Where do we go from here?

The general outline of your near future

Everything is about energy.

The economy, just like the human body, is a self-organized dissipative structure. This means it needs a steady inflow of energy to maintain equilibrium, to persist in existence.

The modern economy is utterly and thoroughly dependent on cheap energy in the form of fossil fuels. It was launched on a supercharged growth trajectory a couple of hundred years ago, it was then hooked up with petrochemicals, and every facet of its complex and interconnected structure that later emerged is conditional upon expansion.

Upon the presence of available resources and means of production that enable a positive net energy return rather than merely equilibrium.

This makes our industrial civilization something of a unique case.

Like every human society, it’s dependent on energy and resources, and like every advanced civilization, it tends towards an unsustainable complexity that finally costs too much to maintain. This sometimes results in collapse, but more generally leads to contraction and adaptation.

The problem with modern industrial society is that it’s structurally rapacious.

It’s hard-coded to grow and expand in a sense that no other human culture throughout history has ever been before. This has in certain ways been “advantageous”, enabling incredibly rapid technological development and expansion and an almost unimaginable control and exploitation of our natural environment.

Adolph von Menzel (1870s), “The Iron Rolling Mill (Modern Cyclopes)”.

Such transformations are historically unique.

Sumerian civilization persisted for almost 2500 years, and was remarkably similar in 3900 BC to its state two thousand years later, in 1900 BC. Moreover, its successors were culturally, linguistically and technologically very close to what came before. The Babylonian Empire emerged about 1894 BC. It practised Sumerian religion communicated through the Sumerian or Akkadian languages, and employed more or less the same industrial and agricultural means of production.

It lasted until the 500s BC. Almost three and a half millennia if you count a bit generously.

A peasant of Sumer in the 4th millennium BC could thus have been transported three thousand years into the future, and he would have found himself in pretty much the same circumstances. The literate classes would even have understood some of his language.

Ruins of Babylon

Industrial civilization began about 250 years ago, and generally changed more in a couple of decades than ancient cultures did over a thousand years.

It’s not going to last fifty years from now.

Our cheap energy is gone. The idea of “renewables” replacing heavy-duty fossil fules is a joke. Even the notion of renewables is misleading, since all of them indirectly presuppose fossil fuels in their dependencies on industrial chains of production.

This means economic collapse in the near future, and likely societal collapse in the mid-term, unless an alternative economic order is miraculously organized.

All of this is what the covid situation is really about. This is ultimately what the climate change narratives boil down to. This is what the war in Ukraine is about.

+++

In the early 70s, industrial civilization hit a wall in terms of easily accessible energy, epitomized by US peak oil occurring in 1970.

Since then, growth in the world economy has been erratic, and the problems have been papered over with a wide array of financial workarounds, which have resulted in little more than nominal growth. Real wages haven’t moved since the 70s.

Stagnation of real wages and the purchasing power of workers

The financial workarounds also enabled a remarkably efficient mustering of resources and energy from the empire’s peripheries to offset local and regional declines within, e.g. the petrodollar arrangement or the global apartheid schemes of the IMF.

This set of responses “kicked the can down the road” for quite some time, but due to the world being finite, the inevitable reckoning could not be postponed indefinitely.

When scarcities can no longer be offset through these financial workarounds, they will first of all manifest as instabilities in the financial economy. In the monetary activities of civilization. In share prices, in interest rates, in bond markets and in the interrelational trust between institutions often codified as credit ratings.

Since money is always a proxy for energy and resources, the net result of these “instabilities” is various sorts of constraints on liquidity. On institutional purchasing power.

As a key example, in 2019, the US repo market “blew out”. This, in effect, meant that the interest rates on short-term lending between major institutional actors spiked, which if unchecked would have brought about a contagious liquidity crisis that threatened the integrity of the world economy.

The covid situation and the near-ubiquitous lockdowns helped address this situation in several ways. First of all, they provided cover for massive bailouts all over the developed world.

But what arguably gave the economy actual breathing space was the genuine drop in resource and energy consumption effected by the lockdowns. They actually brought about a type of austerity interventions across the developed world that relieved some pressure on the various sorts of growth-related constraints our civilization is facing.

The global energy market is experiencing its biggest shock in 70 years. Coronavirus has caused energy demand to plummet, dwarfing the impact of the 2008 financial crisis and leading to a record decline in carbon emissions, a new report from the International Energy Agency states.

Based on analysis of 100 days of data, the IEA projects that global energy use in 2020 will fall by 6% in what it calls a “historic shock to the entire energy world”. That’s the equivalent of losing the entire energy demand of India, the world’s third largest energy consumer.

(WeForum).

The other day, John posed the question why the WHO mass-marketed an average flu as an apocalyptic pandemic.

The most likely reason is that it’s part of the system’s long-term adaptations in the face of resource constraints. That it’s about erecting drastic control measures to slim everything down, streamline energy use, and push out various sorts of excesses before we have an emergency that cannot in any way be managed or mitigated.

In spite of this, the stressors on the global financial system are immense at the moment. The global economy is overburdened by debt, by IOUs predicated on future growth that will never get repaid. This has been “fixed” with quantitative easing for the last 15 years, by artificially creating a low-interest environment, and in spite of this covid-breather, immutable constraints mean that interests rates will go up, strangling liquidity.

This is going to push down the value of bonds, which will hit pension funds, insurance companies and major banking institutions. You’ll then get a self-reinforcing spiral where you need additional contributions to support e.g. pension funds, and governments being forced to step in with bailouts, putting further pressure on liquidity.

You and I will find that debt becomes increasingly precarious to finance, so we can’t invest in property or capital goods as readily. Consumption drops, and with that, asset prices go down. Stocks go down the drain, and debt defaults become the norm.

A devastating global recession seems likely in 2023 or soon thereafter.

The Global Purchasing Managers’ Index 2022 summary

So how does climate change discourse factor into all of this?

It’s not just a simple grift, as many of its critics tend to allege. The climate change discourse functions as a vehicle for the systemic transition necessitated by any meaningful society-wide response to resource depletion.

Its core focus is even partly the same as that of the Transition Network of the early 2000s - namely the elimination of fossil fuel dependence (yet conveniently not of the growth imperative or the capitalist mode of production).

Overall, it also markets a comparatively much more positive prospect for the future to the contemporary consumer in that it leverages our redemptive scientism in its promises of an attractive green high-tech future.

We’ll have flying electric cars, you just wait and see. Just eat your soylent green, steel yourself, and wait for the Green Reset to really bear fruit.

Ukraine?

The West needs Arctic and Russian oil, it needs to control the energy infrastructure, and it’s forced to isolate and corner its Russian and Chinese competitors in what’s increasingly a zero-sum game of dwindling resources.

In light of the very dire economic situation we find ourselves in, why do you think the West happily threw $100 billion to the Ukraine over the last year?

Because we love democracy and would do anything to protect the downtrodden? Or because Russia (and its Texas-sized economy) is actually poised to defeat and occupy the entire European peninsula, and we’re truly in an existential battle?

Guess again.

Oh yeah, and the vaccines. Are they just a simple grift? Maybe.

But why push the mRNA variants so incredibly hard when there literally were tens of other viable options using tried and true legacy technology?

Yeah, it’s dark, but I’m not the first one to realize that a drastic population reduction would go a very long way in addressing the fossil fuel problems and the resource constraints. There are also clear indications of fertility disturbances connected to these pharmaceuticals. And birth rates are indeed plummeting.

An Israeli study shows impaired motility and sperm concentrations after both Pfizer and Moderna vaccination. The safety committee of the European Medicines Agency has also affirmed that the vaccines may cause menstrual disturbances, and Pfizer’s own studies indicate that the lipid nanoparticles of the mRNA-vaccines cluster in the reproductive organs.

The hypothesis that COVID-19 vaccinations influence fertility is supported by a significant and unprecedented decline in the Swedish birth rate during the first months of 2022. According to Swedish demographers, the decline is ”surprising”.

There are similar data from many other Western countries …

(DailySceptic)

It could all just be a coincidence, of course.

So what do I expect for 2023 and the years close ahead?

I think we’ll have a severe financial crisis in the middle of this year, possibly overdetermined by Russian advances in the Ukraine and the net effects of persistent sanctions that lock out Western markets and economies.

There will be governmental collapses and political turmoil as our citizenry’s faith in the institutions is further eroded, with the radical right gaining ascendance, not least due to careful contrarian positioning on all of the key political issues of this historical period.

Religion will probably see a continued revival across the board. I think the mainline denominations will tend to lose out on their close allegiance with legacy institutions to the benefit of both traditionalist factions and fringe alternatives.

And I predict real grass-roots initiatives towards separation and local self-sufficiency to really start emerging. If there’s any hope of political renewal, as well as a rehabilitation of science, communication and education, here’s where it must lie.