We are hitting the absolute peaks of fossil fuels in possibly as little as a decade from now also. The current arrangements are only possible with a constantly high energy throughput. There's considerable limits right now on how much growth can be achieved. And there are more things than ever competing for energy consumption too - including the rise of AI (which is causing energy consumption to soar again after ~2 decades of being flat in Western countries).
The problem with Reddit turning into Instagram is that IG already exists.
At the rate they're going, their actual destination is Tumblr, a company that destroyed their brand trying to fit in with generic corporate BigTech.
Anecdotally, bird migration seems much quieter this year. At times we have had enormous flocks of warblers passing through around this time of the year. There are still birds but it is a fraction of the normal volume. This may also be related to the odd weather we've been having though, I'm not sure.
A lot of people still think it's possible to have an energy transition, even those who should know better and are very well aware of the decline of oil resources - for example, Dennis Coyne who runs Peak Oil Barrel. He knows very well, because he's made mathematical models to that effect, that oil production could decline by about 1/3 by 2050. But he thinks a transition will occur by then. I think it's a religious-like belief at this point that there has to be something waiting in the wings to save us. Oh, and the mainstream opinion is, by the way, that oil supplies are plateauing because of lower demand (because of this alleged transition) and not because we are depleting the main sources.
On the other hand, you have guys like Art Berman who think supplies will last a good deal longer but that there will still be enormous upheaval in the coming century. Out here on the fringes there's not much consensus.
"Are...the public well-informed?" I'm assuming that headline was meant as sarcasm.
Terrible choice caving into the pseudo-moralists, but they've been going down a bad path for a long time. They should've looked at the cautionary tale of Tumblr before committing this own goal. Making sweeping changes to fit in with corporate agendas may be popular among their own class, but it also has the longer-term effect of sacrificing the user base. And they've been hemorrhaging for a while anyway. Where do they think their future profits will come from?
A lot of people will probably doubt this when living in the middle of the bubble. But it has happened elsewhere already. China's RE bubble has melted down spectacularly and their economy is still deflating despite massive government stimulus. I imagine this will be the fate of the American Everything Bubble too, albeit we can't know when it will happen. The last deflationary episode around 2014 coincided with the meltdown in the American shale oil industry, which as we well know is going to happen again with the decline of the Permian - maybe this will start the bubble bursting.
Low IQ people can't comprehend the science, but they are easy prey for demagogues who point out that the elites who tout climate change have no desire to limit their consumption or in any way live as if they believe climate change is real. Thus, they (the mob) come to believe they're simply being lied to and climate change is a "hoax". This is partly an elite problem because they're not willing to lead in the only way that might actually work, which is by example.
It's underappreciated how much of a story this is. This is happening in wide swathes of the USA. Big chunks of the West are abandoned, because of wildfires, earthquakes, etc and all along the Gulf Coast as well, including big chunks of Florida (which tons of people have moved to in recent years).
You may be right. I keep assuming that Western politicians are smart people who are playing dumb for the public so that they can keep their grifts going. But they may not be playing in many cases. That might explain the rather sluggish response to what looks like a very serious crisis unfolding over the next 1-3 decades.
What I don't understand in our current situation is the lying. We're not attempting to transition to green energy because we have a choice, because it's better for the environment, or any of this. We're doing it because there aren't too many other options now that easily accessible fossil fuel is being burned up. What would be the harm, at this point, of just fessing up? It's most disconcerting that Western governments have gotten addicted to lying like this, even when they don't have to.
Wow, and this comes from the horse's own mouth of corporate publication. We are headed for hard times, and soon, as the Permian depletes. It's surreal that normies are completely unaware of this when it's like a freight train of doom bearing down on us.
The insects have gone gangbusters this year in the Upper Midwest. This follows 3 summers ('21-'23) which had abnormally low insect volume owing to severe drought. The drought corrected this year, therefore so did the insects. There are probably local fluctuations like this but as I understand the global situation is pretty dire. A lot of it is from habitat loss, same with other wipeouts of biodiversity, but also ecumenical use of pesticides.
The song was about SoCal in the 1990s but it could equally apply to Florida or Texas circa now.
It has gotten to be dogma that "Malthus was proven wrong" on all sides of the mainstream's political spectrum. I always found that odd, because he didn't make any predictions. All of his work was based on historical data and known cases; he was very much a British empiricist. The only prediction in his essay, to the extent he made any, was that the principles wouldn't change in the future because of some nebulous "progress".
And they didn't. What happened instead, as the article rightly notes, is that we temporarily increased carrying capacity. And in so doing we built a trap for ourselves from which we won't be extricated in the coming decades. No one knows exactly how the trajectory of energy and resource descent will play out, but that it will happen, is happening now, is not in doubt.
The peak oil movement had another renaissance in the 2000s, but it went completely out of style about a decade ago. Most of the people who were aware of it like J.M. Greer, J.H. Kunstler and Dmitry Orlov, for example, just threw up their hands and stopped posting about it, because by that point no one outside of the subculture cared or intended to do anything about it. The "black pill" here, as I see it, is that we are just going to use it all up, whatever is accessible from the economic feasibility view anyway, and then suffer a traumatic economic disruption/contraction when it runs out.
Ever since Covid, by far the most money I have spent is on transport (gas) and food, apart from housing. Beyond that, most of my discretionary spending has been entirely on items that can be immediately used like clothes/outdoor wear, kitchen ware or books. I also try to buy whatever I can used, since there's such an excess of unwanted stuff in consumer society that you usually can find things used. The next step would be more DIY projects for a range of things and accumulating hard skills instead of items, but I haven't quite crossed that bridge yet. That would stand me in good stead for the future that's actually coming, though.
The system has been broken for pretty much my entire adult life and I'm doing my part not to make the problems of our time worse.
I read Ages of Discord and it was very interesting. For example, he had kind of contrarian takes on the Great Depression (e.g. deflation was bad for the financial classes but actually helped the working and middle classes achieve broader prosperity). Which others would you recommend? A friend recommended Secular Cycles a long time ago but I haven't got around to it yet.