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 […]

The Mask of Disenchantment

When I noticed at the beginning of the month that September had five Wednesdays, and I didn’t have anything in mind to post here for the fifth of them, I asked my readers for their suggestions, following an old custom here that I’ve recently revived. As usual, the resulting discussion was lively and quite a […]

Four Reasons Civilization Won’t Decline: It Will Collapse

From Jenna Orkin mikeruppert.blogspot.com Four Reasons Civilization Won’t Decline: It Will Collapse 2 aides for Ilhan Omar challenger shot, 1 killed; no apparent relationship to the campaign… Thousands of Migrating Birds Drop Dead Across Southwestern U.S. Now they want to burn JK Rowling’s books Human Flesh Looks Like Beef, But the Taste Is More Elusive  […]

The Psychology of Denying Overpopulation

Let’s imagine we were giving an award for the worst social problem in the world today. Do you have any nominations? Did I hear someone say international conflict? Racial prejudice maybe? Environmental destruction anyone? Millions of homeless refugees? Exploitation of women? Turns out there’s one problem that connects all of those, and it’s one you […]

The End of Oil? Pandemic Adds to Fossil Fuel Glut, But COVID-19 Relief Money Flows to Oil Industry

As the coronavirus pandemic contributes to a glut of fossil fuels, groups like Greenpeace are calling on Democratic presidential candidate Joe Biden to ban fossil fuel interests from his campaign and administration, if he wins, even as he recently declared at a campaign stop that he “will not ban fracking.” We discuss the politics of […]

Visualizing Permian Oil & Gas Production

Permian – update through May 2020 These interactive presentations contain the latest oil & gas production data from all 27,683 horizontal wells in the Permian (Texas & New Mexico) that started producing from 2008/2009 onward, through May. Total Production Production from horizontal wells in the Permian fell by around 0.5 million bo/d in May to […]

We’re Dumb about Exponential Growth. That’s Proving Lethal

Gradually, and then suddenly. That’s how exponential growth can ruin your day, undo your family, evaporate your economy, destroy your climate, crush an empire and destabilize a planet. Consider the performance of COVID-19. In June a 30-year-old male attended a “COVID party” in San Antonio, Texas. At a COVID party, the host has tested positive. He or […]

Why a Thriving Civilization in Malta Collapsed 4,000 Years Ago

The mysteries of an ancient civilization that survived for more than a millennium on the island of Malta—and then collapsed within two generations—have been unravelled by archaeologists who analyzed pollen buried deep within the earth and ancient DNA from skulls and bones. It’s part of a field of work that is expanding the use of […]

Energy Basics: What is Energy?

In response to listener demand, we are launching a new mini-series on the Energy Basics. If you have found yourself occasionally challenged to follow some of the more technical conversations we have here, or even if you just want to brush up on the fundamentals, this mini-series is for you! We hope these episodes will […]

Why The Unraveling Will Accelerate

Sclerotic, hidebound institutions optimized for linear stability and permanent growth are simply not designed to adapt to non-linear change and disruption of permanent growth. Since the first news of pandemic in late January, I’ve been discussing potential accelerants to the unraveling of our fragile financial system: second-order effects (initial travel restrictions and layoffs were first-order effects, new waves of layoffs […]

A Plague Is an Apocalypse. But It Can Bring a New World.

It’s strange that we now see America threatened by a plague. Because without plague, America, as we know it, wouldn’t exist. It may have been the most devastating epidemic in the history of humankind — surpassing in its mortality rates any before or since, including the Black Death in the Europe of the mid-14th century. […]

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LATEST NEWS HEADLINES

• Everything Is About To Get More Expensive. This Is Good
• Why Collapse Occurs; Why It May Not Be Far Away
• Don’t Believe the US Energy Independence Hype
• Globalist Weather Wars To Crush Humanity  
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• Joe Biden’s huge bet: the economic consequences of ‘acting big’
• U.S. Energy Crisis Leaves Millions Without Power in Big Freeze
• A Market Crash AND High Inflation?  
• China is approaching its own peak oil
• Does a Correction Loom for the Oil Market?
• Peak Oil Pt. 1 – The Playground