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We are at a time when there seems to be far more conflict than in the past. At least part of the problem is that slowing growth in the world economy is making it more difficult to repay debt with interest, especially for governments. A related issue is that government promises for pensions and healthcare costs are becoming more difficult to pay. Donald Trump is trying to make numerous changes that are distasteful both to other countries and to many people living within the US. What is going wrong with the economy?
In my view, major cracks are developing in the economy because we are heading toward a collapse scenario of the type that Dr. Joseph Tainter talks about in his book, “The Collapse of Complex Societies.” No one has told the general population about the potential problem, partly because they don’t fully understand the issues themselves, and partly because the underlying causes are too frightening to discuss with the public. At the root of these collapse-related issues is a physics issue, which is only gradually being fully understood.
In this post, I try to describe some of the issues involved. I don’t believe that the situation is hopeless. At the end, I discuss where we are now, relative to historical patterns, and some reasons to be optimistic about the future.
[1] Economies need to “dissipate” energy on a regular basis, just as humans need to eat food on a regular basis.
In physics terms, economies and all plants and animals are dissipative structures. So are tornadoes, hurricanes, and ecosystems of all kinds. All these structures have finite lifetimes. They all need to “dissipate” energy to continue performing their expected functions. Humans require a variety of foods to digest; economies require energy types that match their built infrastructure. The amount of energy required by an economy tends to rise with its human population.
Figure 1 shows that since 2008, world energy supply growth has only barely been keeping up with world population growth. Physics tells us that energy dissipation is required to create any part of GDP, so energy consumption that rises with population growth should not be surprising.
The dips in per capita energy consumption in the latest period correspond to major recessions in 2008 and 2020. Rapid growth in per capita energy consumption seems to take place when growth in some low-priced fuel temporarily becomes available.
[2] Low energy prices are at least as important to the economy as low food prices are to individual households. Low energy prices seem to allow investments that pay back well.
If a family spends 10% of its income on food, the family has lots of money left over for non-essentials, such as a vehicle, trips to movies, and even a foreign vacation. If a family spends 50% of its income on food (or even worse, 75%), any little “bump in the road” can cause a crisis. There is little money available to spend on housing or a vehicle.
Figure 2 shows that oil prices were under $20 per barrel (adjusted to today’s price level) in the 1948-1972 period. This corresponds quite closely with the rapid-growth early period shown on Figure 1.
The economy was able to add many types of helpful “complexity” during this early period because of the growing supply of cheap oil. It could add interstate highways and many miles of pipelines. Inventions included television, air conditioning, early computers, and contraceptive pills. Many families were able to buy a vehicle for the first time. Women started to work outside the home in much greater numbers.
Many of these early types of complexity paid back well. For example, interstate highways made travel faster. Early computers could handle many bookkeeping chores. Contraceptive pills made it possible for women to plan their families. Without so many children, working outside the home was more of a possibility for women.
[3] Many indirect changes took place between 1948 and 1970 that would be harder to maintain if oil supplies stopped growing as rapidly and as inexpensively as they did during this early period.
If we look back, we know that in the 1600s and 1700s, people worked pretty much all their lives. It was the growth in energy supplies in the 1800s and 1900s that allowed governments to expand their services. They could promise to provide pensions and health care benefits. The rapid growth in oil supplies in the 1948 to 1970 period allowed even more expansion of government benefits, as well as other changes.
US Medicare was added in 1965, providing healthcare benefits to the elderly and disabled. Schools were integrated, promising better education for Black children. After actuarial models started to suggest that pensions could pay out a great deal in pension benefits, businesses started to award pensions to workers, in addition to Social Security.
Social standards started changing, too. Dating couples didn’t have to worry about the woman accidentally getting pregnant, at least in theory. No fault divorce became available. Government programs became available to provide funds to single or divorced parents with children.
Of course, if wages of young people started to stagnate, or if there were too many divorces of low-wage people, this whole approach wouldn’t work as well. It would be harder to tax wages enough to pay for the many benefits for the elderly, the disabled, and those with low incomes.
[4] Governments facing the problem of high-cost oil did exactly what families with suddenly high-cost food would do, if they had unlimited credit cards. They ran up increasing amounts of debt, to pay for all the promised programs.
We know with our own finances that if we are spending too much on food, we can temporarily work around this problem by maxing out our credit cards and adding more debt in other ways. I believe that the world economy has been doing something similar for a long time.
The push toward added debt has become much greater since 2008 (Figure 1), but the general trend toward increased debt started back in the early 1980s, about the time Ronald Reagan and Margaret Thatcher began their terms. Businesses decided that they needed to use what they now called “leverage” to obtain higher profits.
The debt that economies added was a kind of complexity. If the debt was invested in factories or industry that paid back well, everything went well.
But not all the uses of debt went into approaches that paid back well. For example, paying doctors to give high-priced treatments to elderly people who were certain to die within a few months did not provide much benefit to the economy, apart from the money the physician and the rest of the health care system obtained to spend on other goods and services.
Another way the growing debt was used was to invest in international trade. Companies found that they could outsource many kinds of manufacturing processes to low-wage countries in Southeast Asia, leading to cost savings relative to paying for high-priced US labor. (Human labor is a type of energy used by the economy.) In these Southeast Asian countries, coal was used for many processes, making the energy part of manufacturing costs cheaper, too.
The US and other Advanced Economies (defined as members of the Organization for Economic Development (OECD)) seemed to benefit because goods made in Southeast Asia were cheaper than what Advanced Economies could make for themselves. Two major issues arose, however:
a. Wages for the less-skilled workers in the US tended to stagnate or fall.
One reason for stagnating pay was because of wage competition with low-wage countries. As a result, the middle class has tended to disappear. Wage disparity has become a problem.
b. Advanced Economies tended to lose the ability to make many essential goods and services for themselves. If a shortage of inputs were to occur in the future, they would be at a disadvantage.
[5] Now the consequences of too many governmental promises are becoming clear.
Advanced Economies around the world are finding their debt levels ballooning. Much of their higher expenditures are on programs citizens expect to continue forever.
US leaders can see that practically the only way that they can fix this situation is by cutting back on many programs the public depends on. If a leader like Trump has a lot of power, he can also try to get a larger share of the world’s output by imposing tariffs on the output of other countries. Neither of these approaches will be popular with very many people. If nothing else, there will be conflict over who gets cut out if cuts are necessary.
Other Advanced Nations face similar problems.
[6] Leaders have not told the public about the likelihood of a shortfall of energy supplies and the difficulties this would cause.
Physicists have been warning that a shortfall in fossil fuel supplies was likely to occur since the 1950s. More recent models, such as the modeling represented in the 1972 book, The Limits to Growth, gave a similar picture.
Part of the confusion has been that economists have given an optimistic view of what is ahead. Their (oversimplified) models indicate that in the case of a shortfall, prices will rise. With these high prices, a huge amount of difficult-to-extract fossil fuels would shortly become available, or substitutes would be found.
In my opinion, the model of economists is incorrect. With the middle class shrinking, there is not enough “demand” to keep the price of any commodity up for very long. Instead, prices tend to bounce up and down. This can be seen for oil on Figure 2. Pricing represents a two-way tug-of-war: Prices need to be high enough for the producers to make a profit, but end products (including food grown and transported using oil) must be inexpensive enough for consumers to afford.
With one story being told by the physicists and another by the economists, competing belief systems arose:
- One saying that there would be a major shortage of fossil fuels, particularly oil, starting in the first half of the 21st century because the only fossil fuels we can extract are the fairly accessible fossil fuels. There are constraints caused by geology that seem to be difficult to work around, arising from limitations caused by physics.
- The other saying that any such problems lie far in the future. We should be able to develop new techniques quickly. Otherwise, any shortfall should cause prices to rise high enough to pay for more expensive techniques, or to find substitutes.
Both sides could see a need to limit consumption, one side because we appeared not to have enough, and the other because, if we really could extract as much fossil fuels as they considered possible, models suggested that there would be a climate problem.
To try to satisfy both sides, politicians decided to push the “save the world from CO2 emissions” narrative. This approach had an added benefit: Businesses wanting to import low-priced goods and services, made in China and other low-cost countries, very much favored it. The limitation on CO2 emissions of the 1997 Kyoto Protocol was simply a local limitation on emissions, not a limitation on CO2 on imported goods.
[7] The Kyoto Protocol, as implemented, has had the opposite effect from the hoped-for reduction in world CO2 from fossil fuels.
What has happened with the 1997 Kyoto Protocol is precisely what businesses, looking to sell low-cost goods made in Southeast Asia, wanted. Manufacturing and other types of industry have tended to move out of the Advanced Economies, and into lower-cost countries.
Total world CO2 emissions have risen, rather than fallen.
[8] The supposed transition to wind turbines and solar panels is not going well.
Wind turbines and solar panels, the way that they are now being added to the overall electric grid, are having far less benefit than most people had hoped. Of course, their benefit is only with respect to electricity production. Farming, transportation of many kinds, and other industries use a great deal of oil and coal, in addition to grid electricity.
Figure 8 shows a breakdown of world energy consumption by type. Electricity from wind turbines and solar panels makes up only the tiny reddish portion at the top. It represents only 3% of the total energy consumption.
We usually hear about wind and solar electricity as a percentage of electricity production. This is a higher percentage, which averages close to 15%.
The areas with the highest percentage of wind and solar electricity generation are already experiencing blackouts because differences from grid electricity have not sufficiently been compensated for. For example, Spain experienced a 10-hour blackout on April 28, 2025, because of low “inertia.” Inertia usually comes from the rotating turbines used in the production of electricity using coal, natural gas, nuclear, or hydroelectric.
Figure 10 shows that in 2024, wind and solar electricity amounted to between 5% and 6% of energy consumption in Australia and the EU. Their high level of usage helped to bring the world average up to a little under 3% of total energy.
[9] There are important things about ecosystems in general and our economy in particular that we are not told about.
I don’t think that educators and politicians are generally aware of the following issues relating to ecosystems and our economy:
a. Ecosystems are built to be resilient. As dissipative structures, ecosystems and economies are “self-organizing structures” powered by energy, just as the human body is. We need not fret that we are responsible for species extinction. Ecosystems, like plants and animals, have short lifetimes. A replacement ecosystem will quickly develop if adequate resources (such as sunlight and water) are available. Furthermore, the waste (or pollution) of one species helps provide the nutrition for other species; CO2 provided by burning fuel helps plants grow. Over the long history of life on earth, 99.9999% of plant and animal species have died out and been replaced by other species.
b. Ecosystems and economies also tend to heal themselves, just as human wounds tend to heal themselves. If a fire, or a type of beetle, destroys an ecosystem, replacement plants and accompanying animals will soon find a way to populate the area. If a major government fails, or banks fail, somehow workarounds will be found to take their place. Human systems need order; if governments fail, religious systems that provide order may become more important.
c. Humans, unlike other animals, have a built-in need for supplemental energy, such as firewood, or fossil fuel energy. Over one million years ago, pre-humans figured out how to cook part of their food. Because of this cooked food, their jaws and digestive apparatus could shrink in size. The improved food supply allowed their brains to improve in complexity. Also, cooked food greatly reduced the time required for chewing, allowing more time for toolmaking and crafts. Heat is also important for killing pathogens in water.
d. Humans are smarter than other animals, allowing the population of humans to grow, while the population of many other species tends to fall. This issue continues today:
The large rise in the population of the less advanced economies contributes to the huge number of immigrants wanting new homes in higher income countries. The book, Too Smart for our Own Good by Craig Dilworth, discusses this issue further.
e. It is ultimately the rising population issue discussed in (d) that leads to the typical overshoot and collapse situation. The issue is that available resources do not rise fast enough (in the area, or with the technology available) to provide enough physical goods and services for the population. If a new approach can be developed, or a neighboring area with additional resources can be conquered, population can start to grow again. Figure 12 represents my attempt to show the shape of a typical secular cycle (also called overshoot and collapse cycle) based on Turchin and Nefedov’s research regarding collapses of agricultural economies.
f. Outgrowing our resource base is not a phenomenon that began with fossil fuels. In 2020, I wrote a post explaining how Humans Left Sustainability Behind as Hunter-Gatherers. In 1796, when world population was about one billion, Robert Thomas Malthus wrote about population growing faster than food production. This was before fossil fuels were widely used. Now, about 230 years later, population has risen to eight billion, thanks to the availability of fossil fuels. We need major innovations, or additional energy resource types, if we want to work around obstacles now.
[10] We seem to be reaching the end of the Stagflation Period in Figure 12. We are likely starting along the long downslope of the Crisis Period.
In my opinion, the Stagflation Period began when US oil production peaked, in 1970. The estimated length of the Stagflation Period is 50 to 60 years. The 1970 peak is now 55 years behind us, so the timing is just as expected.
The Crisis period is next, listed as lasting perhaps 20 to 50 years. This is the period when governments and financial systems fail. What we think of as national boundaries can be expected to change, while countries themselves will generally become smaller. With less energy per capita, the quantity of government services provided can be expected to fall. Government organizations can be expected to become smaller and simpler. It is unlikely that democracies can continue; authoritarian rulers with a support staff are more likely. Plagues may cause the overall population to fall.
We don’t know if the pattern shown on Figure 12 is the correct model for modern times, but we should not be surprised if things do change in this direction. Governments may fail, and, in fact, the replacement governments may fail repeatedly.
I believe that uranium production is also constrained by prices that never go high enough, for long enough, to increase supply.
To pull us out of this predicament, new energy supplies will need to be developed, or old ones dramatically improved. At the same time, the system will need to reorganize in such a way to use these new, improved energy supplies. I would expect that in the new system, the general trend will once again be toward more complexity. New customs and new variations on religions may also develop.
It is theoretically possible that AI could help us find solutions quickly, so we never go deeply into the Crisis Period.
If much of the world economy does temporarily head downward because of limited fossil fuel supplies, some researchers might continue to work on solutions. Other people may temporarily need to focus on growing enough food, close to where it is needed, and finding sufficient fuel sources to at least cook much of this food. Nice things we are used to, such as home heating and repaving of roads by governments, are likely to be cut back greatly.
[11] Hope for the future.
We know that there are many ideas that are being worked on now that might be helpful for the future. They just aren’t ready to be scaled up, yet.
At the same time, some energy types we have today might work better if used in a different way. For example, solar panels seem to provide intermittent electricity for a long period, with relatively little maintenance. If they can be made to work where intermittent electricity is sufficient, and their use directed specifically to those locations, perhaps this might be a better use for them than putting them on the grid. Solar panels are made with fossil fuels, but they do act to stretch the electricity from those fuels.
Another possibility for hope comes through greater efficiency in using fossil fuels. History suggests that if we can figure out how to use fossil fuels more efficiently, the price of fossil fuels can rise higher. With a higher (inflation-adjusted) price, more oil and other fossil fuels can perhaps be extracted.
One thing that strikes me is the fact that economies are put together in an amazingly organized manner, with humans seeming to be put in charge of them. Everything I can see seems to suggest that there is a Higher Power, which some might call God, that is behind everything that happens. People talk about economies being self-organizing. However, in a way, it is as if a Higher Power is helping organize things for us. It appears to me that creation is an ongoing process, not something that stopped 13.8 billion years ago or 6,000 years ago.
Seeing how ecosystems heal themselves, and how humans have made it through many secular cycles so far, gives me hope for the future.
In the past available resourses were largely used to provide the western world. This was possible, because knowhow and effects of scale were concentrated in the west. This led to more efficient weaponry and thus domination.
Meanwhile, knowhow and infrastructure of scale are also available in China, India and Africa. Resource countries can process their resources themselves or use it for exclusive cooperations. They can afford better military and protection.
The modern and industrial culture was largely developed in the USA with its wide and large landscapes, which requires individual transport and a lot of energy with high density.
Copying and adapting this system all around the world leads to a shortcoming of resources.
This is an additional tendency, which adds to the problem.
I agree. This is a good point. A related problem that people are not generally very aware of is the huge size of the population of Other than Advanced Economies. See Figure 11 above. Their population has especially grown.
The other thing that people are not aware of is the extent to which our current economy is structured like a pyramid scheme. Up until about 1970, it could grow sufficiently, simply based on higher cheap oil (and coal) per capita. Since the 1980s, huge increases in debt, both governmental debt and debt outside the government.
This system needs to be kept growing, to keep the system growing. If the Other than Advanced Countries get more energy products and development in general, the Advanced Economies get less. So there competition for resources, to stay away from collapse.
OPEC+ Has Come Close to Its Limit, Leaving Prices Open to Spike
“In the volatile world of global energy markets, OPEC+—the alliance of oil-producing nations led by Saudi Arabia and Russia—is pushing against its production boundaries. With spare capacity dwindling, the group finds itself in a precarious position where any major disruption could send crude prices soaring. As of October 2025, recent decisions to modestly increase output highlight the tightrope walk between stabilizing supply and avoiding a glut, all while geopolitical tensions simmer.
This vulnerability is amplified by ongoing conflicts and incidents that threaten energy infrastructure, raising alarms for consumers and economies worldwide.
“With OPEC+ nearing its limits and geopolitical flashpoints like the Russia-Ukraine war and U.S. refinery incidents in play, the stage is set for potential price volatility. Investors and policymakers should brace for scenarios where spare capacity proves insufficient, pushing crude higher. For now, the market’s fate hinges on these key players’ ability to navigate the storm.”
https://energynewsbeat.co/opec-has-come-close-to-its-limit-leaving-prices-open-to-spike/?amp=1
But good luck on prices actually staying higher for very long. If consumers cannot afford food, local governments cannot afford new roads, and manufacturers see falling purchases of their products, prices will soon fall back again. As a result, the prices will not stay high enough, for long enough, to actually access resources that are more difficult to extract, using current resources. Oil production will fall because OPEC and other producers are not collecting enough money to purchase materials needed for infill drilling. They won’t be able to afford as much subsidies for food for their own populations, so demand for food will drop. The system will tend to contract.
Let us not forget geopolitics and the water issue with Iran and Iraq . FUBAR .
But won’t an economic contraction help stabilize the system? Or will it be the tipping point as governments take on more debt to push the system out of contraction? And can governments take on debt without running into triffens dilemma.
Triffin’s Dilemma refers to an issue that countries holding the reserve currency seem to run into (in a timeframe similar to our current timeframe, by the way):
I am afraid an economic contraction will tend to pull major parts of the world economy down. Europe seems to be especially at risk. Donald Trump is trying to pull the US as far away from this issue as he can by adding the tariffs, and holding down US debt growth. So far, he hasn’t done very well at keeping debt growth down, but closing down the government, and firing government employees, would seem to be a step in this direction.
With China, India, Africa and few others growing so rapidly, I would think they would absorb most of the decline in affordability, from the western world. My point; for everyone who takes the bus or bikes to work in America due to the oil shock. There are 10 people in India buying their first car.
We could leave us with high oil prices indefinitely, unless another global recession or depression kicked in. And even if that happened it may not even be enough to get oil prices calmed down due to the original points above.
So we could be possibly end up stuck with high oil, high inflation, high unemployment. And not a whole lot anyone can do about it.
I read through the article. It repeats a lot of myths about spare capacity in OPEC+, and about prices rising higher on shortages.
In the short term, higher prices can spike. And in small areas like California, prices can spike. But even in California, I expect that high prices will start digging in. Travel from West Coast airport will need to fall, at least for the short term, if not enough jet fuel is available.
It is DefCon 0 . Quark .
https://futurocienciaficcionymatrix.blogspot.com/2025/10/lamento-decirlo-pero-el-colapso-ya-se.html#comments
https://futurocienciaficcionymatrix.blogspot.com/2025/10/analisis-produccion-petroleo-usa-shale.html
https://futurocienciaficcionymatrix.blogspot.com/2025/10/a-punto-de-activar-defcon0-o-lo-que-es.html
Gail , thanks for giving a platform for those who are not insane ;
This guy is great he says things succinctly
. . .
The second link shows US a monthly graph of US Crude and Condensate two ways: Total and “Excluding Alaska and Gulf of Mexico.” The latter is much more stable. The chart shows that the US EIA’s projection for this portion is a steady decrease.
. . .
From the third link:
I agree that Quark makes a lot of good points. Thanks!
That pre-funded energy threshold of 2027 (#3 post) could be an important marker in the future (not to be forgotten), especially if we stumble now into some low demand quasi depression ~detour for few yrs time, thanks for posting it!
2027 is only two years away, unfortunately.
After feeding it articles from SEEDS, Oilystuff, OFW, Lars Larsen, David Korowicz, Hideaway and Kira and some of the epic rants here and there on peak affordability.. Chatgpt says that my degrowth preparations should be in place by 2028.
This is for Ed, who dreams of getting down to 80M humans. We will be aided in achieving that goal by drastic water shortages, as climate change and depleting aquifers reduce carrying capacity.
https://www.wionews.com/videos/iran-faces-unprecedented-water-crisis-worsens-19-damns-on-the-verge-of-drying-up-1759818035396
We can’t count on water supply being as high as needed, whether for water for humans and other plants and animals, or for making electricity. This is a major issue.
This is a water story closer to home:
https://www.zerohedge.com/ai/could-ais-growing-thirst-water-usher-localized-resources-wars
Could AI’s Growing Thirst For Water Usher In Localized Resource Wars
In many places, it looks like water will be as big a constraint as electricity availability. And of course, most kinds of grid electricity need water to run flywheels, so this adds to the water strain.
AI investment masking problems with the U.S. economy:
“U.S. GDP growth in the first half of 2025 was almost entirely driven by investment in data centers and information processing technology, according to Harvard economist Jason Furman. Excluding these technology-related categories, Furman calculated in a Sept. 27 post on X.com GDP growth would have been just 0.1% on an annualized basis, a near standstill that underlines the increasingly pivotal role of high-tech infrastructure in shaping macroeconomic outcomes.
“Furman’s findings, shared online and echoed by financial analysts including Robert Armstrong of the Financial Times‘ Unhedged (the same writer who coined the term “TACO trade’), echo several months of observations on the remarkable surge in data-center infrastructure. In August, Renaissance Macro Research estimated, to date in 2025, the dollar value contributed to GDP growth by AI data-center buildout had surpassed U.S. consumer spending for the first time ever. That’s remarkable considering consumer spending is two-thirds of GDP.”
https://fortune.com/2025/10/07/data-centers-gdp-growth-zero-first-half-2025-jason-furman-harvard-economist/
Excellent point! New bubble.
Sri Lanka is worthy of a contemporary study of collapse. After collapse of their currency and economy, fertilizer imports were drastically limited, cutting rice production. The IMF along with countries like India injected easily $5-6B in loans. This amount is probably low,, with other “shadow” loans.
The government reduced beauracracy and restructured (simplified) their economy. Now they supposedly have a miraculous recovery.
But do they?
The injection of loans is easily $300 per capital when the per capital income at collapse was probably $1000-1400.
This feels like a “papered over” recovery. It is a recovery that does demonstrate how government simplification can contribute to a more efficient economy.
But with no energy resources, I think it is only temporary.
Right! How many papered over collapses can the world economy tolerate?
Another case of an island area without fossil fuels of its own?
Taiwan, too.
‘A “resurgence” in construction of new coal-fired power plants in China is “undermining the country’s clean-energy progress”, says a new joint report by the Centre for Research on Energy and Clean Air (CREA) and Global Energy Monitor (GEM).
The country began building 94.5 gigawatts (GW) of new coal-power capacity and resumed 3.3GW of suspended projects in 2024, the highest level of construction in the past 10 years, according to the two thinktanks. ‘? https://www.carbonbrief.org/chinas-construction-of-new-coal-power-plants-reached-10-year-high-in-2024/
Coal is the major resource China has. If it can handle the distance from markets problems it has (perhaps with getting more long distance transmission lines in place), then this will work. The biggest increase seems to be in locations distant from population centers.
I see the report also says that there are big cutbacks in wind and solar.
“To put it simply: The US and Europe face major supply chain challenges and a shortage of manufacturing facilities to produce sufficient amounts of artillery shells and other explosives that are essential if they plan to fight Russia or China. “?
https://larrycjohnson.substack.com/p/a-video-update-on-the-wests-faltering
This seems to be an issues we have heard about previously. A big reason the US is not pushing for war with them.
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“An advanced, exotic vehicle of unknown origin was unearthed during an archaeological dig, according to Dylan Borland, a former U.S. Air Force member and intelligence-community whistleblower. “?
https://www.liberationtimes.com/home/former-air-force-insider-intelligence-personnel-were-shown-images-of-an-ancient-tic-tac-ufo
If there were Guardians looking after the earth, Ramanujan would have been killed by a plague, a leprosy or something horrible before he sneaked into the royal society.
So , whoever was looking after humanity did go AWOL in or before 1918, so all arguments about ufos are moot. They might have been there but they are not now.
Blimey, that’s not cricket. Do you mean Hardy and Littlewood hoodwinked the Guardians?
Thank you, postkey. All this highly advanced technology in our skies, in this time of “peak oil”. It’s the elephant in the room. So why the limited hangouts about it in these past few years? And still those few who prefer not to notice it enjoy publicly reveling in their innocence. 🙂
“reveling in their IGNORANCE”, I meant to say. 😉
“Much of the resilience in recent global crude pricing is reliant on China’s seemingly voracious appetite to build its strategic crude stocks (read: Why Aren’t Oil Prices Weaker?). This hoarding—driven by policy rather than by explicit economic incentive—vacuumed up nearly 1 MMbpd, on average, through the second quarter of 2025. While this pace slowed somewhat through Q3, we’re continuing to see a steady climb in Chinese crude stocks and despite prompt-backwardated markets.
Given China’s importance to the current oil market, the key question is how much longer can this discretionary demand stimulus last, exactly? By definition, China can’t continue building stocks forever; however, Chinese crude stocks are at only 60-65% of estimated storage capacity and Beijing has plans for the construction of yet more explicit strategic reserve facilities.
In fact, the entirety of effective year-over-year Chinese “demand” growth impulse for global barrels over the past year has been driven by stock-building and not true domestic Chinese consumption. ”?
https://www.commoditycontext.com/p/beijings-long-term-oil-problem
Interesting, if true. It sounds like China has been trying to keep oil prices up. Of course, China has debt problems too.
A lot of people seem to believe in this “AI” thing but I tell you, it’s just another golden calf (and a quite ridiculous one) …
(But if you must, don’t settle for “AI”, go for battery powered driven by “AI”!)
At here only some delusionists believe in it,. It is like a belief on messiah. No logic, true believers.
“A lot of people seem to believe in this “AI” thing but I tell you, it’s just another golden calf (and a quite ridiculous one)”
You do, do you? And what are your credentials, Mr. Snarly Jarly, that you tell us this without giving us any proof? Revolutions take time to get into their stride, and then you don’t notice them any more. They’re just part of the background.
Look at computers, and how they went from terminals with green screens to personal computers in the home. When was the last time you bought a stamp, for instance? Exactly. You don’t need to. You just email people and organisations. A world of connections is now at your fingertips. What will AI bring? As yet we can’t say. The revolution has just started. But as the months and years pass, new ways and openings will be found. Hang on to your hat!
Mass unemployment and the contradiction at the heart of the AI boom
https://archive.ph/VjHeF
Here the Telegraph tries to assess the impact of AI, present and future.
Me amigo,
I got to know computing as in programmer in the 80s so I’m no layman and could have waxed about the computer as a lot but not intelligence.
But never mind, computing incl digital IDs and “AI” will soon disappear in the obscurity of legends and our minds will be occupied with a lot more down to earth sort of thoughts …
“computing incl digital IDs and “AI” will soon disappear in the obscurity of legends and our minds will be occupied with a lot more down to earth sort of thoughts”
Wishful thinking.
“I got to know computing as in programmer in the 80s”
Me too.
“so I’m no layman”
Oh, the complacency! You’re way out of date now. I watch YouTube videos to get just a glimpse of what they’re up to these days. Tech is virtually self-updating now. The future is here!
Previously, someone called it a mere fantasy or such.. bwah..
https://www.reuters.com/business/energy/not-polands-interest-give-germany-nord-stream-suspect-tusk-says-2025-10-07/
https://www.dw.com/en/poland-pushes-back-on-german-nord-stream-extradition-request/a-74269774
“What did PM Tusk say about the Nord Stream suspect?
“The problem of Europe, Ukraine, Lithuania, and Poland is not that Nord Stream 2 was blown up, but that it was built,” he said.
“It is certainly not in the interest of Poland to hand over this citizen to a foreign country.”
ps I only mixed up the little details as the suspects for extradiction to German prosecution are said to be in Polish & Italian custody..
man rents a sailboat in order to blow up Nordstream 2. Priceless. Self-organizing.
Merkel twists’s again, lol.
She just blamed the proUS/eastern EU wing for not correctly judging the Russian threshold for possible escalation (aka self defense)..
The hysteric reaction is priceless:
https://tfiglobalnews.com/2025/10/06/ex-german-chancellor-angela-merkel-blames-poland-and-baltic-states-for-escalating-putins-war-in-ukraine/
ps given the escalating crisis in FR – we could arrive at very different world even before the ~2030 threshold..
We could indeed!
Meanwhile, Merkel’s opposite, Wagenknecht, though she hit rock bottom earlier this year because it’s always darkest before the dawn, is continuing to lay the groundwork for the Global Peace Accord that rises from the ashes of the Big Nuclear Scare:
“Germany’s Bündnis Sahra Wagenknecht–Vernunft und Gerechtigkeit party (BSW) has sparked controversy by inviting Russia’s ambassador to Germany to a peace-themed art exhibition in the Brandenburg state parliament.
Entitled “War and Peace,” the exhibition features works by Hans and Lea Grundig—artists persecuted by the Nazis, with Lea Grundig later serving on the Central Committee of the Socialist Unity Party (SED).
Left-wing nationalist BSW parliamentary group leader Niels-Olaf Lüders described the event as a call for peace and international dialogue, noting that numerous ambassadors, including from Belarus and Hungary, will be in attendance alongside Russia’s Sergei Netschajew. According to Lüders
We want to send a call for peace with the exhibition.
The invitation has stirred reactions among coalition partners. Parliamentary leader of the Social Democratic Party of Germany (SPD), Björn Lüttmann stated
As the SPD parliamentary group, we would not currently think of inviting Russia’s ambassador.
State Parliament President Ulrike Liedtke clarified that parliamentary groups independently decide on their guests and that the invitation does not constitute an official state parliament event.
The CDU strongly criticized the BSW’s decision. Parliamentary leader Jan Redmann told Tagesspiegel that providing a platform for Russian officials amid the ongoing war in Ukraine was inappropriate and urged citizens to avoid the event.
The opening of the exhibition is scheduled for Tuesday, October 7th.”
https://europeanconservative.com/articles/news-corner/wagenknecht-party-invites-russian-ambassador-to-art-show/
Previously, someone called it a mere fantasy or such.. bwah..
https://www.reuters.com/business/energy/not-polands-interest-give-germany-nord-stream-suspect-tusk-says-2025-10-07/
https://www.dw.com/en/poland-pushes-back-on-german-nord-stream-extradition-request/a-74269774
“What did PM Tusk say about the Nord Stream suspect?
“The problem of Europe, Ukraine, Lithuania, and Poland is not that Nord Stream 2 was blown up, but that it was built,” he said.
“It is certainly not in the interest of Poland to hand over this citizen to a foreign country.”
ps I only mixed up the little details as the suspects for extradiction to German prosecution are said to be in Polish & Italian custody..
“BRICS Just Unveiled the Plan to Replace US Dollar Worldwide
“… The move towards a gold standard supported with real commodities revolutionizes the way the world trades, and these measures chip away at the dollar to the point of extinction.”
https://watcher.guru/news/brics-just-unveiled-the-plan-to-replace-us-dollar-worldwide
According to the article:
So the price for gold may change, I expect. The price of oil may change, too, reflecting the currencies actually being traded, if I am reading this right. I would need to see this in action, to see what actually happens.
I would need to see this happen. They have been saying this for 15 years! I don’t but it
We have seen several building steps so far.
Most recently, and chiefly among them China no longer trading its wares dominantly is USD.. , then you have the one-way energy deals with RU, i.e. no longer EU/R bound energy exports ever..
So, what we can get in the mid horizon scenario say before 2035 is that EURope will be demoted-imploded severely in the global pecking order, while US “allowed” limping along, and the Asians keep on strengthening.
And by ~[2035-2045] the grand finale when US decides the apparent loss of the overall game is worth taking down the whole planet or not.
A world society with 80 million humans and 400 million robots to provide much specialization, will be paradise. No need to ship across oceans as the local robot tailor can stitch up whatever you want. No need for medical schools as the AI models are already trained and good forever.
We keep finding out more problems with pharmaceutical drugs. Now reports are saying that your intestinal flora changes for years, depending on which pharmaceutical product you take.
https://www.theepochtimes.com/health/gut-changes-persist-years-after-stopping-certain-medications-5916418?ea_src=ai_recommender&ea_med=desktop_health&test_user_group=a
Bacteria quickly mutate to get away from whatever antibiotic we are using. Even viruses mutate. Maybe the robots will need to be trained again and again. Or people will need to be trained to eat better.
Pharmaceutical product traces are already in our public drinking water from the tap.
No life is worth less than the life of a working class man, regardless of race.
They are disposable, and if we do not care about casualties, paradise can come faster.
During the Triangle Fire of 1912, the victims, mostly immigrant women, were paid what is now about $1,500, while the owners, worthy part of society, were paid $50,000 for the damages, or about $6.25 million today.
The infamous radium girls were paid $10,000 plus $600/year annuity. At that time if the plaintiff died the case was closed so it was only paid to those who had made it to there. None of them lived long enough to collect their first annuity.
That is civilization. Just ending workers’ comp can advance civilization by leaps and bounds.
The old photos of guys working in high rises with no protective measures were real. If they fell, they died, and maybe their cost of funeral was paid. That was how the world worked before civilization was corrupted.
I have talked a lot about the inbred Amish. A few splinter groups may not pursue intergroup breeding but they still do not accept peoples like Spanish or Italians.
Let me tell the story of a Mennonite.
Johann Heinrich Deutschendorf was a Black Sea German, born at Yekaterinoslav province in Russia, now called Dnipropetrovska province in Ukraine.
When Deutschendorf reached the age of 18, in 1913, he was going to be drafted so he decided to jump it and fled to USA. Otherwise he would have been killed during the Great War.
Johann Heinrich ended up on Oklahoma, where there were a concentration of Mennonites who fled Ukraine.
He married a fellow Mennonite girl and had a son, who was christened Henry John Deutschendorf. Eventually they had 12 children in total.
Henry John decided to ditch he Mennonite faith. He joined the Army Air Corps, later the Air Force. He married a woman whose surname was Swope, which shows Swabian origin; the Swabians emigrated to USA in 18th century and were thoroughly Americanized by that point of time.
Henry John abandoned his Mennonite faith but not the German sternness, and he was stern to his children, and the oldest son, Henry John Deutschendorf Jr, who preferred to call himself John, did not like that.
John Deutschendorf ran away from home and became a singer. A manager suggested that a name like Deutschendorf would not gain him too many fans and advised to change it to something shorter, so he chose Denver, the city name closest to his surname. He married a woman named Annie Martell, which is the “Annie” in Annie’s Song. Later he divorced Annie and married an Australian named Delaney. Neither of them show German ancestry. When he disappeared into the sky in 1997 he was ‘buried’ as Henry John Deutschendorf, Jr, showing he never changed his legal name.
It took just 2 generations from a devote Mennonite into John Denver. Which is why the Amish strictly adhere with intergroup mating, and stray groups who marry outside do not last long.
Which is why the whole Amish argument falls apart. Denver’s example is a blatant show of what happens if a religiously tight group begins to intermarry.
Okay, whatever. I see the settlements growing along a route to my farm. I see the children on the back of buckboard like contraptions swinging their legs. I see the women driving carriages, I see the kids working in the field and I see men driving eight horsepower plows.
Whatever, they have nice land and fields near me.
Dennis L.
A billion whatevers can fix the Amish’s hopelessly inbred genes.
Sorry, i intended to say ‘cannot’.
A colony of pandas is nice to look at. China treats pandas as a national treasure.
Without human intervention there will be no more pamdas once the current ones die out
I see such Amish farns as panda colonies. One cam be impressed by that but it is doomed because its genes are messed up.
Hey, that’s biology.
The Amish use a fair number of products of our fossil fueled society.
For example, they use the roads that have been paved for all citizens. Without this, travel would be tough.
I presume the cloth and buttons used in their garments are made using modern machinery. Their boots, as well. Even the sewing machine and thread is made using modern machinery.
I have heard that some groups use “stationary power,” I presume for drying out crops. Perhaps I am confusing who is using what.
I would presume they use the fire department. Perhaps the hospital emergency room. Also the system that allows them to sell the crops they grow to others. It depends on fossil fuels.
Score another one for the old guy.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=xUt8R2yHm08
Four minute video on Cu, as in MoonStruck, “Copper, it costs money because it saves money.”
In the beginning of the video is a photo of the mine, very deep hole, takes a brave man to drive to the bottom.
Cu will be the problem, not oil and it seems like it is coming up quickly.
We in the US gave up our manufacturing skills. We need engineers, that starts in grade school with arithmetic, we don’t have the funds to do much of what is currently being done. Without electronics/engineering it is back to the stone age.
This is an existential crisis, some well meaning ideas don’t work, it is going to be painful. We need Cu more than oil and the time lines are very short.
Dennis L.
The blurb says,
This video says that because in problems in various places of the world, output equivalent to the third largest copper mine will be lost. Work has started on new mines, but these won’t be available for years.
All of the push for shifting from oil to electricity increases demand for copper at the same time. The situation doesn’t look promising.
Gail, would it be possible to solve, at least in part, the problem of the economy if states and governments expropriated something around 80% of the possessions of the ultra-rich, especially in the West? I would also like to know if you think socialism could solve, or at least mitigate, the issue of resource scarcity.
And, if I may ask you a third question, could the Arctic region possess significant oil and natural gas reserves that could extend the availability of fossil fuels for a longer period of time?
The same goes for the South China Sea. I believe the reason the US Navy is still present in that region of Southeast Asia is because of the resources in there.
I’d like to thank you for this article. I’ve been following your blog for over a year and I have learned a lot about economy and peak oil.
The actual physical possessions of the very rich turn out to be pretty small, especially compared to the size of the overall population. Most of their possessions tend to be things like shares of stock and ownership of businesses.
Dividing up actual possessions has been done at various times in the past, in different countries. When my husband and I visited St. Petersburg in Russia, we visited one of the apartments that had been broken up into pieces, and offered for rent to ordinary citizens in 1917, as a result of the Bolshevik revolution. There was only one bathroom for the eight apartments that it had been cut up into. The large kitchen housed a whole row of clothes washers.
https://ourfiniteworld.com/wp-admin/upload.php?item=53137
https://ourfiniteworld.com/wp-content/uploads/2012/06/shared-bathroom-st-petersburg.jpeg
Regarding the oil and gas in the Arctic Region, my impression early on was that most of what seemed to be available was natural gas. Natural gas is difficult to ship, and it does’t sell for much, relative to its heat value. It is very hard to extract natural gas in a difficult environment, and ship it anywhere, at a high enough prices to cover all costs involved. Russia has been doing this in the North, but I don’t know how much money it has actually been making on the project. This may be one of Russia’s problems now.
Maybe there are oil resources in the South China sea. I expect that there will be conflict with closer-by countries about who gets to extract this oil.
I support 100% tax on all holding over 20 million dollars. I support 100% nationalize of all ownership by people and companies outside the home nation.
There is no reason for the rich dictators of KSA to own the company that provides my electricity. There is no reason for the rich dictators of KSA to own 5% of the entire NY stock exchange. Confiscate it for the sovereign wealth fund.
To be clear the sovereign wealth fund of America.
ed
100% communism has been tried before
check your history books and get back to me
the stock market functions as a viable (for the moment) financial entity…
start confiscating parts of it on some kind of political whim.
and the whole thing will deflate faster than sticking a pin in one of the helium 9oth bday party balloons i had last week
—–just sayin.
Happy Belated Birthday!
ty Gail.
i still havent received my gold clock as the oldest OFW-nut
“Another possibility for hope comes through greater efficiency in using fossil fuels. History suggests that if we can figure out how to use fossil fuels more efficiently, the price of fossil fuels can rise higher. With a higher (inflation-adjusted) price, more oil and other fossil fuels can perhaps be extracted.”
This does not work. The Rebound Effect (xhttps://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Rebound_effect_(conservation)) states that when something gets cheaper, we don’t pocket the savings, we use more of it. Have you seen anyone buying in 19″ TV for $80 for their living room? No we pay much more for a bigger set.
I suppose it depends on how the economy is structured.
If there is a top 5% who gets to use most of the energy available, and the bottom 95%, who gets a minimal amount, and not much say about how society is structured, then there is a possibility that energy consumption can be held to a desired level. (Reproduction would have to be tightly controlled, also.)
All of this starts sounding like things that the World Economic Forum folks were talking about. “You will own nothing, and you will be happy.”
In many ways, it is not a very desirable outcome, but given the way the Universe seems to be headed, it looks like we are headed in that direction. Either that, or a religious ending to our predicament.
I pointed out it elsewhere and someone said Jevons’ paradox.
If something becomes more efficient they just waste more of it.
Jevons paradox works insofar as civilization works: civilization is the culture of Jevons paradox. MPP. Gail’s just talking about buying more time, although myself, I don’t see that as hope. I see it as an intensification of the sixth mass extinction. But it’s not gonna happen anyway.
MPP seems to drive people to use whatever energy is affordably available.
The only way this might possibly be slowed down is if the top few percent (say 5%) could exert considerable control over the bottom 95%, and keep them from reproducing excessively and using too much of the resources.
The top 5% would still likely have a problem with their numbers and desires growing, if any resources are affordably available to use. They would still use a disproportionate share of the resources.
By “slowed down” I gather that you mean over the course of several decades or more a la davidina. That scenario sounds like a global version of a Hunger Games scenario which was a city-state scenario. It is a totalitarian political scenario. Totalitarianism requires more complexity than the soft totalitarian scenario we live in now, and against a backdrop of energy collapse it runs contrary to Tainter and systems theory in general.
OTOH, as you know I believe a short-duration Non-Public Degrowth Agenda of 5-10 years is possible for for stalling chaotic collapse if the political scenario is benevolent but firm-handed libertarianism. In order to maintain adequate law and order against a backdrop of collapsing living standards, young people have to be allowed the space to be creative in fairly acquiring as many of the essentials of their existence as they can, and they need to be encouraged to do so. Returning the commons, large public farm projects. The usual Progressive degrowth political theory. Pol Pot-lite lol. True old-school American Progressivism IS national socialism; its ideological roots are in folk culture and Thomas Jefferson’s republicanism before that. The more structurally resilient that the young are in their own lives, the less drag they’ll be on the rationing systems. A good chunk of he old people will die off pretty quickly because they won’t tolerate a collapse in the medical system along with all the stress.
Yes, the “remaining” resources of the NA (US+CAN) are compatible with the Jeffersonian approach and right tools (non industrial yet intensive ~agriculture) for several hundreds million people.
That’s not doable/repeatable in (W)Europe, Eastern ClubMed and many/most parts of Asia..
Thanks jak, I’m not really suggesting that the US is going to get very far down the road at all on ‘regrarianism’ in the 5 to 10 years that I see the likable politics of the Phase 2 restructuring will bring. It’s more the ethos that counts. The glue will be the rationing system, and that glue will be attempted to be applied around the world in global coordination. Europe still has lots of unused green space though its population density is higher than the US. The quick reduction in the boomer generation will help. Non-nuclear countries unfortunately will receive fewer rations and spillover from them will be contained militarily as necessary but primarily by cutting off all transportation fuels in order to halt mass migration.
People everywhere will need to try and constructively figure out how to make the best of their local and regional opportunities.
This lengthy article can be condensed to Stein’s Law
“Things that can’t go on forever eventually stop.”
The are two lemmas
They go on a lot longer than you expect.
When they stop, nobody sees it coming.
You are right. But it doesn’t make sense to predict imminent stopping, when there is at least some possibility that, over time, the system we are part of will save us. It works in long cycles. The system we have now will not last forever, but a new system will start taking its place. As long as some resources are available (even if they are only wind, water, and burned biomass), human population seems likely to continue. Humans are smart. They may possibly figure out more efficient way of doing things than were done in the past.
Actually, most of the people here do see that.
If you look at the comments below there are a few who refuse to see that, trying to grasp on the straws and resorting to ever more spurious methods to justify their delusions denying the laws of physics and thermodynamics.
Stein’s Law is a pointless law because it is redundant: there’s no such thing as forever.And the two lemmas (irritating word) shouldn’t be so presumptuous of people that Stein’s never met before. Stein and his royal we.
The only variable we have to fix energy per capita is to decrease the number of humans. Getting down to 80 million people, world wide, would make our hydro resources like much more attractive. Would make our wood lots appear gigantic.
Global nuclear war should lower the number of humans greatly. Gold is at $4000 an ounce.
“…should Ukraine deploy U.S.-provided Tomahawk missiles, it might draw the United States into a direct conflict with Russia ‘within hours.’ ” – Former U.S. Army Colonel Douglas Macgregor
And all other life, which has been paying for our exceptionalism since civilization began and especially since the advent of the fossil fuel era
The massive growth in human population is primarily due to the so-called green revolution aka fertilizer and cheap energy for terraforming, irrigation, harvesting and transport, and antibiotics and anti parasitic drugs like ivermectin
The die off and decline in fertility rates over the next 2 generations from the accelerating loss of these factors will be huge even without extraordinary measures by the Illuminati.
You probably are right about this.
There are now an awfully lot of old folks around in the Advanced Nations. They probably won’t be fully replaced with younger people. But it is hard to run a pension plan with a lot of older folks.
Hydro is always very variable in timeframe, especially away from the equator. That makes it a difficult resource to count on using. Africa, with its seasonal rainfall, has a serious problem using its hydroelectric power.
ed
80 m people would put the world as it was roughly at the time of christ
with an economic system to match.
if youre sufficiently interested, go back and find out what the prime energy source was back then
Gail, the repeated references to shifting of manufacturing to South East Asia confuses one. Are you referring to the shift of manufacturing to the ASEAN countries starting roughly in the 1960s, especially to Singapore, Malaysia, Indonesia and Thailand? Or, do you consider the massive expansion of manufacturing in East and North East Asia (Taiwan, South Korea and later, China) to be part of the South East Asian manufacturing boom? Because the industrial belts of China or South Korea are geographically very far (and culturally much farther) removed from South East Asia than say, the US mid west is from Colombia or Venezuela.
I think of the expansion to East and Northeast Asia as having occurred much earlier than the expansion to South East Asia.
Everywhere, industrialization spread first to coal using countries in the north. But as their supplies became exhausted, industrialization spread south.
India to become the world’s largest importer of oil by 2025 but here’s a key admission: “Russia’s oil reserves at the current production level will be sufficient for more than 65 years, and natural gas reserves are projected to last for 100 years, according to analysts.”
https://www.rt.com/india/626018-india-to-become-worlds-largest/
That’s all fine if global economic dynamics stay the same, which we know for a certainty it won’t. We could be looking at a lot more de-industrialization by more countries in the next few decades.
Only a narrative . This will never happen .
1 . India’s refining capacity is 5.6 mbpd , so what will they do with the extra oil ? No refineries are expanding and no new are planned .
2. China imports 11.1 mbpd officially ( it also takes anything available in the black market ) , India 4.8 mbpd . Either China must crash or India must expand industrially at rocket speed which is not going to happen .
3 . My thought : US has put extra tariffs to crash the Indian economy . Why ? The US is currently importing 5–6 mbpd of heavy/sour crude and exports 3.5 mbpd of shale light . In 3–4 years this will change as shale declines and US will need to import 3–4 mbpd of extra crude . US is not going to reroute Chinese crude imports . So the best targets are EU or India — take a pick — which is better to screw . Like I said just a thought .
Just for info –US refinery throughput is 18 mbpd while production is 13.5 mbpd .
In competition for manufacturing, India has a lot going for it. It doesn’t need heat in winter, and the population has pretty much learned to get along without it in summer. Thus, its “overhead” cost for heating and cooling is very low, especially compared to Russia, Canada, Norway, or North Dakota. Even its food costs are fairly low because the people eat little meat. They can get three crops a year, so food can be grown quite easily.
If the economy is going to move in the direction of low-overhead countries, I would agree that India would be a likely growth spot. Also, India has a lot more children than, say, China, or anywhere in Europe. This pattern also helps India.
We don’t know whether there will be oil to import in 2050. My guess is that China could help Russia increase its oil production. There may be more oil to export in 2050 than we know about now.
Gail , the negatives far outweigh the positives for India to move from the agrarian economy to an industrial economy . I have posted those elements earlier so I’m not going to repeat myself . Here is the latest– this company shut down its operations because of bureaucratic harassment and corruption on 1st October .
I will have to admit that India is terrible for bureaucracy. It has been trying to create jobs for everyone who needs one. Thus, there is no push toward efficiency (that I can see).
Maybe, India doesn’t work then.
Hello Gail, thank you for your detailed article.
What surprises me, however, is that you seem—perhaps against your better judgment—to keep circling around the real issue.
You remain focused on describing the system as energetically constrained, but not as depletion-driven.
You do acknowledge “declining energy per capita,” yet you treat it as a structural slowing factor rather than as an exponential process with hard physical endpoints. The Rystad and IEA forecasts (especially since their 2024–2025 revisions) make it clear that:
• technically recoverable oil and gas reserves are shrinking faster than ever previously reported,
• new projects (Guyana, Namibia, Brazil) are structurally insufficient to offset the natural depletion of 6–7% per year,
• and the EROEI of all replacement technologies (including LNG, deepwater, CCS, and hydrogen) is falling below the threshold required for sustainable economic growth.
This changes the nature of the problem entirely: it is no longer “too expensive to extract,” but rather “there is less and less left, even if you are willing to pay.”
Your analysis is thermodynamically coherent but empirically underdeveloped. You describe the economy as a dissipative structure that requires energy to maintain itself, yet you do not update the geological input data on which that principle depends. You still speak of “constraints” where there is now clear physical contraction of the energetic base volume.
That makes your final question, “Can it be fixed?”, essentially meaningless. What the Rystad charts now show (and even the conservative IEA Stated Policies Scenario confirms) is that the law of simultaneous decline is taking hold: production, investment, maintenance, refining, and logistics are beginning to undermine each other simultaneously.
No adaptation is possible anymore in the classical sense—only system contraction, unfolding at different speeds across regions.
The speaker is telling us that the water cut is getting way too high on wells in the Permian Basin now. Some drillers are spending $40 per barrel, simply on water disposal. Drillers there now need at least $90 per barrel.
I can believe that.
This video just like ” Canadian Preppier ” is exaggerated . So the current WTI is $ 65 . LTO sells at 10-15 % discount = $ 50-55 is a wellhead price . If companies pay $ 40 only for water disposal they will have a net revenue of $ 15 . Shale would have closed a long time back . Also exaggeration of decline rates and everything else .Ignore . Mike S is the only expert on this issue .The real oilman .
“Some drillers” should give us a clue that it is a tiny percentage that have such high costs.
It is hard to put out a good video without some really worrying numbers.
I read Yergin’s last book and he claimed shale declines at 70% in three years. Very quietly mentioned that. He also said for Europe to meet its climate goals by 2050. They would need to have per capita income around the size of India. I did the math that is 97% decline in 25 years.
I read Daniel Yergin’s last book “The new map”. And he claimed that shale wells deplete 70% in the first three years after peaking. And he’s no doomer. To be fair too, he didn’t really elaborate on that but I remember reading it like “WTF?”
I am not sure.
We are driven toward more and more complexity. Depletion is always with respect to currently known resources and currently used methods of extraction. Both of these things can be enhanced with more complexity. Admittedly, there are diminishing returns to added complexity, but this is the only direction we have that is available to go, which might give us a longer-lasting outcome.
I think we are likely headed for a significant period of decline, because of the reasons you mention. But, as we work on added complexity, there is always hope that we will figure out less energy intensive ways of doing things.
We also know that even without adding complexity, there still is fair amount of oil, coal, and gas available. Somehow, if there are resources available, the system seems to find a way of using them. We also have a lot of spent fuel from nuclear power plants that we could theoretically use again, if we could how, in an energy efficient way, we could get it back out again. We also would need to figure out how to upgrade it, without using so much energy.
Manufacturing can still be done, even with higher cost fossil fuels, if the overhead is low. That is why I am suggesting India might be the manufacturing site of the future. There is even a younger population in Africa, but the current energy structure is so bad, it is hard to see it going anywhere.
Its not a new theory that the rise of the west is accompanied by access to cheap energy.
But there is one source of energy not discussed: Nuclear Fission. Apparently China is investing in this as their get out of jail card.
https://www.telegraph.co.uk/business/2025/09/23/ultimate-american-nightmare-china-winning-race-nuclear/
I suspect there are going to be twists in this story…
Copy/paste of ZIP on C&E . This answers all you need to understand .
‘How to solve the ‘puzzle of the sun’ , Well, there it is again — the eternal sun in the lab, now with a thin layer of AI smeared over it.
It’s fascinating how every generation thinks it has finally reached the moment when “the puzzle of the sun” can be solved. First it was super-magnets, then lasers, then cryostats, then supercomputers — and now we have Diag2Diag, an algorithm that fabricates synthetic sensor data to correct failing sensors. A virtual band-aid on a thermonuclear abscess.
The Achilles’ heel remains, unchanged: the energy balance.
So far, every record (like the one at NIF in the U.S.) has been a sleight of hand. Yes, “the fusion output exceeded the laser energy that hit the target” — but not the total electrical input of the system. Once you count the cooling systems, magnets, cryo-pumps, lasers, and data processing, the efficiency drops below zero.
You couldn’t even power a hairdryer on 220 volts with it.
Thermodynamics remains merciless:
The Sun works because it’s a billion times larger and uses its own gravity as a pressure vessel.
We have to imitate that with magnetic boxes trying to tame a hundred million degrees — and all that here on Earth, using steel, copper, helium, and a finite amount of patience.
AI might help stabilize plasma, but it won’t repeal the second law.
The energy required to impose order on a chaotic system rises faster than the energy you can ever extract from it.
It’s the ultimate Houdini paradox: the better you lock up the chaos, the more energy you lose to the chains themselves.”
Thanks! This is definitely not my area.
“The energy required to impose order on a chaotic system rises faster than the energy you can ever extract from it.”
Ravi, perhaps you can comment on “The Fifth Law”? This is something I came across years ago, upon which I could not find any discussion. Mentioned it a couple of times here previously, but no one responded. One would think somebody somewhere would have taken the time to sustain or challenge the ‘truthiness’ of this guy’s self-published claims. (Didn’t buy the book at the time myself as it was rather expensive, and I was leery of giving myself an unnecessary headache trying to recall failed math skills.)
His site is now dead, but here is an archive of the press-release page: https://the-fifth-law.com/pages/press-release
This is perhaps why world leaders are so interested in maintaining control of their populations. They know that if the situation is completely chaotic, nothing good can happen, and it would take a huge amount of effort to get the system in order again.
On the way down, a disproportionate share of energy is used on control of the population. Look at China.
Yes , I know about this but the short overview was not good enough for me to go into this in detail . I am a believer in the second law of thermodynamics .
Sorry, this is the archive link:
https://web.archive.org/web/20240918233613/https://the-fifth-law.com/pages/press-release
I guess this could simply be taken as a subset of the Second Law. Its particularity just seems to put its finger on the tragedy of modern industry (sorry, Dennis and Kulm).
Hi, you’re a major influence on my evaluation of the current state of affairs, and I thought you might find this broad overview I wrote up interesting! https://jakehpark.substack.com/p/end-stage-economics-debt-as-symptom
Essentially, I reframe increasing government debt as a symptom of energy decline rather than the problem in and of itself, explaining that government debt is largely an artefact of free-market ideology. I frame my analysis around the interdependence of the symbolic (financial/narrative) economy and the real (energy) economy, emphasising that as long as there is enough surplus, it is technically possible to avoid short-term crisis as long as the symbolic economy is managed well enough. Continued inflation is inevitable, but runaway hyperinflation can in the short-term be mitigated. However, I concede that all of this is less likely due to elite incompetence, organisational costs, and sociopolitical fragmentation. Like you, I emphasise that the economy is a complex, self-organising system, and it is impossible to predict exactly how things will turn out. We probably have some minor disagreements on the specifics, but our outlook appears similar!
Thanks! In this article, you are mostly talking about the mistakes economists make, rather than explaining directly how debt accrues (Other than, generally, we spend first, then use taxes and/or growing debt to pay for our overspending).
Overspending really started about 1980. It really shot up after 2008. l like the way you displayed the FRED chart.
https://substackcdn.com/image/fetch/$s_!u0w3!,f_auto,q_auto:good,fl_progressive:steep/https%3A%2F%2Fsubstack-post-media.s3.amazonaws.com%2Fpublic%2Fimages%2Fe7bbd590-fa04-4201-96c9-881660fe1fe2_360x465.png
I might mention that besides “spending first,” governments also “promise first.” The promise Social Security. They promise Medicare and other healthcare benefits. They “insure” banks and nuclear power plants, and many other things, such as the solar installation plant that just went bankrupt.
The US government, like nature, does not operate on an accrual basis. It operates on a cash basis. So it generally does not set up reserves for all the things it promises. So the only “debt” that show up relates to already spent obligations.
Even money which was collected years ago for Social Security years ago, when there were relatively few retirees has disappeared from the Trust Fund. Instead, there are non-tradable US Government Bonds, promising that the government will come up with the additional funds when the system needs them. To me, this makes these systems be on pretty close to a “pay as you go” basis. With this approach, it becomes difficult to fund a retirement system with a huge number of old people, and a relatively smaller number of young people, not earning high wages.
“we spend first, then use taxes and/or growing debt to pay for our overspending”
I don’t think that’s mostly how it works. The debt IS the spending (for example, when most people buy a house or a car). The phantasmagorical prospect of the loan conjures the money digits into existence.
Private debt is SIGNIFICANTLY greater than government debt
https://youtu.be/zLzcSTjtCzA?si=EEPfpcMxh_nSiq_n
True. I believe that private debt and well as government debt, pulls the economy forward. It gives people money to spend on things that they want to buy before they have actually earned it.
Gamblers are going to use any excuse to justify their gambling away the last remaining money of house.
In a growing economy, turning a semi into a trucking company made sense.
Now it does not. Endless regulations, increasing insurance and fuel costs, etc, makes such venture not very likely to succeed.
Betting the farm on a roulette number, for a 35:1 payout (the odds are either 37:1 or more likely 38:1) is personal choice. Ridiculing others for pointing out the bad odds is not a proper way to deal with this issue.
The promoters are not gambling. They know what to do and say to get investment from the institutions which do have the money, and know nobody will bother to remember after a month or so. According to the Canadian Prepper, they are also very well stocked for a general collapse as well. Nobody seems to be building a refugee in the space.
I am not against future tech, but I do not agree with the direction the current advance of tech has taken; it is the most wasteful and inefficient way to do things, basically pushing brute force , wasting enormous energy for little benefit.
I think we have done way too much of picking winners in advance, when it comes to funding technology.
Technology needs to evolve slowly, so that each increment can prove its value.
technology cannot evolve slowly
for the simple reason it must pay for the next stage…
weve been doing that for centuries
the technology developed for the production of railway lines in quantity, was paid for by the engines that ran on them.
Railroads were an invention that paid back very, very well.
thats not what i said
the steam engine (c 1712) was invented in a incremental succession of technologies—it was about 100+ yrs between the steam engine itself, and a locomotive on rails—then another 50 years to develop the first true express trains.
this first rails were wood—then 3ft long iron fishbelly rails—then longer as steel mills improved to produce them
incremental technologoly paid incremental dividends to increasingly eager investors—of course they paid very well as traffic increased in tandem with development
I didn’t mean to say that that was what you said.
I was thinking that the first US transcontinental railroad made travel a whole lot better between the Western US and the Eastern US. I could have expressed what I meant better.
Yes, the ones who are going to keep making a profit are those closest to the money-printing machine (closest to command-control gov. spending, whether that be on AI / Palantir, “refugee” trafficking and support, enforced health spending like “Covid countermeasures”, military hi-jinks as in Ukraine, and all the fraudulent loans and subsidies that those types of enterprises enjoy).
Normal consumer enterprises are not going to be able to compete in such an environment, and will increasingly be sloughed off, as we are seeing.
Here’s a perfect example (taken from Twitter comment):
“Jennifer Granholm was in charge of the Dept. of Energy under Biden. She shoveled out $93,000,000,000 in her last 76 days in office in the form of ‘loans’ to ‘green’ businesses that weren’t vetted and didn’t file a business plan.
That’s 3 times their annual budget gone in 76 days.
More than twice what was spent for the last fifteen years.”
$93 billion is more than the entire GDP of at least 40 different countries.
Kyiv Post
EN
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UK
Moscow Putin LGBTQ+
Putin’s Scientist Pal Tells Educators West Planning to Kill Most of Mankind
Leading Russian nuclear scientist Mikhail Kovalchuk said the conspiracy involved promoting LGBTQ+ ideology, population control and bioweapons to replace 90% of humanity with more efficient robots.
“”The West, which was developing ahead, understands that a huge number of people are becoming unnecessary. They began to prepare for the reduction of their population. LGBT was introduced so that there would be no procreation. And those who did not accept LGBT were offered a second program — Child Free Family. In a generation or two, they will not have procreation. And the rest will be dealt with with biological weapons: a conditional virus will come with a mortality rate of 90% and mow down the population,” Kovalchuk said (a recording of his speech is published by the Agency).
https://www.moscowtimes.ru/2025/10/01/prezident-glavnogo-yadernogo-nii-rossii-zayavil-o-planah-zapada-ubit-90-zemlyan-s-pomoschyu-lgbt-i-biooruzhiya-a176031
In my view the implementation of LGBTQ+ ideology is more related with the intention of destroying the classical family and destroying the traditional values of being a man.
The objective is to have a population under control, more in the so called ‘pacifist’ mindset and more obedient to vertical indications (directly given by governments) rather than orizontal indications (family, tribes/ethnic/regional/national groups).
The paradox is that when, as in this case, governments want to wage war (see against Russia, in Europe), they don’t find the fundamental basis to support these intentions.
Because, although driven by wrong purposes, the European governments’ intentions don’t find any young people, expecially males, who support the idea of going to war.
European young males in fact already find themselves as being more ‘citizen of the world’, rather than citizen of a specific country and they don’t feel the idea of defending any Country or any family at all.
Additionally, governments have just little group of potentially aggressive males in their bucket (except some exceptions) which are normally little deviant groups and stigmatized.
Therefore current European males who want to fight are not in sight, because current young males are normally already under the heel of a women (if straight ones) or are ‘on the other side’ or anyway don’t feel the sacred fire to defend any family, as most of the time they don’t have it.
Do you see any male who can eventually go to war if his woman has already asked him to take temporary retirement for children?
Or do you see any male who can eventually go to war if his woman has already asked him to clean the kitchen, go to the supermarket to buy milk and take care to put kids at bed, before going to war with his friends? (and my dear, please clean the doormat if your boots have been left with mud…)
The vast majority of young men who are still ‘classic normal’ in Europe are parodaxically immigrants.
In Italy you see them from north african origin or east Europe, but they don’t feel any sacred fire to defend their new country and in case of problems they will chose another country.
Therefore, the funny situation is that ‘globalists’ are now trapped by their own trap.
That’s why you get rid of borders then you would have no more wars. You might have regional issues like Syria or something. But you wouldn’t have nations fighting against their neighbors and such.
most species are territorial, and always have been, check it out–its not just a human trait…
so you will have territotial conflict over resources, until there are no resources left
I can sort of understand this. If population is way too high, give people a way of living a child-free life.
This approach also can lead to voluntary sterilization, so that no more children are born. And, it gives doctors another thing to charge for.
I can see quite few winners with this approach. I’m glad it wasn’t around when I grew up.
“a conditional virus will come with a mortality rate of 90% and mow down the population,”
This won’t work. Viruses with such high mortality rates quickly die out. They can theoretically kill a lot of people in a small area, but they quickly die out.
More on (moron?) Jordan Peterson’s health problems:
Canadian psychologist, author, cultural commentator, and Daily Wire podcaster Jordan Peterson is slowly recovering after spending nearly a month in an intensive care unit battling pneumonia and sepsis, Peterson’s daughter, Mikhaila, said in a Saturday update. Doctors diagnosed Peterson, 63, with critical illness polyneuropathy, a type of nerve damage, toward the end of his pneumonia bout, she said. Peterson was unable to communicate for nearly all of September, Mikhaila said. Peterson is now out of ICU but still very sick, she said. He’ll be recovering for a few more months, if not longer, she added.
What is the nerve damage from? Mikhaila suggested it may stem from CIRS, or chronic inflammatory response syndrome, that she said Peterson developed after decades of mold exposure. She noted that her father had suffered from unexplained neuropathy and weakness in recent years.
Mikhaila also said Peterson has experienced severe reactions to medications, and she blamed spiritual attacks for the family’s health battles, noting that her newborn daughter suffered heart failure in June, about a month before her father became sick. Both Peterson and his granddaughter were hospitalized within hours of each other on the same day in July, she said. Mikhaila insisted, though, that Peterson’s education organization, Peterson Academy, would continue in full force.
https://wng.org/sift/jordan-peterson-in-recovery-after-month-in-icu-1759772614
Decades of mold in Canadian academia notwithstanding, I was assuming as a default position that any of Jordan’s current health issues were exacerbated by the COVID shots he insisted everybody needs to take.
However, we can’t ignore the possibility that one group of elites are trying to destroy him in order to defang and control his education organization, which, much like Charlie Kirk’s organization, is influential among a sizable section of young people and presents a threat to said group of elites’s plans or strategies.
Spiritual attacks? Didn’t she ever consider that the holy one’s inability to communicate might just be glossolalia? Next-level shit? Let the man move on! We don’t mind!
Regarding the Hand, I have said that since Trump’s fake assassination, all false flags concerning ing Democrats and MAGA will favor MAGA, but also that all false flags concerning MAGA and MAHA (which itself is morphing into the America First national socialist coalition) will favor MAGA. Both Kirk and Peterson are/were Zionists, and Kirk’s pre-assassination awakening just facilitates the Hand’s framing of Mossad.
Whatever the case is with Peterson, given the cumulative nature of manufactured consent, the Zionists must start appearing in the rearview mirror ahead of Israel’s destruction so that Left and Right can come together in muted jubilation after the fact. The Hand is a masseuse.
will favor MAHA not MAGA!
Just take the damn vaccine, Tim!
“She noted that her father had suffered from unexplained neuropathy and weakness in recent years.
Mikhaila also said Peterson has experienced severe reactions to medications, and she blamed spiritual attacks for the family’s health battles, noting that her newborn daughter suffered heart failure in June, about a month before her father became sick.”
So Mikhaila suspects witchcraft is at play. Funny how the old tropes are rolled out as prosperity declines. How long before we are burning witches again?
Maybe eating only steak and water is not healthy?
Couldn’t be the novel gene-modifying injections?
Certainly possible, but his family was public about his and his daughter’s autoimmune issues even before 2020. I don’t expect it helped, though.
Trump is about to declare war on Iran. That is unconstitutional. Neither party in congress will do its job and stop him. The same for the war on Venezuela and the war against Russia. The dems talk about no kings but refuse to act. The repubs just want money, lots and lots of money.
Trump act out against the constitution makes him a dictator. It requires the military to refuse his unlawful orders. I am waiting. As the general continue to have their personal for life air wing to take them and the grand kids skiing in Switzerland and snorkeling in Tahiti I do not expect they will honor their oath to defend the constitution.
Trump’s creeping senility is loosening his inhibitions. But he’s still king of the jungle, and his underlings can’t afford to miss a word. Remember Freud’s Id, Ego, and Superego ? Trump’s ID is clearly in the ascendant now. It reflects his base instincts – what he likes to do when he feels there are no restraints.
This Chinese academic Jiang Xueqin has been predicting the US will invade Iran for some time now. And that global civilization will collapse soon.
Through his “Civilization” lecture series and viral YouTube channel, Jiang has outlined a comprehensive theory of civilizational decline that connects everything from the Protestant Reformation to Bitcoin, from Putin’s war strategy to the coming “Age of Prophets.” His May 2024 prediction that Trump would win re-election and lead America into war with Iran—which drew over 680,000 views and proved remarkably prescient—transformed him from education reformer to prophet of collapse almost overnight.
His central thesis cuts against every assumption of modern progress: The West is spiritually exhausted, the global financial system is a house of cards, and we’re heading toward an era of civil wars, religious revival, and the fracturing of the world order. Most provocatively, he offers specific predictions—including a U.S. ground invasion of Iran by March 2027 that will trigger a Second American Civil War.
Lot’s of fun here for doom junkies!
https://tatsuikeda.substack.com/p/jiang-xueqins-prophecies-of-global
According to the link,
It is quite possible that Jiang Xueqin is correct. There certainly is a big right-left divide. And I suppose Trump or someone else could decide to invade Iran. If governments fail, religions will almost certainly get stronger.
I seem to be seeing forecasting some of the things he mentions in the second paragraph I quoted.
Jiang has a BA from Yale. His views are parochial, limited. Send him back for an MA and PhD.
Both parties ultimately cater to the interests of capital. Within a capitalist system, true opposition to these interests is impossible, as even the “left” ends up aligning with capital. Capitalists prioritize oil to maintain economic growth, and if it wasn’t Trump, it would just be another figure serving those same goals. An American invasion of Iran and Venezuela, along with conflict with Russia, could be seen as an inevitable capitalist response to the challenges of global peak oil.
Yes, all three are about oil.
Such invasions can only be an inevitable capitalist response BEFORE global peak oil ever happens. After the global peak all imperialism ceases. There will be no invasions of those countries. Just headfakes in that direction.
You might be right. November 2018 marked the peak of liquid production, but fuel output remains high enough that an invasion could still be on the table. Consider Hitler’s invasion of the Soviet Union (Operation Barbarossa). He had the oil to initiate the attack but needed a swift victory because, apart from Romanian oil fields, Germany lacked access to sufficient oil. I think the U.S. and Israel anticipate or hope for a quick success in a potential war against Iran.
The problem with that Hitler example, as I’m making clear my position in the current WW2 conversation with Fitz and Norm, is that I don’t see Germany’s actions as imperialistic but rather an existential war for survival. Both the Eastern imperial USSR and Western Anglo-American empires had it in for Germany because they knew Germany had no oil and also that it had a fiercely independent and agrarian streak. 19th century German romanticism was an even more influential cultural phenomenon in Germany than toothless English romanticism was in England that inspired the great anti-industrial writers of that age. So Germany chose to live on its feet, and with a folk ethos, and took the fight to both empires when it was finally forced to.
“There is only one party in the United States, the Property Party … and it has two right wings: Republican and Democrat.
— Gore Vidal
LOL
“Both parties ultimately cater to the interests of capital.”
This is a good way of putting the situation. The economy needs to grow, if it possibly can. This involves using available resources.
“ Trump is about to declare war on Iran”
Where are your sources for this?
“slowing growth in the world economy is making it more difficult to repay debt with interest, especially for governments”
WHY governments? They own the bank. They can print all the money they need.
It’s private/corporate debt that’s the problem.
Printed money doesn’t solve the problem. Real goods and services are what are needed. What happens is inflation of printed money if the amount printed is higher than actual goods available.
Governments have been providing all kinds of giveaways. The 2008 bailout started along this line. Then the 2020 shut downs. DEI indirectly provided some more. And all of the handouts to the elderly, disabled, unemployed, single parents, etc. Also to countries overseas. Now, big tax increases are needed if handouts aren’t decreased. This will be unpopular.
The banks own the governments. The governments don’t print any money; the banks print money. The governments borrow the money that the banks print, either directly, via quantitative easing which is the purchasing of government bonds on the secondary market by central banks, or indirectly, via commercial banks extending credit to the global economy.
Reante> what is your assessment of ~freelance billionaires such as Mr. Musk in term of overall systematic pecking order if you will?
Is he just one/single separation from the upper caste (true owner’s of the global fin – banking capital), or does he rather enjoy somewhat sidestepping kind of arrangement to them (as per occasional hints by himself), or that silly msm narrative about the richest person on Earth (no strings attached) is the correct one?
Musk is just a media intel operative in the role of…Musk. Operation Mockingbird began with operatives as ‘journalists,’ and the Hand took that consent factory paradigm to the next level, saturating popular culture with broad-spectrum Farmhands in order to keep the ladies and germs from running wild, like so much ivermectin. The consent factory is in the bidness of antibiotics. Real people living real lives is against the rules. Musk is a 24/7/365 operative instead of a 9-5 M-F operative. The difference between the two is the difference between the above board ‘defense department’ CIA and the true, black budget CIA that Truman, Eisenhower, and Kennedy all warned about as they watched the rise of the emergent phenomenon that is the Hand evolve out of traditional Statecraft, armed with the promise of ARPANET that would allow it to create Key Men from whole cloth.
Welcome to the Matrix.
“Jeff Bezos plans to build a data center in space within the next 10+ years.
Unlimited solar energy available 24/7, space is an ideal location for data centers.
$AMZN AWS is set to make major moves out there.”
https://x.com/BourbonCap/status/1974246055282610500
He read my posts! Another one for OFW.
Dennis L.
Sounds like an excuse for more debt.
Less like a data center out in space can be hacked, sabotaged or destroyed in a civil war. Remember, data centers are about control, not for our convenience or to promote business and “growth.”
Solar power cannot fuel it so just a stock price news
A lot of people have ceased to think and will believe any bs from people who just want money
And nothing will be built by then, despite of the semile musing of some delusionists.
Just for grins where would a person invest if they wanted to make money in the market? I have been buying oil.., natural gas and copper and nuclear and they seem to be going up a lot!
AI has surged even today, and it has ever growing power needs, so nuke etc looks good.
it’s a bubble, but might not pop until 2027 or so.
AMD up big today to $200, I hear it might go to $500+, but I bet it retraces some tomorrow.
INTEL, SMCI, LUMEN, TSSI, DELL, AVGO etc besides old NVIDIA.
this is not investment advice.
Round tripping the money and then this is called growth by the govt . Already discussed earlier Open AI + NVIDIA and now INTEL , AMD etc etc also join the party ;
Nvidia + Broadcom + AMD + TSMC = $8 Trillion
Combined revenue is $350B (with AI mania already in these sales). And of course TSMC just sells to the other three, so real new sales are $240B-ish.
So we’re talking 30+ p/s on $8 Trillions of “value”. Back of a napkin math. Has to be a record of sorts, I won’t even ask AI about it.
Copy/paste Wolf Street
What can go wrong ?
Oracle shares tumbled after a report that the software maker’s profit margin in its cloud computing business is lower than many on Wall Street have been estimating.
While Oracle generated roughly $900 million in revenue from the rental of servers powered by Nvidia chips during the three months ended in August, the company only managed about $125 million in gross profit, The Information reported, citing internal corporate documents. Oracle shares fell as much as 7.1% on Tuesday before paring much of the decline, while Nvidia dipped as much as 0.6%.
In some cases, Oracle was losing “considerable” amounts of money on its rentals of smaller quantities of Nvidia chips, including both new and old graphics processing units, according to the report. Tech giants dragged down the S&P 500 Tuesday, with losses accelerating on the Oracle news. Bloomberg
youve been buying promises—you hand over money, and get a piece of paper with ”oil” printed on it.
not material resources
other people will use those resources, supported by your promised money, to prolong things a bit longer.
bottom line is—you cannot create surplus energy by using surplus money, you just buy a little time.
nobody can say how long for, that’s the ultimate problem…
I cannot figure out what markets are going to do.
Prices tend to go up with general inflation. Governments want to inflate away their debt problem. So they add increasing amounts of debt as long as they can. This adds to inflation. But this is a bubble, which could pop.
Buying anything solid–gold, a house, a farm–has tended to be a good strategy, but prices are so high now, I don’t know if it will continue to be.
Yes but if the bubble pops won’t things keep going up as the governments have shown that they will hand out more money?
If governments collapse, the money they previously printed becomes worthless. The pensions they promised disappear. Think of the US confederacy.
What happens is a new strongman comes in power and offers much lower taxes. But he offers lower services as well. You start over, with a different government, and different money. The new money may not be acceptable in other countries, however.
The new money might not be accepted in other countries. That sounds about right. Americans living abroad with a pension would be in a lot of trouble
Good point. Everywhere, the elderly will gradually be put back to work.
Children, a long term asset. Amish make this work, Ashkenazi Jews also have a good history.
Stuff is secondary to human talent and a social structure which works.
Secular humanism is trying to reinvent the wheel, the ten commandments or a variation thereof works just fine.
Too much stuff takes too much time, children need time and enough stuff not to be hungry.
Socialization and knowledge are powerful, see paragraph 1.
Dennis L.
Maybe it is the time frame. If one lives hand to mouth, money invested in the morning is needed in the afternoon.
80/20 with cash which is not needed for say ten years.
A guess is that any house, almost any house purchased in 2008 has a higher nominal value than the same amount in a savings account. The problem is between then and now the asset was not liquid, liquidity costs.
Dennis L.
Gas is very low right now osb plywood is the price it was 5 years ago. We are seeing a slowdown coming soon
Gail, what do you think will happen to the billionaires, not only in the US, but in the West? Will they lose money and power over time? Will they disappear? I would also like to know if you think Asia will resist this situation longer than other continents?
Peter Turchin, in End Time: Elites, Counter-Elites, and the Path of Political Disintegration talks about the over-production of multimillionaires and billionaires we have been seeing in recent years. He says that the number of these people have been growing. I would associate this with the number of huge companies we now have, and the outsides amounts they pay their leaders. The numbers of these folks have been rising in recent years.
To the extent that collapse takes place, I think we will see the number of these multimillionaires and billionaires falling. But we could see it rising again, if the economy starts expanding again in a more complex way.
I think Asia already has a lot of billionaires. Some of these are trying to move to Canada or Australia. I understand that Bitcoin or something similar has been used to buy homes outside China.
I don’t know if China will collapse after other countries. Europe looks likely to be the first area to collapse. I can imagine a world with several areas of some kind of economy. One is the Americas. Another is a China-Russia-South East Asia group. Africa may go its own (lower) way.
I keep beating the drum, economics does not exist without biology. Children are biology and are wealth; give an idiot child a semi he drag races it and turns it into scrap metal. A gifted child turns it into a trucking company. (Relax, this is a metaphor.)
Amish with little material stuff other than nice land(Horses don’t like to plow up hill.)work and play as a group. I won’t mention the other group so I don’t get into trouble, but it is a community with a set of rules which seem to have endured over several thousand years – correct me if I am wrong.
We humans don’t live long enough to learn from all our mistakes, we can share the mistakes of previous generations; a religion can often do this fairly well. We are good builders, good explorers and we are now moving into space. Or, Starship launches soon. Some of us will do very well indeed but the skills need to match the time period.
Dennis L.
I think Demiurge underestimated my knowledge on this matter, since I prefer not to talk about myself.
>https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=uq-deRtvedI
>How AI Is Saving Billions of Years of Human Research Time | Max Jaderberg | TED
The audience were not knowledgeable about this issue and just cheered.
Actually the presentation was to be given by Unitedhealthcare CEO Brian Thompson, but he got into a small accident in New York and could not be there, so this guy filled in, something which could be easily looked up.
To ‘save billions of years of research’, the AI engine generates billions of bytes of bs data, which all use up electricity. In other words, the cost is not justified.
>Read John Keel, Jacques Vallee, Richard L. Thompson, even Charles Fort.
Been there, done that. These guys were there forever. Analyzed to death.
I read Richard L. Thompson’s book, with Michael Cremo, which claimed the history of humankind is much longer than what is in the history books. The book started with some sanskrit passage with a praise to their guru. No wonder the so called Guardians are not doing anything towards the Hindus.
I found the channel of Nikola Danaylov again. I will give the link for his shorts since people are pressed for time.
https://www.youtube.com/@SingularityFM/shorts
Danaylov has been interviewing those who are doing the research on singularity, long before the likes of Lex Fridman. Danaylov has seen and done it all.
And now he has become somewhat skeptical about what the AI masters are advertising.
Most old hands here have seen and done everything, including me. I don’t know about others but I am not impressed by some inflated claims of some dude just trying to peddle his wears.
So you’ve seen and done everything and have closed your mind to anything new in this fast-changing world. No worries, I’ll leave you to stagnate in your cellar. Farewell! 😉
figure 2 is very revealing.
inflation-adjusted oil prices are in the low range!!
great for the world economy!
oh look, it’s October and Q3 already.
tempus fugit BAU tonight, baby!
It IS revealing, davidina. But when we we have the center of gravity to actually understand what the liberal woke refer to as intersectionality (systems theory), what is truly illuminating is that, under the global private banking system, a WTI barrel price above 66 now causes global deleveraging, and a barrel price below 66 also causes deleveraging. The three month average is 66.46. See the chart dynamics: every time it’s hit 66 we have a baby spike to 70+ and then it falls back below. We are at the end of Steve Ludlum’s last, nested Triangle of Doom.
Thus the Big Nuclear Scare knocking on the door. I give it two months to materialize.
I think you should make note to publicly eat those words in two months.
just a suggestion.
degrowth is here due to imminent declining surplus energy flowing through IC.
you certainly are overemphasizing a mere 3 month average.
oil in the 50s, oil in the 70s, no big deal, degrowth will continue in its gradual and prolonged and slow manner for the next few decades.
Then I expect you to hold me to it brother. But until then my je ne sais quoi remains inscrutable to you. That’s the nature of next-level activity. 😕
if you can up your second level mental activity to average, you should be able to remember this faux pas of yours.
tempus fugit, your life is flying by, see you here in a couple of months, perhaps.
Conveniently for me, I don’t live in the Past. Never have. You wouldn’t believe just how bad my memory of my life is. I only live in the future. My wife, though – she has a great memory of the Past lol. So we’re counting on you to remind us on December 6, perhaps. Just don’t get mad at me if I don’t remember; like I said, conveniently it won’t be my fault. Just have postkey pull it up, that’ll settle it.
The path to degrowth started in 1970-1971. Once we were out of very, very high EROEI oil, it was all over.
In an early version of this post, I compared the situation to a human weightlifter reaching peak strength at 25. The US economy was, in some sense, at its strongest back at the first (and low-priced) oil peak. It has been going downhill after that date, adding more and more debt to try to keep the system going.
Why do you misgender David so, Real Auntie? It’s highly disrespectful, you know.
si it’s outtrageous, jaja.
I do see that is the first 8 letters of my handle, no big deal.
Yes, I remember somebody else calling you that before Real Auntie came along, so it’s not even original.
LOL! Wrong conclusion.
Everybody here calls him davidina because that’s his handle and because there’s more than one David here… It’s nothing to do with misgendering. Told you that you were a liberal. Pay attention.
> Everybody here calls him davidina.
Oh no, they don’t. That’s a disingenuous excuse on your part. I’ll get you, Penelope Pitstop. 😉
Ok occasionally people copy and paste his whole handle but that kind of atavistic listserv formality doesn’t count. Not to this sketch artist anyway. And especially not when most people capitalize my handle. Hate that! But when I capitalize ivan’s handle it’s always autofill’s fault. 😁
Oil prices are in the low range? 🫣 that’s actually not a good thing
Thank you for the new post.
I will have to answer two points my critics raised in the previous post.
This is an answer for the first point.
>If one invests in your direction one can go broke quickly or slowly, if one invests in tomorrow one can go broke, or become very wealthy. Only one bet makes sense.
Actually the idea is not new.
A gentleman named Hideki Tojo had the same idea in 1941.
Japan was slowly strangled by the US oil embargo, and Tojo and his fellow militarists in Tokyo thought investing in tomorrow, i.e. attacking USA and take the riches in the southern seas, was going to make Japan very wealthy.
It did not turn out too well.
There was a general named Kuribayashi. He studied in USA and made enough observation that a war against USA was unwinnable. He pointed that out to the higher command, who put him to unimportant posts because he ‘damaged the narrative’. When the Americans neared Japan, the high command sent Kuribayashi to a desolate island named Iwo Jima (which means ‘Sulfur island’, since there were sulfur mines in that desolate place) to die, and he did.
It is time to set up a long term strategy, for a 100-500 year plan, to conserve what we have and find out what is the best way to advance civilization, not to fritter away the remaining resources for a very energy intensive venture which has little chance of success.
I am not sure that we know enough to make an even somewhat sensible 100 or 500 year plan. We can’t see around the corner to what is next. Everything around us is evolving. The climate always is changing, regardless of what we do.
The self-organizing system seems to work from small starts. Perhaps 20 different scientists and engineers work in different directions to try to solve some part of the problem. A few of them will have at least small successes. These can be built upon.
We can’t save up resources for the future because we do not have command over the whole earth, for the next 500 years. If we do manage to save up some resources, some stronger power (say China) will come and get them out, because we will tend to lose in battle. We need the help of a Higher Power on this one.
”I am not sure that we know enough to make an even somewhat sensible 100 or 500 year plan.”
Some will disagree . Only headlines is enough . Who bought these 100 years bonds .😀https://www.reuters.com/article/argentina-bonds/update-5-argentina-sees-strong-demand-for-surprise-100-year-bond-idUSL1N1JG0MZ/
https://www.reuters.com/article/argentina-bonds/update-5-argentina-sees-strong-demand-for-surprise-100-year-bond-idUSL1N1JG0MZ/
People are looking for higher yield anywhere!
i’m willing to be corrected
but i dont think any segment of humankind has manged a 10 year detailed plan, let alone 100—and 500yr is plain ludicrous
How about your pension plan from the Pru?
That’s been running a good few decades now, detailing how much you put in and how much you take out, and it’s continuing to yield the anticipated results, n’est-ce pas?
“It is time to set up a long term strategy, for a 100-500 year plan, to conserve what we have…”
you may think it’s time, but none of TPTB think that way.
by their locked-in evolved human nature, it will continue to be pedal to the metal resource usage for as long as possible.
degrowth is here and will continue in a gradual and prolonged and slow manner for many decades.
for most people, degrowth will become unpleasant in the 2030s or 2040s and then will become painful in the 2nd half of this century.
setting up anything, requires people to set it up.
no shortage of volunteers there of course…
and thats your problems—the setters up inflict their ideas on everyone else—who tell them to ‘get lost’…
Copy:paste from OSB . Is oil cheap ?
””Gold is being used to control energy pricing. And therefore supply chains.”
I think US LTO/NG producers are looking at energy through the wrong lens. US LTO/LNG producers are selling for USD. Russia, China, OPEC are settling their oil trades in gold.
Since Trump took office in Jan 25, oil has never been cheaper, in gold terms, than it is now.
We are exporting LTO/LNG for USD while exhausting drillable locations while Russia OPEC, are receiving goods, services, loans, from India, China that net settled in gold. Whose oil is more economic? Russia OPEC Venezuela , Brazil or Permian, Eagle Ford, Haynesville, Appalachia?
The Barnett is not going to save the Permian basin. Especially when your primary financial metric is “break even” and not full cycle financial accounting.
I am not sure that this is true, except to a small extent: “while Russia OPEC, are receiving goods, services, loans, from India, China that net settled in gold.
I agree that breakeven is not a good metric to look at. Companies to look at a lot, including that the taxes that their governments need to collect to keep from collapsing.
Over the longer term, I think each area (for example, Americas, China and nearby, Europe, Middle East) will need to provide its own fossil fuels. It will need supply chains that work, given the locally available pricing.
“Oil has never been cheaper, in gold terms” sounds the same to me as saying “gold has never been more expensive, in oil terms”
Is gold a particular outlier among other commodities?
Dr Jordan Peterson is on his deathbed says his daughter “asking for prayers”.
https://x.com/MikhailaFuller/status/1974590350367875325
I pray he is reunited with Charlie real soon.
vaxxed, the silly, bloviating fool. hopefully for his own sake he recovers, unless of course he prefers the pearly gates treatment, then hopefully for the rest of our sakes he doesn’t recover.
I absolutely endorse this comment; an excellent mixture of wit and measured empathy.
I particularly like the adjective bloviating as a descriptor of Jordan’s conversation style. It isn’t so much what he says—although that is part of the problem—as how he says it.
I had thought bloviating was something cows did while chewing the cud, but apparently not. By some accounts, it seems to trace back to the word “blow”. Here’s howWikipedia introduces it:
Bloviation is a style of empty, pompous, political speech. The word originated in Ohio and was most notably used by Warren G. Harding in his successful 1920 US presidential campaign. He subsequently described it as “the art of speaking for as long as the occasion warrants, and saying nothing”. His opponent, William Gibbs McAdoo, compared it to “an army of pompous phrases moving over the landscape in search of an idea.”
Sounds very much like what I’ve been hearing from Jordan these past three years, accompanied by one of the most irritating whiny voices it has ever been my misfortune to listen to on YouTube. You could power a hot air balloon with that voice.
I still wish Jordan well and pray that he recovers his health. He’s only 63 and the pundit circuit wouldn’t be the same without him. I’d like to see him annoying the rest of us for another 20 years at least.
I’m suddenly a posthumous fan of Warren Harding.
“You could power a hot air balloon with that voice.” ROTFLMAO! That’s mean!
Do Bobby Jr!
The disintegration of the EU continues . French PM resigns within hours of swearing . Czech elects the ” Czech Trump ” and Germany continues to live in la la land .https://www.aljazeera.com/news/2025/10/6/frances-new-prime-minister-sebastien-lecornu-resigns
https://www.france24.com/en/europe/20251004-trumpist-billionaire-andrej-babis-wins-czech-parliamentary-election
https://www.zerohedge.com/markets/germany-shock-merzs-media-show-vs-economic-collapse
but someone forecast that 7 years ago .
https://medium.com/future-vision/the-european-union-was-a-construct-of-infinite-prosperity-7a401c225171
Please read the comments . Germany and France are 40 % of the EU GDP and both are now in FUBAR zone . https://www.moonofalabama.org/2025/10/frances-new-pm-lecornu-reveals-new-cabinet-and-resigns/#comments
It looks like things are falling apart, quickly.
Hope for the future is possible unless reality has a say in those matters. We humans seem to be too arrogant to admit our mistakes, thinking we can “clever our way” out of our predicaments.
The world is in crisis today because of our wasteful use of precious resources. That’s why the world looks to be heading towards a global war with combatants who are nuclear armed.
But to your point about the planet being resilient. I remember growing up in NYC, the Hudson River was so polluted from decades of dumping toxic chemicals and raw sewage during the 1940’s thru at least the 70’s. Once the Hudson River was no longer used or limited as a dumping ground, the river bounced back and people catch and eat the fish from the river.
One person’s waste represents another person’s employment. The fact that we are so wasteful is what helps keep commodity prices up as high as they are. We could not get as much fossil fuels out as we do, without built-in wastefulness.
But I agree that if our usage was more efficient, the system might work better. So getting rid of unneeded pieces is that part we have been working on since at least 2020. In fact, the big bulky cars of the late 1960s, with annual model changes, went away not too long after oil prices spiked.
The problem is that our wold got so complex we cannot go back anymore.. the biggest question is when do the majority of the population understands the problem? I guess as soon as this happens we will be in war or civil war.
If the outlook is very bleak, people will stop caring and just live for the moment and then it will really collapse.
Around the world governments are cutting down on democracy. If the EU on 14.10 votes for chat control then there is virtually no more difference in free speech between China and Europe or Russia. Europe will once again be the starting point of collapse/war. Just this time with no recovery… Will that point of time be 2030? Earlier? Later?
A fundamental problem is that there is not enough energy now for democracy and all of the services we have come to expect.
The world was having problems with low-wage protests in 2020, before the shut downs began. Governments embraced the idea because it would allow them to stop the protests and keep order. In fact, China seemed to have some of this problem.
People don’t like disorder and riots. They will take a strongman government that tries to keep order instead. China has been trying to control its population for a long time. It is quite possible that other countries will try a variation on this approach.
Europe is in particularly bad shape. It has significantly exhausted its supply of fossil fuels. Trump is trying to push Europe down further by its tariffs.
Perhaps a good thing is that US weapon supplies are low, and we cannot make more without mineral imports from China. I am doubtful that World War will take place. Local leaders will try to keep populations in control otherwise. Uprisings will be less tolerated. So will big influxes of immigrants.
I have a problem with timing. The system stays together better than anyone would expect.
I eagerly await your articles.
One of the many issues we face is that the end of energy growth means the end of capitalism.
If the best performing asset is gold, which is real money, then that means every asset class actually had NEGATIVE return on investment.
There is literally zero incentive to invest anymore, and without investment, all projects that support industrial civilization will fail.
We are currently moving towards a full command economy like the Soviet Union had, which will probably fail spectacularly.
I am not at all hopeful about AI, and think it is a dead end.
Dmitry Orlov write about the Soviet Union and its collapse. He says that a major industry was taking no longer needed structures apart, and reusing whatever was available, in new ways, elsewhere. I know that in China, many parts of the Great Wall were taken down, and reused for building elsewhere. I expect that there will again be a need for reusing materials that are needed for building elsewhere.
There will always be a need for food, and for cooking food. People need to eat. This will need to be done more locally.
I can see a need for added complexity. We need very bright engineers and scientists to work on finding solutions to our difficulties. These pieces of higher education will remain important. I am not sure about quite a bit of the rest.
”I can see a need for added complexity. ”
So we go to adding complexity in a period of depleting resources ? Makes me go — hmmm .
This is the way the system seems to go. Every time we hit a bottleneck, we try to add more complexity to get around it. There are decreasing returns to added complexity (according to Tainter), so at some point this approach will fail.
Hopefully, we identify things we hadn’t identified previously as resources, or we find a sophisticated way of getting more fossil fuel and uranium supplies (not the brute force, low EROEI methods).
you cant have a command economy without resources to command
sorry—-thats fundamental economics.
We still have energy resources, they just aren’t growing. Without growth of energy, there can’t be a return on investment. Economic Growth= Energy Growth. We have seen that for over 2 years running where gold is going higher in value than any other asset class. The Govt is pretending there is still economic growth, when it’s just a lie.
of course—i should have included ‘growth’.
By one estimate, AI expenditures are contributing 40% of gross domestic product (GDP) growth in the United States, The Economist reports. That’s “an astonishing figure for a sector that accounts for just a few per cent of America’s total GDP.”
https://www.theenergymix.com/as-ai-investments-balloon-experts-see-a-bubble/#:~:text=By%20one%20estimate%2C%20AI%20expenditures,cent%20of%20America's%20total%20GDP.%E2%80%9D
Bizarre. We have to have hope somewhere!
Yes, Europe doesn’t have resources for a world war except if China supports it which doesn’t look possible. That’s the great thing. But it could start a civil war that spreads over the world. For example if the financial system collapses this time it doesn’t look like there will be a way to recover. But not letting it collapse means further destruction of the middle class. It’s a problem Europe cannot solve. If states start confiscating money via wealth taxes it won’t end well for them either. Rich people will just move somewhere else.
So far cheap Asian goods kept people happy enough in the West even though they lost purchasing power.
I’m pretty sure the “World War” is already taking place, just less and less in the physical sphere.
Russia arrests a fraction of the number of people for speech that the UK does, despite having triple the population and also being at war. This tells me that it is the EU (or at least UK) that is gulag-lite already.
Right Ivan just like the US was supposedly gulag-lite until it wasn’t. (Now it’s just clownshow 2.0.) Fooling you twice, even with Farage knocking on the door.
on ofw and elsewhere, we’ve read time and again:
“Everything will be ok because we will find fresh resources of energy—coal–oil—gas—hopium”—and so on.
This is what motivates the MAGAnuts and asteroid miners…..
but our energy sources are only half the problem
dissipation of those resources in the form of affordable goods and services is the other half.
and that means much more than cheap petrol. And where the whole system unravels…
it means cheap everything—food, healthcare–schools–you name it.
cheap is what we had for the past 1-300 years, now theres no cheap left. All we have is infinite debt which will collapse the system…
unfortunately very few people believe that–convinced by trumpnuts (they have been around for at least 100 years btw) that the planet Earth is just an ATM machine that will continue to deliver wealth if only we blame our current problems on others, and kill/deport them in sufficient numbers.
(check Germany in 1933).
ICE are doing now PRECISELY what Hitlers brownshirts did then. Instilling fear in everyone.
the supreme court has been bought. (I was able to supply outline info on that a few months ago, my source was very close and precise, and irrefutable)…
Trump is now immune from legal constraint.
This allows the unchecked march to dictatorship, possibly before ’26. This is what ’emergency’ is being created in Dem cities….(just as i said it would…though I wasn’t sure how).
The supreme court has given the don unchecked power, for one reason only:
To sustain the oil fuelled economic system to the last barrel, because if they dont, the economic system, and their $trillions, will collapse. This is precisely why the surpreme court had to be bought.
There will be no wealth, for you, me, Musk or Bezos et al.
There wont be ‘degrowth’–whether that fact is accepted or not is irrelevant..
this is the ultimate future terror. (for me too) This is why windfarms etc are being cancelled. And why ‘climate change is a hoax’. (the gullible swallow that whole) The antivax thing is a diversion to occupy the minds of the mindless. As is all the other foolishness in the same vein.
This is why Trump is, right now, militarizing the state itself, to keep the rabble in check in advance of whats coming down the pike. Dictatorships must have universal fear.
Other nations are doing the same thing. Germany and Japan were just early starters in this game.
Is anyone still laughing at my ”mid 2020s”?
Norm I have to say it kind of helps complete the commentariat, here, to have you so wholeheartedly fall hook, line, and sinker for the Clownshow Misdirection Play 2.0. When Trump gets removed from office will your dominant emotion be relief or embarrassment? For me it would be the latter.
Collapse Rule No.1: if anything governmental is clearly a clownshow, it’s not going to survive long, and is also likely a psyop. Rule no 2: don’t alienate your military by clowning your military: see Rule no. 1.
Because you bought into the Holocaust Industry, you don’t seem to have any idea how genuinely talented Hitler was. He actually BUILT his dictatorship because on balance, and via his curation of it, the Germans wanted it built because that is what a true, structural German nationalism required in that historical context. We can know that as a fact because Hitler was advocating for dictatorship all the way back to Mein Kampf; Drumpf is the antithesis of a talented builder. Exactly zero people who voted him in want dictatorship and in fact many will take up arms against anyone who tries to impose it because there is no way of justifying a dictatorship in accordance with the Constitution.
You have glaring contradictions in your thesis that need resolving if you want people to see what you think it is that you see.
all dictatorships are constructed on different foundations because the start point is different.
but they usually have a common factor:
The country is broken, and only I can fix it. (you can check that for yourself)
All dictatorshipshave a common purpose: the survival and promotion of ”self”—that is critical. (check again)..
ah yes–the constitution…you may have (or not) noticed that he is ignoring that, and SCOTUS has allowed it. (check again).
Hitler was NOT talented, he was lucky enough to have talented generals. His very foolishness wasted theitheir talents (check again Von Paulus at Stalingrad) He was commanding armies that did not exist.
Hitler also declared war, with oil reserves about 25% of what his armies needed to have any chance of scuccess. ( a truly gifted great leader?)
He was told that declaring war on the USA was the ultimate madness—it certainly was not a clever idea.
Throughout WW2, the Germans were forced to use horse transport because of energy shortage. (maybe you missed that bit of war talent.
The allies used none.
You were extolling Hitler’s talent?—LOL
He built 2 useles giant battleships…instead of the 300 submatines Doenitiz wanted…which would have won the war in short order , before the USA came in.
Had the UK not been available as an aircraft carrier, the USA could not have won the European war.
Hitler held on to power with violence and fear—just as Trump is trying to do now..
True–he may not succeed—-nobody hopes that more than I do.
but I just read the signs –its not just me offering serious warnings about the next 3 years. I wish it was.
I just read that Germany built and fielded 1,162 submarines during WW2…
Hitler exercised extreme aerial restraint towards England relative to England who built aerial bombs as fast as it could and deployed them as soon as they were built in order to bomb so indiscriminately that about half of them never detonated.
The Trump admin and SCOTUS infractions this far are barely breaching the tip of the constitutional iceberg.
“H. exercised extreme aerial restraint towards England relative to England, who built aerial bombs as fast as it could and deployed them as soon as they were built in order to bomb so indiscriminately that about half of them never detonated.”
Gosh, I never knew that AH was such a pussycat. My guess is that he had his hands tied in Europe, otherwise he would certainly have responded in kind.
However, England was indeed vicious in its bombing, including creating a horrific firestorm over Dresden and killing many civilians. This episode in Britain’s history was not widely known until David Irving’s book, The Destruction of Dresden, was published in 1963.
Mind you, all sides were all into the escalation phase by then, thinking that the more harshly they attacked, the sooner they would bring the war and its destruction to an end. We can see that the Russo-Ukraine war is now definitely also into its severe escalation phase.
my point about u boats, was that doenitz wanted them before the war started.
had the uk not been available as an aircraft carrier, the usa could not have become involved in the european war in 1942.
that would have left german factories largely untouched.
hitler would have then developed the a bomb unhindered….
by 1946 he would have had the means to deliver it not just to the uk, but to the usa as well…..and not hesitated to do so…..
game over.
——–
the german airforce used a word to define their bombing technique for british cities…the word was ”Coventried”—you should look it up.
and while youre at it, brush up on ww2 history in general. save me doing it for you…
Hitler was a lunatic, who got his hands on the worlds most powerful army.
Trump is mentally unstable and has surrounded himself with people agree that he is wearing the finest suit of clothes ever made.
Norm it sounds like if Hitler had done-England-in, like you think he should have — the silly git — then we would have had ourselves a Philip K Dick title featuring a global Third Reich. How novel of you.
‘should have’???
reante—sometimes i think you have a thesaurus of claptrap
and make constant references to it
“hitler would have then developed the a bomb unhindered….
by 1946 he would have had the means to deliver it not just to the uk, but to the usa as well”
No evidence of this exists as far as I know. Do have any evidence?
No supposition please.
“the german airforce used a word to define their bombing technique”
Who bombed civilian populations first?
If you hit someone, don’t then complain when they hit back. You brought it on yourself(put the blame where it firmly belongs)
.
“Hitler was a lunatic, who got his hands on the worlds most powerful army”
The most powerful army was the army that won the war and at no point did Hitler have his hands on that army.
That army won the war in Europe and ended the war in Asia.
That’s why the U.S dropped the bombs on an already surrendering Japan, because guess who was powering through Asia, just as they had powered through Europe(again).
As someone once said
“brush up on ww2 history in general. save me doing it for you…”
reante is of course wrong about Hitler, who was no more than a corporate stooge, with an inflated ego(easiest kind to get to do your bidding). A nasty little man, willing to lay down anyone else’s life for a non reality(a singularity), that had been nurtured in his unstable mind for over a decade before anyone knew of him. It’s no coincidence that all of the big stakeholders in the corporation funded and promoted him for all that time, openly at first, then not so open, but they funded him right until the very end.
He was Tavistocked long before his book was ghost written for him.
A confluence of so many flows was no accident.
The engineered depression.
The fractured society.
The man.
The book.
The colour revolution is far older than most believe.
germany was making heavy water in norway, a critical component of nuclear fission
at the outbreak of war, the germany army was the most powerful in usabilty terms, and military skills….by the end of the war things were entirely different…
So no evidence that they could have built a bomb within a year, if the war had continued, let alone one that could travel the thousands of miles to the U.S.
Posturing at the start seems insignificant, if you don’t follow through.
Knocking a bear over matters little, if you allow the angry bear to rise.
That’s deadly.
one of my many weaknessess is making assumptions about people.
nuclear science was ‘out there’
heavy water is a critical part of it. Of course they were working on the basics of nuclear weapons—- Hitler wasnt interested in making heavy ice cubes…
in an industrial system unaffected by continual bombing the germans would have built nuclear devices (I didnt mention ‘a year”). I said by 1946. That was just my guess. might have been later That date was dependent on war factories not being bombed continually.
Heavy water production was sabotaged in Norway….That ended their nuclear program.
you mave have missed their super-advanced technology in ICBMs which no one else had. (you really should brush up on your ww2 history you know)
they built those even under the duress of bombing raids. Thats why Von Braun was grabbed by the USA as soon as the war ended. Maybe you missed that too?
They were the means by which nukes could have neen delivered to USA, but a few submarines would have worked just as well.
Still no evidence that it would have been possible by the year that you chose and then lots of waffle about ICBMs.
If they were that close(we’ll ignore how close they had to put them to hit England) and the yanks stole the brains behind it, why did it take them so bloody long to get one in service?
https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/SM-65_Atlas
Your history lesson on WWII doesn’t match history.
Fitz, Norm is right that pound for pound the German military was by far the best. Even Allied historians acknowledge that. Germans are a special people when it comes to hard work and discipline. No doubt you’ve lost your table to some German interlopers at the motorway buffet.
Fitz it kinda seems like you’re subconsciously asking me to disabuse you of your facile, boob toob, false conspiracy theory regarding Hitler. It’s too easy. The all-pervasive Hand didn’t exist back then.
You say that he was bankrolled by the ‘corporation,” by which you mean international finance capitalism, but Hitler’s funding was domestic. So you’re starting from a false structural premise. Did that domestic funding have extensive ties to international financiers like the Bush family? Of course they did. Welcome to Industrial Civilization. Welcome to the Profit Motive. German GDP was growing 50% every year during the mid 1930s. National Socialism is a market economy.
IG Farben was the largest corporation in Europe. Hitler stripped the Warburgs of their Farben shares and shut down the Warburg banks and seized the assets. Ditto the Rothschilds. The international financiers have never been spanked so hard in their history. But you see that as 5D chess being played by those that got spanked. No mafia don takes a spanking voluntarily.
“The all-pervasive Hand didn’t exist back then.”
There was still the self-organizing system, and whatever push that gives. You ascribe too much power to the group of real people you consider the Hand.
No Norman and you are both incorrect and a bunch of corporate historians can’t rewrite history, as much as they try.
Power on paper is no substitute for the real thing and rolling through France doesn’t count(they couldn’t even complete a ditch).
The Germans lost yet again (so predictable) and if there’s anything special about them, it’s their inability to see the obvious outcome and gullibility to take the bait in the first place (easy with the right people in charge).
Shame really, good engineers and beer(then and now and as then, they are being taken down that path again).
Disabuse to your hearts content, but I hope you have more than an imaginary hand, that didn’t exist then, or now(much like national socialism).
Hitler’s rise and funding was partially covered domestically(I’ve already advised a well documented book if you wanted to see evidence and do look into the early years of the BIS).
From the end of the 20s U.S investment in Europe dropped to almost zero, except for one country, in which it rose 48.5% (bet that helped the funding).
Care to guess the country?
Welcome to the Corporation.
IG Farben were doing very well, but they had the advantage of free gifts of important patents, from those same corporate men. Who gives away important and profitable patents?
The spanking came from the intended rape victim(big miscalculation again, but goes a long way to explain one of those patents).
Do you see who the real rapist is yet?
The same pattern again and again. Nothing new under the sun reante and you can follow the trail back centuries(rebranding isn’t new, changes nothing but a name, so best to ignore).
When I look up IG Farben on the Internet, I immediately see the connection to Bayer, Germany, and Auschwitz. This connection doesn’t sound good.
This is one link I found.
https://encyclopedia.ushmm.org/content/en/article/bayer
At least I’m consistent, Gail. Last month or the month before you were talking about the Hidden Hand yourself and it’s 200 people, so you’re opinion today rings a little hollow imo and WADR.
And the timing of your revised opinion is funny because here I am telling Fitz, who agrees with your current opinion, that he is ascribing too much power to what he sees as a Hand-like entity that existed back then whereas I am saying that it was more like a mere, nascent Hand-like entity given that finance capitalism hadn’t yet structurally/fully colonized Germany and many other places besides. It takes a fully mature, financialized industrial civilization to achieve that. The Hand doesn’t exist for Fitz today yet it somehow existed moreso back then, to the degree that he believes that that entity had full control over German military intelligence and intentionally orchestrated a 50M person massacre as part of its grand design, which really wasn’t such a grand plan after all because the anti-capitalist Soviet Union massively expanded into Europe because of the war. I’d like him to make that make sense if he’s interested in the attempt because he said that of course I’m wrong about it, as if everyone should be in agreement with that. I think I he’s biting off more than he can chew but we’ll see.
I’ll make this quick.
I imagine Gail only agrees as far as i also call it the system, our system, which is a complex system that requires faith from more than a small group to function.
All the rest is easily explained and heavily documented, if you just look past the corporate historians.
It’s the same system with the same goal now, as then(how could it change?), it’s just advanced with the times, which is easy when you control all technological advancements. Unfortunately that time is over and so back to that well trodden path(act III).
Fitz, capture bondage is the psychology that the Hand — and all the Elites that came before the Hand –relies on to drive the self-organizing positive feedback loop below itself, that constitutes civilization. Faith is just a religious formulation of the capture bondage.
Have you mentioned this parallel yet Norman?
“July 1935. German generals were summoned to an extraordinary meeting in Berlin and told that their previous oath of allegiance to the Weimar Constitution was null and void and that they must take a personal oath of allegiance to the Führer. Most of the generals took the new oath to keep their jobs,”
https://vz.ru/world/2025/10/2/1363856.html
The people that won the European war are very aware(no yanks involved).
The courts have just blocked the national guard being sent to Oregon, so the dictatorship might be stillborn. Oh well.
” So yes, Halder and his cronies paint a completely biased picture of the war, blame Hitler for
22:23 bad decisions even though they weren’t, show themselves in as good a light as possible even though they in-fact made the bad decisions, and then also then gets awarded for doing so.
22:33But apparently, when you try to point this out to people, you get branded a revisionist.
22:38 No, the German sources are biased – just like the Soviet sources – and they are twisting
22:44 the facts to manipulate the way you perceive the war. . . .
and unlike the Germans, the Allies have the fuel to run them.
27:00
It’s just a matter of time. Hitler knows this, and knows his only chance to fight against the material superiority
27:08
that’s heading his way, is to capture the oil in the Caucasus. If he gets the oil, his economy will be saved, and he would have the resources of continental
27:18
Europe at his disposal. He would have the fuel to motorize and mechanize his army.
27:24
And the panzers would have the fuel they need to actually fight.”?
I think it’s a mischaracterizing to imply that Hitler wanted Baku oil as a nationalized asset of the Reich over the long term because that would not be compatible with their hardcore ideology. The primary objective would be to starve the Soviet war machine. And as soon as the Soviets knew they couldn’t hold Baku any longer, they would have destroyed the infrastructure such that the Germans couldn’t make use of it for their war effort. Would the Germans have liked to have won the war such that they could have installed a friendly regime in Azerbaijan that would engage in preferential trade with them? Sure.
lol reante
sometimes you outclass hans christian anderson
Norm the Soviets destroyed other oil infrastructure on the way to Baku so that the Germans couldn’t produce the oil. Azerbaijan is nowhere close to Germany.
the iraqis did the same withe the advancing amercans.
if one side cant use a fuel resource, they try to prevent the other side getting it.
In the 19th c, Americand did the same with the buffalo—the energy resource of the indigenous people on the plains
Yep an estimated 150M buffalo in 30 years. Imagine the boom-bust cycle the vultures and other scavengers underwent.
hitler had no option but to start ww2
he spent the preceding years building wartoys and infrastructure (autobahns etc) in order to provide full employment.
but this has limits
you can create 000s of jobs building 000s of aircraft and tanks, but unless you find a use for them, you hit a wall….you cant just park them up somewhere.
the only use for them was to invade adjacent territories, to grab resources to keep the system going.
but this inadvertently did roosevelt a favour, because the usa was forced to do the same thing in opposition, and so ended the great depression…
trouble is, after 80 years, we are fast headed back to square one
Norm it really shouldn’t be that hard to step away from picking sides to see that there were two imperial industrial superpowers that were hellbent on duopolizing industrial civilization with their gargantuan oil fields. And those superpowers did in fact accomplish that goal.
It also shouldn’t be hard to see that both of the political ideologies of those two superpowers were intensely competing for colonial power in Germany, and at the cost of the historical indigenous political ideology.
These are the type of ecological economics, Big Picture facts that we peak oilers always rely on when assessing the lay of any land. Tell me that you see the lay of the land regardless of who’s fault you think WW2 was.
the lay of the land is simple:
we built our economic system on cheap surplus fuel, starting in the 18th c and running to the present.
ww1 demonstrated the critical value of ff energy, (coal mainly)—–ww2 happened because germany and japan had no oil, so had to go grab it from someone else.
we vote for those who tell us this will go on forever—and we have had a succession of wars to ”prove” it. We are merely cannon fodder for wealthy people who finance wars in order to make even more money.
wars are now ”factory wars”—those who own the factories cream off the profit. While millions of patriotic young men get filled with bravado, and go off to die for their country.
that ‘profit’ comes from converting energy resources into cash resources
but of course wars are the ultimate consumers of energy—always have been…
except that now we do not have the cheap energy available to throw into battle in the conventional sense.
a bleak future i think, might be that america declares war on itself, as it seems to be doing right now—resources are being denied to places that need them, because they do not support ”the great leader”.
no other potus has done this.
as i forcast a long time again, soldiers obey whover pays their wages—-right now militia is being used incrementally to ”create chaos”—then of course to ”restore order”.
On taking command…Hitler cancelled all future elections.
Trump is headed the same way for 26….he knows that a 26 midterms will sweep away his power, so he can’t let it happen.
and if he gets away with that, the 2028 one will go too.
laugh all you want—the troops are already on the streets.
nobody wants to be wrong more than i do…
You might be right.
A very few troops are on the streets and the higher echelons of the military are largely not happy about it at all. A military coup always seemed like a fallback option (for the Hand) to me, but these developments make it look like the first option, at least for the moment. Trump is skating on very thin ice.
the higher echelons of military need wages just like the rest of us.
Trump has the power to fire them on the spot (as i understand it)
It doesnt take many troops on the streets to frighten everybody else.
Trump has been given absolute power by the supreme court–and he is using it.
Enough members of the supreme court were bought years ago.
So lets put forward a potential situation.
A case is fabricated against Spritsker, (as an example) the mayor of Chicago. Trump orders his arrest, and that is done.
Who exactly is going to demand his release? The supreme court has authorized any action Trump takes, on that basis the jailing of Spritsker is legal.
If that action goes unchecked, then it will be the first of many.
The dictator rules through fear—it wont take many arrests for this to happen.
Project 25 has been in the making for years—trump is just the useful idiot in it.
I just don’t see how AI is all that it is being cranked up to be. Huge amounts of debt to build the chip racks, water to cool them, electricity to run them. As far as I can tell, AI is just flushing those jobs that were never productive in the first place, aka the paper and pencil pushers like government workers and the bureaucratic bloat, teachers, lawyers, real estate agents, financial planners, Wall Street analysts, the military industrial and the medical industrial complexes, etc. AI is part of the digital prison that is being built around us with digital ID required to access digitally controlled money, travel, even food purchases. Watch UK carefully to see how this plays out. It may offer some clues.
In fact, the internet has so much misinformation and disinformation, bots, influencers, shills, and has spawned a whole ecosystem of “content providers” trying to make a buck off the system that it’s now like having to go through a landfill and sifting through piles of junk and waste to find the things that are truly usefu and affordable. ( Hello restoration and repair.)
I now find myself reading fewer articles, spending less time on the internet simply because so much of it is garbage.
Maybe if AI can be focused on places where it is truly needed, its cost will be a whole lot lower, and there will be more success. For example, try to use AI to suggest ideas relating to fossil fuel extraction. We know that what I think of as “brute force” won’t work on getting more out. We use too much energy in the process. We need to find new approaches for extraction. Perhaps focussing the sun’s rays in a way that will help get heavy oils out, for example. Chemical leaching? We also need an efficient way of recycling the spent fuel from nuclear power plants to provide uranium.
Shipping fossil fuels long distance uses a great deal of fuel. We probably need to be using fossil fuel resources closer to where they are extracted. Shipping raw materials of many kinds across the Atlantic or Pacific Oceans doesn’t make much sense.
Orange man is unhinged . Dr Bardi whose father suffered from dementia . https://senecaeffect.substack.com/p/trump-the-unhinged?utm_campaign=email-half-post&r=26quge&utm_source=substack&utm_medium=email
I think Trump is playing a sophisticated chess game.
lol
no doubt with the board upside down so that he isnt faced with the sophiticated moves between squares, and needing to anticipate the moves of other players.
he can just move pieces from place to place as he feels like it. (who needs those inconvenient black and white squares?)
then declare himself a grandmaster, and demand the nobel prize for chessplaying
He does the same on his golfcourses after all. Always the course champion—year after year.
“My main concern is that the substantial cost to develop and run AI technology means that AI applications must solve extremely complex and important problems for enterprises to earn an appropriate return on investment (ROI). We estimate that the AI infrastructure buildout will cost over $1tn in the next several years alone, which includes spending on data centers, utilities, and applications. So, the crucial question is: What $1tn problem will AI solve? Replacing low-wage jobs with tremendously costly technology is basically the polar opposite of the prior technology transitions I’ve witnessed. . . .
The bigger question seems to be whether power supply can keep up. GS US and European utilities analysts Carly Davenport and Alberto Gandolfi, respectively, expect the proliferation of AI technology, and the data centers necessary to feed it, to drive an increase in power demand the likes of which hasn’t been seen in a generation, which GS commodities strategist Hongcen Wei finds early evidence of in Virginia, a hotbed for US data center growth. “?
https://indi.ca/content/files/2024/07/Goldman-Sachs-AI-Report.pdf
Gail,
Do you see an example of any country that currently appears to be heading toward a less catastrophic transition “Crisis Period”? Many of us are aware of the issues you raise and that there are Limits to Growth. But it’s not apparent that there are “best practices” yet that we can aspire to. The decarbonization movement is partially right but there is no way to suddenly end fossil fuel use and it is naive to believe that our same western lifestyle can just continue but with 100% renewables and EVs. As you suggest, more like an “all of the above” strategy is needed. But it would be helpful if there was a good example of this being feasible and actually happening. You suggest that democracies may not be effective. But there are a growing number of authoritarian governments that also do not seem to have a clue about the problem nor are they doing anything constructive to deal with it. China may be an exception but their economy relies on growth in exports that does not seem sustainable for much longer.
I am afraid the transition has to be a long transition. We cannot see “around the corner.” We learn incrementally about what works and what doesn’t.
I recently read about the problems there are in using current EV charging infrastructure, especially the non-tesla infrastructure. There seem to be lots of different hardware and software vendors. New machines are made differently than older machines. I think I read that only 71% of chargers would work on the first try, for a given non-tesla EV driver who wanted to stop at a station for charging. There were too many incompatibility problems. Older hardware often could not accommodate newer software, for example.
Also, I don’t think that we can count on roads being as good as they are today in the future. This will limit the use of today’s vehicles.
I remember reading that in one collapse, I think in China, roads went from being a wide road, to just the width that would accommodate a wheel barrow. Road upkeep was lower with the smaller road.
Where I live, I see lot of college students on electric bikes and electric scooters. These seem to provide less expensive transportation for them than owning an automobile.
”The decarbonization movement is partially right ”
You mean like ” a little bit pregnant ” .
Gail i have read and followed you for 15 years – you are so intuitive – appreciated
how many times must it be repeated
AI cannot create energy, cheap or otherwise, only help us to find and use more of what we have.
Which will exacerbate the problem
I am guessing you meant to reply to Hubbs.
sorry—i did
how many times must it be repeated?
Energy cannot be created or destroyed. It’s a fundamental principle of physics known as the First Law of Thermodynamics. This law asserts that the total energy in an isolated system remains constant, although it can change forms.
You are aware of the First Law of Thermodynamics, aren’t you, Norman?
The idea that energy cannot be created or destroyed emphasizes the importance of energy conservation and transformation. Who’s to say AI can’t help improve energy conservation and transformation?
AI is helping all sorts of people do all sorts of things? Ask AI the right question, and the answers could change your life.
When will AI-robots harvest the timber of the state of Maine? 20 years?
I am glad you appreciate this.
Working as an actuary, trying to make forecasts about the future, it struck me a very long time ago that the everlasting growth path we were trying to follow could not make sense. It also struck me that investments and annuities would seem to produce way too many dollars than there would be physical goods and services to connect up with. Something in the system would have to fail.
I got started on the project in 2005, but I did not start OurFiniteWorld.com until 2007. I wrote for some insurance and actuarial publications before I started OurFiniteWorld.com. Then I went to TheOilDrum.com for a while, before coming back to OurFiniteWorld.com.
Yes, thanks for the new post Gail. I think you’re sensing the distess so many of us feel, in closing with hopeful comments.
Thanks for the new post!