I feel like I wish to share my reaction to your essay.
Yes, I agree with you that Europe is starved of energy, but even when, a few years ago, when the pipelines were running, Western Europe's was already slowing down and de-industrializing. It probably has been slowly since the 1990s and less slowly since 2009 and even less slowly since the bureaucracies furiously tried to smash a cold virus with a brick but ended up smashing the economies over 2020-2024.
And, can we perhaps talk about psychic energy, or perhaps you have a better term? There is no evident national will or, perhaps a people's will to build and grow industry. The people's will to make families and children is also quickly fading. Growth and optimism are the territories of the youth and the youth are not optimistic and they are not interested to make more and bigger.
What is the cause of this thing that seems so antithetical to human nature? Maybe it has to do with the marginal value bureaucracies (if not actually actively destructive) that have grown bigger than their host of humans engaged in value-added activities?
Institutional corruption so brazen it can no longer be contained behind polite curtains?
Smartphone dopamine dispensers that create negative emotions as the easiest path to harvest billable seconds and generate revenues?
The result of observing our unhappy parents and grandparents neglect healthy and social family life so they can dedicate their lives to meaningless jobs only to grumpily "retire" to God's waiting room? What meaning of life - what LIVING - is that?
The lack of a positive national story and the absence of a charismatic national storyteller?
The coddling, care and preference by OUR public servants for serving hoards of non-invited foreign nationals of in-compatible cultures and religions over the native - and paying-population?
The unsustainable tax burden that finances our oppression without providing accountability or offering political representation?
The institutional skewing of commerce to preference the importation of Asian-produced goods over domestic production - because the Asian banks will use a portion of their profits to buy state bonds that allow the political/bureaucratic machine to be far bigger (and more unaccountable) than the domestic economy could ever support?
I could go on, but not today.
I suppose my point is that no amount of cheap energy of fiat investment funds can create what there is no "people's" will to create. Buildings and physical capital can be built, but WHO CARES?
Well, an interesting comment. A blog post cannot involve more than a few points, but you are mentioning many. And to discuss all of them would take more than a single post. Let me just say that an economy naturally tends to slow down and stabilize, as long as it doesn't overconsume its resources. It is what I was referring to when I said, "progress was being made." Had Europe continued along that road, it wouldn't risk the catastrophe it is risking now. Then, there are suicidal forces within our governments. It is entropy at work. But entropy can be fought with energy.
Dear Mr. Bardi, I hope you didn't take my comment as criticism - and I am aware that you wrote a blog post and not a book ( I do appreciate your books BTW. Extracted changed considerably the landscape of the models I carry in my head).
I suppose the point I wanted to make is that conducting more energy into a society that is resigned to doing little more than existing and consuming isn't going to solve many problems - and may even delay a collapse needed to create the conditions for a widespread reset of a society's philosophical foundation.
Without a goal, without knowing what we are going toward and why, a society incurs a kind of entropy of morale -and, evidently, adherence to moral codes.
Yes, modern societies need massive energy inputs to thrive, or even survive, but what we do with it matters greatly. I believe history has demonstrated that great (and terrible) societies can be created upon an economy of entirely solar-derived energy.
Assess the tremendous amount of cheap and usable energy we now enjoy and what most of us actually do with it. We aren't achieving some grand common goal, we aren't becoming better persons nor forming bigger and more amazing families and we aren't becoming happier.
We could do so much more with what energy we do already do have available and we could create greatness with much less. But we don't have any stories to lead us forward - or even away from our nihilistic and destructive slump.
COVID is mentioned a bit too often in my humble opinion. What did you think one could have expected back in 2019? Twas a novel virus. Science, engineering, and technology have done much for humans. We create problems and solve problems with predicaments. It's like mentioning JFK or 911 everytime you post an article dealing with fuckups. Throw a dart at the globe and pick a random date from the past and pontificate on the fuckups, the horror, the painful getting on with it, or choose a rosy field, a cafe table in Paris with Earnest Hemmingway blathering away. When was the last administration in the USA that had a sense of Reality? They play the Great Game because they've been trained to do that. You have so many solid insights. I've read your book. Have you not set your opinions out on the C19 matter already? Please direct me to your detailed article about the many ways the response to a novel pandemic was screwed up. I'll save it with all the others. Our leaders are screwups, but many people worldwide worked hard to help people during the worst moments of the event. COVID is endemic now and will always be with us. There are still plenty of people living their lives in my part of Europe. Flu strains kill people every year. I, along with most people my age here, got our jabs. I took a 50k bike ride last week. I feel fit as a fiddle. (Anecdotal, I know.) How is RFK doing managing the United States of New Miracles healthcare? Have all the causes been explained, and all the blame and shame for personal ill health put on the socioeconomic system? Do all the obesity drugs have off-label uses that will save us from ourselves? It would be a miracle if world leaders could coordinate across nation states and cultures to focus on mitigating the worst possible outcomes of civilizational collapse, overshoot, and the One Big Polycrisis in human nature's heart. We will live with mismanagement until there are far fewer people on Earth, and our medical interventions once again require leeches and medicinal herbs, and infections kill on contact.
You see that I found the story interesting, but I limited myself to the general misunderstanding of the dynamics of the pandemic and how huge damage was done because of that. Vaccines are not my thing, and I didn't comment on the subject.
The owners and their puppets need to rearm to protect their "order" from the peasant uprisings soon to come, when the IOUs in the cookie jars are found to be irredeemable...
Nicely and calmly put Ugo and timely for the British Isles moored offshore with its large collection of mostly abandoned oil and gas platforms. Starmer's government, all the worse for his background and training, reads the same map. Intelligence tools are deployed against Gaza for mercy's sake from military bases cunningly retained from the previous empire, now handed over to a merciless power. The legacy of a once financial hegemony is located in a digital hub, the virtual reality that is London. His bruised mind ('everything has changed') mimics fruit rapidly gone bad.
During the end of WW2, German occupation was exchanged with a US one. Counting the number of US military bases in Europe is sufficient to be convinced of that. The appreciation of the US army as a fighting force for defense by the regime (back then as now) is illustrated best by:
The collapse of the USSR almost prevented the need to continue the war (Yeltsin ransacking bonanza called "privatization") but Putin restored law, order and the economy (as far as possible as "evil oligarchs" have an influence in Russia too).
From that perspective, US-occupied Europe became a competitor for cheap resources hence the US orchestrated its destruction.
Summarized, Europe isn't allowed to have a map for the future (apart from collapse) and too few politicians are brave enough to realize the urgency for a change of course. A resource too often ignored is human resource (inventiveness, creativity via upbringing and education) as compensation for non-renewable resources.
To add . . . Because they (these vassals) have been bought off, they will do as they’ve been told ( as we can see) with a pipeline blown up to accentuate the point.
This ‘renewable energy” you speak of seems to be procured by raping more resources from other locations around the planet. Isn’t the ecological devastation and human exploitation just more colonialism dressed up for the present?
They got ahead of themselves because the USA has no intention to let Europe be part of Eurasia any more than Japan.
One problem is the meaning of the word ‘defense’. During WWII, Britain and the U.S. had a War Office and War Department respectively. They later became the Ministry of Defence and the Department of Defense. In other words, attacking another nation became part of their ‘defense’.
If Europe were to rearm to defend itself against Russia, that would make sense. But it seems as if this program is really intended to attack Russia and its allies. That’s much more expensive.
At one point, well before 2022 and very much under the US neocon/Democrats influence, some of the more influential European elite and politicians decided that the nationalist, traditionalist and conservative politics favoured by Putin in Russia must be defeated.
More to the point, I believe that the idea that some people, namely people from the Donbass and Crimea, while invited to join the EU, would prefer to favour their age-old cultural and historical links was just inconceivable. And thus unacceptable as it would set a very serious precedent that could call their whole post-national European agenda into question.
So, yes, self-convinced by their own propaganda and pressured by the Biden administration, they thought that a short war would sort out the matter.
And, with the Draghi-style understanding map of the economy in hand, they went straight for it without thinking twice about any cheap energy issues.
Now they are trapped in their narrative. After 3 years of fighting and with the Russian army or economy stubbornly refusing collapse, the stakes are even higher. And their political survival depends more than ever on the continuation of the war...
I agree with your cultural observations. The West is strongly wedded to the idea that there can be a single body of cultural beliefs that can serve the entire globe, if only the benighted masses in "those other places" can be brought on board to believe. Doing this requires that those masses be forcibly led to the well.
However, at the risk of simplifying things, I think one of the major motivators for going after Russia is the unquenchable desire to seize and part out its resources, which obviously represent a massive percentage of what has still not yet been exploited. Whether this desire is linked to the attempts at its cultural subversion or not, I have not yet decided.
Yes. I guess it played a role too. That would have been the icing on the cake.
Actually, after having given up on cheap Russian gas, I see the stubbornness of Europe, and Germany in particular, on this matter, as a way of at least securing cheap food from Ukraine as a consolation prize.
The so-called "leadership class" in the West, especially in the EU, is almost totally bankrupt both morally and intellectually. In Europe they seem to be doing their best to prove that the "expert-run state" cannot work, since the way to put the ACTUAL experts in charge has not yet been discovered.
Among other things, these folks should improve their grasp of systems analysis and the behavior of complex systems. They seem not to understand the ways in which our modern systems affect one another.
I wonder if anyone sees the irony in the fact that these supposed leaders are trying to get their populations to embrace massive lifestyle changes to reduce their environmental footprints, while at the same time trying to stampede them into embracing all-out war, which is probably the most wasteful and energy-intensive activity known to modern man.
Hello Mr. Bardi,
I feel like I wish to share my reaction to your essay.
Yes, I agree with you that Europe is starved of energy, but even when, a few years ago, when the pipelines were running, Western Europe's was already slowing down and de-industrializing. It probably has been slowly since the 1990s and less slowly since 2009 and even less slowly since the bureaucracies furiously tried to smash a cold virus with a brick but ended up smashing the economies over 2020-2024.
And, can we perhaps talk about psychic energy, or perhaps you have a better term? There is no evident national will or, perhaps a people's will to build and grow industry. The people's will to make families and children is also quickly fading. Growth and optimism are the territories of the youth and the youth are not optimistic and they are not interested to make more and bigger.
What is the cause of this thing that seems so antithetical to human nature? Maybe it has to do with the marginal value bureaucracies (if not actually actively destructive) that have grown bigger than their host of humans engaged in value-added activities?
Institutional corruption so brazen it can no longer be contained behind polite curtains?
Smartphone dopamine dispensers that create negative emotions as the easiest path to harvest billable seconds and generate revenues?
The result of observing our unhappy parents and grandparents neglect healthy and social family life so they can dedicate their lives to meaningless jobs only to grumpily "retire" to God's waiting room? What meaning of life - what LIVING - is that?
The lack of a positive national story and the absence of a charismatic national storyteller?
The coddling, care and preference by OUR public servants for serving hoards of non-invited foreign nationals of in-compatible cultures and religions over the native - and paying-population?
The unsustainable tax burden that finances our oppression without providing accountability or offering political representation?
The institutional skewing of commerce to preference the importation of Asian-produced goods over domestic production - because the Asian banks will use a portion of their profits to buy state bonds that allow the political/bureaucratic machine to be far bigger (and more unaccountable) than the domestic economy could ever support?
I could go on, but not today.
I suppose my point is that no amount of cheap energy of fiat investment funds can create what there is no "people's" will to create. Buildings and physical capital can be built, but WHO CARES?
Well, an interesting comment. A blog post cannot involve more than a few points, but you are mentioning many. And to discuss all of them would take more than a single post. Let me just say that an economy naturally tends to slow down and stabilize, as long as it doesn't overconsume its resources. It is what I was referring to when I said, "progress was being made." Had Europe continued along that road, it wouldn't risk the catastrophe it is risking now. Then, there are suicidal forces within our governments. It is entropy at work. But entropy can be fought with energy.
Dear Mr. Bardi, I hope you didn't take my comment as criticism - and I am aware that you wrote a blog post and not a book ( I do appreciate your books BTW. Extracted changed considerably the landscape of the models I carry in my head).
I suppose the point I wanted to make is that conducting more energy into a society that is resigned to doing little more than existing and consuming isn't going to solve many problems - and may even delay a collapse needed to create the conditions for a widespread reset of a society's philosophical foundation.
Without a goal, without knowing what we are going toward and why, a society incurs a kind of entropy of morale -and, evidently, adherence to moral codes.
Yes, modern societies need massive energy inputs to thrive, or even survive, but what we do with it matters greatly. I believe history has demonstrated that great (and terrible) societies can be created upon an economy of entirely solar-derived energy.
Assess the tremendous amount of cheap and usable energy we now enjoy and what most of us actually do with it. We aren't achieving some grand common goal, we aren't becoming better persons nor forming bigger and more amazing families and we aren't becoming happier.
We could do so much more with what energy we do already do have available and we could create greatness with much less. But we don't have any stories to lead us forward - or even away from our nihilistic and destructive slump.
COVID is mentioned a bit too often in my humble opinion. What did you think one could have expected back in 2019? Twas a novel virus. Science, engineering, and technology have done much for humans. We create problems and solve problems with predicaments. It's like mentioning JFK or 911 everytime you post an article dealing with fuckups. Throw a dart at the globe and pick a random date from the past and pontificate on the fuckups, the horror, the painful getting on with it, or choose a rosy field, a cafe table in Paris with Earnest Hemmingway blathering away. When was the last administration in the USA that had a sense of Reality? They play the Great Game because they've been trained to do that. You have so many solid insights. I've read your book. Have you not set your opinions out on the C19 matter already? Please direct me to your detailed article about the many ways the response to a novel pandemic was screwed up. I'll save it with all the others. Our leaders are screwups, but many people worldwide worked hard to help people during the worst moments of the event. COVID is endemic now and will always be with us. There are still plenty of people living their lives in my part of Europe. Flu strains kill people every year. I, along with most people my age here, got our jabs. I took a 50k bike ride last week. I feel fit as a fiddle. (Anecdotal, I know.) How is RFK doing managing the United States of New Miracles healthcare? Have all the causes been explained, and all the blame and shame for personal ill health put on the socioeconomic system? Do all the obesity drugs have off-label uses that will save us from ourselves? It would be a miracle if world leaders could coordinate across nation states and cultures to focus on mitigating the worst possible outcomes of civilizational collapse, overshoot, and the One Big Polycrisis in human nature's heart. We will live with mismanagement until there are far fewer people on Earth, and our medical interventions once again require leeches and medicinal herbs, and infections kill on contact.
Well, I tried my best to make sense of the COVID story:
https://senecaeffect.substack.com/p/slaying-a-tiny-dragon-the-origins
https://senecaeffect.substack.com/p/the-worst-model-in-history-how-the-a9c
https://www.senecaeffect.com/2022/04/china-and-covid-memetic-analysis.html
https://www.senecaeffect.com/2023/05/the-problem-with-galileo-surrogate.html
https://www.senecaeffect.com/2021/02/seneca-and-virus-why-does-pandemic-grow.html
https://www.senecaeffect.com/2023/04/flattening-curve-military-origins-of.html
You see that I found the story interesting, but I limited myself to the general misunderstanding of the dynamics of the pandemic and how huge damage was done because of that. Vaccines are not my thing, and I didn't comment on the subject.
The owners and their puppets need to rearm to protect their "order" from the peasant uprisings soon to come, when the IOUs in the cookie jars are found to be irredeemable...
;-(
Nicely and calmly put Ugo and timely for the British Isles moored offshore with its large collection of mostly abandoned oil and gas platforms. Starmer's government, all the worse for his background and training, reads the same map. Intelligence tools are deployed against Gaza for mercy's sake from military bases cunningly retained from the previous empire, now handed over to a merciless power. The legacy of a once financial hegemony is located in a digital hub, the virtual reality that is London. His bruised mind ('everything has changed') mimics fruit rapidly gone bad.
During the end of WW2, German occupation was exchanged with a US one. Counting the number of US military bases in Europe is sufficient to be convinced of that. The appreciation of the US army as a fighting force for defense by the regime (back then as now) is illustrated best by:
100 Years of US Troops as Lab Rats
https://web.archive.org/web/20161031064736/http://www.informationclearinghouse.info/article44739.htm
(No other country treats the military like that).
The idea was to continue the war Hitler started, at the proper moment. This is more obvious when considering the WW2 main financiers.
https://www.globalresearch.ca/history-of-world-war-ii-nazi-germany-was-financed-by-the-federal-reserve-and-the-bank-of-england/5530318
The collapse of the USSR almost prevented the need to continue the war (Yeltsin ransacking bonanza called "privatization") but Putin restored law, order and the economy (as far as possible as "evil oligarchs" have an influence in Russia too).
From that perspective, US-occupied Europe became a competitor for cheap resources hence the US orchestrated its destruction.
Summarized, Europe isn't allowed to have a map for the future (apart from collapse) and too few politicians are brave enough to realize the urgency for a change of course. A resource too often ignored is human resource (inventiveness, creativity via upbringing and education) as compensation for non-renewable resources.
To add . . . Because they (these vassals) have been bought off, they will do as they’ve been told ( as we can see) with a pipeline blown up to accentuate the point.
This ‘renewable energy” you speak of seems to be procured by raping more resources from other locations around the planet. Isn’t the ecological devastation and human exploitation just more colonialism dressed up for the present?
They got ahead of themselves because the USA has no intention to let Europe be part of Eurasia any more than Japan.
WWII bought the US these countries - didn’t it?
One problem is the meaning of the word ‘defense’. During WWII, Britain and the U.S. had a War Office and War Department respectively. They later became the Ministry of Defence and the Department of Defense. In other words, attacking another nation became part of their ‘defense’.
If Europe were to rearm to defend itself against Russia, that would make sense. But it seems as if this program is really intended to attack Russia and its allies. That’s much more expensive.
Yes...
At one point, well before 2022 and very much under the US neocon/Democrats influence, some of the more influential European elite and politicians decided that the nationalist, traditionalist and conservative politics favoured by Putin in Russia must be defeated.
More to the point, I believe that the idea that some people, namely people from the Donbass and Crimea, while invited to join the EU, would prefer to favour their age-old cultural and historical links was just inconceivable. And thus unacceptable as it would set a very serious precedent that could call their whole post-national European agenda into question.
So, yes, self-convinced by their own propaganda and pressured by the Biden administration, they thought that a short war would sort out the matter.
And, with the Draghi-style understanding map of the economy in hand, they went straight for it without thinking twice about any cheap energy issues.
Now they are trapped in their narrative. After 3 years of fighting and with the Russian army or economy stubbornly refusing collapse, the stakes are even higher. And their political survival depends more than ever on the continuation of the war...
I agree with your cultural observations. The West is strongly wedded to the idea that there can be a single body of cultural beliefs that can serve the entire globe, if only the benighted masses in "those other places" can be brought on board to believe. Doing this requires that those masses be forcibly led to the well.
However, at the risk of simplifying things, I think one of the major motivators for going after Russia is the unquenchable desire to seize and part out its resources, which obviously represent a massive percentage of what has still not yet been exploited. Whether this desire is linked to the attempts at its cultural subversion or not, I have not yet decided.
Yes. I guess it played a role too. That would have been the icing on the cake.
Actually, after having given up on cheap Russian gas, I see the stubbornness of Europe, and Germany in particular, on this matter, as a way of at least securing cheap food from Ukraine as a consolation prize.
The so-called "leadership class" in the West, especially in the EU, is almost totally bankrupt both morally and intellectually. In Europe they seem to be doing their best to prove that the "expert-run state" cannot work, since the way to put the ACTUAL experts in charge has not yet been discovered.
Among other things, these folks should improve their grasp of systems analysis and the behavior of complex systems. They seem not to understand the ways in which our modern systems affect one another.
I wonder if anyone sees the irony in the fact that these supposed leaders are trying to get their populations to embrace massive lifestyle changes to reduce their environmental footprints, while at the same time trying to stampede them into embracing all-out war, which is probably the most wasteful and energy-intensive activity known to modern man.
rethinkx are an 'investor-story-time' con job.
hello professor bardi do you expect a lot of european union citizen's do die before 2030 because of rearm europe ?
Yes! They have many wrong maps. The U.S. included.