End times fear should be spooking the West
Western Civilization has always maltreated, killed, dispossessed and betrayed any trust given by indigenous peoples. Its a Mad, Cruel, Survival of the fittest world, and we human tribes strike against all others for power and glory. We also share our diseases, parasites and vices. All the better to destroy diverse indigenous cultures that are forced to stand up to defend their lives and environments against the one true unfettered global human impulse to invest, rape profit from our industrial culture of today.
In our proudly progressive industrial western culture tribes, we consider ourselves to be rational, pragmatic, self-selected, science — enlightened people. What a lucky fate, how did we manage to pull ourselves up by our successive industrial boot-straps, which enabled all our glorious bloody global colonial conquests, made superior by the seemingly endless bounty of machines and weapons granted by fossil fuel energy, to have achieved now our peak numbers and waste productions of Techo-Industrial Civilization.
I have read various different terms for this, but I think TIC is a good acronym, for in English it also labels a brief involuntary muscle spasm of the face. For now “The Carnival is Over”. We say good-bye to our fossil fuel lovers. And of course TIC sounds like the loathsome blood-sucking “Tick” parasite insect. Other people call it an “carbon energy pulse”. It has long been recognized as a once only TIC fling. Its also the “Tick” of the clock of geological time, as just an instant. An eye-blink of change. Irreversible self induced biosphere collapse, wrought by a spasmic tic of our intelligence.
Industrial man, stress grown in crowded grain-fed cities, does not have the cultural awareness and local ecosystems birth rights, that enable survival on the same land as indigenous peoples do. Without our teamwork “investments” of machines, tools, labor and energy supplies, we are nothing. With them we are environmental bulldozers. Given the total energy needed to run the entire investment, extraction, processing, delivery and waste management systems, there is enormous complexity in this. A lot of jobs as well. Everyone gets a go, to feed on the surplus. A lot of energy gets wasted for the useful energy returns to power our systems of machines, electricity grids, and ecosystems destruction.
I think about this, and I wish I could turn upside-down my understanding of EROI. We left behind our peak TIC growth rate some time back in the 1970’s. Our population and GDP continue to inflate up to about now, but the growth bubble balloon is now very intensely stretched. Our peak growth period of “great acceleration” was also our peak inefficiency. When EROI of oil, coal and gas was really high, and their availability seemed to stretch so many generations beyond, then, the relative cheapness of it all compared to today is astounding. TIC was easily suckered into going into maximum growth rate overdrive.
The growth has stalled, we the suckers are still run by the growth rate fanaticism of governments, banks and finance. The god of money’s interest growth must always be paid. The global owners compete to have their returns on investment. More fossil fuel mines must be developed to feed its fires of waste production. Australian governments say “Yes Sir!”.
Their is method in this madness. The rising inflation price of fossil energy is a creation of increasing demand as actual net supply flow stagnates.
Just as many declining species numbers become critical, their market price rises and we human animals hunt them even more intensely, and more illegally if possible. Ditto with the giant fish factories trawling through entire ocean volumes to catch everything in their nets.
So as the global economy stagnates with inflation and unfulfilled energy demand increases, we will rake the land, mountains, rivers, lakes, ocean depths to find more fossil energy to feed to our machines. Until the collapse is such that all such machines fail. This is the absolute death point of TIC. When there is no fuel left to power our machines that are used to mine metals and fuel. But we need TIC to die sooner than that.
Why wait till the destructive end our global impossible to meet energy demand? Start a powering down plan now. Follow down the decline in births and consumption. Let all fossil powered machines die by not making new ones, not making new mines, rather than force all the present species regime on earth to die first.
Economists still publish that energy is not a primary factor of production. This is still text book stuff. National leaders of developing worlds still understood that fossil fuel energy was the real way to go towards maximum growth, as the secret power behind western oppression, so they also aim to grow their machine powers, and hope to enjoy the same over-lordship rights over nature as their former colonial boot stompers.
The above graphic attributed to M. Hubbert, who predicted the rise and fall of global oil production, has proved wrong in important aspects. Good that he thought of a far flung future. The nuclear energy was his techno-optimistic hopium. The baseline of the pulse seems far too wide. It was never going to be 500 years. More like 150 years, to finish by 2050. A quicker demise from other factors like global warming and global biosphere collapse seem too much likely. And nuclear energy turns out as a barely visible small blip contained inside the much larger fossil fuel pulse. I won’t show any kind of redraw, use your imagination.
Re-buildable energy harvesting, (Renewables) won’t fill the role of hopium given to nuclear energy. RE has not yet reached further than a barely visible line above the baseline, in comparison to the peak energies wasted by fossil fuels. It may continue a little further and higher into the future, if techo-science-engineering continues on for small parts of surviving TIC, only if some of us are very good and very lucky. The parts of RE dependent on fossil fuel energy sustainment, and its mining and industrial processes will fail. Large amounts of extreme industrial heat production will fail or slow to low fractions of former production levels.
Mostly we humans of developed nations are already getting reductions in life years lived from the peak survival times that belonged to the golden age of TIC.
Even today I google economics factors of production, and at the top is
land, labor, capital and entrepreneurship. These can be considered the building blocks of an economy.
Capital meant “machinery”. Which is needed to extract resources. All machines need “energy”. Much more than we humans need food as versatile animal biological chemical machines. When animals starve, we consume ourselves for energy. Our machines cannot. They just stop. Unless they can be run by lower power animal energy.
Energy drives the machines required to get the metals and fossil fuel energy to build more machines, which need more energy. That is “economic” growth. Politicians and business people thought, and still think, that energy reserves were too important to be left alone under the soils and management of other nations and peoples. They have been critical behind the planning strategies of wars, slaughter and diplomacy. These are state secrets, best managed by psychopathic war makers, financiers and bankers. Hidden from general public, by the obfuscations of economic theory, is that the TIC global destruction party (along with much of the biosphere) is already fast ending.
So we end up feeding a world of machines with energy, to power our machine slaves of transport, goods and service delivery to feed our TIC culture. Most of these primary active machine systems depend on diesel fuel and can’t all be run (at the same time) on wind and solar supplied electricity, without massive retooling and systems rebuilds. The total useful energy work consumption (after heat losses, friction, transport and chemical waste loses), our global mechanical systems exergy, has peaked, must fall back down a long way. We will never meet our energy lovers again.
Indigenous peoples survival and management of their ecosystems cannot co-exist on the same land with the intensity of Deforestation, Agricultural Petrochemical Rape, Road and rail landscape carve ups, or the wide-deep mining into the depths of earth required to bring up valuable metals and fossil fuels.
What about the reactions of giving a voice to indigenous peoples of Australia, in the Australian federal parliament? The above cartoon from David Pope, filched off the Australian Canberra Times, says it all. I can’t help but think, that this same reaction also applies in the conservative mindset, to any mentions of climate change, and global resources collapse framings, such as “limits to growth”, biodiversity collapse, and the more explicit impending doom of multiple planetary boundary derangements.
The Lying Opposition Leader, Mr Peter Dutton, now imitates the USA Criminal Trump’s tune of Lies go right around the world before truth even gets its boots on in the morning. His party deserves the biggest “NO” ever possible come the next Australian Federal Elections.
https://www.themonthly.com.au/the-politics/rachel-withers/2023/10/05/peter-rabid
But Dutton was the man who turned this unifying proposal into a partisan game — the leader with the power to prevent this misinformation clusterfuck, but who chose to ignore the direct appeals to his better nature and instead made this campaign a living nightmare for Indigenous Australians, one that threatens to do serious damage to Australia as a nation.
Rumor has it his concern over support numbers for staying on as party leader made Peter Dutton becone a “rabid NO”. A man of strong lying dog political principle. The conservative minds of this world are freaking out, just like the David Pope cartoon shows. The rest of us are also frightened. Our wits end lies dead ahead. Back out of here, at the end of the road for TIC.