Thinking about a world of scarcity

It has now become more fashionable to talk about shortages. Computer chips have been in shortage and then in glut in the last few years. Natural gas was acutely in shortage in Europe after the war in Ukraine and pipeline sabotage brought supplies from Russia down to a trickle. Then, heroic efforts at conservation and […]

Nate Hagens: The Perils of EROI

On this Frankly, Nate discusses a frequently used but often misunderstood way of interpreting the efficiency of an energy source: Energy Return On Investment. EROI, and its corresponding metric Net Energy, are a great way to understand the energy surplus of a technology – and ultimately of a society. However, in climate and energy spaces, […]

Western Civilization Is Ceasing to Exist

I often explain that we are losing civilization. The risks come from many sources.  Among them is the growing risk of nuclear war; the rising police state in which behavior protected by the Constitution is criminalized despite the Constitution; unity supplanted by a Tower of Babel; fomented race and gender hatreds that serve Identity Politics; […]

The Worst Food Crisis In Modern History

People on the other side of the planet are dropping dead from starvation right now, but most people don’t even realize that this is happening.  Unfortunately, most people just assume that everything is fine and dandy.  If you are one of those people that believe that everything is just wonderful, I would encourage you to […]

Kunstler: Chat with David Collum about his Year in Review

And thanks to all my Patrons for your support   David Collum is the Betty R. Miller Distinguished Professor of Chemistry at Cornell University. He moonlights as an Internet gadfly offering commentary on culture, politics, finance, and technology, He publishes a massive Year in Review essay every Christmas season and it’s available at Chris Martenson’s […]

Alex Jones Warns of AI and Genetic Engineering in Best-Selling Book ‘The Great Reset’

Alex Jones’s new book “The Great Reset” has made it to several top-selling lists, despite a steady stream of recent news about lawsuits targeting him that put the beleaguered radio and TV host in a negative light. The book was published on Aug. 30. During its first week, it hit #2 in The Wall Street Journal, […]

The thinnest veneer of civilization

Civilization is fragile. It hinges on ensuring the stuff of life. To be able to eat, to move about, to have shelter, to be free from state or tribal coercion, to be secure abroad, and safe at home – only that allows cultures to be freed from the daily drudgery of mere survival. Civilization alone […]

How the world became overwhelmed

We all feel it. News is always about the unexpected, but this cycle of news is uncommonly grim, and we are all exhausted by it. Look around at the world, starting with Russia. Russian President Vladimir Putin has signed treaties to annex parts of Ukraine following a manipulated referendum carried out at gunpoint. In defiance of international […]

The Drought

the Machiavellian war strategy in the supply chain of the natural gas market … -Hopefully, …the economic giant of the East will wake up and use the unique key that its economic and political power confers on it to find a definitive way out of this situation that is wreaking havoc on the global economy. […]

Kunstler: This Is the Way the World Ends

That “singularity” so many blab about is not what they think it is: the merging of human intelligence with Bill Gates’s Office products, leading to an orgasmic nirvana of infinite memoranda from your HR department concerning new diversity, inclusion, and equity policy. Rather, I speak of the magic moment when the necromancers of finance discover […]

Putin vs Europe – The Long War

”The economy of imaginary wealth is being inevitably replaced by the economy of real and hard assets”. Vladimir Putin, September 2022   Hi all, and welcome back to The Macro Compass! Last week, Vladimir Putin released a massive speech that clearly outlined his strategy to bring Europe to its knees. For decades, Europe’s business model […]

effective accelerationism explained

It’s hard to avoid the messages: mankind is bad. There are too many of us. Our problems are too many and they are too hard to solve. Many people are saying the solution to these problems is to take a step backwards, that the solution is degrowth. But degrowth is a kind of surrender. Degrowth […]

The End of the Industrial Age

The fourth enduring theme of my blogging over the last sixteen years, the decline and fall of modern industrial civilization, is also the one that most people try hardest to misunderstand. It’s not just that so many people blankly insist that it can’t happen and of course we’re on our way to the stars, just […]

Decline and fall of the West

History tells us that civilisations and empires are ephemeral. Like the Egyptian civilisation, they may last for thousands of years or, like the extensive Mongol Empire, be gone in less than 200 years. Douglas Murray’s latest book The War on the West details the decline of our civilisation which found its origin in Greece, a […]

Edward Bernays’ Red Pill

“Instead of knowledge, universal access has given the common man a rubber stamp inked with advertising slogans.”   The terms “red pill” and “blue pill” refer to a choice between the willingness to learn a potentially unsettling or life-changing truth by taking the red pill or remaining in contented ignorance with the blue pill. The […]

Why Civilizations Collapse

Hours before President Joe Biden was set to speak about America’s infrastructure in Pittsburgh, one of that city’s bridges collapsed, three years after someone warned about it on Twitter. As the comedian Dennis Miller said once in another context, “if the symbolism were any more obvious, Andrew Lloyd Webber would have written a Broadway musical about […]

COPE and CATACLYSM

It is possible for a population to forget a global catastrophe within the span of a few generations. The primary mechanism of cope is not self-deception, as many believe, it is Amnesia. People forget huge parts of ongoing reality, of their own near days. There was, in living memory, a great famine in China and […]

Untouchable Big Oil Threatens All Life On Earth

All life on Earth is threatened by catastrophic climate change–the main culprit is so powerful that the U.S. government is setup to serve it, rather than regulate it. The oil industry is a powerhouse with control over land, resources, politics and more. In this episode of The Empire Files, Abby Martin uncovers big oil’s strong-arm […]

The age of energy disruptions

In recent months the world has been thrown into a global energy crisis that seems to have taken observers as well as global leaders by surprise. In September and October, wholesale prices of natural gas and electricity brutally surged in Europe, several energy providers went bust in the UK, China and then India experienced widespread […]

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 […]

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LATEST NEWS HEADLINES

• The Case For China’s Future Oil Demand
• Kunstler: A Theory of the Game
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• A World Running On Empty: The Decline Of Fossil Fuel Supply
• Peak Oil Demand Predicted by Bloomberg in 2027

• Peak oil is another reason to shun OPEC club
• India’s Russian oil buying scales new highs
• Micro-Scale Nuclear Fusion: The Key to Unlimited Clean Energy?
• China Completes Its Longest Deepwater Oil Pipeline
• Exxon: New Fracking Technology Can Double Oil Output
• OPEC Excludes Bloomberg, Reuters and WSJ Reporters From Meeting