Our current oil-fired era, has been nothing more than a brief flash of heat and light, the supernova of humankind’s existence, before we sink back into the darkness whence we came.

Politics aside, we are in a fight to the death. We see only current conflict, but it is just another battle in a century of war.

Trump is just a sideshow. If he was not running this circus, some other clown would be. It was a circus funded by oil billionaires, desperately eyeing balance sheets, when oil, last February, was barely making $60 a barrel.

Then Iran was attacked, Hormuz closed, and the price of oil doubled. Neat huh?

The political deal was done. The Presidency had been bought. The ongoing notion that our planet could be used as an ATM machine was the driving force of those in power. The Iranians would throw in the towel. Except that they didn’t of course.

Yet clear cut as that seems, In the current madness of wars in the middle east, we forget that the dynamics of power and boundaries of the region were changed dramatically by external forces, when the ending of the First World War dismembered the Ottoman empire. The Balfour Declaration of 1917, written by the then Foreign Secretary of Britain, Arthur James Balfour, paved the way for the creation of a homeland for the Jewish people within the Arab territories of what was then Palestine. Palestine was held as a protectorate of Britain until 1948, when the United Nations formally declared Israel to be an independent state.

Quite rightly, they resist the meddling of Western powers, even though (for the time being) they are seduced by the glittering trinkets for which oil is exchanged.

Traditionally Jews had always lived alongside Arabs more or less in harmony. Jews were not oppressed under Islamic law, which specifically allows freedom of worship of all faiths. But the creation of Israel has been an acute focus of resentment by numerous factions throughout the Muslim world and has been the cause of bloodshed for the past 80 years. Massive oil resources across the region have escalated and funded both the scale and the political importance of that conflict.

In 1917 no one foresaw that oil would become the lifeblood of civilisation, and that civilisation itself would expand exponentially to consume it, and become engaged in constant wars to get hold of it. Oil has become critical to our survival.

WW2 was an oil war, America had a vast surplus of it, Germany anf Japan did not. But back in the 1940s, the world was awash with oil.

(Saudi Arabian oil) “is a stupendous source of strategic power and one of the greatest material prizes in world history”. US State Department 1945.

Even though the conflict is not on Saudi territory, the USA is fighting, to keep that prize.

Oilwars cannot be won, because they can only be fought with oil. As oil itself slides into terminal decline, so our struggle to get hold of it will continue with ever-increasing desperation.

This is what we are witnessing right now.

the region is a ticking time bomb, split by religious factions and sectarianism, confined by repression at a medieval level and governed by religious zealots who see their holy oil that rightfully belongs in the land of the prophet, supporting the decadent lifestyle of the west.

Remember the hysteria about annexing Canada? And Venezuela?—oil was the perceived prize.

The obsessive belief that oil will solve the problems of those who have it. Oil delivered wealth, and will continue to do so—for ever. We are mired in debt to enable oil consumption to continue

On such nonsense MAGA was built, to feed the delusions of the fools who believe that.

World industry, wherever it has been carried out over the past 250 years since the industrial revolution, has ultimately enriched those able to produce and deliver the primary energy necessary to do it. A process that started with the coal producers of Victorian England is now in the hands of the oil producers of the Middle East, who are vigorously defending their wealth creating assets in the same way that they traditionally guarded their desert water sources.

Extracted from my book The End of More:

https://www.amazon.co.uk/End-More-resources-humankind-unsustainable-ebook/dp/B00D0ADPFY

This article is an excerpt from my book, The End of More.

“I am inaugurating a program to marshal both government and private research with the goal of producing an unconventionally powered virtually pollution free automobile within five years.” Richard Nixon, 1969

********

“We’ll also fund additional research in cutting-edge methods of producing ethanol, not just from corn, but from wood chips and stalks, or switchgrass. Our goal is to make this new kind of ethanol practical and competitive within six years.” George W Bush, 2007

***********

I propose we use some of our oil and gas revenues to fund an Energy Security Trust that will drive new research and technology to shift our cars and trucks off oil for good. Barack Obama 2013

The fantasy persists today, that we have an alternative to oil. We still do not.

The common thread in such statements was the vital reassurance that technology will somehow bring some form of deliverance and everyone will be able to take their mobile, free choice, oil driven lifestyle unchanged into some kind of cornucopian infinity. It encompasses the strange thinking that universal mobility is the key to infinite prosperity. It misses the point that oil not only supplies the means to move around on wheels, it provides the reason for doing so. Without oil, there will no longer be any purpose in travelling long distances. Wheels do not create prosperity; we can afford wheels because we have sufficient prosperity to allow it. Moving a ton and a half of metal around doesn’t create wealth; it burns (finite) fuel. Yet there is an almost universal certainty that our ability to indulge in freedom of movement will guarantee wealth into our future.

Politics, like humanity in general, is concerned only with the here and now. This is the motivation of Donald Trump, that of immediate greed.

Planning for only 10 years ahead is impossible; promoting plans for mid-century is the stuff of political fantasy by those desperate to hang onto office. Former US president Richard Nixon’s ‘unconventional automobile’ is as far removed from commercial reality now as it was 40 years ago, Bush’s version falls into the same category. All nations face the same problem: there are 240 million vehicles on USA roads, and nearly 1 billion moving around the planet almost wholly dependent on oil. The minute proportion of that number driven by alternative power still cannot function without the subsidy that is in turn provided by the wealth created by conventional fossil fuel energy. Vehicles driven by battery power are seen to show ‘promise’, but just as with ‘unconventional’ fuels, they are entirely dependent on hydrocarbons at every stage of manufacture. Electric vehicles cannot function outside a hydrocarbon infrastructure; they are freewheeling on our hydrocarbon infrastructure and have not moved beyond the preconditions set by Nixon, Bush and Obama. Nor is there any likelihood that they will. Whichever country you are in, think of your present elected government and decide if they will have the necessary ability to rise to the challenges we will face as the transport system, which is so pivotal to the functioning of our modern world, grinds to a halt.

As energy availability declines steeply into the coming decades, the illusion will persist that we have freedom to do anything we choose, and chaos will result from our futile attempts to do just that.

George Orwell: Our civilisation is dying, but it isn’t going to die in its bed.

The current wars are not isolated, they are part of the successive waves of conflict was has been driven by the need for resources, a greed that must grab as much as possible as quickly as possible.

The following excerpt from by book, The End of More, offers a warning that I could not date, but which I knew was relevant, it was not prophecy, because disaster had been building for a century, as wars of resources compounded on one another in a drumbeat of successive force:

our energy wars will go on until we have nothing left to fight with.

Oil revenue has long been adding its own particular brand of mischief to an already insecure world, creating fertile ground for every religious fanatic and aspiring warlord to inflame tribal differences and revolution, whether on a regional, national or international scale. Western armies in conflict on what is regarded as the holy soil of Islam are seen in the Middle East not as liberators, but as promoting wars between Christian and Muslim, fighting over what’s left of the oil wealth of the world.

To quote the political critic Noam Chomsky, during the 2011 uprising in Libya:

“If their main export was asparagus, nobody would care what happened in Libya”.

This is a battle that, when followed to its logical conclusion, will take everyone back to the lifestyle of the Middle Ages, where no energy is available other than from muscle power.

The fight over diminishing oil reserves is clearly seen by many, whether indoctrinated soldiers of the USA, or suicide bombers on the streets of Baghdad or Kabul, as a repeat of the struggle between Christian and Muslim of centuries ago. Ultimately, the conflict over diminishing oil will render it inaccessible to anyone - Iraqi dictator Saddam Hussein demonstrated that when he set fire to the Kuwaiti oilwells after his defeat in the First Gulf war. Without access to oil the commercial system of the world will cease to function. While the oil of the Middle East constitutes only one third of world supply, stopping the flow of it through conflict would immediately shatter the global commercial structure, because it could not be made up from elsewhere.

Oil will never run out, but conflict will make it impossible to get hold of in any meaningful quantity. To think such conflicts will be confined to Middle Eastern or undeveloped nations ignores the potential for wars over every kind of essential resource. Everything we use for life support: food, transport, medicine, and much more besides, relies on fossil fuel energy.

Former US president George W Bush, as with all converts to fundamentalist faith, was inclined to parade his religious fervor to all who might be persuaded to believe him. But his quest for ‘peace’ in the Middle East, which led to the invasion of Iraq in 1993, was entirely focused on continued access to uninterrupted supplies of cheap oil to maintain the American economy.

And MAGAnuts still believe such nonsense

Irrespective of his personal messages from the Almighty, as a Texas based oilman he was aware that a third of the easily accessible remaining world oil supply was located in the giant oilfields of Iran, Iraq and Saudi Arabia, and that it couldn’t be left in the hands of anyone who might be inclined to shut off the oil valves on a whim, or worse still, decide to sell all the oil to anyone other than the energy hungry nations of the developed west. His policies merely followed that of a line of presidents back to Woodrow Wilson in the 1920s, most of whom were aware of the critical importance of Middle East oil in maintaining the power of western industry.

Every warlord throughout history has had a single aim: to take by force the assets of another tribe or country. Whether the acquisitive instincts are being exercised by Genghis Khan, Adolf Hitler or in the ‘peacemaking’ wars of George Bush, the scale of the force used is irrelevant but the aim is constant: to use military superiority to take control of what others have in order to survive and to acquire yet more wealth and power.

If a cause can be linked with some form of righteousness or opposed to a culture that might be pronounced ungodly, so much the better. Invading troops with the certainty that a god is on their side have always died in a happier state of mind. Fascism, communism or any of the brands of religion on offer all deliver the same totalitarian dogma.

It has always been an easy task to inflame the feelings of those excluded from the benefits of good living and incite their inclinations to obtain it elsewhere. Taking someone else’s energy resources has always seemed an easy option, and appropriation of the oil wealth of the Middle East is seen as preferable to the other course of action. Industrial decline and collapse are inevitable if that oil ceases to flow freely and cheaply to run the economic structure of the west. We have created a society that must use energy to move forward and multiply. Growth must by definition continue. We cannot remain static or go into reverse.

The Middle East has been a vortex of oil violence for over a century. When the British army occupied Baghdad in 1917, occupying commander Lieutenant General Sir Stanley Maude said:

“Our armies do not come into your cities and lands as conquerors or enemies, but as liberators. You people of Baghdad are not to understand that it is the wish of the British government to impose upon you alien institutions. It is the hope of the British government that once again the people of Baghdad shall flourish, enjoying their wealth and substance under institutions which are in consonance with their sacred laws.”

His words might just as easily have been spoken by General Tommy Franks, the US commander of the army that occupied Baghdad in 2003. As former CIA agent Larry Kolb wrote in 2007:

“That sounded a lot to me like the rosy assurances our own [American] leaders gave the Iraqis in 2003 not long after we flattened half of Baghdad and then drove our tanks into what was left of it.”

The 1917 liberation was from occupation by the Turkish empire, but the British had no intention of letting go of their oil prize. Instead they found an Arab prince with proven descent from the prophet Muhammad, the third son of Hussein bin Ali, the self-proclaimed Hashemite king of Hejaz in Saudi Arabia. He was crowned King Faisal I in 1921 and duly installed on the throne of Iraq. He was seen as malleable to British interests, and willingly brought a form of legitimacy to what was essentially a one sided deal: 170,000 square miles of semi arid desert in exchange for what was to become the second biggest oilfield in the world.

Having been brought out of desert obscurity, and given a kingdom as a reward for his active participation in the desert uprisings with TE Lawrence in 1916, he eagerly traded the oil rights of his new country for all the powers of puppet-kingship. The elite of Baghdad also welcomed a king who would continue to support their near-feudal tenure of huge land holdings. When the Anglo/Iraqi treaty of 1922 left all military, economic and foreign affairs in British hands, with the right to retain military bases, the country erupted into violence. The Iraqi people correctly recognized this as a retention of colonial powers, and outbreaks of insurgency broke out in all the major provinces of the country.

Times move on but they do not change. We are still in the same mess.

Lawrence knew what he was talking about. He had taught the insurgents the arts of guerilla warfare against their Turkish oppressors only five years earlier, training men to whom fighting was as much a hobby as a necessity. A coalition of Sunni and Shia Arabs formed the Great Iraqi Revolution, fuelled by a fatwa against the British occupying forces issued by Imam Shirazi on the grounds that it was un-Islamic to be ruled by non-Muslims. Cities whose name are now so familiar to us - Fallujah, Karbala, Basra, Najaf and Baghdad itself - were, in relative terms, as violent in the 1920s as they are today, in revolt against what were seen as colonialist oil looters.

The current war on Iran is not a new war, it just another chapter in an old one.

The constant incursion of foreign oil companies into the country provoked increasing violence and unrest and forced the provision of a new treaty with the British in 1930. This led to a form of independence in 1932 and full membership of the League of Nations. The treaty still carried with it the:

“right to maintain military airfields at Basra and Habbaniya in times of peace, and to have unlimited access to all relevant Iraqi infrastructure for the passage of armed forces in times of war.”

This gave the British government almost unlimited rights to re-establish military bases if its oil interests came under threat, and so did nothing to cool the resentment of the Iraqi people.

The additional condition of the 1930 treaty that Iraq should side with Great Britain in time of war served to fan the flames of pro-nazism as the 1930s drifted towards World War 2. Arab nationalism linked itself with the politics of Nazi Germany and found common ground against the British. This led to the establishment of a pro-fascist government in 1936, and an uprising in 1941 that provoked another British full scale military invasion in defense of oil installations.

The British clung to their last bases in Iraq until 1958, when they were finally expelled after the last Hashemite king was deposed, and both he and the crown prince were executed. Iraq was declared a republic and an integral part of the Arab nations, with Islam as the state religion. This was exactly what TE Lawrence had fought for in 1916.

To the east, even without an invasion by the Turks or any western power, Iran had been fermenting along broadly similar lines. The border between the two countries had been vaguely fixed where the opposing empires of the Persians and the Ottomans had reached an uneasy truce in the eighteenth century. Awareness of the power and wealth offered by oil drove the political forces throughout the Middle East, with the growing realization that they held the key element in western industrial progress and military strength.

It is against this inexorable rise in militant Islamic fundamentalism, driven by decades of plunder by western oil companies, that we find the countries being invaded yet again, but this time bringing with them a militant Christian doctrine in conflict with radical Islam, which has the political mindset of the seventh century, and an awareness that without the power of oil, the world would quickly return to just that. The fundamentalist extremes of Muslim thinking sees, perhaps rightly, that oil has been a curse, and a return to a primitive lifestyle would in some way serve to restore Islam to what it was at the time of the prophet. As with all fundamentalist beliefs, there is a desire to inflict it on others, whether willing or not.

A hundred years of renewed invasion by armies seen as western and therefore by definition ‘Christian’ has been seen as a reawakening of the crusades of the eleventh century. Although the original Crusaders effectively only invaded land we now know as Israel, their invasion left scars that could easily be opened as fresh wounds by the inflammatory words of imams and jihadists.

The wealth of oil has placed modern weapons in the hands of zealots – both Christian and Muslim - where the primitive theology of the bronze age has been spread in the ranks of opposing factions.

“This crusade, this war on terrorism is going to take a while.” President George W Bush September 13, 2001

Even after 800 years, the term Crusade is anathema to Muslims, with its connotations of western invasions and conquest of the Middle East in search of plunder and infliction of Christian dogma on ‘infidel’ races. George W. Bush was a gifted ‘foot in mouth’ orator, and this rhetoric was not lost on the Muslim media, which gleefully publicized such a gaffe throughout the Arab world. The Arab nations correctly saw that western industry had to have control of a major proportion of their oil in order to sustain economic output. Modern media guaranteed that words could not be confined, but were broadcast instantly around the world.

Bush headed a country where 90% of the population was armed and where many people of similar religious fundamentalism looked on a high-energy, well-fed lifestyle as a god-given right in a literal sense. The USA has a million men under arms in the most powerful military machine in the world.

Although religious proselytizing in the armed forces is expressly prohibited by the American constitution, it has been tacitly condoned from the top down and has allowed dissemination throughout the military of a dogma that seems to focus on Armageddon and the enforced conversion or subjection of the infidels who happen to live in countries with the most oil, by the use of force or finance.

The American armed forces have traditionally had an ethos of aggressive Christianity. At the entry level to the nine week course of basic induction the acceptance of Jesus Christ as a personal savior was given almost as much importance as the program of physical and mental endurance that would be expected of military training. Condoned at the very highest level, the Christian right was successful in spreading its fundamentalist agenda at US military installations around the world for decades, but the movement came into its own after 9/11 and immediately after the US invaded Iraq in March 2003.

It’s still happening

At a time when the US was promoting the idea that invasion would bring greater religious freedom in Muslim nations, soldiers back from the battlefields told disturbing stories of being force-fed fundamentalist Christianity by highly controversial, apocalyptic ‘end times’ evangelists. They were often able to exert undue influence on junior soldiers by being in positions of superior rank, having infiltrated all branches of the services throughout the world with the blessing of high-level officials at the Pentagon. Proselytizing among military personnel was conducted openly, in violation of the basic tenets of Article 6 of the United States Constitution.

One of the most influential fundamentalist groups was ‘Military Ministry’ whose stated agenda was to:

“pursue our particular means for transforming the nation - through the military. And the military may well be the most influential way to affect that spiritual superstructure. Militaries exercise, generally speaking, the most intensive and purposeful indoctrination program of citizens.” Major General Bob Dees, US Army 2007 Executive Director Military Ministry (now retired)

Military Ministry is a national organization and a subsidiary of the controversial fundamentalist Christian organization Campus Crusade for Christ. It has specifically targeted basic training installations, which it calls ‘gateways’, and successfully converted thousands of soldiers to evangelical Christianity before sending them into theatres of war where the conflict is with fundamental Islam.

Even the senior pastor at the Evergreen chapel at Camp David at the time, Lieutenant Commander Carey Cash, was quoted as saying:

“First we get the military, then we get the nation” 4 July 2005 to the congregation of Grace Church, Eden Prairie, Minnesota.

In a TV interview with televangelist Pat Robertson, Cash asserted that in the battle for Baghdad, where he was a front line commander, he saw incoming RPG missiles being physically deflected to left, right or above his advancing soldiers by a wall of ‘protecting angels’. They also prevented Iraqi tanks from firing on his men, though he failed to offer a convincing explanation of why several men were killed under his command.

While there is no suggestion that the military in general is convinced of such dangerous righteousness or has such unconventional views on the business of warfare, Lieutenant Commander Cash could safely take reassurance from his commander in chief at that time:

“I am driven with a mission from God. God would tell me, ‘George go and fight these terrorists in Afghanistan’. And I did. And then God would tell me ‘George, go and end the tyranny in Iraq’. And I did. And now, again, I feel God’s words coming to me, ‘Go get the Palestinians their state and get the Israelis their security, and get peace in the Middle East’. And, by God, I’m gonna do it.” George W Bush, Israeli-Palestinian Summit conference, Sharm el-Sheikh August 20 2003

The evangelical oddities of the Bush era were subsequently subverted by the common sense reality of president Barack Obama.

Now the Jesusfreaks have returned.

But in the face of entrenched commercial and political interests Barack Obama was able to do very little in any real sense. Promises and agreements made at numerous climate change conferences are reflected as job losses at voter level, lending credibility to the deniers. That is why the politics of climate change is so deeply entrenched, and denial remains ongoing.

Due to the volatility of the current economic climate, political stability has become equally unpredictable, allowing the rise of extremists of every calling. Whether of the far right or left, it is a response to disturbances to the status quo of hitherto stable and prosperous nations across the world.

Everyone has an answer, but few recognise the problem, let alone understand it.

Moderate leaders are fully aware that some kind of problem lies ahead, but don’t have answers, and try to address vague problems, but only from the experiences of their past.

Ultimately of course they are as powerless as ordinary mortals; we have locked ourselves into an economic and political system of our own choosing.

This allows the rise of extremists who pander to the beliefs of their followers, making unrealistic promises, always pointing to a utopian past that has no hope of manifesting itself into a realistic future.

It is comforting to believe what one wants to believe. And any clash of political ideals is readily inflamed by dogma, and conflict over perceived problems can easily be given evangelical overtones by charismatic but evil leaders. Germany’s expansion into Eastern Europe in 1939 was driven by the need to secure resources for the German people. The mantra then was to ‘make Germany great again’. After all, God was with them.

Hitler said so.

We hear the same sinister invocation today, with a list of essential actions that must be taken to make it so. The same emotions are being stirred, inflaming the same people, blaming minority groups for the problems of a country with insufficient indigenous energy to sustain itself, enlisting the same willingness to embrace the doctrines of evil for the greater good of the nation, especially when economic deprivation is the only other option on offer.

Energy depletion is going to cause global economies to nosedive, and there will be a desperate grab for any lifeline of salvation, no matter how extreme.

The pattern is being set.

the new dictators are rising, this time with weapons for worse than last time.

My internationally acclaimed book, the End of More is an attempt at an explanation of the human greed that brought us. here. It does not offer solutions.

https://www.amazon.co.uk/End-More-resources-humankind-unsustainable-ebook/dp/B00D0ADPFY

At the start of WW2, The emperors of Germany, Japan and Italy all made the proclamation that they were going to make their countries great again.

Hitler played with his tabletop city while Berlin burned over his head.

·

‘Downsizing’ isn’t going to be a gradual shift into a state of bucolic peasantry where life carries on as it always has, with a few minor changes.
The slightest slowdown of our current economy by just a few percentage points brings an immediate chaos of unemployment and global destabilisation.

Transport

In the face of imminent global chaos, whether through climate change, overpopulation or energy depletion, vast amounts of money are being poured into development of alternative methods of transportation. Elon Musk, though producing a first class electric car, proposes it to be a vehicle for the ‘post oil’ age.

The basic reality is ignored, that no road vehicle in the context of modern usage can function without an infrastructure that is itself a construct of hydrocarbon. But the electric car adds to the socio-economic complexity of our over-stressed life support system, it does not simplify it.

Yet our focus on such dead ends as the electric car shows that humankind does not have the means to rid itself of dependence on the wheel. While the electric car might appear to be a bright shiny symbol of continuing wealth and prosperity, it is in fact a block of embodied energy, as subject to the laws of thermodynamics as any other construction.

No industrialised nation can maintain its road transport system without the constant input of oil.

And there are no alternatives.

Healthcare

When advocating downsizing, there is rarely, if ever, any mention of the healthcare we currently enjoy, which has given us a reasonably fit and healthy 80 year average lifespan.

A prime safeguard for the health of citizens throughout the developed world is the ability to remove and dispose of human waste and provide an inflow of fresh water. But to do it there must be constant availability of cheap energy. Electricity will enable you to pump water and sewage but it cannot provide the infrastructure needed to build or maintain a fresh water or waste treatment plant; for that you need oil, coal and gas.

Modern domestic plumbing systems are now made largely of plastic, which is manufactured exclusively from oil feedstock, while concrete main sewer pipes are produced using processes that are equally energy intensive. In a downsized society fresh water will have to be carried from its source, and sewage will not be moved.

Doctors

But we are even more deluded when it comes to the medical profession and all the advanced treatments and technologies it has provided to keep us in good health and make our lives as comfortable as possible.

While ‘downsizing’ — a somewhat bizarre concept in itself — might affect other aspects of our lives, it is not supposed to apply to doctors, medical staff, hospitals and the vast power-hungry pharmaceutical factories and supply chains that give them round the clock backup. Without that backup, your medical practitioner might know what ails you, but unlikely to be able to offer you any more help than a tribal witch doctor.

Like our forebears, we also will not have the means to make it otherwise.

Since the introduction of modern drugs and the availability of products that can kill bacteria, we have set out to do just that. Bacteria have had a bad press, but they keep us alive, if only to serve their own ends.

In our haste to kill off or control almost every microscopic form of life, as well as larger species, we have forgotten that bacteria have been around in one form or another for about 2 billion years and possess a collective survival capacity that is far in advance of ours.

The Top Predator

(It’s not us)

On that basis, which is the dominant species? Our attempts at eradication have merely caused them to retreat for a while and given them the means to mutate into new and more deadly forms.

Humanity, at least our ‘western’ developed segment of it, is enjoying a phase of good health and longevity that is an anomaly in historical terms. There is a refusal to recognize that our health and wellbeing will only last as long as we have cheap hydrocarbon energy available to support it. While there are those who profess to welcome a return to the freedom of a frontier society with minimal or non-existent law enforcement, the ravages of the diseases that were an everyday part of frontier life will not be accepted as part of it.

Emergency services

Nor does downsizing appear to apply to the other emergency services we might want to call on if our home is on fire or those of criminal intent wish to relieve us of what is rightfully ours. We might put solar panels on the roof, and banks of batteries to supply power, but a downsized society will not have the engineering complexity available to manufacture a single lightbulb, heating element or the basic components of an electric motor.

Without those, any electricity production system is useless. A downsized lifestyle means a dark lifestyle, or put more bluntly a naked flame society.

Alternative lifestylers seem to have blanked out the detail that fire engines, ambulances and police cars need fuel, and the people who man them need to get paid, fed and moved around quickly. They will not have time to indulge in the fantasy of self sufficiency. In other words ‘we’ might reduce our imprint on the environment, as long as those who support our way of life do not.

The deniers will vent their frustration and anger, and apportion blame and demand that diseases be cured. But there are just too many humans to allow the possibility of a human solution. On a planet with 7 billion people, which has a carrying capacity of around 1 billion, we may not want to admit to an impending die off, but it will come, and within this century.

Without oil our food sources will end.

And with it the sustenance of six billion people, and the hopes of billions yet unborn.

The infrastructure of modern healthcare hasn’t given us immortality, but it has provided the next best thing: long, safe and comfortable lives. But it relies entirely on hydrocarbon energy, and in the future a range of problems will make it progressively more difficult for us to exert control over disease as that energy source goes into irreversible decline. Disease will become more prevalent, not only in localized outbreaks, but at epidemic and even pandemic levels. Modern healthcare systems cannot downsize, they are either there or they are not.

And finally……Democracy

The greatest loss in a downsized economy will be your democracy.

democracy is the child of plenty, privation makes it an orphan and it starves to death

You don’t think much about the democratic state you live in. A few gripes about it sometimes, but other than that, things coast along reasonably well. You vote one lot of useless politicos in, and another lot out. Or maybe don’t vote at all. They never change anything, being swept along by the tide of circumstance just like everybody else.

Your democratic state is an unnatural state.

Through almost all of recorded history mankind has lived under autocratic rule to a greater or lesser degree, always enforced by the threat of violence, either on a personal or collective level.
In the sense that we know it democracy has been selectively planted only during the last 2 centuries, with universal suffrage appearing in different places at different times. But it has not in any sense taken root. It is a fragile concept that we are going to lose as our environment alters and degrades with climate change and energy depletion. Before the industrial revolution, the concept of democracy and human rights did not exist.

It may not seem immediately obvious that our democratic state is dependent on surplus energy, but it is, and in the absolute sense.

We look to Ancient Greece, or more specifically Athens itself for the origins of our democracy, but while Athens in the 4th century BCE had a population of 100,000, living in what we think of as democratic harmony, they also had an underclass of about 150,000 slaves who supported their economy. Slaves had no part in the Athenian democratic process, but they allowed the free time for their owners (men only, women were not part of it) to go about their leisurely democratic business.

Our time differs only through the surplus energy of fossil fuel that has allowed us to enjoy the luxury of democracy.

Democracy is a fragile concept and we cannot claim this as a fundamental human right.
When our coal, oil and gas has finally been used up, our comfortable environment will vanish with it, together with our democratic niceties as we strive to survive.

An energy depleted economy will mean a downsized state and a breakup of established law, because no government can exist outside the boundaries of its own energy range. In that situation you can have no control over your position within your future state or nation, and the way in which you will be governed. The individual details might be open to question, but millennia of past history supplies the outline of our future: weakened states submit to whichever despot can hold power. We will not only have a downsized economy, we will have autocratic rule by someone who has seized the opportunity of weakness and used it for his own ends.

It doesn’t stretch the imagination too far to see that happening right now.

Your home, your town, your city and everything contained within them are constructs of fossil fuel energy, specifically oil, coal and gas.

They are the same heat producing compounds that perpetuate the succession of climate change hoaxes that smash into homes, towns and cities and destroy them.

It is important to see the bigger picture than that shown by the current succession of hurricanes.

By burning hydrocarbon fuels, we have released 200 million years of stored sun-heat. In just a couple of centuries.

Oil is now beginning the process of destroying what oil created. Alternative energy sources will not replace oil, because wind turbines and solar panels cannot build cities. Without oil our civilisation collapses. The exact manner of our destruction is one of the great unknowns, but what we are witnessing now, year on year, is the beginning of our end.

Cities, in nature’s terms, are unnatural structures. We built them by inputting colossal amounts of energy, in particular oil, coal and gas. They grew in size to accomodate our needs, our hubris knew no bounds as their original purpose was sublimated by our greed. Cities became our beacons of wealth and progress. Humankind crowded into the city because that is where the streets are paved with gold.

When a city is wrecked by a catastrophe of climate, we cannot escape the reality that it was caused by the substance that gave the city its original purpose.

The city does not produce wealth, it sucks it in relentlessly. Nothing demonstrates that more clearly than having to rebuild one.

Cities need constant inputs of energy to sustain them, and that is where the finite power of humankind fails. We expect rebuilding to happen as a financial transaction: hand over enough cash, and the shattered city will be restored to what it was. Few realise that money is a token of energy exchange, and has no value in itself.

The only function of money is to buy energy in one form or another. If there’s no energy available, then money has no value.

To rebuild a city, there must be sufficient momentum in the national infrastructure to provide it the energy to do it.

That momentum can only be sustained if there is enough fuel in the industrial system to keep ourselves employed. That has become our prime function as a species. We turned oil into food, and expanded our population beyond the level of global support. We all demanded employment, and hydrocarbon fuel turned explosive forces into rotary motion. On that simple concept hangs the function of the industrial world; what we created as seemingly benevolent forces are now beyond our control and looming as a threat of extinction.

The wheels of industry are running out of control.

Our cities have become the focus of what we are. We have built cities on the edges of continents, open to the catastrophic effects of climate change that we have brought upon ourselves. But the denial will go on. Demands will be made that smashed cities are rebuilt. The wealth of the past still offers a mirage of a prosperous future where everything will be as it was. As with all mirages, the closer we get to them, the faster they vanish.

Figures around $200 billion are being touted as necessary to fix things after hurricane Harvey. The national coffers can stretch to that this time. And maybe next time. But all government money is ultimately derived from the industrial infrastructure of the nation, which in turn is a derivative of oil coal and gas that built the cities in the first place.

What happens when (not if) the scale of damage exceeds the means to pay for rebuilding?

The energy that built cities during the last century was cheap and readily available. Rebuilding broken cities in our own time must be done with expensive fuels that are in depletion. Most remain convinced that cheap surplus oil can still be made available if only we spend sufficient money in finding it, or develop some new, as yet unthought of technology. That is a delusion.

As climate change hoaxes smash city after city, our energy resources are depleting at an increasing rate. It is inevitable that the means to rebuild them will decrease to the point of nothing. Then whatever nature knocks down will stay down.

Despite political promises to the contrary, hydrocarbon fuels are finite.

The power of nature is not.

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“Each man is locked into a system that compels him to increase his herd without limit -- in a world that is limited. Ruin is the destination toward which all men rush, each pursuing his own best interest in a society that believes in the freedom of the commons. ” Garret Hardin, Tragedy of the Commons, 1968.

The forces of human endeavour have created a global economy that now controls all our lives, but at the same time we have blinded ourselves to the fact that those same forces are also making collapse inevitable.

We have ignored the warnings of nature, science and common sense in our pursuit of more: more people, more fuel, more food. Each drives the others into excess in the name of progress and prosperity; it is the triumvirate that governs our chances of survival.

But there is a fundamental law of collective survival: if a nation doesn’t produce enough indigenous surplus energy to support the demands of its people, they must beg, buy, borrow or steal it from somewhere else, or face eventual collapse and starvation until their numbers reach a sustainable level.

Despite this, we insist that our economy powers ahead at an ever faster rate to accommodate our demands for fuel and food, without considering the source of that growth, or its consequences. Ultimately, we have behaved like any other opportunistic species; we used energy sources and the food they gave us to take ourselves beyond the limits of our environment.

In our lifetimes most of us have been lucky enough to be spared the horrors of extreme deprivation. Many of us have been sufficiently prosperous to be able to help those less fortunate than ourselves, particularly the people of the third world who continue to suffer famine and live in the most abject of conditions.

Now deprivation is climbing the ladder of prosperity in the developed nations of the west, and that has grave implications for both ‘wealthy’ and poorer countries. For example, foodbanks, previously unheard of in our prosperous societies, are now becoming so commonplace as to be unremarkable.

The USA, supposedly the wealthiest nation on the world, now feeds 1 in 7 of its people through food aid. The current administration seems blind to this reality.

Meanwhile, the perceived wealth of Europe has become the magnet for migration out of Africa and Asia. Low cost and readily available mobile phone technologies show full supermarkets and an apparently prosperous lifestyle in other parts of the world, making mass movement of people inevitable.

Right now, the blame for declining living standards in the west is being placed squarely on the political and financial system. Banks and highly paid financiers have become the scapegoats for all that is wrong with our society, but in truth the problem lies elsewhere.

The developed world has built its perceived prosperity on fossil fuel energy, and the entire structure of what we recognise as civilisation on the conversion of explosive force into rotary motion. The house you live in, the car you drive and the road it moves on are products of fossil fuel energy; your office, factory and every other place of employment and whatever is produced there are also a construct of hydrocarbons, as is the food you eat and the means by which it reaches your plate, and even the plate itself. We take the attributes of our daily lives for granted and believe that, irrespective of our profligacy, they will not only remain constant, but that our lives will continue to get better. But now infinite consumption is driving us into a wall of finite resources.

Our individualistic society is destroying our means of collective survival; food, energy and population growth have combined to form a single interlocked problem that is driving us into an uncertain future.

We have become quite literally the victims of our own success by using natural resources to fashion an environment in which we have been able to thrive and multiply.

We have founded wealthy nations with massive physical and social infrastructures on the principle that continuing growth is good for everyone and can continue into infinity.

Whether hungry or bloated with excess, most of the world population is almost entirely dependent on the energy input and heat output of fossil fuels to produce, harvest, store, and distribute everything they consume. Fossil fuel reserves are dwindling at the same time as numbers are rising, with the forecast being that the global population will reach 9.6 billion by the middle of the century. In order to keep all of these people alive, and with a lifestyle that increasing numbers are demanding, we will need the nitrate fertiliser that comes from fossil fuels and the water that is in short supply, and we will constantly have to try to find more land for agriculture as our soils become degraded through over-use. We have few further undiscovered natural resources to exploit. The planet has been picked clean.

Accurate forecasting of the future is impossible, but most experts are starting to acknowledge that we can no longer assume that life for everyone in the west will continue to get better. Our past provides the best visualisation of how our lives will change when the fossil fuel age comes to an end, and the developed world no longer enjoys its abundance of food and possessions, or its economic growth. In the pre-industrial era we were all self-sufficient in food, fuel and all the other essentials of life. That wasn’t a choice; it was a necessity because the energy sources were not available to allow the large scale exchange of goods and services. Every aspect of commerce was controlled by natural forces; our economy could only function at the speed of hoof and sail.

Although there has been international trade throughout recorded history, ships carried only a few hundred tons of merchandise and could sail only at the mercy of winds and tides. Even ships engaged in ocean going trade were still governed to an average pace of a fast walk. Broadly speaking, with the exception of a privileged few, people did not travel because the effort expended outweighed the rewards gained.

The concept of secure employment as we know it didn’t exist. A man was hired to carry out a specific task such as bringing in the harvest, paid for his labour, and then had to seek new work. Essentially that is (by our definition) a zero hours contract; suddenly it has become a familiar term again in our current job market. If you wanted a trade you had to pay for an apprenticeship. Skills had a value and were sold as training opportunities to those who could afford to buy. Is this all sounding familiar?

As cheap energy ceases to be readily available, this will decline, as will all the services we currently regard as free.

We can already see the signs of change in the rise of contract and freelance employment, global shortages in supplies of basic foodstuffs, and the frantic attempts to find replacements for fossil fuels. That is only the start of what promises to be a traumatic period of transition.

That transition will not be peaceful.

we cannot accept that our problem is not a political one. but a shortage of cheap surplus energy to sustain the lifestyle we perceive as our right.

This is what motivates the MAGAnuts and asteroid miners…..

but our energy sources are only half the problem

dissipation of those resources in the form of affordable goods and services is the other half.

and that means much more than cheap petrol. And where the whole system unravels…

it means cheap everything—food, healthcare–schools–you name it.

cheap is what we had for the past 1-300 years, now theres no cheap left. All we have is infinite debt which will collapse the system…

And 300 years ago, this is how this (cheap energy) mess kicked off:

This is where it started, when it started, and why, the whole mess of industry, and the names of the men who started it, (and how we all eagerly joined in the great burning) the entire world was turned into a cash asset, supplying infinite resources . Except that our world doesn’t do infinite.

it was a great confluence of geology and geopolitics. It literally put the world to work

unfortunately very few people believe that–convinced by trumpnuts (they have been around for at least 100 years btw) that the planet Earth is just an ATM machine that will continue to deliver wealth if only we blame our current problems on others, and kill/deport them in sufficient numbers.
(check Germany in 1933).

ICE are doing now PRECISELY what Hitlers brownshirts did then. Instilling fear in everyone.

the supreme court has been bought. (I was able to supply outline info on that a few months ago, my source was very close and precise, and irrefutable)…

Trump is now immune from legal constraint.

This allows the unchecked march to dictatorship, possibly before ’26. This is what ’emergency’ is being created in Dem cities….(just as i said it would…though I wasn’t sure how).

The supreme court has given the don unchecked power, for one reason only:

To sustain the oil fuelled economic system to the last barrel, because if they dont, the economic system, and their $trillions, will collapse. This is precisely why the surpreme court had to be bought.
There will be no wealth, for you, me, Musk or Bezos et al.

There wont be ‘degrowth’–whether that fact is accepted or not is irrelevant..

this is the ultimate future terror. (for me too) This is why windfarms etc are being cancelled. And why ‘climate change is a hoax’. (the gullible swallow that whole) The antivax thing is a diversion to occupy the minds of the mindless. As is all the other foolishness in the same vein.

This is why Trump is, right now, militarizing the state itself, to keep the rabble in check in advance of whats coming down the pike. Dictatorships must have universal fear. Trump has even embraced god to get the rapturemongers on side. Putin has done the same…..both are atheists.

Other nations are doing the same thing. Germany and Japan were just early starters in this game.

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Hitler created the 'S.A.' The Stumabeiltung, which grew into a paramilitary force to intimidate any opposition to his actions, and ultimately government of Germany.

The titles may be different but the purpose is the same.

The intention is to subvert the nation itself to totaliarian rule, In America's case, this means theofascism in an ultimate form, through a twisted and totally corrupt form of christianity, in effect, no different to the church of the inquisition, with enforcement of laws on a par with the middle ages.

Project 25 makes no secret of the fact that they want reversion to biblical law in the absulute sense. A western Afghanisatan in you like. Hegseth patronises a church advocating disenfranchisment of women.

This is collective insanity---already the Smithsonian is ''under review''-----you can be certain that 'creationiism' will soon be displayed alongside reality.

all part of the collective madness.

And why?

Because the 'American Dream' is over. The means to support it are no longer there. They are now relying on Jesus to return and 'fix things' as some kind of divine intervention, so a privileged elite can go on living their lives of 'excess'.

Gullible fools wanted that excess to last forever. The laws of physics apply to all critters, particularly human beings. There will be no saviour to absolve our foolishness and profligacy.

MAGA—-Make America Gullible Again.

Electing a crackpot was a symptom of the problem, not the cause.

https://www.amazon.co.uk/End-More-resources-humankind-unsustainable-ebook/dp/B00D0ADPFY

At some point during the last 10,000 years, someone, probably somewhere in the region that we now call the Middle East, the realisation dawned that food as an energy source could be cultivated, and then stored for longer periods than the time between successive harvests.

Think for a moment, what that meant and its significance to the advance of humankind.

Food, the prime energy base of all species, became an energy source that could be stored and used at will. That gave it tradeable value and created the concept of profit from energy. A degree of security could be factored in to any future beyond the timescale of the next harvest, and, barring wars and natural catastrophe, futures could be planned with a reasonable degree of certainty. Humankind was the only species possessing such a facility.

With food security, the hunter had no need to move around in search food sources. The process was gradual, but the hunter became a farmer,

The hunter does not need a house, the farmer does. Fixed tenure of land requires established dwelling.

So land came to support the house which was built on it. This concept expanded into villages, towns and cities. The bigger they got, the more surrounding land they neede

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After that, human progression was just a matter of scale compounded by time. Control of the city fell into the hands of the strongest, who used it to acquire more, always by force of arms. Over millennia this became the pattern of human existence, expansion and acquisition, usually under the banner of righteousness supported by the current deity.

All wars are fought over resources.

But someone else always had a bigger and stronger army so the capital of the state had to expand exponentially to meet any external threat from others. Retraction was not an option.

Conquest by one power meant defeat for another. This pendulum of capital has swung across the planet for millennia, ultimately with no purpose other than self aggrandisement of one individual by accumulation of capital territory. Loot, in short..

This then, was the origin and purpose of all we know as capital. All that we see in the form of our great cities and vast urban sprawl and commercial undertaking is directly dependent on our ability to store and use energy in its various forms. Usually through warfare and conquest of weaker nations. Our ability to acquire and re-distribute that energy underpins everything we know as capital.

That capital has been entirely dependent on infinite growth. It still is.

But the laws of physics do not permit infinite growth. Prayer does not absolve us from those laws

Tapping into reserves of fossil fuels allowed exponential growth of capital, which was used to support our new way of life and living. It boosted world population tenfold,

We looted the earth itself to increase our capital assets. We all demanded a share of what we tore from the earth. But there was never enough to go round.

It was an infinite demand on a finite resource.

And totally incompatible. Right now we are at the stage where this reality is a stark truth. Our capital-based lifestyle is running out of capital. There is no more to supply what we need to sustain our existence.

Unfortunately we cannot face what this means for our future. So we believe the charlatans who tell us that ‘others’ are to blame for our predicament. Not ourselves.

War with ourselves has already started, to prove that we can have our age of abundance forever. Our wars are destroying that which sustains our existence.

Our age of capital is over, and with it our dream of plenty.

How Hitler cowed the German people

When the Enabling Acts gave the Hitler regime the power to arrest people and disappear them into concentration camps or worse without judicial oversight, Heinrich Himmler came up with what he thought was a neat way to deal with political dissidents: “Night and Fog.”

Terror

People became terrified to resist…the threat to their lives and the lives of their families was very real.

It was designed to instill such terror among the occupied population that it would cause people who might otherwise protest the Nazis violations of law and human rights to self-censor and remain quiet. As Himmler himself wrote:

“The Führer is of the opinion that in such cases penal servitude or even a hard labor sentence for life will be regarded as a sign of weakness. An effective and lasting deterrent can be achieved only by the death penalty or by taking measures which will leave the family and the population uncertain as to the fate of the offender. Deportation … serves this purpose.”

Field Marshall Keitel was equally enthusiastic, writing:

“Efficient and enduring intimidation can only be achieved either by capital punishment or by measures by which the relatives of the criminals do not know the fate of the criminal. The prisoners are, in future, to be transported … secretly, and further treatment of the offenders will take place here; these measures will have a deterrent effect because: A. The prisoners will vanish without a trace. B. No information may be given as to their whereabouts or their fate.”

This is the fate the USA has chosen for itself, just as the German people did in the early 1930s.

Watch is video, and try not to weep for what America is becoming. The tears will flow for the future.

I’d like to add a comment to this, but any words from me would be superfluous

This boy is Ignorance. This girl is Want. Beware them both, and all of their degree, but most of all beware this boy, for on his brow I see that written which is Doom,

it is not possible to reduce the planet to an entirely profitable enterprise if is inhabited by unprofitable people.

We might well call that “Trump’s Law”

Hence the purge on any social program that offers assistance to anyone of reduced means or abilities.

Think about what reduced ‘’means or abilities’’ covers. It means kids not getting enough to eat, veterans in difficulty, people without homes, long term illnesses…and as to brown people in foreign lands, they bring no profit at all, unless it’s in the form of their marketable resources.

i would have thought this observation was clear to anyone studying the business ethos of Trump Musk et al.

check the workplace record.

It is part of the process of reducing people to serfdom.

Our modern welfare system is less than a century old. If you fell by the wayside in previous times you were expected to die with the minimum of inconvenience to everyone else. Trump 's thinking is of that era.

As long as you are fit and well----there is a use for you. If you are not, then your demise will 'reduce the surplus population'

and no---I am not trying to inject sarcastic black humour into the current situation---I am offering stark Dickensian reality of what the American people have voted for themselves.

"oh but I didn't think it would affect me"----well, it does affect you.

Bear in mind that Hitler didn’t seek to rid Germany of Jews. He eliminated, or tried to eliminate everyone he saw as ‘unprofitable’. Also bear in mind that he never went near a concentration camp, There was no shortage of willing volunteers to do his dirty work.

Trump sees only profit in the world, his world. The only world that matters.

The planet is now a cash asset to be bought and sold. We might do well to remember the number of bankruptcies and fraud cases Trump has to his name.

The world itself might be next.

when I crossed the Canada-US border recently — -it took 85 minutes to process me — -with paperwork, passport etc in perfect and unquestionable order, all registered electronically. I’m white and English. I do not pay homage to any god of the infidels. There were no crowds of would be immigrants. It was nearly midnight.

The same crossing in 2006 took just 5 minutes (and we thought that was long time), Each crossing since 2006 has got longer and more obstructionist, the questions more surreal: Was I or had I ever been a member of the Nazi party? Did I intend to commit any sexual misdemeanours while in the USA? Was I entering the USA to abduct a minor?

All questions asked by border officials over years I’ve been crossing.

Who writes this stuff? Smart-ass me wanted to say ‘chance would be a fine thing’. I wasn’t allowed to say that. At least those questions seem to have disappeared from the agenda lately. English mirth and smart-ass answers would not have gone down too well, so I refrained.

Questioning me about membership of the Nazi party back in 2006 was a negative factor. I couldn’t help but think that had they asked the same question now it would have been a positive.

How times do change.

The uniforms behind the desk were doing nothing but pass the time of day amongst themselves, making it clear that we on the outside must wait upon their (eventual) favours.

The policy was obviously one of obstructionism — this has clearly permeated down from the top. Trump has accellerated it, but he is not the source. Clearly it is a collective unease about those unfortunate enough to live beyond the borders of the ‘land of the free’.

Why should this be? Plainly the border is the face of a frightened nation, closing in on themselves to protect what they have from outsiders. It is manifested at that border crossing.

Crossing back into Canada 2 days later (this before Canada was listed as the 51st state) took 30 seconds and a cheery wave and a ‘welcome to Canada’. Canadians are content with themselves. They do not feel threatened. No need even to get out of the car. My scanned passport was sufficient. Being back in Canada felt like a return to sanity, though away from the horrors of the border crossing I couldn’t have met nicer folks in the USA.

(At least that part has always been consistent)

The USA is obviously being consumed by its own collective fears, not only shunning outsiders, (America first?) and inflicting cruelties on its own people as all empires do in the early stages of collapse.

Every adversity can and must be stopped at the border. Climate change? Vote for those who say it isn’t happening, and it will not happen. Withdraw from world climate agreements and anything nasty about the climate will be stopped at the border.

Just as I was.

Denial denial at every level. Climate change cannot happen because their god says it can’t.

Those who live beyond the pale cannot be allowed to dilute the American Dream, there is little enough to go round as it is. Poverty can be kept out and wealth kept in by slamming gates and building walls.

Prosperity is something to be voted for, just as the Germans voted for Hitler’s Ponzi scheme in the 30s — -they had no option but to believe. First he took small steps towards tyranny, then bigger ones that reflected the apathy of the people he was treading on.

Thus are tyrants made by those they come to rule.

Germany was in a mess and Hitler had figured out the perfect job creation scheme — -war. Trumps ranting rhetoric was (and still is) believed. His war threats are constant, he’s got rid of any sane people who counsel against it. There was no real difference between the two — -or any of the other right wing crazies on the rise elsewhere in the world.

They too promise infinite prosperity,

Right now the USA war industry is a mainstay of the economic system, wars are constant — they have to be — Trump sells arms to the world’s worst people. If he gets his total war he can assume total “emergency” control and stay in power permanently.

He has to. When he leaves office he becomes subject to criminal liability.

The POTUS is commander in chief, and he has fired any general who might have stood in his way. The military will fall in behind whoever pays their wages — -just like the Wermacht. Rommel knew Hitler was a lunatic, but it didnt stop him leading his armies.

Humankind is driven by opportunists, they grasp at every last shred of support, even though it robs others. The USA is an overblown version of that. They must now steal to exist. This is why wars are now endless and will get worse as oil supply tightens. But for the moment fracked oil has kept out the reality of oil poverty beyond the American frontier.

Demands beyond the frontiers of America keep the spectre of poverty and collapse out for a little longer

We are now in the process of robbing our own future, and our children’s future. We will leave them with nothing.

This is an insight into where we’re all headed — -borders have never kept out unpleasantness, though dictators have invariably promised that they would.

The conversion of one energy form into another.

A successful economic system requires that conversion process to produce surpluses. The higher the surplus, the more affluent we all are. (ie--higher and higher productivity/wages)

That's where the "American Dream'' originated. It started with the 'surplus' after ww2, and lasted until economic system ran into deficit, which happened around 1970 --that debt ran on for about 50 years, which is where we are now, as I forecast it ten years ago, to be mid 2020s.

it was the denial of reality.

Fossil fuel prices cannot rise because there is now no effective surplus in the system to pay for that price rise.

The incredibly low interest rates have encouraged all kinds of investment in projects that make people happy, but those projects do not truly make more goods and services, and more taxable income.

Trump et al cannot grasp this---hence "MAGA".---there can be no "MAGA'---the lack of surplus means steepening decline.....into commercial oblivion. (that applies world wide btw)

The constant rise of debt/fuel deficit is exactly like taking out ever increasing bank loans, after you've lost your job, in order to convince yourself, and others, you still have actual income.

It also explains the root cause of fascism:

Democracy is the child of plenty.

Scarcity makes it an orphan and it starves to death.

the majority of unthinkers embrace fascist theories, convinced that it will restore some kind of economic equilibrium.

It enriches an elite and impoverishes those who’s lives it purports to improve. History records that time and again.