I also think there will be financial crashes, and likely more than one – just as the last leveraged bubbles collapsed in 2008 and 2020. Of course, he is right that this will lead to them adopting an inflationary model to “solve” it, which will result in a worse version of the same dynamic with time. Eventually I think we will get the dreaded hyperinflation if it goes on long enough.
The wild card is that the demographic collapse and energy descent trends will be highly deflationary no matter what government does, but that’s a longer term issue.
Yes, this is a good idea. Farmed salmon in the USA was fed in such a way that they had much diminished Omega-6 content versus wild-caught. However, I am not sure if practices have changed since I first looked into it, which was in the later 2000s. It is harder to track down suppliers to verify in the USA because of the supermarket phenomenon here.
My general theory is that yes this was true for the Cold War era when there was a “trilateral” system of the USA with arms in Europe (what eventually became the EU) and East Asia (Japan, SK, Taiwan, etc) against the communist bloc. But since the 2000s, right before the GFC the EU was getting to be as big GDP as the USA and turning into a serious competitor and with more viable productive industry. Ever since then, I think US policy has been to harm the EU more and more. The US wants subservient allies, not self-sufficient ones. Alienating EU’s energy ties to Russia has been more damaging to European industry than to Russia thus far. And as far as I can tell US oligarchs mainly care about the Ukraine because of the agricultural potential of that land and the US policy of controlling world food supplies. Supposedly some millions of hectares of Ukrainian land have already ended up owned by various Western companies like Cargill or Bayer (not sure if this has been proven but I’d not be surprised).
Used to get about 200+ pages of search results. Now it’s about 30 actual results and half of them are fake / malicious / useless. Google as a company was once an innovator, but is now mostly a barrier to any kind of progress or improvement.
I downvoted because the poster didn’t back up any of its claims and these kind of hit and run, insulting posts are getting more and more common. I am starting to suspect there’s a concerted effort by green energy shills to infiltrate these message boards and spread nonsense. We know there are organized efforts by bad actors to spam sites and spread discord and misinformation, and these kind of attacks have become so frequent that one really becomes suspicious. Green energy has big, institutional money behind it and a vested interest in lying to the public who subsidizes it about its viability, so there’s plenty of motive to misuse sites both large and small for this purpose.
The Atlantic Meridional Overturning Circulation has a major impact on climate, not just in the northern Atlantic but globally. Paleoclimatic data show it has been unstable in the past, leading to some of the most dramatic and abrupt climate shifts known. These instabilities are due to two different types of tipping points, one...
I believe that Western Europe’s population at the dawn of the 17th century was about 20-25 million and this did not represent a base case for preindustrial organization – in fact it was quite scaled up and organized in its own preindustrial way, with population having been significantly less at certain places and times before that. So that gives an idea of where things may be headed, and that doesn’t take into account the accumulated damage to the biosphere that we can expect on the downside of the slope which did not have any parallel in the preindustrial world.
If this turns out to be an extra-hot summer as the long term models are showing, and also droughty, then that will make 4 summers in a row (in my area, which is agrarian) of bad years. It will not take long to seriously damage food supplies at the rate this is going. I haven’t looked into what conditions have been like in the other breadbasket areas like the Ukraine/S. Russia, the Cone of South America, or the fertile parts of East/South Asia.
A lot of these younger leftists are authoritarian and anti-intellectual, and react with hostility to any disagreement with their beliefs. This was a problem on Reddit and it’s a problem on Lemmy. I don’t know what happened to the left, but when I was young they were the intellectual and rational ones. These days, anything other than “fully automated luxury communism” is ecofascism I suppose. Yes, they do take the view that an accurate assessment of our predicament makes you a terrible person.
Also blaming white people for this is inappropriate as there is basically no part of the world today that’s on a sustainable trajectory in the scenario of energy descent.
Probably belongs in the “local observations” thread but all of the employers in my area (Midwestern USA) are doing at least partial RTO – it started midway through 2022 and picked up momentum since. Obviously SWE can easily be done from home with digital meetings, and so it’s just a lot of time and energy wasted commuting. I could see 1x/2 weeks for a sprint meeting or something but the way they are doing this is just absurd. It’s all to shore up control and their CRE which will collapse anyway.
All of which goes to clarify the fact that, pay aside, corporations are really just not the place to be when it comes to innovation or forward thinking.
It’s actually scary that most of the world’s potash comes from 4 countries and 3 of those are currently in hostilities with the USA.
I doubt we will ever see complete shortages even if there are embargoes because they will just sell potash to us via third parties but still… not an antifragile situation at all. And you have to wonder how much is left/how sustainable is the current production.
The piece is generally good, although I’d take issue with the statement that there’s no historical precedent for decline such as we are about to see. The main difference is in the global scale and population numbers in civilization now as versus previous known collapses, e.g. the Roman Empire, the Lowland Mayans, the “Bronze Age Collapse” and so on. But in all those cases, very high population densities were achieved that pushed the limits of their carrying capacity as much as ours do now. And other trends not unlike our context, cultural decadence, mass migration, falling birth rates, etc all made their appearance as well.
Also the “life expectancy not exceeding thirty” claim is commonly repeated but is mistaken. The number was obtained because they did not omit infant mortality from the statistics, whether out of an intention to mislead or simple error I’m not sure, which was much higher in premodern times. Once that is accounted for, Europeans of the so-called “Dark Ages” lived to between their 40s-50s and occasionally 60s. It did represent a falloff of life span but not quite so drastic as is claimed here.
In America I see complacency continuing, because I’ve learned from experience that as long as an oil boom is in progress, you cannot get Americans to accept energy descent as a concept. It will take another Great American Oil Bust like in 2015-20 to wake them up a bit. Even then I don’t know whether Americans can accept the reality of limits, because they have a natural optimism that is hard to pierce.
Observing American health care firsthand thanks to ill relatives, I can say that it still functions but it is probably a few years at most to collapse. Centers for Medicare and Medicaid Services budget is about 15% funded and getting worse each year. Wait times for specialty appointments are months, surgery a half-year at least (unless urgent/life-threatening), care impossible to access – many people have to go to the ED just for diagnosis. Life expectancy down significantly in the last 10 years. We won’t escape Canada’s fate.
The homeless population increasing in a geometric ratio is something I have also seen in the USA. Luckily it has been a very mild winter or we would likely have large numbers of people freezing to death here as well.
I used to live in MN and there was a while there when the insect population had dropped critically low. Certain species like the native ladybirds appeared to disappear completely, replaced by the Eurasian invasive ones. And the monarch butterflies almost disappeared as well, but the practice of leaving prairie buffers on the edges of farms in the western part of the state seems to have helped their numbers recover. By the time I left, you would see monarchs in the summertime again. I still have grave concerns about biota in America though, as I suspect there will be major abuse of wild habitat as energy descent takes hold.
That’s fine as long as people can admit to themselves that energy throughput with renewables is going to be a fraction of what it was in the age of abundant fossil fuels. And the problem I see is that most people touting green energy are either unrealistic or mendacious about this. We still haven’t got past the phase of people thinking they will keep their consumer and commuter friendly lifestyles in the coming decades.
It’s not just nazis on substack. There were plenty of other people who joined it thanks to the willy-nilly censorship that was happening on the large platforms in the past few years. The problem is that it’s hard to avoid some parasitic free-riders like the nazis if you want to have a genuine free speech platform, which none of the major platforms are any longer.
Personally I think it’s a good trend that more people are blogging and not all of the money is getting funneled away from creators to platforms owned by billionaire sociopaths like Musk and Zuck.
IIRC, there was a time period when tropical forests were found as far north as North Dakota in the Americas, and there was deciduous forest within the Arctic Circle. That gives some idea of what the biota would be like in a warmed world, about 1 million years from now that is. A big bottleneck awaits us though and I’m thinking that also includes enough scarcity to mean famine will be thing on the far end of declining net energy, maybe as soon as later this century (though earlier for low income nations).
In the Upper Midwestern USA, we have had an unprecedented warm spell this winter, with almost no snow in December, and the mildest winter on record thus far. The only blip was a minor cold snap of below-zero wind chills for just over a week, and that just ended in the past couple of days. Now we are in a January thaw that looks to cause an entire melting off of the snow cover, which I don’t recall ever happening before during January in my life. This pattern is the result of a combination of overall warming and a “Super El Nino” pattern in the Pacific this year.
I’m not surprised. An instance of this would be the monarch butterfly which was abundant when I was a child. Then there were years where no one saw them and they even were presumed extinct in our area. Finally in 2016 I saw them again in a different part of the same state I was living at the time, and slowly they returned. But the overall volume of insect life in general is down. I would guess a large part of it is owing to both destruction of habitat and excessive use of pesticides. Suburbanization in my region has accelerated this process.
Sorry to practice thread necromancy to respond, but what the internet is really good for at this point is aggregating the previous output of culture. Social media has gotten way past the point of “too much noise” but sites like archive dot org are gems, and there are a bunch of private curated libraries like that as well. So in other words, the internet is good for learning if you are a self-directed person. But that’s about it, and so that’s what I use it for at this point.
It’s also an interesting question to ask what will happen to the web in a declining net energy world, over the next 1-2 decades. Probably a slower, text-only internet could be preserved well into the future. But the question is will it be? The corporate stewardship of the internet has been very poor.
I vaguely remember Hawkwind: wasn’t that a project that Lemmy Kilminster was in before Motorhead? I listened to them back in my stoner daze. But I left all of that behind, so I haven’t listened to as much psychedelia ever since.
Yes, that makes sense. There used to be this place called Tower Records in London, which I visited the one time I actually stayed in London (I’m from the USA). And this was, at the time, probably the biggest and best-stocked record store I had seen, so I bought a bunch of stuff. Hawkwind albums were among them. In those days there was an “old rock revival” ongoing and also that was the heyday of the first wave stoner rock/metal as well. Very interesting to reminisce on those days which seem like a lifetime ago.
I think it represents people being fed up with both institutions in the real world and the decline of the quality of the internet since the last couple of decades. As for them tuning in to something else, I have seen much more interest in DIY, hard skills, personal projects and such of late, but nothing societal beyond that which would really bring people together. I think that’s the best we can hope for at this time – at least people learning useful skills or not sacrificing their whole lives to corporate ambition is a plus.
#277: At the limits of monetary possibility (surplusenergyeconomics.wordpress.com)
World’s hunger for salmon linked to an ecological disaster (www.straitstimes.com)
The Oil and Energy Macro | Art Berman (www.artberman.com)
Google search boss warns employees of 'new operating reality,' urges them to move faster (www.cnbc.com)
At a recent all-hands meeting, Google search head Prabhakar Raghavan told employees that the world is changing and they have to adjust.
I Saw the Future of Europe… In India (thehonestsorcerer.substack.com)
Is the Atlantic Overturning Circulation Approaching a Tipping Point? (tos.org)
The Atlantic Meridional Overturning Circulation has a major impact on climate, not just in the northern Atlantic but globally. Paleoclimatic data show it has been unstable in the past, leading to some of the most dramatic and abrupt climate shifts known. These instabilities are due to two different types of tipping points, one...
Exponential increases in high-temperature extremes in North America - Scientific Reports (www.nature.com)
Unsustainable Goose Chases (dothemath.ucsd.edu)
RTO doesn’t improve company value, but does make employees miserable: Study (arstechnica.com)
Draining America First---The Beginning of the End for Shale Gas | Art Berman (www.artberman.com)
Potassium depletion in soil threatens global crop yields (phys.org)
Or, to put it another way (consciousnessofsheep.co.uk)
Monthly observations thread Feb 2024
If you build it, will they come? Insect community responses to habitat establishment at solar energy facilities in Minnesota, USA (iopscience.iop.org)
It doesn’t really work like that (consciousnessofsheep.co.uk)
Death Cults, Doomers and an End of a Civilization (thehonestsorcerer.substack.com)
Monthly observations thread Jan 2024
Reddit Falls Short of Ad Growth Targets Ahead of Likely 2024 IPO (www.theinformation.com)
Disproportionate declines of formerly abundant species underlie insect loss - Nature (www.nature.com)
Monthly observations thread Dec 2023
The Machine Stops - Wikipedia (en.wikipedia.org)
The Human Ecology of Overshoot: Why a Major ‘Population Correction’ Is Inevitable (www.mdpi.com)