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 […]

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 […]

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