There is a bit of clickbait and channeling here. Also, I am no fan of systems modeling because it restricts the number of interactive variables - in order to make it simple enough to model! This is beyond ironic and delves into the realm of disingenousness. So, three points.
1) "What if Predicting Collapse Hastens Collapse" is the title and I was immediately intrigued, as this is something I have pondered ever since I became a "doomer" fifty-five years ago. (In 1969, I started looking to get out of the city "before the shit hits the fan.") But this is clickbait because Ugo is not looking at it from the angle of multitudes of people making collapse happen because they are preparing for it. Nor does he approach it from the idea of collapse being preferable. (Think of how the localized violence may actually be less oppressive than the system violence we all live under now. This is just one possibility. There are many others.) The article is not really about this aspect of individual and group actors affecting the social and economic systems. (Either for positive or negative results.) It is about Ugo's modeling of Mind-Sized System Dynamics Models. This is a worthy endeavor, but it is not what I thought he was going to talk about in this post.
2) The channeling effect. The title of the article is the "hook," to use an old journalism term, and the use of myth is another hook. But then Ugo straitjackets the concepts into cornucopians vs. doomers and gives a false definition of doomers. (He also equates doomers with catastrophists, which is another problem.) Here is his paragraph:
"The current debate sees two camps facing each other: the catastrophists and the cornucopians. The first group sees our civilization brought down by a combination of pollution, resource depletion, or overpopulation. The second sees technological progress breaking through all physical barriers and leading humankind to keep growing in power and numbers."
"Channeling" is an old term from the 1960s underground newspapers in the US that I used to sell (and read!) back in the late 1960's and early 1970s. It was an early version of the Hollywood term "spin" and means about the same. The way it works is to first restrict a term and secondly to box it in by definition. The effect is to follow 1 & 2 to the logical conclusion 3, which is what you intended to "prove" in the first place. In other words, you have a desired effect 3, which you pre-ordain by 1 & 2. As an aside, Karl Marx was real good at this, which is probably why the quasi-Marxist/Leninist writers in the underground newspapers were so aware of it. By the way, this is also why I have dismissed Marx as irrelevant since 1968. It was also a favored technique of the Tea Party from 2010 to 2016, when they were able to take over the Republican Party in the US. (The libertarian types got all their good ideas from us "lefties." I first noticed this in 1973.) But I digress.
Doomers are not necessarily catastrophists. There is a wide spectrum of doomers. The word itself comes from the Old Norse "dómr." It simply means judgment or sentence, but also has other extensions, for instance the court that passed judgment. In modern English usage it simply means, "We are judged and sentenced to pay the price." And of course, the court that has judged us is the ecosystem as a whole. We can certainly make an attempt to slip the sentence, like getting out of the city and living a rural life growing our own food. But this is not a solution in the conventional sense of trying to "fix the system." It presupposes that it will take time for the effects of fouling our own nest and giving the billionaires even more money to play out over a gigantic complex ecosystem. You are not going to wake up some morning and find out that the world has gone to shit before breakfast. It is not catastrophism. It will be a decline - sometimes steady, sometimes punctuated. As an aside, back in grad school, one of my teachers mentioned that the proper term for Stephen Jay Gould's "punctuated equilibrium" should actually be punctuated gradualism. The term applies here too.
So I am proud of being a doomer because it means I can see the problem clearly. It does NOT mean I am a greedy, grasping, gerontocratic gray-hair spending the millenials' future on trips to the Barbados in the dead of winter. Quite the opposite. I have been working on alternatives to the evil US and Western system since 1970. As I say so often, "If YOU would have listened to US fifty-five years ago, WE wouldn't be in trouble NOW."
3) The Mind-Sized System Dynamics Model. Ugo says, "This post presents a simple extension of the Single-Cycle Lotka-Volterra (SCLV) model that treats fossil and renewable energy systems as two independent capital stocks. The model was created in view of a “mind sized” approach proposed by Seymour Papert in 1980. To maintain the model simple, the two stocks (fossil-generated capital and renewable-generated capital) were treated as independent from each other. This is, obviously, an approximation."
In this SCLV model, the technique of applying first-order, nonlinear differential equations is applied to energy rather than predators and prey. In other words, what is important is the interaction between two variables. Not three, not four, not the large number of variables that exists in reality. The limit of modeling itself is that one must restrict the variables in order to make it workable. Even if one has access to supercomputers and multivariate statistics.
In a nutshell, this is the problem with modeling. One has to restrict the variables in order to make the model work. Here is a little blurb on the Lotka–Volterra model from Science Direct:
"The Lotka-Volterra model is defined as a mathematical representation of the dynamics between two interacting species, typically a predator and its prey, where population changes are expressed through a set of first-order, nonlinear differential equations."
I have been criticizing the use of modeling for decades, not only for its poor use of statistical methods, but because it takes up so much of the energy and financing that could instead be used for doing REAL projects. Like sustainable agriculture and landrace development - two of my fields.
Here is a real example of what I am getting at. Analysis of variance (ANOVA) was developed by R.A. Fisher to make sense of the reams of agricultural data at the Rothamsted Experimental Station in the 1920s. AND you can still test your hypothesis by analysis of variance using a pencil and paper. You do not need computers, unlike principle components analysis (PCA). What we need now are simple solutions that actually work. We have one sterling example from 1970: Reduce, Reuse and Recycle. You do NOT have to spend a whole lot of time funding people who develop extensive computer models and furthering inequality between the blue-collar workers and the "professionals." Instead, you could just STOP wasting so much time, energy and money on bullshit that does not make our life better. This is what YOU the individual can do. And when collapse does actually accelerate and your life is rapidly sliding into a quasi-medieval lifestyle, you will be better off. I have been doing this for fifty-five years. It has greatly extended my lifespan (based on my family history and genetic load) and given me a life worth living.
The infamous bottom line. Our political and economic overlords are not going to allow you to make any REAL changes in the System and they have the guns and the police on their side. The System will collapse because it is unsustainable. Get out of the way and save yourself, your family, and as many of your local community as you can. If you can build local alternatives along the way, so much the better. There are plenty of us still doing this.
The infamous bottom line. Our political and economic overlords are not going to allow you to make any REAL changes in the System and they have the guns and the police on their side. The System will collapse because it is unsustainable. Get out of the way and save yourself, your family, and as many of your local community as you can.
Unquote
I agree which is why am emigrating
Collapse can take decades
Or nuclear war but don’t want to be here for that
We cannot even get rid of unpopular senators our system is so controlled by donors
We fled in 2018. We started the process in 2014 and did a scouting expedition to southern France and Spain in 2015. It took us three years to sell our little 5-acre farm but we finally got out. We closed on May 7th and were on a plane to Portugal on May 9th. We investigated Portugal and Spain again, but fixed on France. We are in the Ariege, in the foothills of the Pyrenees at 500 meters. Several reasons for this. The Ariege has plenty of water and looks like western Oregon in its greenness. We have a stream at the bottom of our property and Montsegur, the last stronghold of the Cathars to be taken, is visible from the house and garden. 500 meters is a good altitude to be a little cooler in the summer but still have a long growing season. There are plenty of farmers markets here and the tree cover is mixed forest, with plenty of deer, wild pigs, acorns, mushrooms, etc. I have adapted many of my landrace crops to this new soil structure and even built up some new varieties. Since we are residents, we have high quality, low cost healthcare. We are both in our mid-70s and our social security checks go much farther here. France has its downsides of course, but it has been a net gain. I encourage you to get out. Some other countries may be even cheaper, but we picked France because it is a rural country that is a net exporter of food. My partner always wanted to live here too.
Thank you for expounding upon the weaknesses of this analysis, better than I'd be able myself, though it screamed out, particularly from the oversimplified, bifactor analysis and clunky framing.
Here's what I've learned paddling Class V whitewater in my kayak. You go where you look. The surest way to end up in a huge hydraulic reversal (we call them 'holes') is to focus your gaze on that. You'll go right into it.
We seem to have an entire elite class with brainworms, who long for collapse because they are bored, or otherwise have no meaning in their lives. We could instead focus those intellectual resources on refinement of renewables/nukes -- but instead we spend incredible energy screaming about a collapsing world.
Legends, at least Greek stories are suitably mind-sized... great post, no real predictions, more a matter of scenarios. Thanks.
NB. The food industry is a large item in advanced modern economies (GDP) and is much larger than primary agriculture which is only 4% of global GDP.
Am thinking though of the Liebig Minimum concept, used in deriving mind-sized scenarios in Agriculture, perhaps having wider application. Primary food production still relies essentially on solar energy, hydrological and soil (nutrient) cycles, climate etc. Each of these factors presents a minimum condition for obtaining any harvest. Modernity has presented a further 'minimum' condition for modern harvest yields, where fossil fuels and an industrial economy allow input from machinery, synthetic N fertiliser, 'timing' etc... These modern inputs were until very recently unavailable in a previous solar-based agriculture, previously serviced by what was the conveniently much larger biosphere, the latter's physics and chemistry and life.
Almost impossible, but I am trying to get my head around risk-based scenarios for 'Liebig Minimums' making their critical appearance geographically on future time-lines, depending on the scenarios you have so usefully provided.
If Philip you’re over 45 yoa you’ve probably little to be concerned about except inflation. Our heating planet is a slow burner, and may amount to not much in the scale of things.
For those under 45 yoa there are any number predicaments pushing humanity towards the bottleneck of ecological overshoot and the great simplification. Many of those predicaments have number of tipping points. But they’re all bound to one thing. There’s myth going around that the population is falling it’s a lie, the of births globally maybe falling but not the trend, that’s still heading towards 10 billion within this century. In the meantime as more planet eaters are birthed causing consumption of energy in the form of FREE FINITE Flammable Fossils and key raw materials to be depleted at ever increasing amounts the inevitable result will be that ecological bottleneck happening sooner.
To understand this and the elephant in the room of taboo a subject, view Dr. Sofia Pineda Ochoa’s (free to view on YouTube) 2025 documentary film “GREENWASHED”, you can find it with your favourite web browser if you search for: “Dr. Sofia Pineda Ochoa - GREENWASHED | Full Documentary [Official]” but a warning the documentary does contain some distressing and disturbing scenes, from the start🤔
It would take too long to debate all your points. Demographic momentum is possibly even likely to peak at 10 billion, but the range of per capita demand (consumption) of fossil energy is so large as to make the issue of the 'total' population to my mind a bit beside the point. The numbers are easily verified online for different economies / polities. Per capita consumption in modern America works out as double most places, and it is very uneven even in the most profligate polity on earth. And per capita it is as much as orders of magnitude larger than some very much larger populations elsewhere.
I have been following climate change science for 40 years, and every time I looked up the likely disturbances in the near term were worse than predicted. There are some incredibly smart people trying to get the science round this. Some tipping points seem inevitable as you say, but we can only hope 'the when will be later. Take AMOC; even under 'low emission' scenarios the probability of collapse could be as high as 22%. North America might figure that it won't affect them much? Who knows? The future is very unevenly distributed as the saying goes.
You'r right though, I won't see it. I won't be around. I'm 85 next week. Smile.
Philip, I haven’t denied that the planet is heating, and I don’t question your 40 years experience of following the science of heating planet. I’m not an academic or scientist but I do choose my sources carefully. I’m just a pragmatic realist and observer of the facts, and that comes from formally being a successful professional engineer.
Whether FREE FINITE Flammable Fossils can maintain supply in meeting demand beyond 2035 I have my doubts, but I’ll give you the benefit of the doubt, but that only exacerbates the predicament humanity is in.
The heating planet debate has been lost, it’s now seen as a weather problem, a problem to be managed though adaptation. CO2 related planet heating became a significant political and public issue in the late 1980s and early 1990s with rising scientific consensus. But those institutions and NGO’s responsible for getting the public to believe in it have been sadly lacking. If you’d viewed “GREENWASHED” You’d have heard this:
Chris Packham- “GREENWASHED” - “One of the problems we've got at the moment is that we've invested a lot, and we believe that we are reliant upon the NGOs, sometimes the charities, the campaigning organisations of yesteryear. But a lot of those bodies are not up for the fight. A lot of those bodies won't even admit that what they've been doing hasn't been enough, because they've been telling us for a long time that we're in deep trouble, but they've done nothing about it. And if they've tried, they haven't achieved it. Because they haven't been trying hard enough. They haven't been using the right methodology. They haven't reviewed their methodology. They've carried on with the same methods that haven't worked, and they've got flabby, and they've got lazy, and they've lost their edge. They're terrified of stepping out of line. They're terrified of getting criticism. They've integrated themselves with all the wrong bedfellows. They're sleeping, sometimes, with the enemy. And when it comes to significant issues, such as biodiversity loss and how we address that, human population growth and how we address that, and the continued reliance on fossil fuels, they are simply not taking the fight.”🤔
And Happy 85th Birthday Phillip, for next week 🎉🍺🍷
I think I agree with all of that. Ugo has reminded us fairly recently about 'Greens' going from pacifist to war-party in Germany for example, which seems a change of focus revealing perhaps an authoritarian psychology?
Likewise, it appears Ugo's scenarios and some version of LTG / peak industry etc. are playing out with their peaks within the next 50 years.
My point assumes that the globe has a disturbed climate now and that increased disturbance is inevitable because it is already in the pipeline. Some places are going to be hit very hard from time to time and are increasingly unlikely to have the means of recovery.
My guess is that the global industrial interconnected system is going to break from time to time, might even be breaking now... see examples in geopolitics... and that, for example, privileged high income populations and modern life-security, publicly secured welfare for example, will be degraded. Some places - unknown just now - will do much better under these circumstances than others. We might do risk assessments.
Like Nate Hagens at the Great Simplification, my fear is for the biosphere and the creature world already under multiple threats from industrial civilisation, not just climate change.
Many thanks Barry. May all your years see happiness!
Of course, all models are flawed, but that seems to get worse the simpler the model.
In particular, declaring that fossil fuel and so-called "renewable energy" are independent of each other seems like a fatal simplification, guaranteed to provide nonsense results.
In my first college ecology class, some decades ago, I used the logistics equation to model human population as the predator and fossil fuel as the prey. It did not have a happy ending — no matter how you tweaked the initial numbers, the prey went extinct and then the predator starved.
I'm not so much a "doomer" as a "realist".
We don't have a way to feed 8.3 billion humans on renewable energy. We don't have a way to make the steel, cement, and plastic that is needed by renewable energy sources without fossil fuel. We don't have the copper, lithium, or precious minerals to replace the fossil fuel system with renewable energy.
With the expensive exception of green hydrogen, renewables produce electricity, but aren't very efficient at making heat. We can't recycle the initial generation of renewable sources into the second generation without heat.
We already have the WORLD3 model. Anyone can download it and run it. It has dependencies and feedback, unlike the overly-simple model presented here.
I'm certain Ugo understands this, so unless he was being purposely provocative, I can't understand the decoupling of the two energy sources.
Of course, all models are flawed, but that seems to get worse the simpler the model.
In particular, declaring that fossil fuel and so-called "renewable energy" are independent of each other seems like a fatal simplification, guaranteed to provide nonsense results.
In my first college ecology class, some decades ago, I used the logistics equation to model human population as the predator and fossil fuel as the prey. It did not have a happy ending — no matter how you tweaked the initial numbers, the prey went extinct and then the predator starved.
I'm not so much a "doomer" as a "realist".
We don't have a way to feed 8.3 billion humans on renewable energy. We don't have a way to make the steel, cement, and plastic that is needed by renewable energy sources without fossil fuel. We don't have the copper, lithium, or precious minerals to replace the fossil fuel system with renewable energy.
With the expensive exception of green hydrogen, renewables produce electricity, but aren't very efficient at making heat. We can't recycle the initial generation of renewable sources into the second generation without heat.
We already have the WORLD3 model. Anyone can download it and run it. It has dependencies and feedback, unlike the overly-simple model presented here.
I'm certain Ugo understands this, so unless he was being purposely provocative, I can't understand the decoupling of the two energy sources.
dear jan steinman steel is already made with renewable energy in some places it is called green steel and if we overbuild renewable energy we will have more abundance than that fossil fuels ever did give us read dr nafeez ahmed blog called age of transformation greetings aaron and happy newyear to you
It looks like fossil-fuel-free steel was first made in Sweden in just August of 2021, and very little of if is made fossil-fuel-free today, with wildly varying estimates from less than 1% to 15%. The low numbers came from news sources, while the higher numbers came from environmental proponents.
I have nothing against "green steel". It's just that the reputable data I've seen indicates it is not cost-competitive while natgas and coal are cheap.
but ugo bardi how can we all survive in the scenario make elon musk happy it will take years to build renewable energy infrastructure what will keep us alive in the meantime than ?
John Michael Greer, would tell you we’re already in the throes of the collapse of global industrial civilisation, as reflected in his books “The Long Decent” and “Collapse Now and Avoid the Rush”. But to really understand what happens when the power goes off and trucks stop running there’s Kurt Dahl’s “An American Famine” but I suggest anyone considering reading it should first read Alice J. Friedemann’s book “When Trucks Stop Running” to understand the immensity of that, should it ever happen.
So, choose your collapse of global civilisation, predictably all the options are there, but for the majority it’s economically clinical considering billions would die, or killed by others to survive, in what would effectively be degrowth on a massive scale, a regression towards a 17th century feudal lifestyle. The majority of writers would see this as too doomerish and so regression would take place without a scream, a whimper or a drop of blood spilt, no one murdered, raped, or adult or child dismembered, contrast that with Kurt Dahl’s view as depicted in his book “An American Famine” —
In the shadowed years from 2028 to 2048, as America's fragile empire crumbles under the weight of insatiable consumption and ecological ruin, “An American Famine” unleashes a nightmarish chronicle of societal disintegration that claws at the soul. What begins as an insidious downward spiral. Supply chains fracturing, farmlands withering into dust, and cities swelling with the desperate and the destitute; escalates into a cataclysmic year of 2038, where the grid fails, marauding gangs descend upon the starving masses, and the veneer of civilisation shreds to reveal the primal beast within humanity. Through a mosaic of shattered voices; widowed mothers clawing through rubble for scraps, once respectable men turned cannibals in the flickering light of burning suburbs, and hollow-eyed survivors bartering their last shreds of humanity. Kurt Dahl paints a harrowing tableau of anarchy's embrace, where famine doesn't just empty bellies but devours the very essence of the American dream, leaving only echoes of screams in the endless, barren night.
But how has humanity got itself into this predicament of having the poly and meta-crisis force it into the bottleneck of ecological doom resulting in the great simplification, for an answer to that you need to view Dr. Sofia Pineda Ochoa’s (free to view on YouTube) 2025 documentary film “GREENWASHED”, you can find it using your favourite web browser if you search for:
“Dr. Sofia Pineda Ochoa - GREENWASHED | Full Documentary [Official]” but a warning the documentary does contain some distressing and disturbing scenes, from the start🤔
Another challenging yet informative essay, Ugo! Yes, let's turn our attention to managing a global collapse because it is the field itself that is failing, not just the objects in it. But how are we preparing so far? It seems that we are not making sure all of humanity has the bare minimum to survive what is coming. It seems we are purposely being triaged so the poorest third of humanity will starve first. How will that play out which we remain on Scenario path of Too little, too late?: https://www.ngfs.net/ngfs-scenarios-portal/
There is a bit of clickbait and channeling here. Also, I am no fan of systems modeling because it restricts the number of interactive variables - in order to make it simple enough to model! This is beyond ironic and delves into the realm of disingenousness. So, three points.
1) "What if Predicting Collapse Hastens Collapse" is the title and I was immediately intrigued, as this is something I have pondered ever since I became a "doomer" fifty-five years ago. (In 1969, I started looking to get out of the city "before the shit hits the fan.") But this is clickbait because Ugo is not looking at it from the angle of multitudes of people making collapse happen because they are preparing for it. Nor does he approach it from the idea of collapse being preferable. (Think of how the localized violence may actually be less oppressive than the system violence we all live under now. This is just one possibility. There are many others.) The article is not really about this aspect of individual and group actors affecting the social and economic systems. (Either for positive or negative results.) It is about Ugo's modeling of Mind-Sized System Dynamics Models. This is a worthy endeavor, but it is not what I thought he was going to talk about in this post.
2) The channeling effect. The title of the article is the "hook," to use an old journalism term, and the use of myth is another hook. But then Ugo straitjackets the concepts into cornucopians vs. doomers and gives a false definition of doomers. (He also equates doomers with catastrophists, which is another problem.) Here is his paragraph:
"The current debate sees two camps facing each other: the catastrophists and the cornucopians. The first group sees our civilization brought down by a combination of pollution, resource depletion, or overpopulation. The second sees technological progress breaking through all physical barriers and leading humankind to keep growing in power and numbers."
"Channeling" is an old term from the 1960s underground newspapers in the US that I used to sell (and read!) back in the late 1960's and early 1970s. It was an early version of the Hollywood term "spin" and means about the same. The way it works is to first restrict a term and secondly to box it in by definition. The effect is to follow 1 & 2 to the logical conclusion 3, which is what you intended to "prove" in the first place. In other words, you have a desired effect 3, which you pre-ordain by 1 & 2. As an aside, Karl Marx was real good at this, which is probably why the quasi-Marxist/Leninist writers in the underground newspapers were so aware of it. By the way, this is also why I have dismissed Marx as irrelevant since 1968. It was also a favored technique of the Tea Party from 2010 to 2016, when they were able to take over the Republican Party in the US. (The libertarian types got all their good ideas from us "lefties." I first noticed this in 1973.) But I digress.
Doomers are not necessarily catastrophists. There is a wide spectrum of doomers. The word itself comes from the Old Norse "dómr." It simply means judgment or sentence, but also has other extensions, for instance the court that passed judgment. In modern English usage it simply means, "We are judged and sentenced to pay the price." And of course, the court that has judged us is the ecosystem as a whole. We can certainly make an attempt to slip the sentence, like getting out of the city and living a rural life growing our own food. But this is not a solution in the conventional sense of trying to "fix the system." It presupposes that it will take time for the effects of fouling our own nest and giving the billionaires even more money to play out over a gigantic complex ecosystem. You are not going to wake up some morning and find out that the world has gone to shit before breakfast. It is not catastrophism. It will be a decline - sometimes steady, sometimes punctuated. As an aside, back in grad school, one of my teachers mentioned that the proper term for Stephen Jay Gould's "punctuated equilibrium" should actually be punctuated gradualism. The term applies here too.
So I am proud of being a doomer because it means I can see the problem clearly. It does NOT mean I am a greedy, grasping, gerontocratic gray-hair spending the millenials' future on trips to the Barbados in the dead of winter. Quite the opposite. I have been working on alternatives to the evil US and Western system since 1970. As I say so often, "If YOU would have listened to US fifty-five years ago, WE wouldn't be in trouble NOW."
3) The Mind-Sized System Dynamics Model. Ugo says, "This post presents a simple extension of the Single-Cycle Lotka-Volterra (SCLV) model that treats fossil and renewable energy systems as two independent capital stocks. The model was created in view of a “mind sized” approach proposed by Seymour Papert in 1980. To maintain the model simple, the two stocks (fossil-generated capital and renewable-generated capital) were treated as independent from each other. This is, obviously, an approximation."
In this SCLV model, the technique of applying first-order, nonlinear differential equations is applied to energy rather than predators and prey. In other words, what is important is the interaction between two variables. Not three, not four, not the large number of variables that exists in reality. The limit of modeling itself is that one must restrict the variables in order to make it workable. Even if one has access to supercomputers and multivariate statistics.
In a nutshell, this is the problem with modeling. One has to restrict the variables in order to make the model work. Here is a little blurb on the Lotka–Volterra model from Science Direct:
"The Lotka-Volterra model is defined as a mathematical representation of the dynamics between two interacting species, typically a predator and its prey, where population changes are expressed through a set of first-order, nonlinear differential equations."
I have been criticizing the use of modeling for decades, not only for its poor use of statistical methods, but because it takes up so much of the energy and financing that could instead be used for doing REAL projects. Like sustainable agriculture and landrace development - two of my fields.
Here is a real example of what I am getting at. Analysis of variance (ANOVA) was developed by R.A. Fisher to make sense of the reams of agricultural data at the Rothamsted Experimental Station in the 1920s. AND you can still test your hypothesis by analysis of variance using a pencil and paper. You do not need computers, unlike principle components analysis (PCA). What we need now are simple solutions that actually work. We have one sterling example from 1970: Reduce, Reuse and Recycle. You do NOT have to spend a whole lot of time funding people who develop extensive computer models and furthering inequality between the blue-collar workers and the "professionals." Instead, you could just STOP wasting so much time, energy and money on bullshit that does not make our life better. This is what YOU the individual can do. And when collapse does actually accelerate and your life is rapidly sliding into a quasi-medieval lifestyle, you will be better off. I have been doing this for fifty-five years. It has greatly extended my lifespan (based on my family history and genetic load) and given me a life worth living.
The infamous bottom line. Our political and economic overlords are not going to allow you to make any REAL changes in the System and they have the guns and the police on their side. The System will collapse because it is unsustainable. Get out of the way and save yourself, your family, and as many of your local community as you can. If you can build local alternatives along the way, so much the better. There are plenty of us still doing this.
Quote
The infamous bottom line. Our political and economic overlords are not going to allow you to make any REAL changes in the System and they have the guns and the police on their side. The System will collapse because it is unsustainable. Get out of the way and save yourself, your family, and as many of your local community as you can.
Unquote
I agree which is why am emigrating
Collapse can take decades
Or nuclear war but don’t want to be here for that
We cannot even get rid of unpopular senators our system is so controlled by donors
We fled in 2018. We started the process in 2014 and did a scouting expedition to southern France and Spain in 2015. It took us three years to sell our little 5-acre farm but we finally got out. We closed on May 7th and were on a plane to Portugal on May 9th. We investigated Portugal and Spain again, but fixed on France. We are in the Ariege, in the foothills of the Pyrenees at 500 meters. Several reasons for this. The Ariege has plenty of water and looks like western Oregon in its greenness. We have a stream at the bottom of our property and Montsegur, the last stronghold of the Cathars to be taken, is visible from the house and garden. 500 meters is a good altitude to be a little cooler in the summer but still have a long growing season. There are plenty of farmers markets here and the tree cover is mixed forest, with plenty of deer, wild pigs, acorns, mushrooms, etc. I have adapted many of my landrace crops to this new soil structure and even built up some new varieties. Since we are residents, we have high quality, low cost healthcare. We are both in our mid-70s and our social security checks go much farther here. France has its downsides of course, but it has been a net gain. I encourage you to get out. Some other countries may be even cheaper, but we picked France because it is a rural country that is a net exporter of food. My partner always wanted to live here too.
After Dubya was (s)elected in 2004, I started working on immigration paperwork, and was out by mid-2006. Best move I ever made!
Thank you for expounding upon the weaknesses of this analysis, better than I'd be able myself, though it screamed out, particularly from the oversimplified, bifactor analysis and clunky framing.
Here's what I've learned paddling Class V whitewater in my kayak. You go where you look. The surest way to end up in a huge hydraulic reversal (we call them 'holes') is to focus your gaze on that. You'll go right into it.
We seem to have an entire elite class with brainworms, who long for collapse because they are bored, or otherwise have no meaning in their lives. We could instead focus those intellectual resources on refinement of renewables/nukes -- but instead we spend incredible energy screaming about a collapsing world.
We will go where we paddle. And where we look.
Legends, at least Greek stories are suitably mind-sized... great post, no real predictions, more a matter of scenarios. Thanks.
NB. The food industry is a large item in advanced modern economies (GDP) and is much larger than primary agriculture which is only 4% of global GDP.
Am thinking though of the Liebig Minimum concept, used in deriving mind-sized scenarios in Agriculture, perhaps having wider application. Primary food production still relies essentially on solar energy, hydrological and soil (nutrient) cycles, climate etc. Each of these factors presents a minimum condition for obtaining any harvest. Modernity has presented a further 'minimum' condition for modern harvest yields, where fossil fuels and an industrial economy allow input from machinery, synthetic N fertiliser, 'timing' etc... These modern inputs were until very recently unavailable in a previous solar-based agriculture, previously serviced by what was the conveniently much larger biosphere, the latter's physics and chemistry and life.
Almost impossible, but I am trying to get my head around risk-based scenarios for 'Liebig Minimums' making their critical appearance geographically on future time-lines, depending on the scenarios you have so usefully provided.
If Philip you’re over 45 yoa you’ve probably little to be concerned about except inflation. Our heating planet is a slow burner, and may amount to not much in the scale of things.
For those under 45 yoa there are any number predicaments pushing humanity towards the bottleneck of ecological overshoot and the great simplification. Many of those predicaments have number of tipping points. But they’re all bound to one thing. There’s myth going around that the population is falling it’s a lie, the of births globally maybe falling but not the trend, that’s still heading towards 10 billion within this century. In the meantime as more planet eaters are birthed causing consumption of energy in the form of FREE FINITE Flammable Fossils and key raw materials to be depleted at ever increasing amounts the inevitable result will be that ecological bottleneck happening sooner.
To understand this and the elephant in the room of taboo a subject, view Dr. Sofia Pineda Ochoa’s (free to view on YouTube) 2025 documentary film “GREENWASHED”, you can find it with your favourite web browser if you search for: “Dr. Sofia Pineda Ochoa - GREENWASHED | Full Documentary [Official]” but a warning the documentary does contain some distressing and disturbing scenes, from the start🤔
It would take too long to debate all your points. Demographic momentum is possibly even likely to peak at 10 billion, but the range of per capita demand (consumption) of fossil energy is so large as to make the issue of the 'total' population to my mind a bit beside the point. The numbers are easily verified online for different economies / polities. Per capita consumption in modern America works out as double most places, and it is very uneven even in the most profligate polity on earth. And per capita it is as much as orders of magnitude larger than some very much larger populations elsewhere.
I have been following climate change science for 40 years, and every time I looked up the likely disturbances in the near term were worse than predicted. There are some incredibly smart people trying to get the science round this. Some tipping points seem inevitable as you say, but we can only hope 'the when will be later. Take AMOC; even under 'low emission' scenarios the probability of collapse could be as high as 22%. North America might figure that it won't affect them much? Who knows? The future is very unevenly distributed as the saying goes.
You'r right though, I won't see it. I won't be around. I'm 85 next week. Smile.
Philip, I haven’t denied that the planet is heating, and I don’t question your 40 years experience of following the science of heating planet. I’m not an academic or scientist but I do choose my sources carefully. I’m just a pragmatic realist and observer of the facts, and that comes from formally being a successful professional engineer.
Whether FREE FINITE Flammable Fossils can maintain supply in meeting demand beyond 2035 I have my doubts, but I’ll give you the benefit of the doubt, but that only exacerbates the predicament humanity is in.
The heating planet debate has been lost, it’s now seen as a weather problem, a problem to be managed though adaptation. CO2 related planet heating became a significant political and public issue in the late 1980s and early 1990s with rising scientific consensus. But those institutions and NGO’s responsible for getting the public to believe in it have been sadly lacking. If you’d viewed “GREENWASHED” You’d have heard this:
Chris Packham- “GREENWASHED” - “One of the problems we've got at the moment is that we've invested a lot, and we believe that we are reliant upon the NGOs, sometimes the charities, the campaigning organisations of yesteryear. But a lot of those bodies are not up for the fight. A lot of those bodies won't even admit that what they've been doing hasn't been enough, because they've been telling us for a long time that we're in deep trouble, but they've done nothing about it. And if they've tried, they haven't achieved it. Because they haven't been trying hard enough. They haven't been using the right methodology. They haven't reviewed their methodology. They've carried on with the same methods that haven't worked, and they've got flabby, and they've got lazy, and they've lost their edge. They're terrified of stepping out of line. They're terrified of getting criticism. They've integrated themselves with all the wrong bedfellows. They're sleeping, sometimes, with the enemy. And when it comes to significant issues, such as biodiversity loss and how we address that, human population growth and how we address that, and the continued reliance on fossil fuels, they are simply not taking the fight.”🤔
And Happy 85th Birthday Phillip, for next week 🎉🍺🍷
I think I agree with all of that. Ugo has reminded us fairly recently about 'Greens' going from pacifist to war-party in Germany for example, which seems a change of focus revealing perhaps an authoritarian psychology?
Likewise, it appears Ugo's scenarios and some version of LTG / peak industry etc. are playing out with their peaks within the next 50 years.
My point assumes that the globe has a disturbed climate now and that increased disturbance is inevitable because it is already in the pipeline. Some places are going to be hit very hard from time to time and are increasingly unlikely to have the means of recovery.
My guess is that the global industrial interconnected system is going to break from time to time, might even be breaking now... see examples in geopolitics... and that, for example, privileged high income populations and modern life-security, publicly secured welfare for example, will be degraded. Some places - unknown just now - will do much better under these circumstances than others. We might do risk assessments.
Like Nate Hagens at the Great Simplification, my fear is for the biosphere and the creature world already under multiple threats from industrial civilisation, not just climate change.
Many thanks Barry. May all your years see happiness!
Of course, all models are flawed, but that seems to get worse the simpler the model.
In particular, declaring that fossil fuel and so-called "renewable energy" are independent of each other seems like a fatal simplification, guaranteed to provide nonsense results.
In my first college ecology class, some decades ago, I used the logistics equation to model human population as the predator and fossil fuel as the prey. It did not have a happy ending — no matter how you tweaked the initial numbers, the prey went extinct and then the predator starved.
I'm not so much a "doomer" as a "realist".
We don't have a way to feed 8.3 billion humans on renewable energy. We don't have a way to make the steel, cement, and plastic that is needed by renewable energy sources without fossil fuel. We don't have the copper, lithium, or precious minerals to replace the fossil fuel system with renewable energy.
If you don't think this is a problem, I can't explain it better than The Honest Sorcerer: https://thehonestsorcerer.substack.com/p/2025-the-year-of-peak-everything
With the expensive exception of green hydrogen, renewables produce electricity, but aren't very efficient at making heat. We can't recycle the initial generation of renewable sources into the second generation without heat.
We already have the WORLD3 model. Anyone can download it and run it. It has dependencies and feedback, unlike the overly-simple model presented here.
I'm certain Ugo understands this, so unless he was being purposely provocative, I can't understand the decoupling of the two energy sources.
Of course, all models are flawed, but that seems to get worse the simpler the model.
In particular, declaring that fossil fuel and so-called "renewable energy" are independent of each other seems like a fatal simplification, guaranteed to provide nonsense results.
In my first college ecology class, some decades ago, I used the logistics equation to model human population as the predator and fossil fuel as the prey. It did not have a happy ending — no matter how you tweaked the initial numbers, the prey went extinct and then the predator starved.
I'm not so much a "doomer" as a "realist".
We don't have a way to feed 8.3 billion humans on renewable energy. We don't have a way to make the steel, cement, and plastic that is needed by renewable energy sources without fossil fuel. We don't have the copper, lithium, or precious minerals to replace the fossil fuel system with renewable energy.
With the expensive exception of green hydrogen, renewables produce electricity, but aren't very efficient at making heat. We can't recycle the initial generation of renewable sources into the second generation without heat.
We already have the WORLD3 model. Anyone can download it and run it. It has dependencies and feedback, unlike the overly-simple model presented here.
I'm certain Ugo understands this, so unless he was being purposely provocative, I can't understand the decoupling of the two energy sources.
dear jan steinman steel is already made with renewable energy in some places it is called green steel and if we overbuild renewable energy we will have more abundance than that fossil fuels ever did give us read dr nafeez ahmed blog called age of transformation greetings aaron and happy newyear to you
Those numbers are really hard to get.
It looks like fossil-fuel-free steel was first made in Sweden in just August of 2021, and very little of if is made fossil-fuel-free today, with wildly varying estimates from less than 1% to 15%. The low numbers came from news sources, while the higher numbers came from environmental proponents.
https://www.cbc.ca/news/science/fossil-free-steel-1.6146061
I have nothing against "green steel". It's just that the reputable data I've seen indicates it is not cost-competitive while natgas and coal are cheap.
but ugo bardi how can we all survive in the scenario make elon musk happy it will take years to build renewable energy infrastructure what will keep us alive in the meantime than ?
John Michael Greer, would tell you we’re already in the throes of the collapse of global industrial civilisation, as reflected in his books “The Long Decent” and “Collapse Now and Avoid the Rush”. But to really understand what happens when the power goes off and trucks stop running there’s Kurt Dahl’s “An American Famine” but I suggest anyone considering reading it should first read Alice J. Friedemann’s book “When Trucks Stop Running” to understand the immensity of that, should it ever happen.
So, choose your collapse of global civilisation, predictably all the options are there, but for the majority it’s economically clinical considering billions would die, or killed by others to survive, in what would effectively be degrowth on a massive scale, a regression towards a 17th century feudal lifestyle. The majority of writers would see this as too doomerish and so regression would take place without a scream, a whimper or a drop of blood spilt, no one murdered, raped, or adult or child dismembered, contrast that with Kurt Dahl’s view as depicted in his book “An American Famine” —
In the shadowed years from 2028 to 2048, as America's fragile empire crumbles under the weight of insatiable consumption and ecological ruin, “An American Famine” unleashes a nightmarish chronicle of societal disintegration that claws at the soul. What begins as an insidious downward spiral. Supply chains fracturing, farmlands withering into dust, and cities swelling with the desperate and the destitute; escalates into a cataclysmic year of 2038, where the grid fails, marauding gangs descend upon the starving masses, and the veneer of civilisation shreds to reveal the primal beast within humanity. Through a mosaic of shattered voices; widowed mothers clawing through rubble for scraps, once respectable men turned cannibals in the flickering light of burning suburbs, and hollow-eyed survivors bartering their last shreds of humanity. Kurt Dahl paints a harrowing tableau of anarchy's embrace, where famine doesn't just empty bellies but devours the very essence of the American dream, leaving only echoes of screams in the endless, barren night.
But how has humanity got itself into this predicament of having the poly and meta-crisis force it into the bottleneck of ecological doom resulting in the great simplification, for an answer to that you need to view Dr. Sofia Pineda Ochoa’s (free to view on YouTube) 2025 documentary film “GREENWASHED”, you can find it using your favourite web browser if you search for:
“Dr. Sofia Pineda Ochoa - GREENWASHED | Full Documentary [Official]” but a warning the documentary does contain some distressing and disturbing scenes, from the start🤔
E&OE
Have tried electrifying the production of flat glass? Let me know.
You are probably right Peter, but shouldn’t there be a: you, and an: if so. Just saying🤔
Another challenging yet informative essay, Ugo! Yes, let's turn our attention to managing a global collapse because it is the field itself that is failing, not just the objects in it. But how are we preparing so far? It seems that we are not making sure all of humanity has the bare minimum to survive what is coming. It seems we are purposely being triaged so the poorest third of humanity will starve first. How will that play out which we remain on Scenario path of Too little, too late?: https://www.ngfs.net/ngfs-scenarios-portal/
It's not only about renewables. It is a lot about getting through the end of economic growth and the geo-politics of maintaining power...
https://open.substack.com/pub/thehonestsorcerer/p/2025-the-year-of-peak-everything