All very academic and nicely presented. As a background, I briefly looked at Limits to Growth in 1972 and dismissed it as the System protecting itself by misdirection and "kicking the can down the road." At the time, it also drained social energy from us environmentalists who were working on solutions "on the ground." These solutions did NOT need more computer models. They just needed more actual work fixing problems directly (or managed outcomes if you buy the false dichotomy of problems vs predicaments). In point of fact, we STILL don't need more accurate computer models of the problem/predicament. We need REAL reduction in demand of fossil fuels and more rational and sane ways to grow food and build houses and repair infrastructure and the like.
As for the actual modeling, the Deviations section mentions a couple of fails, 1) " . . . does not include renewable energies. Although renewable energy plants can be considered part of industrial goods, this is inaccurate." and 2) "And it does not provide for the service life of structures."
1) B - The Honest Sorcerer (popular Substack site) has repeatedly pointed out that renewables are not really renewable because of the diesel energy needed to make them and maintain them. Nate Hagens, Richard Heinberg and John Michael Greer have been pointing this out for years too. So including them in industrial goods is okay. What I worry about is the common dodge of excluding the cost of EVs and electricity, as if electricity grows on trees and is free energy. It is not.
2) If you do not take into account the "service life of structures," you do not take into account embedded energy (or embodied energy if you are a Howard Odum fan). If you do not take into account embedded energy, any set of solutions will not even comprehend the value of driving a 20-year-old Honda which had its embedded energy accounted for in the first 10-years of its life. There are many, many people who drive 20-year-old cars (Citroen and Renault in our case) precisely BECAUSE they no longer have an embedded energy footprint, being past the 10-year cutoff. We really do NOT need any more new buildings or cars or diesel tractors or computers even.
As for optimizing variables, this is a real minefield and can be easily manipulated for whatever reasons the authors deem important. (One of the ways sponsors buy the results they want.)
Local Differences is an important qualifier, BUT if you really investigate how things change from region to region, it really does negate the whole idea of consistency. This last point also fits into the idea that computer modeling is a crap concept. And I am not the first one to think of this. For instance, if you want to use one-way analysis of variance (ANOVA), you can do the equations with a pencil and paper without needing a computer at all. You cannot say that about Principal Components Analysis (PCA) or other multivariate methods. And as for learning a programming language like Python, why bother? We already know what to do.
As I say, this article gives some credibility to the basic ideas we have known since 1970. But does it help us to grow food using much lower inputs? Nope. Does this new model promote the idea of not buying ANY new cars ever again? Nope. Does this new model have any value at all beyond providing a living for a few researchers in their cushy chairs at the lab and expounding at their next TED Talks? Not really. It would be better if the researchers took their grant money and gave it to the peasants in the hills of Tuscany so they could grow more olives with hand labor.
No quarrels with the excellent response you wrote. I personally believe that the value of the Limits to Growth modeling frameworks created originally, and subsequently updated, is many-fold. The frameworks cause critical conversations and stimulate critical thinking in circles (such as policy-making groups) that might otherwise be totally captive of a BAU logic only. It’s the act of refining data and adjusting models that draws more people and new generations of decision-makers into this conversation and opens their minds. Models are our best representations of reality. We cannot get the necessary conversations going about the future of industrial civilization if we do not have “strawmen” to examine.
One key limb on the Limits to Growth strawman is the very basic assumption that on this planet, everything is linked to everything else. We benefit from having tools that help us understand how decisions or behaviors that appear to impact one isolated part of the global system actually ripple out impacts into all parts. Without strawmen models how could we even reach agreement across multiple decision-makers about the risks and benefits of those decisions in all parts of a global system? And how could we reach agreement about “what’s best” to decide and why?
My bottomline belief: The Limits to Growth models are a tool for attracting more people to a systems ecology perspective. Not everyone other than you or I is wired to accept this perspective unflinchingly. Every time a new model run is done and written up, we attract more people to the systems ecology camp. It’s a slow and frustrating process, but it is necessary that we grow the numbers of people who accept this perspective. The future of the planet depends upon it.
What if, in a nested fashion with industrial production, we've also just reached the Limits to Growth of people who accept systems ecology? Is it still necessary to grow numbers that can't be grown?
When you say the future of the planet depends on it, what you really mean is that the future of civilization depends on it. That claim comes from an assumption not based in the systems ecology because civilization is structurally antithetical to systems ecology; cultural anthropology established that truth back in the 70s.
Actually, I am arguing for a total reset of human activity on the planet.
My beliefs, borne of years of study: The dream of civilization we promote is the addict’s dream - never-ending affluence and comfort, eternal growth, eternal progress. If we had the discipline required, and followed a systems-thinking approach to inhabiting the planet, our civilization might survive. But as Barry Commoner and Buckminster Fuller pointed out half a century ago (and many more people since then), we don’t see that earth is a spaceship with a crew that promotes a metabolic demand that grows exponentially. This is our reality. Don’t Look Up.
The maximum power principle is on display. Humans do things just because we can, not because they are the most logical things to do to sustain all life on the planet indefinitely. We take over every niche. We consume everything we can access. We create a trail of waste.
The publishing of The Limits to Growth was a first shot across our collective bow that gave us tools for challenging the addict’s dream. It was a quantitative push to validate the qualitative concerns Alexander Von Humboldt, John Muir, Charles Darwin, Henry David Thoreau, Aldo Leopold, Rachel Carson, and countless others provided as warnings.
Thanks for sharing your thoughts. This is the kind of conversation younger generations should be having, but I do not sense it is happening. I hope I am wrong.
"If we had the discipline required, and followed a systems-thinking approach to inhabiting the planet, our civilization might survive."
This is the bargaining. Perhaps it's not psychological bargaining, but it is certainly structural bargaining.
That list of luminaries that you shared did not have the cultural anthropology of the 1970s at their disposal, for incorporation into their systems theories. Steady-state civilization cannot exist. Agricultural civilization is defined by the running of year on year food surpluses in the name of political stability. You put ten of any mammalian species in a cage and feed it fifteen mammals worth of food and soon enough you end up with fifteen mammals whether they are mice or humans. That is the origin of the growth requirement of civilization. You feed ten mammals ten mammals' worth of food in a communal cage setting and they're gonna fight like hell and some will end up dead. Prisons, for example, are basically all you can eat.
When I sell a cord of firewood I sell big cords because selling little cords is bad for both my ability to move wood and my conscience, and there's no such thing as an exact cord of wood. So it is with civilization. There is no exact 'cord of wood' food supply that matches the population in order to achieve steady state. As with moving firewood, in order to move civilization you have to err on the side of big, which, as night turns to day, grows out the population according to physics.
Not bargaining. I am suggesting that every ecosystem has a carrying capacity for every living species in the various populations that occupy that ecosystem. Some species oscillate over and under that carrying capacity over time. If the over oscillations don’t destroy the integrity of the systems and the systems are resilient enough to bounce back, the over oscillation will likely occur again, unless the species learns from its mistakes.
Humans have used technology, ingenuity, and disregard for the laws of thermodynamics to violate the carrying capacity of the planet. Look at planetary boundaries currently being exceeded. This is dangerous behavior for a k-selected species, which would typically operate in a narrow bandwidth around the planet’s carrying capacity. If humans keep up present behaviors, we’re going to be a k-selected species attempting to survive in an unstable and unpredictable environment we are not ideally suited for.
Although all farmed systems exist within wild systems, farmed systems in and of themselves do not share the population dynamics of the wild system that you are describing.
I'm not trying to come down on you, but for you to shift the conversation to cyclical wild dynamics on the heels of my exposition on linear farmed dynamics is effectively a strawman argument.
Civilizational MPP is an evolutionary extension of wild/evolutionary MPP, but the methods by which the two MPPs are attained are different. Any peak hyper complex civilization is so far out of whack from ecological MPP that the peak is defined by affordable resource exhaustion at the exact moment that it needs more resources than it's ever needed before. That's catastrophic oscillation, whereas hunter gatherers that maintained their cultural refusal for farming/enslavement had internal (Dunbar's Number, long lactation cycles, paleo diet limiting their reproductive capacity) and external (animism, warfare, infant neglect) restraints on their ecological competitiveness that kept the amplitude low and within the ballpark of the population dynamics of the rest of their local ecology.
I should have written that the future of human civilization on the planet is threatened by decisions that do not account for planetary systems responses. The planet will outlast human civilization. Thank you for the reminder. The human species is part of the planet, but human civilization is the product of the human species.
What I'm getting at with the cultural anthropology is that civilization has been objectively found to be dependent on running structural surpluses or it collapses. The Limits to Growth represents the terminal collapse phase. Degrowth does not exist as such. Look at the word: it's a euphemism, right? For Collapse. Degrowth as political policy in a post- growth zero-sum-world can only look like death panels on the grandest scale, no matter how well-intentioned its marketing campaign looks like.
Therefore, all we can do is communicate reality as best we can online and IRL, with the IRL communication being weighted towards leading by example. If we don't let go of civilization in our hearts, we can't do that reality work.
A day in the life of involuntary degrowth? What "death panels" might look like in response to a GoF virus outbreak as a form of "medical triage” resetting energy flows to test deindustrialization and crowd control technology.. isolating the elderly and disabled with DNR bracelets, denial of food and water, releasing test positive patients into nursing homes then treating them with sedatives and pain killers, withholding early treatment options and then placing patients on ventilators and creating a 2-tier society with digital passports to exclude the non-compliant from access to normal life (and bragging about the plan with a smirk on your face to the media - Jacinda Ardern, Australia).
Thanks, sure, the plandemic deaths by design from both plandemic response and the vaxxes is obviously factual, but those deaths/killings obviously weren't about making the human population smaller so that civilization could get more efficient because there wasn't anywhere close to enough deaths/killings. The plandemic response deaths were for keeping up plandemic narrative appearances (plausible deniability that there was an L in plandemic), and the vaxx deaths were for destroying the neoliberal establishment such that Trump could engage in controlled demolition of globalization, both under cover of 'nationalism' and his own brand of insane.
The primary purpose of the plandemic, however, was to destroy about 30pc of global oil demand for 1.5yrs so as to buy about 5 more years of time until the final financial collapse. This Iran war is basically plandemic 2.0 in function, but much much more catastrophic, and will serve to provide political cover for the collapse of global finance capitalism.
There can only be one kind of 'degrowth' politics, and that is covert 'degrowth' politics, because civilization immediately enters chaotic collapse if the public is told that civilization is in terminal collapse. All medium and long-term investment would hard stop.
The covert, Elite-run Non-Public Degrowth Agenda is more than 6 years old now, and I had been writing about it coming before it ever started, and have been charting it since. It's a metasystems analysis of the Limits to Growth systems theory. That's a fancy way of calling it a conspiracy theory, so it's not for everyone. I comment over at Gail Tverberg's place.
Thanks Angus. So what you're essentially saying is that the future of civilization on the planet is threatened by civilization because the civilizational decisions do not account for planetary systems responses (ie depletion). Yet you are clearly advocating for better decision making.
You do realize the cyclical predicament that the civilization is in don't you? If you do then aren't you just lapsing, here, into bargaining again with the reality?
I was just comparing notes according to our old patterns and letting you know that the utilitarian small bore motorcycle could fill a hole for you between the bicycle and the car. Store 20gals of stabilized gas and you got 2000+miles of run.
There's an outfit that makes trailers for the TW200. They're the ultimate farm and hunting bike. They call em the quad of bikes but I already have a quad.
The TW200 is the best apocalypse bike and super easy to ride but you sacrifice some mpg. Gets a about 75-80. And it has a manual tranny which is obviously superior to the Trail's semi-auto. I actually ended up getting a used Honda monkey 125 because it is a manual tranny a gets the same mpg as a Trail 125 and can wear my hiking backpack for carrying loads beyond what I can get on the rack. Fuel injection. Exclusively a farm chore bike at this point for the three mile round trip. Also because I have a quad with a trailer that gets 40mpg for hauling needs. I rarely use the Nissan Frontier now but for selling firewood.
Yeah pros and cons. The 90s and 110s have a low gear range that you switch into with the flip of a lever on the tranny for steep or difficult terrain. They got rid of that feature on the new 125s which was a dealbreaker for a lot of people. The 125s have disc brakes instead of drums, and fuel injection which is either a pro or con depending on one's priorities, but on balance it's a con for collapse. The old models are obviously cheaper and always come with knobby tires, so even if you bought a used 125 they mostly have the stock road oriented tires on them that you'd need to switch out.
Such a fascinating overview! Past energy use seems to have doubled every 30 years or so as it is 400% what it was when I entered high school in 1965 according to Figure 13. I'm thrilled to be departing before the worst of the Ecological Overshoot Unraveling, Ugo. Thanks for all your efforts to help people have a clear-eyed understanding of our prospects.
The realist: Actual war. And here I think this will be an unmitigated disaster for the United States. Not because American soldiers aren’t capable. Not because I think the missiles can’t fly. But simply because the logistics don’t support a sustained campaign, the AD systems can’t stop what Iran will throw at them, the element of surprise is completely gone (China is watching every move and relaying it), and the political will to absorb serious losses simply does not exist in Washington. They’ve never faced a real peer (or even near peer) adversary since 1945. Iran in 2026, with Russian AD integration and Chinese ISR, is not the Iran of June 2025. And June 2025 was already a war that the US/Israel essentially lost, dressed up as a draw.
The difference between now and January is that the force is there.
hi professor ugo bardi what do you mean by a general collapse for the european union economic are that we all gonna die young and old or will it also by fertillity decline ?
All very academic and nicely presented. As a background, I briefly looked at Limits to Growth in 1972 and dismissed it as the System protecting itself by misdirection and "kicking the can down the road." At the time, it also drained social energy from us environmentalists who were working on solutions "on the ground." These solutions did NOT need more computer models. They just needed more actual work fixing problems directly (or managed outcomes if you buy the false dichotomy of problems vs predicaments). In point of fact, we STILL don't need more accurate computer models of the problem/predicament. We need REAL reduction in demand of fossil fuels and more rational and sane ways to grow food and build houses and repair infrastructure and the like.
As for the actual modeling, the Deviations section mentions a couple of fails, 1) " . . . does not include renewable energies. Although renewable energy plants can be considered part of industrial goods, this is inaccurate." and 2) "And it does not provide for the service life of structures."
1) B - The Honest Sorcerer (popular Substack site) has repeatedly pointed out that renewables are not really renewable because of the diesel energy needed to make them and maintain them. Nate Hagens, Richard Heinberg and John Michael Greer have been pointing this out for years too. So including them in industrial goods is okay. What I worry about is the common dodge of excluding the cost of EVs and electricity, as if electricity grows on trees and is free energy. It is not.
2) If you do not take into account the "service life of structures," you do not take into account embedded energy (or embodied energy if you are a Howard Odum fan). If you do not take into account embedded energy, any set of solutions will not even comprehend the value of driving a 20-year-old Honda which had its embedded energy accounted for in the first 10-years of its life. There are many, many people who drive 20-year-old cars (Citroen and Renault in our case) precisely BECAUSE they no longer have an embedded energy footprint, being past the 10-year cutoff. We really do NOT need any more new buildings or cars or diesel tractors or computers even.
As for optimizing variables, this is a real minefield and can be easily manipulated for whatever reasons the authors deem important. (One of the ways sponsors buy the results they want.)
Local Differences is an important qualifier, BUT if you really investigate how things change from region to region, it really does negate the whole idea of consistency. This last point also fits into the idea that computer modeling is a crap concept. And I am not the first one to think of this. For instance, if you want to use one-way analysis of variance (ANOVA), you can do the equations with a pencil and paper without needing a computer at all. You cannot say that about Principal Components Analysis (PCA) or other multivariate methods. And as for learning a programming language like Python, why bother? We already know what to do.
As I say, this article gives some credibility to the basic ideas we have known since 1970. But does it help us to grow food using much lower inputs? Nope. Does this new model promote the idea of not buying ANY new cars ever again? Nope. Does this new model have any value at all beyond providing a living for a few researchers in their cushy chairs at the lab and expounding at their next TED Talks? Not really. It would be better if the researchers took their grant money and gave it to the peasants in the hills of Tuscany so they could grow more olives with hand labor.
No quarrels with the excellent response you wrote. I personally believe that the value of the Limits to Growth modeling frameworks created originally, and subsequently updated, is many-fold. The frameworks cause critical conversations and stimulate critical thinking in circles (such as policy-making groups) that might otherwise be totally captive of a BAU logic only. It’s the act of refining data and adjusting models that draws more people and new generations of decision-makers into this conversation and opens their minds. Models are our best representations of reality. We cannot get the necessary conversations going about the future of industrial civilization if we do not have “strawmen” to examine.
One key limb on the Limits to Growth strawman is the very basic assumption that on this planet, everything is linked to everything else. We benefit from having tools that help us understand how decisions or behaviors that appear to impact one isolated part of the global system actually ripple out impacts into all parts. Without strawmen models how could we even reach agreement across multiple decision-makers about the risks and benefits of those decisions in all parts of a global system? And how could we reach agreement about “what’s best” to decide and why?
My bottomline belief: The Limits to Growth models are a tool for attracting more people to a systems ecology perspective. Not everyone other than you or I is wired to accept this perspective unflinchingly. Every time a new model run is done and written up, we attract more people to the systems ecology camp. It’s a slow and frustrating process, but it is necessary that we grow the numbers of people who accept this perspective. The future of the planet depends upon it.
What if, in a nested fashion with industrial production, we've also just reached the Limits to Growth of people who accept systems ecology? Is it still necessary to grow numbers that can't be grown?
When you say the future of the planet depends on it, what you really mean is that the future of civilization depends on it. That claim comes from an assumption not based in the systems ecology because civilization is structurally antithetical to systems ecology; cultural anthropology established that truth back in the 70s.
Actually, I am arguing for a total reset of human activity on the planet.
My beliefs, borne of years of study: The dream of civilization we promote is the addict’s dream - never-ending affluence and comfort, eternal growth, eternal progress. If we had the discipline required, and followed a systems-thinking approach to inhabiting the planet, our civilization might survive. But as Barry Commoner and Buckminster Fuller pointed out half a century ago (and many more people since then), we don’t see that earth is a spaceship with a crew that promotes a metabolic demand that grows exponentially. This is our reality. Don’t Look Up.
The maximum power principle is on display. Humans do things just because we can, not because they are the most logical things to do to sustain all life on the planet indefinitely. We take over every niche. We consume everything we can access. We create a trail of waste.
The publishing of The Limits to Growth was a first shot across our collective bow that gave us tools for challenging the addict’s dream. It was a quantitative push to validate the qualitative concerns Alexander Von Humboldt, John Muir, Charles Darwin, Henry David Thoreau, Aldo Leopold, Rachel Carson, and countless others provided as warnings.
Thanks for sharing your thoughts. This is the kind of conversation younger generations should be having, but I do not sense it is happening. I hope I am wrong.
"If we had the discipline required, and followed a systems-thinking approach to inhabiting the planet, our civilization might survive."
This is the bargaining. Perhaps it's not psychological bargaining, but it is certainly structural bargaining.
That list of luminaries that you shared did not have the cultural anthropology of the 1970s at their disposal, for incorporation into their systems theories. Steady-state civilization cannot exist. Agricultural civilization is defined by the running of year on year food surpluses in the name of political stability. You put ten of any mammalian species in a cage and feed it fifteen mammals worth of food and soon enough you end up with fifteen mammals whether they are mice or humans. That is the origin of the growth requirement of civilization. You feed ten mammals ten mammals' worth of food in a communal cage setting and they're gonna fight like hell and some will end up dead. Prisons, for example, are basically all you can eat.
When I sell a cord of firewood I sell big cords because selling little cords is bad for both my ability to move wood and my conscience, and there's no such thing as an exact cord of wood. So it is with civilization. There is no exact 'cord of wood' food supply that matches the population in order to achieve steady state. As with moving firewood, in order to move civilization you have to err on the side of big, which, as night turns to day, grows out the population according to physics.
Not bargaining. I am suggesting that every ecosystem has a carrying capacity for every living species in the various populations that occupy that ecosystem. Some species oscillate over and under that carrying capacity over time. If the over oscillations don’t destroy the integrity of the systems and the systems are resilient enough to bounce back, the over oscillation will likely occur again, unless the species learns from its mistakes.
Humans have used technology, ingenuity, and disregard for the laws of thermodynamics to violate the carrying capacity of the planet. Look at planetary boundaries currently being exceeded. This is dangerous behavior for a k-selected species, which would typically operate in a narrow bandwidth around the planet’s carrying capacity. If humans keep up present behaviors, we’re going to be a k-selected species attempting to survive in an unstable and unpredictable environment we are not ideally suited for.
Although all farmed systems exist within wild systems, farmed systems in and of themselves do not share the population dynamics of the wild system that you are describing.
I'm not trying to come down on you, but for you to shift the conversation to cyclical wild dynamics on the heels of my exposition on linear farmed dynamics is effectively a strawman argument.
Civilizational MPP is an evolutionary extension of wild/evolutionary MPP, but the methods by which the two MPPs are attained are different. Any peak hyper complex civilization is so far out of whack from ecological MPP that the peak is defined by affordable resource exhaustion at the exact moment that it needs more resources than it's ever needed before. That's catastrophic oscillation, whereas hunter gatherers that maintained their cultural refusal for farming/enslavement had internal (Dunbar's Number, long lactation cycles, paleo diet limiting their reproductive capacity) and external (animism, warfare, infant neglect) restraints on their ecological competitiveness that kept the amplitude low and within the ballpark of the population dynamics of the rest of their local ecology.
I should have written that the future of human civilization on the planet is threatened by decisions that do not account for planetary systems responses. The planet will outlast human civilization. Thank you for the reminder. The human species is part of the planet, but human civilization is the product of the human species.
What I'm getting at with the cultural anthropology is that civilization has been objectively found to be dependent on running structural surpluses or it collapses. The Limits to Growth represents the terminal collapse phase. Degrowth does not exist as such. Look at the word: it's a euphemism, right? For Collapse. Degrowth as political policy in a post- growth zero-sum-world can only look like death panels on the grandest scale, no matter how well-intentioned its marketing campaign looks like.
Therefore, all we can do is communicate reality as best we can online and IRL, with the IRL communication being weighted towards leading by example. If we don't let go of civilization in our hearts, we can't do that reality work.
A day in the life of involuntary degrowth? What "death panels" might look like in response to a GoF virus outbreak as a form of "medical triage” resetting energy flows to test deindustrialization and crowd control technology.. isolating the elderly and disabled with DNR bracelets, denial of food and water, releasing test positive patients into nursing homes then treating them with sedatives and pain killers, withholding early treatment options and then placing patients on ventilators and creating a 2-tier society with digital passports to exclude the non-compliant from access to normal life (and bragging about the plan with a smirk on your face to the media - Jacinda Ardern, Australia).
Thanks, sure, the plandemic deaths by design from both plandemic response and the vaxxes is obviously factual, but those deaths/killings obviously weren't about making the human population smaller so that civilization could get more efficient because there wasn't anywhere close to enough deaths/killings. The plandemic response deaths were for keeping up plandemic narrative appearances (plausible deniability that there was an L in plandemic), and the vaxx deaths were for destroying the neoliberal establishment such that Trump could engage in controlled demolition of globalization, both under cover of 'nationalism' and his own brand of insane.
The primary purpose of the plandemic, however, was to destroy about 30pc of global oil demand for 1.5yrs so as to buy about 5 more years of time until the final financial collapse. This Iran war is basically plandemic 2.0 in function, but much much more catastrophic, and will serve to provide political cover for the collapse of global finance capitalism.
There can only be one kind of 'degrowth' politics, and that is covert 'degrowth' politics, because civilization immediately enters chaotic collapse if the public is told that civilization is in terminal collapse. All medium and long-term investment would hard stop.
The covert, Elite-run Non-Public Degrowth Agenda is more than 6 years old now, and I had been writing about it coming before it ever started, and have been charting it since. It's a metasystems analysis of the Limits to Growth systems theory. That's a fancy way of calling it a conspiracy theory, so it's not for everyone. I comment over at Gail Tverberg's place.
Thanks Angus. So what you're essentially saying is that the future of civilization on the planet is threatened by civilization because the civilizational decisions do not account for planetary systems responses (ie depletion). Yet you are clearly advocating for better decision making.
You do realize the cyclical predicament that the civilization is in don't you? If you do then aren't you just lapsing, here, into bargaining again with the reality?
Grow your own fresh vegetables, ride your bicycle, and consider a pre-2009 Toyota Matrix (Pontiac Vibe) for cheap, reliable transportation.
Or fence in a savanna ecosystem, ride your bicycle, and back it up with a two-person Honda ct motorbike at 125mpg. Hi old friend!
Hi Reante. I made certain assumptions, based upon the content of the comment to which I replied.
;-)
I was just comparing notes according to our old patterns and letting you know that the utilitarian small bore motorcycle could fill a hole for you between the bicycle and the car. Store 20gals of stabilized gas and you got 2000+miles of run.
The Honda Trail 125 is a modern version of their classic Trail 90, and looks to be a best fit to your concept. https://www.hondaoftheozarks.com/Motorcycles-Honda-Trail125-2025-Springfield-MO-fe2769b8-e304-4b61-8bc2-b26d006cd028G
There's an outfit that makes trailers for the TW200. They're the ultimate farm and hunting bike. They call em the quad of bikes but I already have a quad.
The TW200 is the best apocalypse bike and super easy to ride but you sacrifice some mpg. Gets a about 75-80. And it has a manual tranny which is obviously superior to the Trail's semi-auto. I actually ended up getting a used Honda monkey 125 because it is a manual tranny a gets the same mpg as a Trail 125 and can wear my hiking backpack for carrying loads beyond what I can get on the rack. Fuel injection. Exclusively a farm chore bike at this point for the three mile round trip. Also because I have a quad with a trailer that gets 40mpg for hauling needs. I rarely use the Nissan Frontier now but for selling firewood.
Yeah pros and cons. The 90s and 110s have a low gear range that you switch into with the flip of a lever on the tranny for steep or difficult terrain. They got rid of that feature on the new 125s which was a dealbreaker for a lot of people. The 125s have disc brakes instead of drums, and fuel injection which is either a pro or con depending on one's priorities, but on balance it's a con for collapse. The old models are obviously cheaper and always come with knobby tires, so even if you bought a used 125 they mostly have the stock road oriented tires on them that you'd need to switch out.
Such a fascinating overview! Past energy use seems to have doubled every 30 years or so as it is 400% what it was when I entered high school in 1965 according to Figure 13. I'm thrilled to be departing before the worst of the Ecological Overshoot Unraveling, Ugo. Thanks for all your efforts to help people have a clear-eyed understanding of our prospects.
"...every single citizen of this planet will have steadily less energy available from now on."
The mean is meaningless here. The wealthiest will continue to increase consumption while they push everyone else off the Seneca cliff.
Thank You again, Ugo. I have read that intently and I really appreciate your rigor in this process.
I will include it prominantly in the post I am composing.
Fire Horse Year https://www.nationalgeographic.com/culture/article/year-of-fire-horse-lunar-chinese-new-year
Armageddon Weekend https://drjohnsblog.substack.com/p/armageddon-weekend
Gold & Geopolitics summation: https://no01.substack.com/p/iran-operation-trust-me-bro
The realist: Actual war. And here I think this will be an unmitigated disaster for the United States. Not because American soldiers aren’t capable. Not because I think the missiles can’t fly. But simply because the logistics don’t support a sustained campaign, the AD systems can’t stop what Iran will throw at them, the element of surprise is completely gone (China is watching every move and relaying it), and the political will to absorb serious losses simply does not exist in Washington. They’ve never faced a real peer (or even near peer) adversary since 1945. Iran in 2026, with Russian AD integration and Chinese ISR, is not the Iran of June 2025. And June 2025 was already a war that the US/Israel essentially lost, dressed up as a draw.
The difference between now and January is that the force is there.
hi professor ugo bardi what do you mean by a general collapse for the european union economic are that we all gonna die young and old or will it also by fertillity decline ?