Richard Heinberg: Human Predators, Human Prey – Part 3

6. “Disease organisms” (revolutionaries), “parasites” (criminals), and “immune systems” (law and punishment) in times of growth and release In his brilliant 1976 book Plagues and Peoples, historian William H. McNeill explored how infectious disease has shaped human societies through the ages. A remarkable paragraph on page 84 of the Anchor paperback edition has stayed with […]

The world’s not as bad as our brains would have us believe

Even highly educated people have gross misconceptions about state of the world, says the book “Factfulness.” On many fronts — economic, health, mortality, — the real picture is a lot brighter than people think. Chimpanzees are better at answering questions on the state of the world than Nobel Prize winners, according to a book I’ve […]

Chris Martenson: The Whole System Is Rigged

As the dog days of summer wind down, it’s hard not to notice how the climate is suffering brutally right now across many areas of the globe. Crop failures have hit hard across Europe. Australia is under an intense drought. Warm water representing ‘archived heat’ has penetrated deep into the arctic.  Coral reefs are dying through […]

Snyder: Society Is Unraveling

The thin veneer of civilization that we all depend upon on a daily basis is disappearing at a staggering pace.  On Sunday, the young men that gathered to participate in the Madden Championship Series tournament in Jacksonville probably never imagined that they would be in any sort of danger, but then gunfire erupted around 1 […]

Bahrain Sees Beyond Oil and Gas, Eyes a Path To Tech Greatness

Offering unique benefits, this Persian Gulf country attracts a wave of tech startups, from food to fintech to fitness. Bahrain 25.930414° N, 50.637772° E view map 1,492,584Population Arabic, EnglishSpoken Language $51,846GDP Per Capita ManamaCapital City Indian tech entrepreneur Amjad Puliyali had worked for a decade in Dubai, but in 2016, he relocated to tiny Bahrain […]

Society Is Made Of Narrative. Realizing This Is Awakening From The Matrix.

In the movie The Matrix, humans are imprisoned in a virtual world by a powerful artificial intelligence system in a dystopian future. What they take to be reality is actually a computer program that has been jacked into their brains to keep them in a comatose state. They live their whole lives in that virtual […]

Blind Spot and Fuel: a Review of Two Peak Oil Documentaries from 2008

Blind Spot: Peak Oil and the Coming Global Crisis A documentary directed, written, photographed and edited by Adolfo Doring Music by Randall Wallace Produced by Michelle Cicalese, David Gil, Randall Wallace and Amanda Zackem Presented by Wallace Global Fund in association with Dislexic Films Release Date: October 2008 Running time: 1 hour, 26 minutes Fuel […]

why do political and economic leaders deny peak oil and climate change?

Since there’s nothing that can be done about climate change, because there’s no scalable alternative to fossil fuels, I’ve always wondered why politicians and other leaders, who clearly know better, feel compelled to deny it. I think it’s for exactly the same reasons you don’t hear them talking about preparing for Peak Oil. 1) Our […]

Kunstler: The Winners Will Lose and the Losers Will Win

Who doesn’t want to think that they are a good human being? That they are a person of good intentions, clear conscience, fair-minded, generous, loving, and merciful? On the other hand, who wants to be a loser? The current political predicament in the USA has America’s winners turned losers and the consequent pain of that […]

A Better World Is Here

The belief that everything is getting worse paints a distorted picture of what we can do, and makes us more fearful. But while getting the facts wrong – or willfully misrepresenting them – often results in misguided policies, fact-based recognition of what humanity has achieved encourages policies that can achieve the most good. SKANDERBORG, DENMARK […]

Peak oil went in the barrel — now the debate is over peak oil demand

When I started writing this column here a decade ago, I laid down several markers that might shove us sideways. Long before the word became a tech commonplace, I called the sum of these trends the Great Disruption. One was peak oil. This didn’t mean “the world about to run out of oil.” Instead, it […]

How the World Elites are Going to Betray us: Lessons from Roman History

The more I study the story of the Roman Empire, the more I see the similarities with our world. Of course, history doesn’t always repeat itself, but it is impressive to note how with the start of the collapse of the Western Empire, the Roman elites abandoned the people to build themselves strongholds in safe […]

Its Not The Heat. It’s The Stupidity

With your sweaty host, Category5. (Thanks, J.T., J.S. and T.M. for the donations. Its been put to good use for a future article)   There is only one subject worth talking about. THE subject. The Heat. Ya. I know I said I wouldn’t be back till the winter once all the chores and Honey, Do […]

Why Collapse Is Leaving Americans In Shock

Have you ever been in a car crash? Do you know that weird, numb, nauseous, out-of-body feeling that hits, after the adrenaline fades? You’re in shock. Now imagine that you were in a car crash every day. How would you feel, after a month? Now consider the fact that we describe the world as a […]

American Society Would Collapse If It Weren’t for These 8 Myths

Our society should’ve collapsed by now. You know that, right? No society should function with this level of inequality (with the possible exception of one of those prison planets in a “Star Wars” movie). Sixty-three percent of Americans can’t afford a $500 emergency. Yet Amazon head Jeff Bezos is now worth a record $141 billion. […]

The Seneca Glass: Half Full or Half Empty?

  Optimist: the glass is half full. Pessimist: the glass is half empty. Catastrophist. It will not be half full for long. Cornucopian: We are running into water rather than out of it. Oil executive: The water level grows more the more we drink from the glass. Conspiracy Theorist: Water? What water? THEY want us […]

You Can’t Stop A Wave But You Can Surf-3

“The struggle with any addict is to produce permanent change.“   Part Three Just when things seem most dire, and there is no possible escape, we catch another faint flicker of hope. In my two previous installments I laid out the predicament. By now anyone who has followed this blog for a while (and a […]

Stop the hand-wringing, humankind will adapt and prosper

When people go public with private tears I am immediately suspicious. Not that I am against tears; as a physical reaction to emotion they are a fact of life best controlled in some circumstances but uncontrollable in others. But articles, tweets and interviews that deliberately lob personal tears into the public domain sound the alarm […]

Are Things Getting Better or Worse?

Branko Milanović grew up in Yugoslavia, during the nineteen-sixties and seventies. He became an economist at the World Bank and then a professor at CUNY; on his blog, Globalinequality, he discusses economics and reminisces about the past. Recently, he published a post about his youth. He had been reading histories of the postwar decades, by […]

Empty by Suzanne Weyn (a Peak Oil Novel for Young Readers)

Aimed at readers aged 12 to 14, this novel successfully blends high school drama and adventure with an important message about the world oil crisis. It was published in 2010, a time of mounting public concern over runaway energy costs. The book’s author, Suzanne Weyn, saw it as a means of raising awareness about the […]

James Howard Kunstler: The “coming” collapse? We’ve been collapsing since 2005.

I suppose many who think about the prospect of economic collapse imagine something like a Death Star implosion that simply obliterates the normal doings of daily life overnight, leaving everybody in a short, nasty, brutish, Hobbesian free-for-all that dumps the survivors in a replay of the Stone Age — without the consolation of golden ages […]

Oil shocks will hit region hard

Fuel prices are rising. More oil shocks have been predicted, and we remain unready to face a new age that is approaching rapidly. Some may not have heard of “peak oil”. If so, I suggest Googling it up. Alerts: This year Exxon Mobil has warned us to prepare for demand-driven oil shocks. Last year, Saudi […]

The Queen and the Philosopher: the hidden story of Boudica’s revolt against the Roman Empire

    We know very little about Queen Boudica of the Iceni (20 AD (?) – 61 AD) and most of what we know is probably deformed by Roman propaganda. But we may still be able to put together the main elements of her story and how it was that she almost threw the mighty […]

Why The Coming Oil Crunch Will Shock The World

My years working in corporate strategy taught me that every strategic framework, no matter how complex (some I worked on were hundreds of pages long), boils down to just two things: Where do you want to go? (Vision) How are you going to get there? (Resources) Vision is the easier one by far. You just […]

David Korowicz: A study of global system collapse

  [ I’ve extracted about half of Korowicz’s paper, left out the references, math, charts, and tables, so you might want to read the original document yourself.   This is a great explanation – one of the best – of the intertwined spheres of complexity (financial system, supply chains, oil production, electric grid, and so on) […]

Energy: A Human History – a Slim Slice of History and Science

“The population of the earth has increased more than sevenfold since 1850 – from one billion to seven and a half billion – primarily because of science and technology,” Richard Rhodes concludes at the end of his new book Energy: A Human History. “Far from threatening civilization, science, technology, and the prosperity they create will sustain […]

Well Gosh…….

I just came out of a meeting with two ministers of Finland. One was the Director of Ministry of Economic Affairs and Employment of Finland. We were to discuss how to develop the battery industry in Finland. They openly discussed concepts like peak oil, hyperinflation, EU currency reset, Break up of EU into something else […]

Sargon and the Sea Peoples

“For hundreds of years, stories of marauding Sea Peoples were told to frightened children.“   Back in 4300 BCE, Sargon of Akkad found the grain farming good in the broad, flat alluvial valley between the Tigris and Euphrates Rivers. Being an accomplished bully and not fond of toiling in the heat of the sun himself, […]

The Impossible Battle against Fake News: The Horse Manure Crisis in London

Illustration and initial text from a recent post on WUWT Sometimes, I have this horrible feeling that the battle against fake news and propaganda is just impossible to win. The latest example is an article appeared on the unnamable WUWT blog, which repeats the story that someone in 1894 “predicted” that 9 feet of horse […]

Irv Mills: My Peak Oil Journey

For some time now I been intending to do a post about “My Peak Oil Journey”, describing how my understanding of Peak Oil has evolved over the years. I think it will fit nicely at this point in my series of autobiographical notes. Throughout the history of this blog I’ve focused on three of the […]

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