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Collapse has ARRIVED!

Collapse has ARRIVED! thumbnail

Discuss this article at the Energy Table inside the Diner

Due to my High & Mighty position as a Global Collapse Pundit, I am often asked the question of when precisely will Collapse arrive?  The people who ask me this question all come from 1st World countries.  They are also all reasonably well off with a computer, an internet connection, running water and enough food to eat.  While a few of us are relatively poor retirees, even none of us wants for the basics as of yet.  The Diner doesn’t get many readers from the underclass even here in Amerika, much less from the Global Underclass in places like Nigeria, Somalia,Sudan and Yemen.

The fact is, that for more than half the world population, Collapse is in full swing and well underway.  Two key bellweathers of where collapse is now are the areas of Electricity and Food.

http://dieoff.org/synopsis_files/image002.gif In his seminal 1996 Paper The Olduvai Theory: Sliding Towards a Post-Industrial Stone Age, Richard Duncan mapped out the trajectory of where we would be as the years passed and fossil fuels became more difficult and expensive to mine up.  Besides powering all our cars and trucks for Happy Motoring and Just-in-Time delivery, the main thing our 1st World lifestyle requires is Electricity, and lots of it on demand, 24/7.  Although electricity can be produced in some “renewable” ways that don’t depend on a lot of fossil fuel energy at least directly, most of the global supply of electric power comes from Coal and Natural Gas.  Of the two, NG is slightly cleaner, but either way when you burn them, CO2 goes up in the atmosphere.  This of course is a problem climatically, but you have an even bigger problem socially and politically if you aren’t burning them.  Everything in the society as it has been constructed since Edison invented the Light Bulb in 1879 has depended on electricity to function.

Now, if all the toys like lights, refrigerators big screen TVs etc had been kept to just a few small countries and the rest of the world lived a simple subsistence farming lifestyle, the lucky few with the toys probably could have kept the juice flowing a lot longer.  Unfortunately however, once exposed to all the great toys, EVERYBODY wanted them.  The industrialists also salivated over all the profit to be made selling the toys to everyone.  So, everybody everywhere needed a grid, which the industrialists and their associated banksters extended Credit for “backward” Nation-States all over the globe to build their own power plants and string their own wires.  Now everybody in the country could have a lightbulb to see by and a fridge to keep the food cold.  More than that, the electricity also went to power water pumping stations and sewage treatment plants, so you could pack the Big Shities with even more people who use still more electricity.

This went on all over the globe, today there isn’t a major city or even a medium size town anywhere on the globe that isn’t wired for electricity, although many places that are now no longer have enough money to keep the juice flowing.

Where is the electricity going off first?  Obviously, in the poorest and most war torn countries across the Middle East and Africa.  These days, from Egypt to Tunisia, if they get 2 hours of electricity a day they are doing good.

The Lights Are Going Out in the Middle East

The world’s most volatile region faces a challenge that doesn’t involve guns, militias, or bloodshed, yet is also destroying societies. Public fury over rampant outages has sparked protests. In January, in one of the largest demonstrations since Hamas took control in Gaza a decade ago, ten thousand Palestinians, angered by the lack of power during a frigid winter, hurled stones and set tires ablaze outside the electricity company. Iraq has the world’s fifth-largest oil reserves, but, during the past two years, repeated anti-government demonstrations have erupted over blackouts that are rarely announced in advance and are of indefinite duration. It’s one issue that unites fractious Sunnis in the west, Shiites in the arid south, and Kurds in the mountainous north. In the midst of Yemen’s complex war, hundreds dared to take to the streets of Aden in February to protest prolonged outages. In Syria, supporters of President Bashar al-Assad in Latakia, the dynasty’s main stronghold, who had remained loyal for six years of civil war, drew the line over electricity. They staged a protest in January over a cutback to only one hour of power a day.

Over the past eight months, I’ve been struck by people talking less about the prospects of peace, the dangers of ISIS, or President Trump’s intentions in the Middle East than their own exhaustion from the trials of daily life. Families recounted groggily getting up in the middle of the night when power abruptly comes on in order to do laundry, carry out business transactions on computers, charge phones, or just bathe and flush toilets, until electricity, just as unpredictably, goes off again. Some families have stopped taking elevators; their terrified children have been stuck too often between floors. Students complained of freezing classrooms in winter, trying to study or write papers without computers, and reading at night by candlelight. The challenges will soon increase with the demands for power—and air-conditioning—surge, as summer temperatures reach a hundred and twenty-five degrees.

The reasons for these outages vary. With the exception of the Gulf states, infrastructure is old or inadequate in many of the twenty-three Arab countries. The region’s disparate wars, past and present, have damaged or destroyed electrical grids. Some governments, even in Iraq, can’t afford the cost of fuelling plants around the clock. Epic corruption has compounded physical challenges. Politicians have delayed or prevented solutions if their cronies don’t get contracts to fuel, maintain, or build power plants.

Now you’ll note that at the end of the third paragraph there, the journalist implies that a big part of the problem is “political corruption”, but it’s really not.  It’s simply a lack of money.  These countries at one time were all Oil Exporters, although not on the scale of Saudi Arabia or Kuwait.  As their own supplies of oil have depleted they have become oil importers, except they neither have a sufficient mercantilist model running to bring in enough FOREX to buy oil, and they can’t get credit from the international banking cartel to keep buying.  3rd World countries are being cut off from the Credit Lifeline, unlike the core countries at the center of credit creation like Britain, Germany and the FSoA.  All these 1st World countries are in just as bad fiscal deficit as the MENA countries, the only difference is they still can get credit and run the deficits even higher.  This works until it doesn’t anymore.

Beyond the credit issue is the War problem.  As the countries run out of money, more people become unemployed, biznesses go bankrupt, tax collection drops off the map and goobermint employees are laid off too.  It’s the classic deflationary spiral which printing more money doesn’t solve, since the notes become increasingly worthless.  For them to be worth anything in FOREX, somebody has to buy their Goobermint Bonds, and that is precisely what is not happening.  So as the society becomes increasingly impoverished, it descends into internecine warfare between factions trying to hold on to or increase their share of the ever shrinking pie.

The warfare ongoing in these nations has knock on effects for the 1st World Nations still trying to extract energy from some of these places.  To keep the oil flowing outward, they have to run very expensive military operations to at least maintain enough order that oil pipelines aren’t sabotaged on a daily basis.  The cost of the operations keeps going up, but the amount of money they can charge the customers for the oil inside their own countries does not keep going up.  Right now they have hit a ceiling around $50/bbl for what they can charge for the oil, and for the most part this is not a profit making price.  So all the corporations involved in Extraction & Production these days are surviving on further extensions of credit from the TBTF banks.  This also is a paradigm that can’t last.

The other major problem now surfacing is the Food Distribution problem, and again this is hitting the African countries first and hardest.  It’s a combination problem of climate change, population overshoot and the warfare which results from those issues.

Currently, the UN lists 4 countries in extreme danger of famine in the coming year, Nigeria, Sudan, Somalia and Yemen.  They estimate currently there are 20M people at extreme risk, and I would bet the numbers are a good deal higher than that.
 

somalia-famine.jpg World faces four famines as Trump administration plans to slash foreign aid budget

‘Biggest humanitarian crisis since World War II’ about to engulf 20 million people, UN says, as governments only donate 10 per cent of funds needed for essential aid

 

 

 

The world is facing a humanitarian crisis bigger than any in living memory, the UN has said, as four countries teeter on the brink of famine.

Twenty million people are at risk of starvation and facing water shortages in Somalia, Nigeria and Yemen, while parts of South Sudan are already officially suffering from famine.

While the UN said in February that at least $4.4 billion (£3.5 bn) was needed by the end of March to avert a hunger catastrophe across the four nations, the end of the month is fast approaching, and only 10 per cent of the necessary funds have been received from donor governments so far.

It doesn’t look too promising that the UN will be able to raise the $4B they say is necessary to feed all those hungry mouths, and none of the 1st World countries is too predisposed to handing out food aid when they all currently have problems with their own social welfare programs for food distribution.  Here in the FSoA, there are currently around 45M people on SNAP Cards at a current cost around $71B.  The Repugnants will no doubt try to cut this number in order to better fund the Pentagon, but they are not likely to send more money to Somalia.

Far as compassion for all the starving people globally goes in the general population, this also appears to be decreasing, although I don’t have statistics to back that up. It is just a general sense I get as I read the collapse blogosphere, in the commentariats generally.  The general attitude is, “It’s their own fault for being so stupid and not using Birth Control.  If they were never born, they wouldn’t have to die of starvation.”  Since they are mostly Black Africans currently starving, this is another reason a large swath of the white population here doesn’t care much about the problem.

There are all sorts of social and economic reasons why this problem spiralled out of control, having mainly to do with the production of cheap food through Industrial Agriculture and Endless Greed centered on the idea of Endless Growth, which is not possible on a Finite Planet.

More places on Earth were wired up with each passing year, and more people were bred up with each passing year.  The dependency on fossil fuels to keep this supposedly endless cycle of growth going became ever greater each year, all while this resource was being depleted more each year.  Eventually, an inflexion point had to be hit, and we have hit it.

http://4.bp.blogspot.com/-aWWVsOhX9oA/TrxXROe6CEI/AAAAAAAAAN8/fXiBu_jeZvg/s1600/unicorn.jpgThe thing is, for the relatively comfortable readers of the Doomstead Diner in the 1st World BAU seems to be continuing onward, even if you are a bit poorer than you were last year. 24/7 electricity is still available from the grid with only occassional interruptions.  Gas is still available at the pump, and if you are employed you probably can afford to buy it, although you need to be more careful about how much you drive around unless you are a 1%er.  The Rich are still lining up to buy EVs from Elon Musk, even though having a grid to support all electric transportation is out of the question.  The current grid can’t be maintained, and upgrading to handle that much throughput would take much thicker cables all across the network.  People carry on though as though this will all go on forever and Scientists & Engineers will solve all the problems with some magical new device.  IOW, they believe in Skittle Shitting Unicorns.

That’s not going to happen though, so you’re back to the question of how long will it take your neighborhood in the UK or Germany or the FSoA to look like say Egypt today?  Well, if you go back in time a decade to Egypt in 2007, things were still looking pretty Peachy over there, especially in Touurist Traps like Cairo.  Terrorism wasn’t too huge a problem and Da Goobermint of Hoser Mubarak appeared stable.  A decade later today, Egypt is basically a failed state only doing marginally better than places like Somalia and Sudan.  The only reason they’re doing as well as they are is because they are in an important strategic location on the Suez Canal and as such get support from the FSoA military.

So a good WAG here for how long it will take for the Collapse Level in 1st World countries to reach the level Egypt is at today is about a decade.  It could be a little shorter, it could be longer.  By then of course, Egypt will be in even WORSE shape, and who might still be left alive in Somalia is an open question.  Highly unlikely to be very many people though.  Over the next decade, the famines will spread and people will die, in numbers far exceeding the 20M to occur over the next year.  After a while, it’s unlikely we will get much newz about this, and people here won’t care much about what they do hear.  They will have their own problems.

The Doomstead Diner



32 Comments on "Collapse has ARRIVED!"

  1. Hello on Sun, 4th Jun 2017 9:41 am 

    The nations under collapse in this article pretty much never climbed above cave dweller level but were lifted by generous western aid. It’s about time they fall back to their natural level.

    If you don’t have enough food to feed yourself, high performance breeding is not a good idea. But then again, negros aren’t the clever bunch to begin with, right Ape, our high school dropout?

  2. Davy on Sun, 4th Jun 2017 9:52 am 

    Maybe this is the future of techno man. Controlled markets and controlled people. Bye bye price discovery and grass roots productivity. Hello brave new world of centralized control and wealth transfer of the elites because once control concentrates like it has today it then corrupts. This power concentrating corruption is a hallmark of civilizations that imploded from within.

    “Central Banks Now Own A Third Of The Entire $54 Trillion Global Bond Market”
    http://tinyurl.com/y7lolwqs

  3. onlooker on Sun, 4th Jun 2017 10:20 am 

    Makes sense what us happening. The weaker succumb first. For all the fuss about East- West rivalry. At this moment, the rich countries of both regions have more in common with each other than their poor neighbors. Eventually, as things get more chaotic and tighter it will be last man standing , survival of the fittest. But for now, symbiotic relations continue among the stronger countries

  4. joe on Sun, 4th Jun 2017 10:53 am 

    The 1% in our globalised world essentially are global citizens, you might be American, another guy French, etc but if you are a 1% that distinction does not apply. Most of us are expected to believe in antiquated notions of nations, and they created alt – left ideas for those who wish to feel like they are involved like ‘european’ but all these concepts are designed to stop us from seeing that the real enemy is the wealthy class who are busy forcing us to accept cheap foreign labour while they use every last bit of oil and money for themselves and fuck us if we complain that society can’t handle these extreme religious and social changes they are forcing us to accept to suit them.

  5. Cloggie on Sun, 4th Jun 2017 10:54 am 

    Richard Duncan! I’m already feeling nostalgia. He is a doomer that would even make Davy blush.

    Here a lecture by him in 2007, when everybody still believed this shit:

    https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=LWCQ9MDxOaw

    Duncan is a financial analyst and as such, like Richard Heinberg, a “lateral entrant” in the energy field.

    Less friendly people would say that they don’t know what they are talking about.

    Now you’ll note that at the end of the third paragraph there, the journalist implies that a big part of the problem is “political corruption”, but it’s really not. It’s simply a lack of money.

    The truth is these countries have nothing to compete with on global markets and never will. If they are lucky they have resources the industrialized world needs.

    So what to do about it? Answer: let these people at least produce their own basic stuff, outside of and protected from world markets. It is questionable though if they can even do that. What was wrong with (real) colonialism again? The only solution I see is that the North (US, Greater Europe and China) begin to “adopt” (colonialism lite) individual countries and try to elevate them.

    The world is facing a humanitarian crisis bigger than any in living memory, the UN has said, as four countries teeter on the brink of famine. Twenty million people are at risk of starvation and facing water shortages in Somalia, Nigeria and Yemen, while parts of South Sudan are already officially suffering from famine.

    That’s not “the world” but four war-torn countries.

    Here is the reality in most of Africa:

    https://www.theguardian.com/world/2015/nov/17/africa-faces-up-to-obesity-epidemic

    But I guess that the “Doomstead Dinner” is addicted to doom.

    https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Richard_C._Duncan

    In 1996, Duncan claimed that e had peaked around 1978. In 2000, the theory was revised to hold that the ratio would begin to decline around 2007. The peak was again revised in 2013 to have occurred in 2012

    Keep us posted, Richard, about your latest predictions, sharp as ever. Can’t wait to hear them.

  6. eugene on Sun, 4th Jun 2017 11:43 am 

    I thought of making a comment but, reading the “enlightened” comments of others, I thought “aw to hell with it”.

  7. Srsrocco on Sun, 4th Jun 2017 1:06 pm 

    Where’s Rockman?

    Come on Rockman…. how are you going to rationalize this? Unfortunately, the majority of the U.S. and global oil industry will likely have disinterested within the next decade.. but that won’t keep Rockman from rationalizing how the oil companies will continue to be profitable during this time… lol.

    Steve

  8. Northwest Resident on Sun, 4th Jun 2017 1:19 pm 

    When will global energy shortages begin? They’ve already begun! Spreading rapidly, devouring the periphery, taking down nations, breeding riot war and starvation, creeping inward toward the core steadily and most assuredly. The central bank printing machines are in overdrive mode trying to keep the illusion of all is well inflated. But the end to it all is surely approaching, and I DO NOT think that the core nations are either stupid enough or even remotely inclined to just keep kicking the can until it can’t be kicked anymore. A time is coming when a button will be pushed, and dramatic changes will hit us all instantly. What might that trigger be? Just end QE/money printing — that would do the trick. It’s coming….

  9. twocats on Sun, 4th Jun 2017 3:09 pm 

    dear lord, thank you NW Resident for an insightful comment. It’s getting brutally dim-witted on these comment threads.

  10. Cloud9 on Sun, 4th Jun 2017 4:23 pm 

    All these doomers remind me of Peter Schiff warning us that housing prices would implode when we all knew that prices could only go up because God was creating very little new real estate and populations were only going up.
    With that out of the way, I have been thinking about building a tiny house that would withstand a zombie apocalypse. Any of you guys know a source of plans for such an undertaking?

  11. Cloggie on Sun, 4th Jun 2017 4:51 pm 

    I have been thinking about building a tiny house that would withstand a zombie apocalypse. Any of you guys know a source of plans for such an undertaking?

    Many preppers tip Middle-America and Costa Rica in particular:

    https://auswandern-info.com/costa-rica-2.html

    A lot of rain, no need for FF to heat (to cool perhaps), pleasant climate, nice people (Catholic). 80 people/km2, not too poor ($15k/year)

    https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Costa_Rica

  12. Apneaman on Sun, 4th Jun 2017 6:39 pm 

    “Spreading rapidly, devouring the periphery…”

    Puerto Rico Records Largest Bankruptcy among US Municipalities

    http://marketrealist.com/2017/05/puerto-rico-records-largest-bankruptcy-among-us-municipalities/

    Puerto Rico’s Exodus Is Speeding the Island’s Economic Collapse

    https://www.bloomberg.com/news/articles/2017-06-02/-i-had-to-choose-for-my-family-thousands-fleeing-puerto-rico

  13. Apneaman on Sun, 4th Jun 2017 6:47 pm 

    Germans again

    The Real Threat To Europe Is Neither America Nor Russia

    http://www.ianwelsh.net/the-real-threat-to-europe-is-neither-america-nor-russia/

    fucking germans

  14. makati1 on Sun, 4th Jun 2017 7:26 pm 

    “People carry on though as though this will all go on forever and Scientists & Engineers will solve all the problems with some magical new device. IOW, they believe in Skittle Shitting Unicorns.”

    Too all of you Unicorn believers, I hope you are prepared. I do not give the FSofA 10 years. Not even 5. Maybe 1 or 2 at best. Buckle Up!

  15. Sissyfuss on Sun, 4th Jun 2017 9:30 pm 

    Cloggenspiel, the article states that the grid(US) will never support an all electric transportation system. As an aside, what is the shape of the Eurozone system, the Netherlands and do they intermix the current flow between countries? Also what is the maintenance level upkeep like? Hopefully better than the negligence in the US.

  16. NotALiberal on Sun, 4th Jun 2017 10:54 pm 

    “Terrorism wasn’t too huge a problem and Da Goobermint of Hoser Mubarak appeared stable”

    Okay we get it, you’re a retarded liberal. No need to keep acting like it. Speak to adults, not children.

    Growing up in Los Angelos I remember a time when everyone was employed (i’m 79 years old), almost everyone was married, it had some crime but was generally limited to mafias, and was generally a nice place. Sure the pollution was terrible but aside from that, most people were happy.

    So what happened? I wouldn’t even bother living there anymore. It’s just like everywhere else, some ghetto shithole. And yes you know what I mean, racially, economically, socially, culturally, and linguistically a ghetto. America has many third world cities (New York, Chicago, L.A., etc.). An upper class and wealthy elite on the top in penthouses and highrises, and the squabble down below. That’s truly the mark of any Third world city.

    The collapse is not what people think, it’s not some monumental government shutdown and potential WWIII catastrophe. Collapse is making less money, connecting to people less and less, not getting married, moving to safer neighborhoods and greener pastures every decade or so, and being more confined every year in what you can say and do. That’s what collapse is, the total collapse of freedom, intelligence, morals, standards, and meaning. With all of these things being dead, lined up against the wall and shot by idiots just like this author every day.

    I won’t say the conservatives haven’t had their fair share of idiots and greedy simpletons either, by the Christ they do. But by and large, they are criticized for this and have been for decades, the Left considers itself untouchable in this regard. That’s why the Left’s craziness gets a little more unhinged every year or so, it’s been that way since the 1960’s, no one dares challenge them.

    Now we’re hear, the final component to collapse, the economic one. I can’t tell you how many people who told me their grandkids work a “job” in retail, even with college degrees. When I was 22, college degrees were unnecessary to get a job adequate to both own a home and raise a family. You could even have cars and far better food and health insurance than anything you could possibly get today. A college degree was only necessary for specialty occupations and even then it wasn’t always enforced. Now you spend a small fortune for the privilege to make $9-10/hr. What a waste.

    The collapse will come now in the next 15 years, I’m sure of it. I love my children and grandchildren and have shared my feelings on the matter if they listened. At least they own guns and are a little bit wiser about the world because of me. But I just know it won’t be pretty. Good luck.

  17. Keith McClary on Sun, 4th Jun 2017 10:58 pm 

    Cloggie:
    “colonialism lite” – isn’t that “globalisation” ???

  18. Apneaman on Sun, 4th Jun 2017 11:57 pm 

    The long, slow, rotten march of progress

    “For a few lucky companies selling these moronically “smart” objects, there are ludicrous millions in investor funding. Not because they’re any good, but because markets are volatile and governments are issuing negative-yield bonds and there’s nowhere else for all the ruling class’s extra money to go. Time is not moving us forwards. There has not been progress. The tech boom is not the first trembling steps of a new era. Its growth and dynamism is the halo of rot spreading over the globe.”

    https://theoutline.com/post/1611/the-long-slow-rotten-march-of-progress

  19. Apneaman on Mon, 5th Jun 2017 12:28 am 

    Jun 3 2017,

    Retail Wreck? Over 1,000 Stores Close in a Single Week

    http://www.nbcnews.com/business/consumer/retail-wreck-over-1-000-stores-close-single-week-n767556

  20. Cloggie on Mon, 5th Jun 2017 5:50 am 

    Retail Wreck? Over 1,000 Stores Close in a Single Week

    Doomer fundamentalist ApneaTurd tries to frame everything as doom in his nihilistic world view. If he had taken the trouble to actually open his link he would have noticed that the decline of retail is a consequence of trading moving from retail to online.

    The days that huge numbers of people jump in their cars to go bargain hunting in shopping malls, that’s for retards.

    The new practice is that is you need something, you go hunting online from the comfort of your chair. You can see everything online, read hundreds of reviews, watch YouTube videos of consumers unpacking, installing, using and reviewing the product.

    If I recall what I bought over the past few years: greenhouse, tablets, desktop computer, monitor, chain saw, holidays, books (e-books all), garden tools… everything online.

    The largest Dutch groceries company Albert Heijn has been offering online ordering for years now:

    https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=4nyatZ8NrM8

    Albert Heijn online and “Dutch Amazon” bol.com have growth rates of 25-30%/year:

    http://twinklemagazine.nl/2017/03/albert-heijn-online-en-bol.com-30-en-25-procent-groei/index.xml

    Won’t be long and automatic driving will increase this growth. Why drive to Albert Heijn if they can drive to you?

    The days of retail and shopping malls are over. Good riddance.

    Poor old ApneaTurd. He doesn’t understand the modern world anymore.lol

  21. Cloggie on Mon, 5th Jun 2017 6:03 am 

    Cloggie: “colonialism lite” – isn’t that “globalisation” ???

    Absolutely not. Real colonialism means administering a country with physical presence of civil servants from the colonizing country, who can put the local population to work to set up an infrastructure.

    http://content.time.com/time/world/article/0,8599,1713275,00.html

    Come Back, Colonialism, All Is Forgiven

    South-American, Middle-Eastern, Asian and Maghreb countries can support themselves (stone housing, grid, water), sub-Saharan Africa is different.

  22. Davy on Mon, 5th Jun 2017 6:05 am 

    “colonialism lite” – isn’t that “globalisation” ??? Good one!

  23. Davy on Mon, 5th Jun 2017 6:29 am 

    Globalization is parasitic eventually as increasingly appears apparent today. There was a time when the tide of globalism lifted everyone. Now that limits and diminishing returns of techno development are becoming apparent across a broad spectrum from pollution to depletion it is the poorest areas of both the rich and poor parts of the world that are being gutted. The more connected and productive parts are being maintained and in some cases growing.

    This is the nature of late term civilizations. The pie is shrinking and the brunt of that shrinking is with the poor extremities everywhere much like hyperthermia functions in humans. The poor are being added to by the new poor in a triage of decline. This is a process and there is little that can be done. It is called survival and those parts of the world that are doing this exploitation are doing it because of a competitive cooperation to maintain the status quo. The status quo is all we know and all that is available. There is no alternative to globalism except decline. Modern civilization peaked out with globalism.

    There is hypocritically talk about doing good for the poor and the environment but this is fake green and dubious social concern. Social and environmental justice is not possible if affluence is also the goal in late term civilization. Affluence in an environment of decline can only be parasitic. Our current Ponzi economics of globalism should be a dead giveaway of this process. When we allow markets to determine value and liberal democracy to protect individual wants then the public and commons will eventually be exploited by the private.

    It is the nature of human systems that they corrupt and destabilize just as they grow and organize. We are in the corrupt and decline part now. Many other converging problems are combining with a declining globalism making this decline just one of the many pricks that will take our civilization down. The sad reality is we are trapped in catch 22’s of problems that are predicaments. Some kind of degrowth of economic activity and population is needed but that process is a globalization killer. Without globalization at least half the current population would be at risk.

  24. Davy on Mon, 5th Jun 2017 6:52 am 

    Good try clog, yes it is true brick and mortar retail is being pressured by online retail disastrously. It is those companies that can combine and utilize both that will be winners in this decline process. Virtual purchases eliminate significant aspects of the velocity of economic activity. Declines like this are cumulative and inertial. This means the decline of retail will have a knock on effect to other areas including the retail process itself on and offline. We are seeing yet again Main Street gutted by Wall Street.

    We are suffering creative destruction but now this creative destruction is also destructive to the core of our economic fabric. You can’t have your cake and eat it all the time. We have manage to do this for years with a variety of activities that are exploitive and finite. It happened because of a unique combination of variables and circumstances in time in a growth process. Sometimes substitution ends and limits are reached. Minimum operating levels of vital variables to civilization are approach.

    Today compression of economic activity is going on and it is resulting in stagflation. We have bubbles in various sectors and we have the pressure of economic decline. This is causing irrational policy and dysfunctional activity. Economic abandonment is occurring in areas it shouldn’t because of this irrational policy and dysfunctional activity. Corruption and moral hazard are increasing because of these pressures.

    The huge retail build out was a bubble that is popping. Easing and rate repression post 08 allowed all this unneeded growth to retail and excessive investment in commercial real estate. Retail is dying because growth is dying. We are not in decline we are in deceleration of growth at a time when we need to be accelerating to be able to address the multitude of problems civilizations faces as well as 80MIL new mouths to feed a year. Ponzi economics cannot slow down by its nature.

  25. Cloud9 on Mon, 5th Jun 2017 6:58 am 

    Progress has been sold to us as a positive thing, unless of course you are talking about the progression towards poverty, crime, war and death. Then it becomes a bad thing. The Progressives stole the term and labeled everyone that did not support their narrative as being, primitive, backward and ignorant. With this argument they embarrassed and shut up the opposition. They stole the narrative and gave us the Federal Reserve, Federal Income Tax and World War I. Shrouded in secrecy, the Federal Reserve was touted as too complicated to be understood. The income tax was only going to be levied against millionaires and the War to End all Wars was going to end war. Folks we have been snookered.

    The Federal Reserve was and is a brilliant idea. With it you can have much more government than you could ever actually afford. With it you hide the true cost of all this largess and meddling with inflation. And then, you can convince the lower half of the demographic that they are getting richer because they got a numeric raise. The fact that the dollar has lost 97% of its purchasing power is lost on the below average.

    We can bitch about this system all we want but nothing will happen. We cannot unwind it. Shut it down and the hunger games will begin in 36 hours. All fiat currencies collapse. Knowing this, Middle America has bought enough guns and ammunition over the last eight years to arm and army of 52,000 men every two days.

    What concerns me are the organized brigands, some wearing uniforms and some wearing colors, coming out of the cities pillaging for what they need. Equally as dangerous will be the millions of deer hunters desperate to feed their families. These are the real zombies.

  26. Revi on Mon, 5th Jun 2017 7:44 am 

    Great article!

    I think we are in the beginning of the bargaining phase of the process outlined in the 7 stages of grief.

    We are all going to have to figure something out.

    We’ll see…

  27. Cloggie on Mon, 5th Jun 2017 7:51 am 

    Sisterfoot asks: Cloggenspiel, the article states that the grid(US) will never support an all electric transportation system. As an aside, what is the shape of the Eurozone system, the Netherlands and do they intermix the current flow between countries? Also what is the maintenance level upkeep like? Hopefully better than the negligence in the US.

    First of all it is yet an open question whether the electric e-vehicle system of the near future will be powered via the grid. Yesterday I posted about a US innovation where e-vehicle can be charged by replacing electrolyte fluid in a transaction that lasts minutes:

    https://deepresource.wordpress.com/2017/06/04/ifbattery-instantaneous-recharging-a-battery/

    Regarding EU grids… they are aging but still fairly reliable. The EU has set as a target in 2002 that by 2020 every EU country must be able to get at least 10% of its electricity from neighboring member states.

    https://deepresource.wordpress.com/2017/06/05/european-power-grid/

    A big issue is the construction of a North-South line through Germany, to bring offshore wind electricity to Southern Germany. That project is meeting a lot of resistance from “environmentalists” to the tune that it currently makes no sense to build more offshore if you can’t bring the electricity to the consumers:

    https://www.theguardian.com/environment/2016/oct/11/germany-takes-steps-to-roll-back-renewable-energy-revolution

    A solution perhaps is to convert the renewable electricity in chemicals like ammonia or electrolyte of hydrogen or CH4 at the moment it gets onshore, which is off course is a pity because of conversion losses.

  28. BigMind on Mon, 5th Jun 2017 8:17 am 

    Cloggie says: “an[] … innovation where e-vehicle can be charged by replacing electrolyte fluid…”

    The linked article says: “The spent battery fluids or electrolyte could be collected and taken to a solar farm, wind turbine installation or hydroelectric plant for re-charging”

    Do a bit of arithmetic. How much solar, wind and hydro do you need to build to supply all the kwh’s needed for the world’s transportation habit?

  29. Cloggie on Mon, 5th Jun 2017 8:58 am 

    Do a bit of arithmetic. How much solar, wind and hydro do you need to build to supply all the kwh’s needed for the world’s transportation habit?

    Maybe YOU do the calculation first, before suggesting that it can’t be done.

    In fact it is surprisingly little:

    https://deepresource.wordpress.com/2017/05/22/wind-power-and-electric-vehicles/

  30. Alice Friedemann on Mon, 5th Jun 2017 12:46 pm 

    The details of collapsed nations are explicated in the book: Ahmed, Nafeez. 2017. Failing States, Collapsing Systems BioPhysical Triggers of Political Violence. Springer. My review of it is here: http://energyskeptic.com/2017/book-review-of-failing-states-collapsing-systems-biophysical-triggers-of-political-violence-by-nafeez-ahmed/

    Ahmed has a timeline of collapse. He gives the U.S. until 2045 but the problem is that collapse elsewhere creates more serious black swans everywhere, and I have no idea if he thinks collapse will be later here thanks to tar sands which I’ve written a lot about being less of a hope than most people realize.

  31. _______________________________ on Tue, 6th Jun 2017 12:23 am 

    Damn, you pig-apes like to type.

  32. GregT on Tue, 6th Jun 2017 1:26 am 

    Dear Alice,

    “The few nations still producing much of the oil – Russia, Saudi Arabia, and the U.S. are about to join the club and stop exporting oil so they can provide for their domestic population.”

    Russia and Saudi Arabia are both net oil exporting nations, the US has been a net importer of oil since 1973. Nice try.

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