Are YOU Ready For Collapse?

Recently I have seen a string of articles and videos that repeat the same basic theme - that within the next 5 years we face umpteen different symptoms of collapse. I don't like attempting to attach timelines to any of this, and so I am simply repeating the theme that I see in all of these articles - none of this is my own assessment. I will say that I agree with the assessments. We're running out of road, folks. As for whether anyone is ready or not, I think very few if any truly are. We've been discussing this for decades, now the time is drawing near for issues to develop that will be extremely difficult for society to deny (although people still will because that is what we do).

I mentioned most of all this in my recent article about our actual reality. Still, the warning bells are getting louder. This article from Alice Friedemann mirrors my own feelings about the situation, quote:

"The only way I can see this being prevented or the end of oil delayed a few years, is if a government has already developed effective bio-weapons and doesn’t care if their own population suffers as well.

I feel crazy to have just written this very dire paragraph with just a few of the potential consequences, but the “shark-fin” curve made me do it!

Even though I’ve been reading and writing about peak everything since 2001, and the rise and fall of civilizations for 40 years, it is hard for me to believe a crash could happen so fast. It is hard to believe there could ever be a time that isn’t just like now. That there could ever be a time when I can’t hop into my car and drive 10,000 miles.

I can imagine the future all too well, but it is so hard to believe it.

Believe it."

It is difficult to believe, isn't it? Part of this is because we don't want to believe it. I'm not sure I'm concerned about being able to hop in a car and drive 10,000 miles. I'm more concerned about the supply chains that provide all of our everyday needs. While I'll miss the ability to go on trips to the mountains, I can still be happy as long as the medical supplies and food doesn't run out. Electricity would be nice too, although I'm well aware of what collapse means - that nothing can be taken for granted. Once medical supplies can no longer be guaranteed, disease will skyrocket. It is important to keep in mind that collapse is not a single event over a short period of time. It is a long-term loss of complexity. Sure, a nuclear war would reduce industrial civilization very quickly through a nuclear winter. But even that would take months to play out, if not years. 

While writing this, I came across this article from Ugo Bardi saying more of the same. Many people within the overshoot/collapse community are talking louder and louder about it. Here in this article from Eric Lee, he explains what transformity is and why it matters. Basically, this is the biophysical reality of the economic system. There are some key quotes in the article, including these three, the last one cracked me up:

"Modern Techno-Industrial (MTI) society is an entropy maximizing dynamic, a dissipative, complex, adaptive system that selects for its dissipation (its end like all whirlwinds end), i.e. is not evolvable for the same reason a whirlwind or metastatic cancer within a somatic system (body) is non-evolvable."

"Gold is a scarce natural resource. So are fossil fuels (of much higher transformity than biomass [wood, food]), which should have been mostly left in the ground and sipped on for the next million years instead of being dissipated by trains, planes, and automobiles (and cargo ships and military transport)… and to make vast quantities of consumables to maximize growth in the 20th and 21st centuries to perhaps insure the Anthropocene mass extinction event will rival that of the Permian (but modern humans are not smarter than yeast nor are they adapted to one-off plague-phase overshoot, i.e. yeast just sporulate and modern humans will just die-off — sorry about that)."


"Hall is the founder/instigator of today’s best-guess science-based economics, which has yet to replace conventional pretend economics at all levels (from high school AP classes to elite universities) for some lack of reason. The science of economics is called BioPhysical Economics, bitches."

The word "bitches" had me in stitches! It's only too true about most economics being pretend science, and most of us have known this for a long time. Infinite growth on a finite planet just doesn't compute no matter how one looks at it.

Meanwhile, while writing this, I came across a couple of brand new articles also adding to the mix, including this one from Gail Tverberg. Another excellent article from Art Berman likewise provides articulation and analysis about these upcoming changes. 

Strangely enough, most of society seems to be caught up in politics and nonsense - bread and circus. Locally, talk still focuses on growth despite the reality that there hasn't been any real growth since 2018, before the pandemic. People know this, being that their paychecks may have gotten bigger but have not made up for the increase in prices on necessities at the same time taxes have also gone up. So, while gross pay for many has gone up, net income is still down. While people know intuitively that the economy isn't doing well (with a continuous stream of restaurant and retail bankruptcies), what we constantly hear from the news is that inflation is easing, the economy is great, and hundreds of thousands of jobs are constantly being created. Of course, this is the narrative that the mainstream media wants expressed, but the actual reality is that economic growth, growth in jobs, and "prosperity for all" are over. 

The trajectory is going to be downward for most everyone with the possible exception of those at the top - the billionaire class - who are busy extracting wealth from the rest of us at record rates. This is known as catabolic collapse, made popular by John Michael Greer. He's also famous for the maxim, "Collapse now and avoid the rush!" Many different articles can be found regarding this phenomenon, but here's the wiki for it. Surprisingly, I even found a song for it! To be honest, it reminds me of this song by Rapination and Kym Mazelle. In the first article by Greer, he points out just how long collapse has been ongoing in the United States, quote:

"The date in question is 1974.

That was the year when the industrial heartland of the United States, a band of factories that reached from Pennsylvania and upstate New York straight across to Indiana and Michigan, began its abrupt transformation into the Rust Belt. Hundreds of thousands of factory jobs, the bread and butter of America’s then-prosperous working class, went away forever, and state and local governments went into a fiscal tailspin that saw many basic services cut to the bone and beyond. Meanwhile, wild swings in markets for agricultural commodities and fossil fuels, worsened by government policy, pushed most of rural America into a depression from which it has never recovered. In the terms I’ve suggested in this post, the US catabolized most of its heavy industry, most of its family farms, and a good half or so of its working class, among other things. It also set in motion the process of catabolizing one of the most important resources it had left at that time, the oil reserves of the Alaska North Slope. That oil could have been eked out over decades to cushion the transition to a low-energy future; instead, it was pumped and burnt at a breakneck pace in order to deal with the immediate crisis."

Many people aren't aware of this fact. Even the folks who lived it may not have really understood why all the factories were moved to other locations of the world where labor was cheaper and environmental laws lax or nonexistent. It was the end of the innocence for many people. 

Even Peter Zeihan is getting in on the action, although he appears to be convinced that it's just a "Mexican" thing. This is what I find humorous...the obvious bias going on with certain analysts. For instance, I often see different videos or articles with Dmitry Orlov going into his view of collapse in the USA, and while he is correctly critical of the US in many respects, he seems to be blind that collapse is going to affect people everywhere (including Russia), not just the US. It most certainly won't be distributed evenly or at the same time, but affect everyone in one way or another it definitely will. While it may be true that Russia is better prepared for collapse, especially since they already went through a major one, this doesn't mean that some consequences will be escaped altogether. Still, Russia is much better prepared culturally I think, to weather most aspects of collapse.

That brings us to the final aspect of all of this - belief. As Dave Pollard points out here in one of his recent articles, we believe what we want to believe despite the facts, quote:

"I have long argued that we believe what we want to believe — what fits with our existing, conditioned worldview — not necessarily what aligns in any way with the facts or evidence, i.e., with what we ‘see’. That doesn’t mean that we’re all witless. There are sound evolutionary reasons why human brains are conditioned to find patterns and to disregard what doesn’t fit with those patterns — to dismiss things and not ‘see’ them at all if we can’t ‘make sense’ of them."

There is much more to that article; I highly recommend reading in its entirety. Understanding where we truly are based upon the facts rather than hype is important. The rosy stories are about to end, as this article from 2023 explains, quote:

"The most crucial development in global oil markets is depletion in the Permian basin. We first warned about this in 2018, predicting the Permian would peak in 2025. In retrospect, our analysis was too conservative. We now believe the basin could peak within the next twelve months. The implications will be as profound as when United States oil production peaked in 1970, starting a chain of events ultimately sending prices up five-fold over ten years. If we are correct, this could not come at a worse time for oil markets: inventories are tight, production in the rest of the world is declining, and investors are incredibly complacent.

Whenever we make long-term thematic predictions, we construct a road map of things we should expect to see. Since price is rarely a good proxy for fundamentals, we need hard data that confirms we are going down the right path, even during the inevitable periods when the oil price is moving against us. Based upon our original work back in 2018, we concluded the Permian would roll over once operators drilled most of their best Tier 1 locations. Before peaking, per-well productivity would fall as operators drilled lower-quality inventory. This is what has happened. For the first time, productivity per lateral foot registered a 6% year-on-year decline in the Permian. According to our models, this proves the industry has drilled its best wells; basin-wide production decline is likely not far behind. With the Eagle Ford and Bakken unable to grow over the last eighteen months, once the Permian rolls over, the shale revolution will shift from growth to decline, and Hubbert’s Peak will re-emerge with a vengeance."

Once again, take some time to enjoy this time we have before conditions worsen. Reconnecting with nature is a sure way to feel good at the same time, so if you need some inspiration, places like the McNeel Mill as pictured here is a great start!