilization. It’s a mature system with an autopilot function during times of stability. And yes, sure, when the West sanctions and price caps Russian oil it is naturally going to flow to the Eastern albatrosses that need it the most. Perhaps the Hand doesn’t even need to distribute memos regarding credit prioritization downstream to the relevant compartments like the central banks because global fascism is always going to optimize globalization under the MPP. So in this particular case maybe the Hand only has to pull the strings of the Western political bureaucracy into levying sanctions and price caps.
This is right up there with KSA building the line all at once right now. Maybe the department of war should try an alpha program of 1000 drones. Then move on to a beta program of 100,000 drones.
The glaring missing piece of drone warfare is the AI software. Not to mention trained military that knows how to use it tactically and strategically. Further the will to power that accepts collateral killing.
Gail,
Under section 3 on Platinum, I think you made a typo in the paragraph about how fuel cells work. You said they enable the separation of Hydrogen and Oxygen, but you probably meant to say they enable the combination of H & O.
You are right. This is a write up for lay people:
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Fuel_cell
“A fuel cell is an electrochemical cell that converts the chemical energy of a fuel (often hydrogen) and an oxidizing agent (often oxygen)[1] into electricity through a pair of redox reactions.[2]”
So we start with hydrogen and oxygen, and we get water and electricity as outputs.
I will have to admit I am a lay person when it comes to fuel cells. I would expect that providing hydrogen fuel as an input to a fuel cell would be a huge problem. There are two different problems: (1) Getting it separated from hydrogen in water, and (2) storing it safely.
I had always assumed that the role of the platinum as a catalyst worked the opposite way, taking water plus the catalyst, and making it into hydrogen and oxygen. Then you would seem to have the chemical energy of hydrogen available to work with.
Maybe someone can provide more explanation to me. Remember, I was a math major and I worked in the financial system. Physics, and how fuel cells work, are things I have been “picking up” as I go along.
I’ve read that about 95% of comercially-produced hydrogen comes from “natural gas” (a source for such a figure eludes me, now — https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hydrogen_production ).
https://www.energy.gov/eere/fuelcells/hydrogen-production-natural-gas-reforming
“Today, 95% of the hydrogen produced in the United States is made by natural gas reforming in large central plants.”
Later:
It sounds like this process uses a whole lot of fossil fuel energy to make the hydrogen.
Gail, I’m not a fuel cell expert either, but from 40,000 ft, a fuel cell is a technology that allows Hydrogen to bond to Oxygen creating water and releasing energy. An electrolyzer is the opposite, where we use electricity to separate Hydrogen and Oxygen from water. This can be done with renewable electricity of course, but its a very inefficient round trip process, and one of the reasons why Hydrogen is unlikely to become a significant energy carrier.
And as someone correctly points out below, >95% of hydrogen is made from natural gas. And its very important, since this is how we make an important fertilizer via the Haber-Bosch process. If we had to make all our hydrogen from electrolysis, we would be in trouble. We would have to sacrifice huge portions of our electrical supply to support hydrogen production for fertilizer.
Thx Gail!
JD Vance said that globalisation has failed. The West was meant to rise through the value chain and the rest of the world was meant to continue to do simple stuff. The idea was that the West would continue to dominate in science and technology. This would have ensured that money and energy would have continued to flow to the West, while the rest of the world would burn down due to energy issues. The energy is good for nothing without the technology. This would at least have given us in the West more time. And then they accidently created the Chinese monster, that not only challenges the West, but now has started to dominate in technology.
JD Vance is more or less right.
I agree that globalization is no longer feasible, in the form it is today.
There has been a great deal of belief (encouraged by economists) to the effect that commodity prices will always rise, so we will be able to extract as much fossil fuels and other minerals as is technically feasible. The problem is that this view is wrong. Thus, extraction limits are denied by economists.
The view of JD Vance seems to be that the “complexity” that the West has historically dominated would be so important that it could continue to dominate, science and technology. “Complexity,” unfortunately needs energy inputs. Joe Tainter talks about the complexity/energy spiral. More complexity always seems to go with more energy use.
Yes, the West did create the Chinese monster. Comments and reference given to early posts indicate that most of the research is now being done where the minerals are available to implement it, which is China.
Trump is trying to somehow get more for the US (or, at least, something greater than zero for the US) in this world-wide tug of war for resources.
Guess: the Chinese is not as much a monster as some think. It initially worked(this is a guess), due to willingness to accept horrible pollution levels and low wages. That no longer seems the case. The game changer is AI and Optimus 3 like robots.
Problem for the group. Given a AI data center, get the total necessary input in KwH and calculate how many humans would need that amount of energy. The conclusions should be obvious.
Dennis L.
My son who works in China has a far higher quality of life than my two sons who work in the US. China remains the center of civilization. The US is a never ending killer.
Ed,
I was thinking earlier in the cycle, Mao’s great leap forward was not easy and I recall photos of Peking and the rest with pretty horrible pollution.
Life is a cycle.
Dennis L.
China just opened their first MAGLEV train. They are ahead of the US in many areas…EVs, batteries, telecom chips…oh yes and AI!
The US is currently making a last ditch effort to recover leadership they gave away.
A million dead in Ukraine, working on two million in Gaza. How many will the US have to kill to make monster status?
Maybe it is part of biology and we are biology. Stalin was not easy on his population, Adolph was not a very nice man, Mao certainly did some less that desirable things with his population and yes, American settlers were pretty hard on indigenous people.
We are biology and perhaps this is just the way it is; narratives are perhaps written so as to somewhat smooth the rough spots of life. When the narratives diverge too far from biology perhaps that is when they are discarded by one means or another.
Some pretty horrible things have been done in the name of a narrative; life in nature is not idyllic, ask the hare running from hiding spot to hiding spot with the eagle circling overhead. I have both on/over my land. Eagles are patient, one hare is as good as another. But, strangely it is beautiful and all seemingly part of a whole.
Dennis L.
Do you still think Elon is all hype?
Or is he the man who fell to earth?
A Future of Abundance 🤯
Was it Einstein said “our current problems cannot be solved at the level of thinking at which they were created”? I don’t believe reasoning/computing faster can generate any genuinely new creative solutions. So I wil be surprised if AI ” invents” new technologies or discovers new physics.
I do think Musk genuinely believes this stuff in perhaps a naïve way.
And none of this can in any way mitigate the chimp brain/pre frontal cortex whose nature is hierarchical, competitive, aggressive.
The prefrontal cortex is the seat of Reason. And you and I both know that true Reason is unassailable because we wouldn’t be here in the first place without it.
The functional nature of the prefrontal cortex always depends on whether the chimp is currently high-functioning or low functioning, which, in turn, is largely but not entirely dependent upon how well its chimp society is currently functioning, which, in turn, depends largely but not entirely on how the local ecology is currently functioning.
Let’s not statically ‘flat earth’ the dynamic, biological reality. And especially not in a jaded, defeatist manner because it can discourage others from reaching their potential.
yes the dorso lateral pre frontal the seat of reason.
orbitofrontal is what i should have said.
I was never a particular Police fan but they had moments of greatness :
“I was never a particular Police fan”
You got previous, then? Rascal!
Here’s my tribute to Tim Groves, who says he hates this (serves him right for posting that ridiculous Talking Heads video with their repetitive chant), and his chum Fast Edward, who commented here back in the days when I lurked.
Them’s fighting words, stranger!
One night about ten years ago, I was sitting in my favorite karaoke snack, just minding my own business at the bar, and the drunken young man who was sitting next to me—because I was the only English speaker present and I have a presentable and useful baritone—persuaded me to sing half a dozen of Sting’s “classics” one after another.
Through this “hand’s on” experience, I realized how puerile and vapid most of the Police jingles are. That band was definitely a step down from what came before them in the UK pop scene. Yes, a simplification, an abandonment of the pretense that pop/rock music should strive to a real art form, and a rejection of so-called progressive rock that took itself far too seriously,Even I could play the bass line on Every Step You Take or Wanking on the Moon on an elastic band.
So the Police, along with a bunch of other punk- and reggae-influenced purveyors of monotonic elevator music would more accurately be described as regressive rock artists.
Although to give Sting credit, Englishman in New York is a pleasant and witty little ditty and They Dance Alone and Fragile are both poignant ballads.
Now, to get the sound of sight of Sting and his mates out of our ears and eyes, let’s have some thoroughly unpretentious music from the unfashionably-styled and unashamedly syrupy pop group Pickettywitch (circa 1970), fronted by Polly Brown. You won’t learn anything from this lot because they aren’t trying to teach you anything. But remember, this is how the youngsters had fun back when Norman was barely middle-aged!
Introduced here by the infamous Jimmy Savile:
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=J_x8OtbmWlQ
And here by Lulu:
>Through this “hands on” experience, I realized how puerile and vapid most of the Police jingles are.<
More a reflection on your lack of singing ability, I'd reckon. 😉 Anyway, baritone doesn't suit Sting's soaring voice of those days.
Police's first two albums were a mixture of the stripped down and the sophisticated (Andy Summers' shimmering guitar sound), beautifully arranged and performed to produce a new sound – a kind of mashup of reggae, ambient, and shoe gaze and rock'n'roll. Their music of 1978 / 1979 has both rhythm and melody in great balance. "Walking on the Moon" gets into a pleasant and repetitive groove that I can just wallow in – it has a similar effect on me as Satie's "Gymnopedies". The bass line is just right for the tune – horses for courses. Such a tune does not require dazzling instrumental virtuosity.
As for reggae, I don't usually like it, but I do enjoy the first two albums of the Police and their channeled reggae influence. Copeland is an ace drummer and Summers a superb guitarist.
However, I don't like "Every Breath You Take" or "Every little things she does is magic" – both are too predictable and simplistic.
—————————-
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=MX6MvV8cbh8
Listen to Summers' masterly guitar break from around the 2 mins to 2:28 mark. It goes places you wouldn't expect.
—————-
https://youtu.be/nH0vjLwMyc4?list=RDnH0vjLwMyc4
Can't stand losing you.
Listen to Sting's soaring voice here – "Can't stand losing YOU…" There's also humour in his evocation of the immature melodramatic hurt of a jilted young man.
"I've called you so many times today
And I guess it's all true what your girlfriends say
That you don't ever want to see me again
And your brother's gonna kill me, and he's six feet ten
I see you sent my letters back
And my L.P. records, and they're all scratched!
I guess this is our last goodbye
And you don't care, so I won't cry
But you'll be sorry when I'm dead
And all this guilt will be on your head
I guess you'd call it suicide
But I'm too full to swallow my pride"
There's much to enjoy, though IMO not so much after 1979.
Demiurge, you are allowed to be a Sting fan or a Police fan and I certainly won’t hold it against you.
You have to admit that old Sting, who I think is rated as a tenor, has a rather weak and thin rather than a powerful voice. There are a lot of songs, and even a lot of genres that he simply can’t manage to get his vocal cords around. If his voice was considered a musical instrument, it would be an electric one that wasn’t plugged in. As one commenter on Quora explained, “if you ever heard Sting sound deep and powerful, it’s because he had a great microphone and a sound engineer who knew how to boost those frequencies to make him sound that way.”
I put Sting on a par with Peter Gabriel, an artist I like and admire. Both of them have weak and anaemic voices that distract the listener from enjoying the song. Although I admit, they are not as annoying as my karaoke voice must be to people in range.
Generally, among male singers, I much prefer those who can muster a full timbre—a sound that is rich, warm, and resonant, often characterized by a strong presence of low frequencies and a robust fundamental frequency. It’s the opposite of a thin or weak timbre—as exemplified by Sting and Gabriel’s crooning—which might be described as bright, hollow, or lacking in depth.
But there are some artists with the most amazingly weird idiosyncratic voices who I adore. There’s more to singing than hitting the right notes and maintaining the right rhythm all the time. Which brings me to the real reason I don’t like Sting.
He’s one of those artists who works for an agenda. I don’t say he shills, because I don’t know if he gets paid, but he is often there pushing.
Long ago, back in the 80s and 90s, he was preaching the green agenda, going around the world with his friend Chief Raoni Metuktire, a leader of the Kayapo people, telling everyone who would listen to save the Amazon. This odd couple—the rock star and the indigenous Amazonian with his remarkable native dress and lip plate were the toast of many a TV news program.
Over his long career, Sting has promoted a variety of causes, related to human rights, environmentalism, and social justice. He has been a vocal advocate for Amnesty International and the Rainforest Foundation, and has used his platform to raise awareness about issues such as AIDS, poverty, and deforestation.
He was there on 9/11, doing a concert at his villa in Tuscany, which he interrupted several times to give the audience bulletins on the terror attacks and how horrible it was making him feel. I saw a recording of parts of the concert that at the time. Checking now with a clever bot, I see that:
“The concert was primarily broadcast live on television, specifically by the Italian network RAI. While it was a significant event, not the entire concert was broadcast; portions of the performance were featured. The broadcast also included commentary and coverage of the unfolding events of September 11, 2001, which affected the overall tone and context of the concert.”
Anyway, it smelled scripted at the time, and raised my suspicions as to why Sting would be doing this, feeding into the media narrative about the attacks in a way that further enflamed the public’s emotions.
And then, a decade ago, Sting, along with his Irish mates Bono and Geldof, campaigned enthusiastically against Brexit, slamming it as “an act of folly” and predicting “it will be a disaster.”
Moving on to COVID, when the clot shots and death jabs came out, Sting was happy to promote them. The told the LA Times: “I had no doubt about it. I’m old enough to remember polio — kids in my street who were crippled by a disease that was eradicated very quickly by vaccines. So I have no truck with people who doubt their effectiveness..”
Then, after Eric Clapton went public explaining that said he had experienced a “severe” reaction to the AstraZeneca vaccine: ” My hands and feet were either frozen, numb or burning, and pretty much useless for two weeks, I feared I would never play again” — Sting publicly criticized Eric, declaring that he was “baffled” by Eric Clapton’s vaccine skepticism, particularly regarding the COVID-19 vaccine.
“I don’t really understand the science of the objection,” Sting was reported to have said in an interview with AFP, “I had no hesitation in taking the vaccine. I’m old enough to remember kids in my street with polio who were crippled, and that disease was eradicated overnight with the vaccine.”
In addition to these criticisms, Sting has participated in campaigns promoting vaccination, such as the “Vaccines Save Lives” initiative. He has used his platform to encourage fans to get vaccinated and has highlighted the collective responsibility to protect communities through vaccination efforts.
Depending on one’s take on the COVID injectables, either the guy is a real hero, or else he is an accessory to mass murder.
And although I don’t follow him closely, I’m old enough to remember a lot of dubious promotions Sting has been involved in, which is the main reason I have no truck with him, and why I probably find his singing problematic, and why I prefer musicians who don’t try to preach or teach at me.
Tim wrote:
“You have to admit that old Sting, who I think is rated as a tenor, has a rather weak and thin rather than a powerful voice.”
A rather subjective view. You probably just don’t like tenors. Or you’ll say that it’s all in the engineering. But how would we know? Maybe you’re just a stickman cloaked in a hologram, and nobody has worked it out yet.
Which singers do you rate, then? Jim Morrison? Elvis? In any case, pop and rock aren’t opera standard or meant to be when it comes to vocals.
Sting’s views are neither here nor there, though, when we’re assessing his musical talent. I do think he was sincere in them, and they’re probably standard among the people he mixed with in his work, so I discount their views and self-publicising in that respect. Or maybe he’s just not that bright. Or maybe he just never had time to look at OFW or similar websites and get that “Eureka!” moment.
Health was the perfect choice for a skam, because most people would never imagine that their government, even if they don’t like its politics, would not be trustworthy in the arena of health. The skamdemic showed me just how many people are indoctrinated, even reasonably bright ones. I was staggered by how gullible and easily led so many people were. It made me think of the Austro-German dictator and how he led people along, especially with all that clapping from windows every Thursday night during the ” ‘demic”.
There is much to agree with in your comment, Demiurge.
As much as I may read like a failed Melody Maker music critic, I don’t actually “rate” musicians or their voices. Quite honestly, I take a liking or a dislike to people capriciously based on my intuitive first impressions, and if I take a dislike to them, then I don’t like their singing voice either.
I don’t like either Jim Morrison or Elvis Presley for precisely the above reasons. But I love the other Morrison—Van, and the other Elvis—Costello. I can listen to either of them all day long. In addition to being Irish, both of them have rich, thick, vibrant voices that reverberate like a good cello—marvellous woody voices, in stark contrast to Sting’s horrible tinny tinnitus-inducing reed pipe voice.
The pandemic was perfect for the service economy and relied on deference to medical experts who aren’t really more trustworthy than any other group, but have greater social status than any other group. The majority of indoctrinated people were working women, many of whom are liberal. Women lionize the medical industry, make up the majority of workers in it now, and tend to be docile compared to men.
Very few men were going to risk the disapproval of women or challenge medical experts since they know very little about medicine. You should see what the experts say about what people like to watch on tv in the largest numbers. It’s stuff like reality tv, and “talk shows”. These are the kind of people still heavily influenced by the media even though they are old.
Tim Groves wrote:
“I take a liking or a dislike to people capriciously based on my intuitive first impressions, and if I take a dislike to them, then I don’t like their singing voice either.”
Weird. I like “Oliver’s army” despite Costello’s cheesy-wally image, and a lot of Ian Dury’s music despite his seedy image. Oirishry I don’t like at all, so celtic music or dance is a big no-no for me, though occasionally I’ll listen to Enya’s non-celtic ambient hits, which are totally artificial, of course, along with the visuals. Just the sight of Sinead made me want to puke, though, and all the more after she converted to THAT “religion”.
For Tim Groves, now that I’ve converted him to a Sting fan.
Musk seems to think that we will all have AI powered robots, at a time when fossil fuel supplies are depleting.
Many people talk about fossil fuels being our energy slaves.
Unless AI can solve the energy problem, quickly, there is no possibility going forward.
How quickly?
AI consumes energy—it cannot create it..
300 years ago we found an energy monster that had been sleeping peacefully for 3oo million years.
We prodded it awake, to make it our slave…
unfortunately the exact opposite happened.
(just in case anyone is still deluded about out current situation)
I keep wondering how “AI” is going to keep functioning, as fossil fuels deplete — does it make energy, or consume lots of it?
AI is the same as believing in a god that will come and redeem us all.
it won’t.
AI cannot perform physical functions, any more than you can lift a cup of coffee to your mouth, just by thinking about it— without the intermediary use of your hand and arm…
Norm,
We live in tomorrow and today, we do not live in the past. None of us knows what the future will bring.
Five years ago has someone stated a rocket would be larger than Saturn V they would have faced a skeptical audience.
Politically if I understand your ideas a politician would go before the people and tell the populace how terrible things were and were going to be. We had a peanut farmer who told that story, he was mostly wrong. He also had one term.
Back to your regularly scheduled doom and gloom.
Dennis L.
Was the peanut farmer wrong? Or just early?
he was right…..
unfortunately maganuts think prosperity is something you vote for…..
dennis
i havent inferred that we live in the past.
i merely pointed out that we prodded a sleeping monster, thinking we could make our slave.
instead we have become slaves to it.
please feel free to point out where this observation is wrong?
There are lots of potential ways around our energy problems. We are not facing a classic dilemma in physics terms. We are in the ice-cream shop, having problems deciding which combination of flavors to choose.
One way around our problems is Kulm’s solution—deprive the 99% of all but the minimum level of sustenance. As the great shogun Tokugawa Ieyasu is reported to have said: “Give the peasants neither life nor death.”
Another way is, as I’ve said before, to shrink the people physically to a third or a quarter of their current size. This effectively gives us three or four times as much planet, and by living “lighter” on the earth, we can enjoy running around on solar-powered vehicles that never need to be plugged in and even pedal-powered flying cars.
A third way, which I suspect is one of the reasons behind the Pandemic and the Injections, is to drastically reduce the size of the human population. This also effectively gives the survivors more planet/
Don’t like any of those solutions? Well, think up some of your own.
In the West, and in the East, hundreds of millions of people travel around each day in vehicles that literally weigh a ton. All that precious energy spent on pushing around large masses of metal and plastic every time the owner wants to commute to work or travel to the golf course, the doctor, or the supermarket.
No, I am not lecturing or criticizing; but merely observing that if hundreds of millions of people can afford to spend energy in this fashion, we do not have an energy problem so much as a social organization problem. If only everything was available to us within a 15 minute walk…….
But now I am starting to sound just a little bit like Klaus Schwab, so I’d better stop there.
People don’t like solutions, they just want to see “Action taken” sometimes in the form of violence
or sometimes in the form of a non-solution
like an electric car.
Whatever, he has done some pretty remarkable things in his brief time on earth.
Dennis L.
dennis
buying rocket scientists does not—repeat not, make you a rocket scientist
It makes Elon Musk a rocket scientist.
Buying computer programmers made
B ll Gates a computer programmer, who we’re are told can program, even though he hasn’t programmed anything.
i was under the impression that gates was messing around with computers while still in school/college.
if you are convinced that musk is a rocket scientist, i can only bow out gracefully. and leave you to your delusions
that was before gates started putting iron filings in vaccines so he could track everybody, of course
the delusion continues
we can grow out economy using currency—–
I’m really glad i didn’t throw out that old monopoly game—-
Your old monopoly game has large stacks of money. They may be useful again.
Gail et al –
You might want to consider the issue of hypercomplexity. For all of you with a calculus background, you might want to consider the 2nd vs. the 3rd derivative applied to the post-World War II growth model. Here is a little blurb for you:
“It is well known that the first derivative of position (symbol x) with respect to time is velocity (symbol v) and the second is acceleration (symbol a). It is a little less well known that the third derivative, i.e. the rate of change of acceleration, is technically known as jerk (symbol j).” A fun fact is that the 4th, 5th and 6th derivatives are called “snap, crackle and pop.”
When talking about the growth model, we are not only in an acceleration of growth but an acceleration of the acceleration of growth. In real terms, that means that the financialization of debt has put us on a treadmill that is not only rising, but going faster and faster in its rise. This is the classic illustration of hypercomplexity and it will not end well.
Per Tainter (1988), when complex societies collapse, they contract into less complex regional polities. In the case of hypercomplex societies, like the US and UK, where the rate of growth has accelerated in its acceleration, I see a much more dire consequence. That is, these two countries will not be able to contract but will instead collapse in upon themselves. Of course there will be dieoff to accompany this collapse. I am considering adding Sweden to this list too, but I have to do more research.
What countries like France and Germany and Spain will be able to do is just contract their economies and preserve some semblance of order as they feel the pinch. The US and UK will be prone to Mad Max scenarios. It will be worse in the US because of the large number of guns in the hands of rightwing whackos. Oops.
So – predicting collapse is far too simplistic. There will a variable speed of collapse.
ive seen bits of the mad max movies—i couldnt take more than a minute or two.
laughing too much….
mad maxers are like maganuts…
Where do they get their petrol from?????—hilarious.
In a collapse situation, the first thing to go will be liquid fuels—-filling stations need electricity and reliable deliveries—with no oil refineries (incredibly complexity there), filling stations will run out in hours. hypercomplexity is over.
After that, you will only have the fuel in your own tank. Forget calculus, without liquid fuel, modern civilisation ends. (it really is that brutal I’m afraid) There will be no ”wind down”. I’m 90, but I fear for my g/grandkids.
You speak of contraction as if it will be under some kind of government control and order—-sorry, but the human mind doesnt work like that.
Yes, godnuts will expect rapture and salvation—this is part of the problem, a vast proportion of the global population adhere to a belief system of the 13th c….but possess modern weapons.
Please give an example of a 13th c belief and simultaneous possession of modern weapons(physical possession, not mental) please. Thanks.
er…..
the population of the USA possesses 300 million firearns. (I exclude single shot muskets)
A majority of them belive in evil spirits, a literal satan, the imminent return of JC, the etermal war between god and satan, angels, the rapture, eternal life after death if you pray hard enough, literal scripture, young earth creationism, virgin birth, reincarnation and a mish mash of other BS —(mix as required).
You cannot accept the bible on a selective basis.
i suggest you read project 25—because thats what your great leader is suckering you into…..
which means a fascist theocracy—if you need a 2 word summary.
Thanks for your insights. I hadn’t thought about the issues you raise.
Do you have any links to suggest on the acceleration of the acceleration of growth. Certainly, financialization has seemed to go this way. I had not run into the fact that the 4th, 5th and 6th derivatives being called “snap, crackle and pop.
Agree with all your points minus the anti-gun dogwhistle. Drive down any small town in the US and you have personalized soldier memorials hanging from light poles. In the World Wars you had millions of young men enlist or drafted who had experience with subsistence hunting and firearm safety. In the 70s, high school rifle teams were phased out in the suburbs.. you saw popular media glorifying violence and gang culture, pharma pushing harmful anti-psychotics and narcotics while endless legislation attempted to restrict whole classes of firearms and ammunition.
Despite the subversion there are some well grounded groups like sportsmens alliances and little known advocacy focusing on accessibility, safety and civilian marksmanship. Neo-marxist and far left calls for resistance and violent revolution have resulted in attacks on federal agents, courthouses and peaceful protestors while mass shootings are overwhelmingly a response to violent rhetoric, drug and gang culture, SSRIs and mental illness. Dad and I watched a live stream of black revolutionaries taunting national guardsmen with AR style long guns and a rally in Portland where a young women called for overthrowing the US as we know with thunderous applause from clergy and other attendees. Extremism is dangerous in all forms but its not easy to spot it in your own side of the street.
Having done calculus(not well, program was more theoretical than engineering, my mistake) as well as programming and working with discrete values, I suspect the discrete method is preferable. Also, this easily lends itself to percentiles for the next value if historical data is available. Limiting the precision of the calculations to that of the input data would seem wise.
Calculus predates computers, modern desktop computers are a thing of wonder, the Raspberry Pi is an underappreciated machine.
It is my opinion(not an argument) that calculus is more and more being replaced by discrete calculations as well as a rise of linear algebra and matrices(tensors if you like more abstraction).
This is a period of change, I wonder if topology is even relevant anymore(I was not a great topology student). I have somewhere read where abstract algebra, groups, etc. has some use, not sure about that one.
We, the universe as well appears discrete; using discrete calculations which are no available would seem to have merit. That said, EE uses the sine wave and its variations the calculation of which makes nice use of calc as well as imaginary numbers.
Math is an interesting world, modeling is having more and more choices. .
Dennis L.
Modeling can work two ways:
1. It can give you good answers.
2. It can lead you to disregard important part of a system and thus systematically produce very wrong answers.
“The future will always be like the recent past” seems to be a popular model, for example. It has often been true in the past, but history shows that “overshoot and collapse” is often a good model.
Unfortunately, political leaders seem to always like happily ever after endings to stories. This leads to a proliferation of terrible models.
Maybe, if the issue is simply modeling interactions of physics, there is a lot less of a problem with politics getting in the way. I agree that discrete modeling makes sense, too.
I wasn’t convinced by your second chart on diesel so I looked closer at the data. It turns out that a) you are probably right, in that there is a significant slow-down, especially if we look at the years from 2000. I graphed that with a curtailed scale to see the changes more clearly and fitted a trend line (logarithmic – I never know which type to use for best fit really). b) it is of course rather volatile and could change – it is a pity we only have consumption figures and not production – they are of course linked, but it is actually supply that we are interested in. I know (from Antonio Turiel’s work), that there has been rationing in a number of countries of the global South, including petroleum producers.
Thanks for taking the time to look at this in a different way.
On a world basis, consumption and production are very, very close. Inventory levels are low. Consumption records go back farther than production records, also. This is why, on a world basis, I use this approach.
The rationing of supply partly comes through changes in currency relativities. People in countries with “low” currencies find themselves unable to afford fossil fuel energy products.
You may not have considered the situation, but countries like the UK and those in the EU realize that they have very limited local supply of energy products. They put huge “carbon” taxes on supply. It doesn’t matter what they are called, the purpose of these taxes is to discourage the use of (mostly imported) fossil fuels. If citizens of these countries were to buy more, it would add greatly to the debt levels of these countries. This would likely make the currencies of these countries fall. This is the reason for the so-called carbon taxes.
The US is now encountering tariffs, which discourages imported goods. This is a different way of trying to handle the problem of trying to import goods that the country can’t really afford to import.
A very interesting overview of the current geopolitical situation by former Colonel Baud and also former member of Swiss intelligence service.
US, UK, EU, Russia, China, Ukraine, Israel..
Great article Gail. Did you look at the Net Purchasable Oil trend?
No. Where would I get such statistics? Isn’t data provided in the Statistical Review pretty much on this basis already? It looks at traded energy of most kinds. The IEA adds in “Trash” that is burned for electricity, but the Statistical Review does not. Of course, electricity is not oil.
Or perhaps you are thinking about oil exports. There is data in the Statistical Review on the this subject, but it was beyond the scope of this analysis to look at it.
A very clear and useful analysis, Gail.
As a local politician I have been grappling with these problems for over a year now. We have just approved an energy plan that will see electricity double to 2045 and de fossilization complete 2050.
The reason I didn’t oppose it is it gives us something to work to.Our party will be pushing the administration to show us their working, and convince us it is feasible. We have to come to a point where we get shaky figures back so we can raise a dialogue about degrowth.
All this while our country wants to go to war with Russia, military conscription age limits will go from 47 to 70 and military spending is now on steroids.
Peace. Degrowth. Restoration of our decimated ecosystems. That is a better way forward.
I have a very difficult way seeing electrification going anywhere. I am concerned about losing 24/7/365 electricity in the near term. Spain recently had a big outage, and we keep seeing warning that the US electricity system is near limits. It cannot accommodate the huge amount of electricity being demanded by the planned growth of AI.
“The reason I didn’t oppose it is it gives us something to work to.” Yes, it does give people jobs, if you can find people to fund the effort. It gives universities something to teach courses on, so that they can provide hope for the future. But the feasibility of getting through the current bottleneck does not look good at all.
Perhaps there is a chance that this whole effort can work, on say a 50 or 100 year timeframe. But in the meantime, there is the likelihood of a severe recession and a great reduction in population.
Hi Gail,
I wait with excitement for every one of your posts and read and reread them as they are so full of very detailed information and great analysis. Time to move the farm away from dependence on the grid methinks.
Here in British Columbia, we have lots of hydro electricity but that is starting to change as the decades-long drought is catching up with us and BC Hydro has been forced to shut down some of its minor power generating plants for the first time in abut 60 years.
Maxine
I had to look this up, but last year the Arrow Lake dam was held due to low levels. Nothing easily found for this year though. I wonder if Site C might reduce the need for smaller, more expensive to operate generators?
I know that Norway has gone through issues like this also. Even on a world basis, graphs of hydroelectricity supply tend to look wavy.
We have tried to convince ourselves that hydroelectricity is 24/7/365, but this is generally not the case. It can come close in some areas fed by glacier melting, but output is extremely variable in California, Venezuela, and many other locations. Places in Africa, hoping to depend on only hydroelectricity tend to be disappointed, because of the seasonal nature of moisture.
Thank you! As long as energy production is dominated by ideology, we have a problem and are not serious. And ideology does not only include the forced preference for wind and solar, but also the use of low enriched uranium in NPPs and the absence of breeder technology.
It is becoming clear that wind and solar are not going to be solutions. Nuclear at least seemed to work better, so that is being pulled out again. But, it has a long way to go, too.
Political leaders need stories to tell constituents.
Breeder reactors are not common because they are more costly to run.
We are running into other resource limits other than energy that would make
expanding nuclear power difficult.
Thank you for the new post and I can see how prices for energy have remained low. I did not want to give up on the idea that energy will go up in price it will just be for the elites and the AI machines . The working class will just have to get by with less. I guess the main question I have is where are we on the timeline…do we have 5 years 10 years or 15? Before things start to go a little bit wonky. I see the 2030’s as maybe being a rough time.
The big issue is that the “system” can’t be expected to hold together well. Governments cannot afford to pay pensions and other benefits. Governments will collapse or be overthrown. International importation of raw materials won’t work. Repairs cannot be made to electricity infrastructure after storms.
I expect that we will start seeing big changes by 2030, but I really don’t know. The economy is amazingly resilient.
It is possible that the US economy can mostly hold on without its current structure. We are used to having a huge number of US government employees. Maybe this can be cut back to a dictator, plus a very lean support staff. This would be much more efficient. We cannot imagine this happening, but a lack of resources seems to point to changes in this direction.
The individual countries of the EU can perhaps get along without the EU structure and without promised pensions and healthcare.
Peak oilers have tended to miss this structural problem.
Just a dumb question for the simple minded such as my self. If the US imposes a 500% secondary “tariff” on say the sale of one million dollars worth of oil from Russia to India who pays it? Indian government, Indian company, Indian consumer? Who do they pay it to? The US government? isn’t that simply robbery? If they fail to pay how does the US punish them?
The tax is only on US imports. It depends on the cost, to the importer, of the goods (oil in this case) being imported. Thus, the company importing the goods pays the tax.
Who “eats” the cost of the tax is a different problem. If, in your example, the very high cost is added to the price of the imported oil, it is likely the US won’t import any oil that is that high priced. It may cause oil production to go down, and the quantity of goods available to American consumers may go down.
If there is a more reasonable tariff, often a big part of the tariff cost will be “eaten” by the exporter. It will need to reduce its wholesale price, to make the price of its goods attractive to American consumers.
Or the price to the consumer may temporarily go higher, to try to get American companies to compete in making these goods. Democrats tend to worry about this issue. So far, this doesn’t seem to be a major issue.
American consumers are limited by their wages and borrowing ability on the quantity of goods and services that they can buy. The presence of tariffs doesn’t change this situation. Unless the tariffs raise the wages of Americans, the tariffs mostly reduce the quantity of imported goods that Americans buy.
Thanks Gail. Another fine post. The production and consumption of energy across the globe is managed piecemeal, and not as a complex “system”. Many of the green and modern tech solutions don’t even address basics like EROI and TCO over the lifetime of the mines, wells, plants, recycling, waste disposal and equipment. Your example of the amount of copper needed for EVs vs ICE powered vehicles alone is enough to get the “deer in the headlights” look from many.
The transition underway is bumpy at best, and the economic side of things seems to clearly indicate the era of cheap energy, especially liquid fuels for transportation, has come to an end. Unfortunately, rather than decrease complexity and cut out mass adoption via government subsidies to shake out the real winners and losers of new tech, most governments and many businesses have just made things that much worse with trying to bring some new solutions online before they’re proven worthwhile. Just bringing new sources of materials into production is a long and expensive process, and it looks like we’ve run out of time.
It’s difficult to predict exactly how things pan out, but widespread shortages, broken supply chains, stagflation, brownouts and fails of the electrical and Internet grids, rationing, etc., all seem baked in the cake now. And needless to say, the side effects of civil unrest will be part of that too. Buckle up.
I’m afraid this is my view of the situation, as well. If we weren’t so close to the edge of problems, the situation might be more amenable to a solution.
The best case might be a recession sometime in the near future, while at least a few people work out solutions that might work and start implementing them. Humans have lived through many bottlenecks, including ice ages, before. They likely will likely live through this coming bottle neck, likely with smaller total population.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=qcHD206n_jk
I know this is not our topic but this is such an impassioned plea for the children it deserves to be spread.
I think child sexual abuse is a very “modern” concern. Before, people were concerned about children (and their parents) starving to death. They came up with solutions that often involved trade offs. Leaving children in the care of adults who might abuse them sexually was a solution that often seemed to work.
Now we have all kinds of rules that churches, scout troops, and other organizations must always have two leaders with children, to prevent sex abuse. This very much handicaps these organizations in the kinds of programs they can offer, because they need close to twice as many leaders,
I have seen some of the materials that insurance companies put out regarding problems with sexual abuse. They are very liberal in what they consider sex abuse. There doesn’t need to be physical contact, for example. A major concern is that the child will feel guilty because he/she consented to such a situation.
A different approach is to teach children (and adults), “Bad things happen to all of us. The best approach is to forgive and forget. Each day is a new day. We need to move on, and take care of the rest of our lives.”
An economy has to have a whole lot of “surplus energy” to chase after and lock up all of the sexual offenders. I am afraid that being excessively offended by child sexual abuse is one of the things that needs to go away in a low energy world. Studies of genetics of families seem to come up with a whole lot of examples of incest and other relationships that shouldn’t exist.
We can start thinking instead about people starving to death. Or people being killed for organ harvesting. Or populations outgrowing their resource bases and governments planning to bring down their populations, whether the citizens like it or not.
the age of consent for girls in uk was only raised from 12 to 16 in the late 1800s
By figure 11; in about 2045 China will have triple the per capita energy of the world outside China. There is a fair chance I will live to see that.
Good luck! I am afraid many parts of the world economy will stumble by 2045, but there are many things we don’t know.
Given that China is in large part the factory to the world, concomitant Chinese per capita energy consumption is actually world per capita consumption. And all the leveraged excess production that covers for falling world consumption by propping up world GDP rots on the vine like so many ghost cities.
unfortunately, output must be counterbalanced by consumption.
this is an immutable law of economics…
produce as much ‘stuff” as you want, but if no one can afford it, it just piles up on docksides
The world over is ruled by the obscenely wealthy. The 99.9% have no control or say in how the world is organized. To fix this we should limit individual ownership of wealth to ten million dollars. Large endeavors can spread around using stock ownership corporations.
As we become a slower more modest world let’s work on fair opportunity to rule.
Nice dream but that won’t happen. That is a description for socialism which doesn’t work. Throughout human history there has always been insanely wealthy people and contrary to popular beliefs they make the world turn with their ideas both good and bad.
Elon Musk, brought about SpaceX and Tesla which popularized EV’s. In wasn’t until Jeff Bezos founded Amazon that the online retailing business became a must for businesses to survive. Wealth and the pursuit of wealth is what causes ideas to take shape.
Until industrial civilization collapses whenever that happens, you can bet someone will want to be the next tycoon. As economist Martin Armstrong likes to say, “history repeats because human nature never changes”.
Nice dream back atcha Rod! Corporate socialism seems to work pretty well these days hmm?
Everything is socialism of one kind or another because humans are social creatures. Even capitalism/fascism which is just socialism for the rich and connected and corrupted. Free markets never have, will, or can exist.
Everything, of course, is also capitalism. But that’s another subject (here’s a clue: even big C commies love scrip) and the yin in the yang or the yang in the yin, depending on one’s politics. If you’re nonpolitical then it’s just turtles all the way down. Infinite political regression.
Humans are also -ism creatures.
The suffix “-ism” generally signifies a doctrine, theory, system, principle, practice, or belief, often associated with a particular movement, ideology, or philosophy. (Although it can also indicate a state, condition, or the action or practice of something.)
Most humans are filled to the brim with -isms of one kind or another, many of which are pathological. Our closest cousins the chimps, bonobos, and gorillas don’t seem to suffer from this malady.
While chimpanzees are capable of logical reasoning and problem-solving they don’t seem to sport any human-style ideologies. Indeed, it is very difficult to have an intellectual debate of any kind with our fellow apes, let alone an argument about sport or politics.
You will be utterly surprised how less infected with -isms are people living outside the wider western world. -isms are theoretical but hardly over realised in practice constructs. Most people outside the western world are practical creatures who don’t see any meaning in theories which cannot be established in practice.
When we have no true sense of belonging we cling to our -isms as a form of psychological capture bondage and economic cost-benefit analysis. This forms the functional basis of the civilizational cosplay that Salinger’s Holden Caulfield identified as phoniness. There’s nothing more tragic than to have one shot at human life only to waste it on more or less strategically pretending our way through it. That’s the nihilistic collective subconscious undertow that courses through the dominant culture. Subconscious mental slavery is institutional slavery’s peak state that we refer to as the Matrix. Achieving it across all economic classes required 200 years of trickle down industrialism.
That’s not to say of course that people are phony across the board. They’re still real animals inside like us. It’s just an implacable clown mask for the clown show. Family forever masking like that naturally hurts the most but what else is new. We eventually withdraw because they’re clinically withdrawn.
I respectfully disagree,
Amazon would have been created by someone else over time. Bezo just got lucky (right place + right time)
Just like Bill Gates and Paul Allen went to one of the richest private schools in America that was one of the very first to have computers in all the classrooms. (Notice they don’t tell you that part of the story, they tell you they created it from their garage with no college).
And people who come from rich families like Bezo and Gates, can take big risks that sometimes pay off with big rewards that others can not.
For example that one Kardashian. The real hot one with super dark hair. She took all her modeling money and invested it into a make up brand and now she’s a billionaire. And Forbes argues she’s “Self Made”. But a normal woman could never invest all her money into something like that because the risks would be too high. If the company goes bust she would be screwed. But if Kardashian company goes bust her parents and family will bail her out and she’ll do something else. She won’t be driving an Uber or living on the streets.
Another example, look at Gail and Dr Simon’s work. Both aren’t getting paid s*** and way beyond anyone else on these dire subjects. IMO. According to your logic Chris Martinson (Buy my monthly $$) or Kunstler (Buy my books) should be at the top of the food chain.
Just my .02 cents
yup
Amazon sold out of my book—how amazing is that?
now i shall have to wait till next month to be a billionaire
Perhaps a lot of buyers assumed The Iron Men of Shropshire was pornographic. If so, they are going to be in for a surprise.
US based Amazon.com says “This title will be released on September 23, 2025.” So you may have to wait about three months for that first billion to start rolling in.
Good catch Tim. French and Italian men forge keen reputations for themselves that precede them but an Englishman’s relentless, raw urges stain red.
lol reante
if you had any awareness or knowledge of that particular subject—you would know that any ‘reputation’ in that respect is not forged by yourself, it comes from someone else….
absolutely never from yourself …
Norman, when the movie based on your book comes out, this will make the perfect theme tune.
Flying off the shelves, eh? There must have been a tornado in the warehouse. One of those rare events that are getting less rare, you know. Given the booklet is also available on Kindle, it can’t be sold out. NP deserves the 2025 Nobel Prize for Best Phib, I’d say. Or maybe he just doesn’t understand modern technology?
lol dem
you really are desperate—-
aren’t you?
Have you thought of making a comment that isn’t an embarrassment to read?
It takes money to make money, they say.
Look at the Fords; but didn’t they start that way?
Great song. Lou Reed might be my wife’s very favorite. His intelligent perspective in the song, of not caring, dovetails with detached viewpoint on the last song on the Funeral album I mentioned to you, in which Regine Chassange sings that she’s been learning to try her whole life. Myself I was Lou’s not caring, as an apathetic gen X slacker until, upon learning of Collapse, I became Regine’s lifetime learning to try, with the unending learning as an inbred legacy of the formative not caring. Some people are far more naturally motivated than myself. Real self-starters. I’m hard-starting like a cold-blooded, carbureted Japanese ATV.
This one!
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=i2jsArz5IQg
This first Arcade Fire album, Funeral (2004), has a sad theme and tone running through it, but curiously I found it very uplifting. It is brand new to me—Regine’s voice is new too—and I came away from my first listen in a better mood than I went in.
The album that Lou Reed song is taken from, Berlin (1973), is similarly doleful, looking at the depressing subject of people living on the edge of failure and despair on the mean streets of NY, and even has a song called Sad Song at the end of it.
If your wife is a Lou Reed fan, then congratulations; you’ve picked a good ‘n. When I was in secondary school, Lou was considered the epitome of cool. The Fonze had nothing on him.
Much ruder than Sting, the young Lou used to insult his audience, the press, and everyone else, and was sarcastic to the point of being offensive. He calmed down a bit in middle age though and tempered into a bit of a cynic.It’s unbelievable to me that he died 12 years ago, and missed out on the entire Trumpian era.
As early as I989, Lou was playing humorously with themes that we are still stuck with today. Even back then, Donald was “The Trump”.
Thx Tim. I lived my life on the lower east side of Manhattan when Reed wrote that album. I saw he was in Greenwich Village just to the West. It was pretty rough back then, before gentrification and before all the homeless and street users and gangs had been swept out. I was one of just a handful of white boys in my whole school (junior high school), and the only athletic one, and I was middle class so I had to learn to navigate that. It was my favorite place growing up. My girlfriend lived deep in Alphabet City, on avenue D, and it’s a testament to how much I, ahem, cared for her, that I would walk to her apartment in the projects all by my lonesome. Good old days. Lou Reed was not on my radar. My favorite band, now, from that circa1990 period of time is the English band Ride. The kings of shoegaze imo. Their Nowhere album is my favorite album from the 90s. You don’t have to listen to it.
There’s a song called Halloween Parade on Lou’s New York album, containing the lyrics:
There’s the Born Again Losers and the Lavender Boozers
And some crack team from Washington Heights
The boys from Avenue B, the girls from Avenue D
A Tinkerbell in tights
Well, it certainly rhymes beautifully, but never having been to NY, I had no idea at the time what or where those avenues were. You had to do more than google in order to find info in those days. And there you were growing up there on the mean streets and trying to stay out of trouble.
So, you have abandoned the hustle and bustle of the East Village where people are woken by gunshots and settled down to a life of rural bliss in the far west where you are woken by roosters? You’ve come a long way, and not just in miles.
I still don’t know what Lou meant by a crack team. Given the context, my first guess is they were on crack.
Who is Dr Simon????
Micheaux I assume
We need to grow at the speed of trees instead of fast as we can.
*great article too Gail.
our growth was governed by the speed of tree growth until the 1700s—-then we started burning fossilised trees…
which was not a good idea—-but we all went along with it unfortunately.
That makes perfect sense!!! Never thought of that before. thx!
Taking “money” away from the wealthy does little good. What we are short of is goods and services. Most of the “wealth” of the rich is paper wealth that can (and likely will) disappear, when the financial system has a major problem.
The wealthy do need to own companies. These companies are indeed useful, as long as supply lines hold up, and the economy goes on much as in the past. But when the economy stumbles, most of these wealthy will lose their supposed wealth.
When you look at biographies of notable people who were born before say, 1950, it wasn’t uncommon for some wealthy people to lose fortunes and actually become poor. Charles Ponzi came from a downwardly mobile well-to-do family.
Not “too long and complex.” The part about China very interesting…
Thanks for a new post Gail!
I did add a second paragraph to the introduction, after I put the post up, to try to tie some of the pieces together better. It is about prices not rising high enough, for long enough.
How I use the information or might use the information in this post:
Farm machinery is going autonomous, currently diesel. Photovoltaic electricity will lose going first universally, not just CA and on earth will still have an intermittency problem.
Farm machinery can be smaller if used more hours/day, automation solves that problem as labor is an issue on farms. Farm machinery can use electricity generated directly on the farm as transmission is a trivial issue. H is the ideal storage medium as the Pt can be recycled and H is a very clean energy. Fuel cells can be on the machinery and the empty H tanks can be exchanged for full ones, robotically I assume.
American farm exports seem to be hitting a snag with GMO crops, I am not directly involved so this is hearsay. GMO is probably a way to increase production/acre and which also influences machinery capital costs. Non GMO crops are probably healthier for humans, but for the same volume of food will result in increased consumer costs.
As we don’t yet have solar Pt mining, recycling it makes sense; if diesel is going to be more expensive to produce, sunlight has some advantages going forward.
For farming perhaps go autonomous, go electric, go solar production of electricity and store as H for basically immediate or very short duration storage on the farm. It is consistent with Gail’s ideas.
Where to put the arrays? Soil is not equally productive per different unit areas, the sun is about the same over all the land. Soil sampling and measurement of crop yields can lead to maximization of yield and use the less productive land for electricity. This saves input costs as well as reducing runoff. Currently large equipment does not work well on nonlinear fields, so everything is farmed as it is cheaper than turning around. This is an interesting freshman maximization problem.
Above is a possible path I conclude from Gail’s research.
The best tractor cab is no tractor cab.
Dennis L.
The more nutrient-dense food you grow, the more other species are also interested in it.
Growing low nutrient-dense food is bad for the human health. The human resorted to grains as the populations grew. That is our bad heritage.
It is hard to escape from this predicament. It requires a lot of energy to produce quality food: it is the art of concentrating resources.
The people got used to food as something having a lot of flavoured fillers.
Fake food.
You realize this when you start to grow your food like berries, nuts, which have become insanely costly during the last time.
Interesting post. One point about diesel is that vehicles can be converted to use CNG. That may only be a temporary solution but it one that I think should be pursued.
Gail
I have the uneasy feeling that you are right about shortages underlying the US budget cuts. Although the shortages are mixed with the tax cuts for the 1% so it’s a more complicated mix. But I would like your opinion about how to understand China. On the one hand we are hearing about China’s big lead in EVs, solar panels, and other “green” technologies. But your graph shows that China is totally dependent on coal. They can hardly be thought of as green. Is the US in a hopeless situation because we don’t have industrial policy like China does? Is the US emphasis on fossil fuels going to hurt as the US falls behind on these new technologies? Or is this a fake because China is far from exiting fossil fuels itself?
Andrew
There are a lot of things we don’t know about China. Kevin Walmsley claims that China has figured out a way to use solar and wind much more efficiently than other countries. We don’t know if this is true. China may have figured out a different pricing scheme for wind and solar that doesn’t penalize nuclear and coal production. China seems to be using high capacity direct current to transport wind and solar to population centers. I don’t know if they are charging back this cost.
I suspect that China has a lot of problems, but it also has a lot of manufacturing capability. It would seem like it might be able to carry on for a while longer, perhaps with a change in the government.
I think countries everywhere are facing the possibility of central governments collapsing. Otherwise, they may have to throw off promised pensions and health care.
China is about as dependent on fossil fuels as elsewhere, based on this chart.
https://ourfiniteworld.com/wp-content/uploads/2025/07/Fossil-Fuel-as-of-China-Energy-Consumption.png
(When I work on a post, I end up making a whole lot of charts that don’t “fit” into the post. Also, this chart.)
https://ourfiniteworld.com/wp-content/uploads/2025/07/Non-Fossil-Fuel-Types-as-share-of-China-Energy.png
I am not convinced that China’s central planning will work very well for the long term. No one can anticipate how rapidly things start falling apart.
Tax cuts for the rich are something very silly that liberals like to complain about because the rich do not go out and spend more money when they pay less taxes. Low taxes are meant to prop up businesses that have low profit margin profitable–like, say retail, or refining unconventional oil.
Copliot has added a few more to my short list.
“Copilot Answer
A low profit margin can result from prices that are too low, or excessively high costs of goods sold or operating expenses. The following businesses are among those with the lowest profit margins:
Bizfluent
+1
Lawn and Garden Supply Stores
Car Dealerships
Furniture Stores
Assisted Living and Retirement Homes
Travel and Accommodations
Recreation Services
Home Healthcare Services
Real Estate Services”
The service economy in general seems to have a low profit margin, if we exclude I.T., college education and medical procedures. Can someone explain to me how “non-profits” can have “mergers”? Rarely patients or consumers benefit from them.
Gail, thank you for the post, I have not read most of it, but I saw the paragraph titles, Cu and Pt, dear to my heart.
Starship is coming up and it will make it, now how do they solve the fuel boil off in space – it is the side of the ship towards the sun, hot, hot, hot? We will deal with it.
Fossil fuels are going down, we have that down and were early(too early in retrospect) on that one.
We are going to need Cu and Pt, both dense and the optimist says they are up there somewhere in abundance and we are at the bottom of a gravity hole.
I don’t think Mars will work and sooner or later Musk will have all the internet traffic through his satellite system and that growth will stop as all the land based providers go broke, buying electricity no less. Musk uses solar, photovoltaics and the income from the satellite network makes the bucks from what I see.
The huge problem is going to be with humans. Humans need a religion and I personally think God can become a bit irritated with those who choose to usurp His rule, think the Soviet Union, secular humanism didn’t work all that well.
We are trying to again understand the universe, there are some pesky galaxies which are too large for their location which is in what is currently understood to be the young part of the universe, bummer. Now, some ideas have our universe looking out of a black hole. Other thinkers have the universe as having fields which speculation leads to whether or not the universe could be sentient. Back to the God problem again, or God saying, “I told you so.”
Life is an incredible voyage and we in the US have a wonderful country but as I have said many times, it is going to be bumpy.
Here is to another month of interesting conversation thanks to Gail.
Dennis L.
dennis…
if god was irritated…..why didnt improve the assasins aim—or keep trump still for a second longer?
that is beneath you Norm.
Dennis L.
why Dennis?
Its you who talked about an irritated god, not me.
Why should god only be irritated in a way that conforms with your viewpoint?
“When they go low, Norman goes lower.”
—attributed to Michelle Obama
https://afrodizzyacts.co.za/products/limbo-dancers?srsltid=AfmBOop3VDdzmoLpMTWBmcseQ65fGhv1RZ-4cC4uhpgq087pgjIyVxr1
Thanks for your thoughts.
My post may be too long and complex for most readers. I was hoping that at least the headers and graphs would tell some stories.
I hadn’t stopped to analyze how Musk makes his money, but you probably are right about his satellite system making the money.
Now, we have this pesky worry that the system can’t go on much longer. The system is too complex to have simply arrived out of nothing. There has to be a God behind it. But there are a whole lot of people in denial that there has to be an end to the growth we have seen. Going backwards won’t be anything like going forward. The transition is a worry.
Perhaps those who believe in the Rapture have at least a little bit of the story right.
dress it up how you like….
….but 200 odd years ago humankind decided that using engines to get around was a better idea than musclepower….
it seemed a good idea at the time, and Rockefeller became the wealthiest man in the world as a result… we all went along with it.
everyone was going to get wealthier ad infinitum, (currently maganuts—-but they don’t have exclusivity on gullibity)
cutting through all the side issues, and the blame game…. this is why we are where we are.
You are right, unfortunately!
Man did not see many things prior to their being used. Some cultures had material wealth under their feet and chose to live in tents, etc. Humans adapt and some grow and look for solutions not yet found.
I think this will be the case with humans. No way to collect the bet today.
Dennis L.
Dennis
People lived in tents and teepees on oilfields because they did not possess the means to convert oil energy into any other form of energy.
It really is that simple….
Acquiring the means requires premeditation; ultimately, therefore, people lived in tents on top of oilfields because they had no desire to acquire the means – because they weren’t acquisitive like that.
On another note, the dark beauty of the plandemic was that if we start the global per capita energy consumption trend line at the beginning of the plandemic, the trend line is negative per year. Sleight of the Hand.
lol
if you live in a teepee on top of an oilfield, you cannot simply come to a collective decision not to ”acquire the oil” you are sitting on…
the ‘means” did not exist for them to do so. niether did they have the knowledge that the oil was there in such vast quantities..
You’re lolzing at yourself. Humans are not inherently fallen; you rail against Christianity yet you have succumbed to its greatest lie. Humans are culturally fallen…
You’ve momentarily forgotten that acquiring the oil is a long process that begins with a rank acquisitiveness that desires to practice intensive agriculture. Let’s see the systems theory in order to live the systems theory in order to be the systems theory.
as you wish
but we did not, and could not, acquire and use oil until we had iron in sufficient cheap quantities to
a… drill for it
b,,,pipe it and store it…
c…make engines in which to burn it..
forgive my lols—you might have an alternative to the above….if you have, please write them down…i would be very interested to read them.
Humans are fallible anyway—I have no idea how that is connected to the above.
Thanks Norm. Cultural intent always precedes and therefore causes cultural acquisition; therefore, dysfunctional cultural intent always causes cultural acquisitiveness. That is the neutral/scientific simple dynamic explanation for why the teepee dwellers did not drill for oil: cause and effect in the correct order.
What you did was misindentify the effect for the cause, which is what the Judeo-Christian psyop weaponized.
You’re right, there, Norman.
We dug ourselves into this hole collectively and now we are too deep to dig ourselves out of it.
We made our own bed and now we have to lie in it.
We followed our self-interest as far as we could and now we are reduced to desperately tying to find ways of kicking the can a bit further down the road.
However, there have alway been at least a few (and probably more) of us who counselled against the path of progress, industrialization and technological development.
Off the top of my head:
Two thousand years ago, Jesus Christ (although I’m not sure that was his real surname) cautioned against prioritizing worldly progress over spiritual matters and warned against misplaced trust in human endeavors.
Earlier than Christ, Gotama Buddha (although I am not sure that was his real surname either) critiqued the idea of progress as it was understood in his time, particularly the notion of linear, inevitable advancement in material wealth or societal structures.
Diogenes the Dog (who gained that nickname for peeing against lampposts) followed a philosophy that emphasized a rejection of societal norms and material wealth, which could be seen as a critique of the values associated with progress during his time. He advocated for a simpler, more natural way of life, often challenging conventional wisdom and social structures.
Closer to our own time, the Reverend Thomas Robert Malthus didn’t explicitly oppose all progress, but his theory of population growth suggested that any advancements in living standards, especially those leading to increased food production, would be ultimately offset by a corresponding increase in population, returning society to a state of near-subsistence. He was skeptical of utopian visions of endless progress.
William Blake was highly critical of the specific forms of progress he saw during the Industrial Revolution, such as the “dark satanic mills,” etc. He believed that true progress involved spiritual and imaginative development alongside social improvement, not just material advancements.
While Henry David Thoreau wasn’t against all forms of progress, he was highly critical of the way his society defined it, particularly the uncritical embrace of technological and material advancements. He believed that outward progress often came at the expense of inner peace, self-reliance, and a connection with nature. He advocated for a simpler, more self-sufficient life, prioritizing spiritual awakening and individual fulfillment over material accumulation and societal conformity.
J.R.R. Tolkien was critical of the unchecked, destructive aspects of industrialization and modernity, particularly as they impacted the natural world and traditional ways of life, and this attitude was evident in his fictional work. He held a nostalgic view of the past and a deep appreciation for the Shire-like, pre-industrial England. Isaac Asimov admired Tolkien’s The Lord of the Rings and read it at least five times. While he appreciated the story’s artistry and complexity, he also viewed the One Ring as a symbol of technology, and he questioned whether humanity could resist its seductive power and the potential for destruction it brings.
Great post, Gail.
Thanks!
More recycling can help reduce some of the supply pressure. However, recycling is labor-intensive AND energy-intensive. It is unlikely that we can keep the world population as high as it is now for much longer.
I think more reuse is important.
Recycling often doesn’t work well. There are certainly some areas where it is economic. In such a case, there is already a market to buy the recycled material. For example, copper. But mostly, recycling simply uses more energy, and helps a for-profit company succeed.
Mixed recycling (especially paper and plastic), which used to be sent to China and other low-income countries, generally uses more resources than it saves. Now the “recycling” mostly goes to landfill, or worse, gets dumped into the ocean. The for-profit owner makes money on the funds paid for the supposed recycling.
Hi Gail,
I think it is time t become people who use it up, wear it out, make it do or do without. Conservation is the winning strategy and remembering how we used to live before we were all so rich.
Maxine
Right.
I’m afraid people will not take kindly to living barefoot, carrying water in, and wastes out, and being subject to unspeakable and incurable diseases,
walking everywhere, dying at 50.
but if this is you idea of ‘living’….best of luck.
it may of course come to that, but we will not readily accept it.