Kunstler with Rob Gourdie about Oil Price Waves and peak Oil

download (size: 0 MB )   #317 Rob Gourdie is Professor of Biomedical Engineering and Mechanics at Virginia Tech. He is also Director of the Center for Heart and Reparative Medicine Research at the same university. He writes under the pen name of Tom Therramus.  In his “day job,” he works on the repeating waves […]

“The Storm” and “Tower Time” – Simple Names For A Complicated Situation

I’ve written a bit lately about “The Storm” and “Tower Time” and “The Long Descent” – everyone knows what I’m talking about, right? Right? Such is modern language. Words get used in new ways – seemingly at random – and before long they become a part of ordinary language. Except that everybody doesn’t know what […]

Kunstler: The Zeitgeist Knows

Who said the global economy was a permanent installation in the human condition? The head cheerleader was The New York Times’s Tom Friedman, with his 1999 book, The Lexus and the Olive Tree, the trumpet blast for the new order of things. Since then, we partied like it was 1999, with a few grand mal […]

Collapse Now and Avoid the Rush by John Michael Greer

Like John Michael Greer’s numerous other books on the subject of industrial civilization’s demise, this one reveals its author to be an astonishingly gifted guide to a future that most people refuse to contemplate. The 25 short writings it contains were originally published on Greer’s former blog, The Archdruid Report, which was an institution among […]

Too Many People, or Too Much Greed?

During the dark early morning hours of a September 27 a few years after the Second World War, a passenger ship cruising calm South Atlantic waters struck a drifting forgotten mine, was violently breached, and quickly sank before any distress signal could be broadcast. Daylight found 26 survivors massed in, or floating in the sea […]

Peak Oil Infographic

A simple infographic created with BBH and GQ, and the art director Todd Bois that shows our journey to peak oil and beyond. Jeff Johnson

Going the Distance with Family Planning

Lower population growth, achieved through effective family planning, translates into higher per capita GDP, leading to higher incomes, savings, and investment. If Indonesia is to reap these benefits, it will need to revitalize a family-planning program that was once one of the most effective in the world. GOTHENBURG – Indonesia, home to 264 million people, […]

Why the World’s Richest Man Wants Humans To Live on Floating Space Cities

In a Washington D.C. ballroom, bathed in dark royal blue and twinkling star-like lights with a space-themed soundtrack playing, Amazon founder Jeff Bezos revealed the hydrogen-fueled Blue Moon lunar lander, the spacecraft destined to deliver human cargo to the moon’s surface by 2024. But to preface this ambitious moonshot, Bezos also laid out a convincing […]

The Peculiar Blindness of Experts

The bet was on, and it was over the fate of humanity. On one side was the Stanford biologist Paul R. Ehrlich. In his 1968 best seller, The Population Bomb, Ehrlich insisted that it was too late to prevent a doomsday apocalypse resulting from overpopulation. Resource shortages would cause hundreds of millions of starvation deaths […]

Energy and commodities highlights: Crude contamination, alternatives to Iranian oil, China shale gas

Supply-side issues continued to preoccupy oil markets at the start of May, after Russian crude exports to Central and Eastern Europe were hit by a contamination problem that caused disruption all along the supply chain. Problems with crude quality on Russia’s Druzhba (Friendship) pipeline began to emerge on April 18, and the pipe was subsequently […]

Present at the Death

Well, the penny finally dropped.  I’m not sure why it took me this long to realize that the collective tantrum that’s seized America’s mass media, intelligentsia, and privileged classes generally for the last two and a half years, since the election of Donald Trump to the presidency, was described right down to the small details […]

The Extinction Conundrum

  Audio Only:   (audio-only MP3 provided in case you want to multi-task and listen while sitting in traffic on the way to work in your cubicle or digging post holes for your fencing on the Doomstead or kneeling by the throne and Praying to the Porcelain God.  mp3 Audio can be downloaded from Diner […]

Who is Cassandra?

A wonderful interpretation of the ancient Trojan prophetess in a performance by the theoretical physicist Sabine Hossenfelder on her always interesting blog “Backreaction.”  You can find more of her songs at her youtube page. But who was Cassandra? I can tell you that from personal experience. She appeared to me in person — well, as […]

Jay Hanson Dies in Diving Accident

Last week Nate Hagens informed me of some sad news and offered a brief reflection: Friends, I was informed by Jay Hanson’s wife today that he died unexpectedly on a diving trip in Indonesia. Many of us were greatly influenced by Jay’s thinking and writing over the years and the many listservs and websites he […]

Adrift In An Airship

The collective confusions we’ve been exploring since I returned from January’s break form a tangled web, and no one loose end leads straight to the heart of it. It so happens that in recent months I’ve had the chance to explore it from yet another angle, by way of the research I’ve been doing for […]

My Life In Collapse, By Bodhi Paul Chefurka

I was recently asked to respond to a short email interview. My response seems like a nice summary of how I’ve spent the last decade and a half of my life, so I thought I would share it here. 1) What is collapsology and what role does a “collapsologist” play? “Collapsology” isn’t a formal field […]

Resilience, the Global Challenge, and the Human Predicament

We face a perfect storm of environmental, social, technological, economic, geopolitical and other global stressors. These global stressors interact in unpredictable ways. The pace of future shocks is increasing. The prospect for civilizational collapse is real. We need to build meaningful resilience. There are four questions about how to build resilience: 1.  How do we […]

Morning Collapse Update

Manafort sentencing, Brexit, Venezuela Blackouts, Democratic Party split, Iditarod on tap this morning with your Java.

Kunstler: A Place of Your Own

Do you know your place? In these days of hysterical Wokesterism, the question would surely provoke a riot of cowbell-clanging Antifa cadres, fainting spells in the congressional black caucus, and gravely equivocal op-eds from David Brooks of The New York Times. Yet it’s a central, unacknowledged quandary of our time that so many Americans have […]

LOCK YOUR DOORS, LOAD YOUR GUNS AND GET YOU A BARKING, BITING DOG

Is this a sign of what is coming for the rest of the nation?  In Martin County, Kentucky times are very tough right now.  Thanks to severe budget cutbacks, there are only two paid law enforcement officers covering a deeply impoverished 231-square-mile area that sits right in the heart of America’s raging opioid crisis.  Needless […]

Russia Comes to Maduro’s Rescue After U.S. Sanctions Hit

Just as Venezuelan state-run oil company PDVSA was running out of an obscure product needed to thin out its crude and keep exports flowing in the wake of U.S. sanctions, Russia is coming to the rescue. Rosneft Oil Co. PJSC, the Moscow-based company controlled by Vladimir Putin’s government, is sending the first cargoes of heavy […]

Facing Extinction

DARK KNOWLEDGE “The heavens were all on fire; the earth did tremble.” –William Shakespeare Henry IV, Part 1 For much of my life, I thought our species would soon go extinct. I assumed we might last another hundred years if we were lucky.  Now I suspect we are facing extinction in the near future. Can […]

How to reach a sustainable human population

“And God blessed them, and God said unto them, be fruitful, and multiply, and replenish the earth, and subdue it: and have dominion over the fish of the sea, and over the fowl of the air, and over every living thing that moveth upon the earth.” — Genesis 1:28, KJV This scripture was written around […]

Gail Tverberg: Have We Already Passed World Peak Oil and World Peak Coal?

Most people expect that our signal of an impending reduction in world oil or coal production will be high prices. Looking at historical data (for example, this post and this post), this is precisely the opposite of the correct price signal. Oil and coal supplies decline because prices fall too low for producers. These producers […]

Are we on the road to civilisation collapse?

Great civilisations are not murdered. Instead, they take their own lives. So concluded the historian Arnold Toynbee in his 12-volume magnum opus A Study of History. It was an exploration of the rise and fall of 28 different civilisations. He was right in some respects: civilisations are often responsible for their own decline. However, their […]

Global predictions for 2019

* Global predictions for the world economy are less optimistic than in 2018. * Many countries also expect public unrest in the coming year. * After a hot 2018, most expect global temperatures to continue to rise. The latest Ipsos Global Advisor poll was carried out in 31 countries around the world at the end […]

Chris Martenson: Collapse Is Already Here

Many people are expecting some degree of approaching collapse — be it economic, environmental and/or societal — thinking that they’ll recognize the danger signs in time. As if it will be completely obvious, like a Hollywood blockbuster. Complete with clear warnings from scientists, politicians and the media.  And everyone can then get busy either panicking […]

Peak Oil Theory’s No Good Terrible Very Bad Week

Just when you thought continued belief in any of the various brands of “Peak Oil” theory could hardly become less sustainable, you get a week like this one. No matter whether you come at Peak Oil from the supply side or the demand side, several events this week would have had to put you in […]

Why do Societies Collapse? Diminishing Returns are a Key Factor

  In 1988, Joseph Tainter published a fundamental study on the collapse of societies, proposing the existence of a common cause, diminishing returns, for the fact that all past empires and civilizations had eventually collapsed. Recently, myself and my coworkers Sara Falsini and Ilaria Perissi performed a system dynamics study that confirms Tainter’s ideas and […]

2019 Collapse Survey Results – The 500: Who are the Kollapsniks?

  Notes from RE: 1- Although the title says 500, I actually took this snapshot of the Stats when the numbers were between 430-435.  They are now at 525 as I publish this article.  I chose 500 because it sounds good and it’s right between the 300 of Thermopylae and the 600 of the Light […]

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