We Don’t Talk About Collapse To Revel In It, We Talk About Collapse To Prevent It

If one possible result of the current system is collapse, realizing the system itself must be changed isn’t doom-and-gloom, it’s problem-solving. Those of us who discuss collapse are generally dismissed as doom-and-gloomers, the equivalent of people who watch dash-cam videos of vehicle crashes all day, reveling in disaster. Why would we spend so much effort […]

From Whence The Fine Tuned Universe

The case that the universe is fine-tuned has been made convincingly by many of the giants of physics, including Leonard Mlodinow, Luke Barnes, Geraint Lewis, Leonard Susskind, Robin Collins, Paul Davies, Martin Rees, John Barrow, John Leslie, Alan Guth, Brian Green, Roger Penrose, the late Stephen Hawking, and many others. However, there are still a […]

The great Covid reset

Even a casual understanding of history would determine that the catastrophe of World War I was the result of a multitude of bilateral agreements and treaties between the European nations. About 20 million—equally divided between military and civilian—deaths occurred primarily because “the enemy of my enemy is my friend.” About a year after the war […]

The Slow Drain of an Expensive Collapse

Complexity is expensive. One of the reasons people are desperate for a “living wage” is because living costs so much more than it used to. New and improved technology starts out as status symbols for wealthy people, but gradually becomes a necessity. Mobile phones, for example, used to be a fancy luxury, and now nearly […]

The Social Decay That Is Eating Away At America Like A Cancer Is Visible All Around Us

You probably don’t need me to tell you that society is coming apart at the seams all around us.  If you live in a major city, you can just walk outside and watch it happen right in front of you.  Prior to 2020, social decay was steadily eating away at our society, but once the […]

Bill Gates and population

What’s the connection between the tech billionaire and population concern? It appears a surprisingly large number of people believe Gates is on a mission to wipe out the human species through forced injection with fertility-blocking, mind-controlling or otherwise poisonous substances and ‘microchips’ disguised as COVID-19 vaccines. Some even believe the COVID-19 pandemic was deliberately engineered […]

Global oil demand has risen to 95 mln bpd

The global oil market is rebalancing, and oil demand has risen to 95 million barrels per day, Sultan Ahmed Al Jaber, chief executive of the Abu Dhabi National Oil Company, said on Thursday. The longer-term forecast has demand rising to 106 million bpd by 2030, Al Jaber said during the Columbia Global Energy Summit. The […]

If A, Then…Meh?

“There are only nine meals between mankind and anarchy.” – Alfred Henry Lewis “So, first, we recognize that victims of cyberattacks often face a very difficult situation.  And they have to just balance off, in the cost-benefit, when they have no choice with regard to paying a ransom.  Colonial is a private company, and we’ll […]

How The Original Movie Predicted The Future

Since the original Mad Max was released in 1979, the sci-fi action franchise has been predicting the future of the world’s over-reliance on oil—and the later movies contain worrying news for society’s future. Released in 1979, Babe director George Miller’s Mad Max was a sparse, raw revenge thriller that saw a fresh-faced Mel Gibson star […]

Money Is Made Up And We Can Change The Rules Whenever We Want

Have you ever noticed how online capitalism cultists who condescendingly tell socialists they “just don’t understand economics” are always unable to lucidly defend their own understanding of economics? If you’ve never pressed such a character to clearly and concisely explain what it is you “don’t understand” using their own words, I highly recommend that you […]

Is The Temporary Collapse Of Texas Foreshadowing The Total Collapse Of The US?

We are getting a very short preview of what will eventually happen to the United States as a whole.  America’s infrastructure is aging and crumbling.  Our power grids were never intended to support so many people, our water systems are a complete joke, and it has become utterly apparent that we would be completely lost […]

Peak Oil from Conspiracy Theories

Many experts believe the world will run out of oil in the next 30 years, and some people think the looming scarcity inspired unconscionable acts — like the Iraq War in 2003. But there might be massive reserves under our feet that oil companies don’t want you to know about.

Peak Oil Pt. 1 – The Playground

In 1859, a prospector invented modern drilling technology and kicked off an oil rush in the United States. Countless corporations made themselves rich through mass extraction — but according to one geologist and physicist, the world is on track to run out of fuel by 2050. When that happens, society as we know it may […]

James Howard Kunstler and John Michael Greer

John Michael Greer, an old friend of the podcast, blogs at Ecosophia, subtitle, Toward an Ecological Spirituality. JMG has been an astute observer of the Western world’s arduous economic and cultural descent, and is the author of many books, both novels and non-fiction, including Green Wizardry, After Oil, The Wealth of Nature, and Not the […]

Doubling Down on the Fossil Fuel Fairy Tale

Let me start with a conundrum. As part of my day job as a political economist I consume a lot of international economic, business, and energy news. Preparing for my research and teaching requires me to read reports in Bloomberg, the Financial Times, The Economist and other business publications. It also leads me to check […]

Why Mainstream Economic Forecasts Are So Often Wrong

Every end of the year, by the end of the year, we receive numerous estimates of global GDP growth and inflation for the following year. Historically, almost in all cases, expectations of inflation and growth are too optimistic in December for the following year. If we look at the track record of central banks, it […]

Biggest Oil Trader Sees No Travel Rebound Till Third Quarter

A return to pre-pandemic levels of oil demand will hinge on jet-fuel use, which is unlikely to recover until the third quarter of the year, said Mike Muller, head of trader Vitol SA’s operations in Asia. Jet fuel has been the oil product hardest hit by the coronavirus pandemic in Asia. Demand in the region […]

Net Energy and ERoEI* in a Mark III Economy

Structure The Mark I economy had only one economic requirement, namely, that each person had to eat one potato per day or die. This was useful to show that one man’s wealth can mean another man’s or many men’s death. The Mark II economy had four or five economic sectors and was useful to demonstrate […]

Behold the dawning of the Age of Aquarius

The Grand Conjunction of Jupiter and Saturn is upon us and there is no looking back. Image: Twitter We are all in the gutter, but some of us are looking at the stars. – Oscar Wilde Today all radio stations on Planet Earth should be playing this song. What the aptly named Fifth Dimension immortalized […]

The great reset

In May, the World Economic Forum launched its ‘great reset’ initiative. In October, Time Magazine dedicated an entire issue to the idea. Just a week later, International Monetary Fund Managing Director Kristalina Georgieva declared that the world was facing a ‘new Bretton Woods moment’. Almost seven years ago, Amsterdam University Press published my book, The […]

Peak James Kunstler?

James Howard Kunstler was always the John Gray of Peak Oil prophets, or beyond that, a Cassandra in reverse — often telling direly pessimistic overstatements, but always being believed. I had read columns and essays by him semi-regularly 15 years ago, when many in the West were worried about Peak Oil. Recently, I saw his […]

Tom Wayburn and Gail Tverberg discuss ERoEI

  ·                     Gail Tverberg says: June 11, 2013 at 8:03 am The minimum ERoEI has to be a whole lot higher than 1.0. I am not sure what the right number is. I suspect it is something close to 9.0; certainly at least 5.0. The calculation leaves out way too much. In particular, it does not […]

The Cosmic Doctrine: The Law of Impactation

This week we continue a monthly discussion of The Cosmic Doctrine by Dion Fortune, which I consider the most important work of 20th century occult philosophy. Climb in and fasten your seat belts; it’s turning out to be as wild a ride as I expected. If you’re just joining us now, please go back and […]

Telling others about peak oil and limits to growth

Preface. Obviously the planet is finite. We’re using many times more oil than we’re discovering, and therefore at some point global oil production will peak and decline.  Yet even in 2019 this reality is denied by most, so much so that low prices after the last financial crash caused by high oil prices, has led […]

Orlov: “Watch This!”

There are times in my career as a collapse observer and systematizer when my running commentary can quite reasonably be pared down to just two words: “Watch this!” The current severe stage of the financial and economic collapse sequence that was initiated in 2008, which is being artificially masked (no pun intended) by the Covid “pandemic,” and […]

The Care of the Mind

Before we begin, a preliminary note is in order.  Yes, I heard about what’s happening with the US election. I write my posts in advance, and this one was finished days before the votes started being counted. We’ll discuss the election over on my Dreamwidth journal once the rubble stops bouncing and the dust settles. […]

Heinberg: A simple way to understand what’s happening … and what to do

The world seems to be coming apart at the seams. It’s critical to understand why, so that we can avoid the worst and find the best responses so as to move toward the environmentally and socially healthy future we want. It turns out that there’s a relatively simple frame for gaining such understanding. This straightforward […]

Everything We Assume Is Permanent Is Actually Fragile

Masking the rot and fragility is not the same thing as strength or permanence. The great irony of the past 75 years of expanding consumption is the belief that all these decades of success prove the system is rock-solid and future success is thus guaranteed. The irony lies in the systemic fragility that’s built into the large-scale industrial […]

Can we predict collapses before they happen? What we learned from the pandemic

My 2019 book “Before the Collapse.” In it, I examined several scenarios of the future of humankind. Was I able to predict the current pandemic? Of course not in the details, but I think that I did note an important facet of the story: epidemics are never very deadly when they come alone. They become […]

Tom Whipple: Whatever Happened to Peak Oil?

It is now over 20 years since a pair of European geologists set forth the concept of “peak oil” in Scientific American. When the idea that the world’s oil supply might soon hit a peak was first developed, the world consumed about 63 million barrels of oil per day, and consumption was rising. Official projections […]

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LATEST NEWS HEADLINES

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