So money broke physics?

Wine consultant Leon Deans said distillation could be a viable option to remove the oversupply, but may require government support because the cost of distilling the wine could be higher than the revenue from the ethanol.

If you consider that:

• cost of distilling bakes in the thermodynamic and energy costs of raising the temperatures of the wine to separate the alcohol
• the price for the pure alcohol is fungible with the market price of any other liquid fuel or alcohol on a per-energy equivalence

This seems like it’s a net energy negative process where the total amount of energy available to the society drops where you do this. This is exactly why it loses money.

Basically:

• you buy some energy some place
• wine producers take product they already made that has no market value and use the energy input to make something they can sell, using up that original energy
• the energy coming out is lower than what you started with in step 1, but you sell the energy for less money
• this loses energy AND money, but the government subsidies make the money side not a problem

This cuts wine makers in on the deal in a way where the market makes this feasible despite the underlying thermodynamic losses.

NOTE: the grapes and wine that were originally grown, the harvesting, bottling etc also have thermodynamic and material costs that are totally external to this analysis. The farm itself bought fuel when it made the wine, that’s all not ibcluddd into the ethanol calculus. When you consider the total investment with a wider boundary you can start to cost many additional resources like time, water, wages, insurance, financial interest and on and on.

• Comaps for driving / street navigation
• Caltopo for backcountry navigation (has offline maps)
• Trailforks for public recreation trails (hiking, mountain travel, mountain bike)
• Relief Maps for 3D landscape visualization / viewing

The LtG showed that if 1972 population had frozen at that level, there was STILL eventually a crash within a few hundred years.

And they also carefully stated that if you grew population from 1972 to 1990 and then had no further population growth (same idea starting 20 years late), the crash was before 2100. The window for any kind of sustainable population control would have already closed within the next 20 years.

What you’re outlining is a scenario where let’s say it’s roughly approximate to growing population from 1972 to 2022, then DECREASING population growth. Let’s say if we could snap our fingers and put today’s population of 8.3B to 1990s level of 5.3B, well we can already interpolate from the LtG that this doesn’t get us to 2100, they already spelled that out.

You need the following : Population rapidly back to 1990 or 1972 levels, double/unlimited resources, pollution controls, increased agriculture etc. Like basically every variable beyond all the most unrealistic scenarios they modelled.

You’re saying “there is a solution” but I think basically a lot of people would technically need to die somehow, given where we are in this story. So just ethically, no, there isn’t a solution.

The “voluntarily reduced population” was what they called “perfect birth control”. They showed that this led to a crash also. To really halt population growth into a “steady state” you need to place a strict license on reproduction to get zero growth, like an imposed law or whatever.

In the paper LtG 30yr recalibration, the model is validated against historical data and basically they say that the boundary in the original model was running out of resources, but in the revised model it’s pollution, but the limits are still in force. Almost all the other variables are in line to the original model. Resources and pollution are the main difference from the 1972 study, and they diverge in opposite directions and basically cancel the effect of the change in the other, so there is no change to the overall summed together story.

In a bee hive, many of the bees are sterile drone workers that don’t reproduce because the queen is laying clones that are even more related than their own direct offspring would be. So the drone workers genes are being better reproduced by the super organism.

Individual humans share 99.9% of genes in perfect overlap across all humanity. Therefore our genes don’t care about any individual human survival, the push is for growth at a community scale, anywhere. This is a situation with a profoundly different evolutionary drive than anything that Darwin cooked up. For human genetic evolution to occur, how would you drive it without operating that at a network level?

Places like Cuba and Haiti are a natural experiment in what life would look like without industrial agriculture inputs. They are basically producing food on organic small scale agriculture by hand.

Fun fact: Britain has around the same per capita agricultural area as Haiti does, only Britain is using fertilizer and in addition importing 50% of the food sold (almost like importing double the farm area). This amount of fertilizer costs less than 1/40,000th of Britain’s annual GDP.

• Standard run (business as usual) population crash around 2050.
• Doubled resources population crash around 2050.
• Unlimited resources population crash around 2050.
• Unlimited resources and pollution control population sharp decline 2075.
• Unlimited resources, pollution control and increased agriculture population crash around 2050.
• Unlimited resources, pollution control, increased agriculture and perfect birth control population crash around 2090.
• Stabilized earth (no population growth, no economic growth) crash after centuries. [* if you start in 1972. By 1990 it’s too late.]

In general, it seems like LtG scenarios show that more resources or more technology just push population level higher before hitting a crash. And as you point out, the crash is worse (steeper and more severe) the more resources and technology went on and the bigger the population at the point of collapse.

In a way you could analyze LtG as saying that overpopulation is the central issue and there is no solution set to solve population overshoot.

The 1972 Limits to Growth study famously made many of the same exact points. Their computer model projected different scenarios, and none of them didn’t eventually have a crash. They showed that business as usual and lots of population growth would lead to a very abrupt cliff / die-off and they also showed that a much more restrained population growth could continue for hundreds of years in an almost economic steady state.

The backlash from economists was that all the previous claims of a hard civilization limit had been successfully transcended and that models were too complicated to understand and the plan would be downright lousy for the economy. Therefore it wasn’t a problem, or if it was we shouldn’t do anything about it.

If the LtG was correct and the economists were wrong about innovating our way out of a collapse, I hope we have airbags installed in this thing.

The popular understanding of Malthus was that he was calling for a population crash / overshoot.

I think he was saying a more nuanced thing. What he said was that any material improvements that raise the standard of living will be responded to with human population growth and that the growth always increases population until humans are living in miserable conditions again.

He was claiming that technology cannot solve this issue, human behavior sabotages the technical advances. Every technological step that could lead towards a human utopia will be overwhelmed by population and progress was sort of paradoxically impossible.

This is very similar to Jevons who said that resource efficiency causes it to be cheaper to use that resource so humans will use more, not less, as efficiency advances, so technology steps backwards, not forward.

At some point you would expect 2X imbalance to be 2X temperature change rate. The climate system has all kinds of hysteresis, but eventually the system has to find a new setpoint and jump to it.

About a year ago I did a deep dive on some of the economic aspects of the logging industry. There is a major study on the USA industry put out by the USDA.

What I was going to mention was that logging had a particular situation where credit was pretty cheap at a moment in time, so big expensive machines were basically the way to go.

Most logging companies went into debt buying logging machines, trucks etc and it was all managing well until FUEL became more expensive. The cost of running the machines essentially squeezed all the profits out of the business and a lot of companies were basically just squeaking by and paying loans and not much else. I think the entire usa had only about $1B in total industry profits.

This report came out BEFORE diesel doubled in price. It’s going to be like the fertilizer / farming thing where the costs of energy will absolutely cripple the industrial Timber businesses also. They could raise prices and pass along the costs only if consumers have the ability to pay.

I think it’s likely that the marginal timber companies will simply fold. Timber sales that have too great a hauling distance to a mill will just be uneconomic.

If there are shortages of both diesel and fertilizer (and costs go up), it’s hard to imagine this won’t spike food prices.

But if both inputs are not JUST expensive, but unobtainable, it’s a worse problem than prices.

He called Trump the anti-Christ and evil.

This comes from a recent interview you can listen to here or read here.

The absolutely most interesting thing from this interview is not the hash smoking detail.

The part that is more important is that Carlson states early on in the interview that he feels that the American president was being blackmailed by Israel into engaging in the Iran war. Carlson basically comes out and implies that the president is compromised and manipulated and knows it, and he had no choice. He doesn’t specifically speculate on how they are controlling Trump. But he says that he’s shocked at the media failure to investigate this. Its really worth listening to this section of the interview. He met Trump 3X and deeply discussed Iran in the weeks before the fighting.

The only thing that comes immediately to mind is that Israel has the Epstein files and are threatening to release them. But it could be something else of course.

" A competitive descent is more unstable than a cooperative one would be, and nothing in the current system reliably produces cooperation at the scale required. "

Returns to the “elites” in the society come at the cost of the system’s ability to maintain itself.

The “largest rocket” also peaked in the 1970s and is now getting smaller. . Rocket fuel is basically made of kerosene.

Fun fact. Notice that on rockets designed to get farther out into space that the actual capsule is tiny and the rocket is essentially an enormous fuel tank needed to carry all the fuel you need to carry all the fuel you need?

So the fun fact is that if planet earth was 1.5 diameters larger, gravity would be stronger. If gravity was just that much stronger, humanity would still be unable to get to space. Right now, we discovered oil, which had just barely enough energy per mass to allow a launch to orbit. But if gravity was a little more, we would not have any technology that could do it. This tells a story about the limits of human ingenuity. We were just lucky to discover the resources ready to go, we did not invent the resources.

A friend of mine was a social worker in senior leadership for a national hotline that was a resource for youth who were struggling with problems.

Over the years, the nature of the calls shifted away from typical teenage problems around parents, friends, school, dating etc.

The number 1 call coming from the teens was about a sense that there was no future and that older generations were engaging in gaslighting youth about how things are still ok.

For my friend, this posed a major dilemma because it became increasingly difficult to obtain the essential operating fund donations. How do you ask for funding from older generations who had a strong desire to avoid hearing that message?

IMF said the most severe conditions that could lead to a worldwide slowdown would include oil prices reaching an average $110 per barrel this year and hitting $125 in 2027.

Based on these assumptions, the IMF said inflation could reach as much as 6% next year. This could force central banks to increase interest rates to slow the pace of price rises.

IMF chief economist Pierre-Olivier Gourinchas told the BBC a prolonged conflict would lead to spiralling inflation, push up unemployment and lead to food insecurity in some countries.

He warned that even if the conflict ended today, the impact on oil supply would be as big as the fallout from the 1970s oil crisis,

If shit properly hits the fan, I suspect things are going to be way more desperate.

To be a little more precise, people have studied this question carefully at a planetary scale.

The total agricultural production possible in the absense of artificial inputs like fertilizers, pesticides, diesel tractors, cold storage and refrigerated supply chains etc is around no more than 3billion people running off solar inputs and natures nutrient cycles and the amount of land and water available.

Pretty shocking number if you don’t have the context, but here is a place to get started on the information this is based on.

So for example, in the green revolution, land and agriculture technology increased a modest amount, but artificial fossil inputs into the existing technology system increased 90-fold. Most of the gains in food production are because it’s now based on fossil energy and nutrients rather than natural sources.

Currently, today ~40% of all the human food supply molecules come from fossil fuels and are incorporated into the plants and animals we eat.

So it’s not “just” a land management issue, or urbanization. Humanity is literally on artificial life support. There is no simple, survivable way out of this commitment. Fundamentally this is far, far from penciling out any other way we know how to survive. Humanity population passed some threshold for change around 3-4 generations ago.

https://lemmy.zip/c/collapse

In the collapse community people have been aware of a “thermodynamic” collapse of energy supplies for quite a while.

So for example, to mainstream people and the investors, there is something called ‘oil’ which seems like a commodity item.

In the collapse community, worldwide supplies of diesel and heavy oil energy products (shipping, trucking, agriculture, mining and gasoline refining among many other applications) has been in a 10-year long period of decline with major implications for our global civilization.

(Diesel / heavy crude comes from several places globally. The USA has run out but Venezuela and Iran are two heavy hitters for the molecules needed.)

The blockade on the strait is only having any impact because it’s a zero sum game now that nobody can raise production any higher. Like you don’t see Norway and Canada suddenly ramping up and filling demand, right?

I consider this the most parsimonious and cogent world view.

In a short summary: the blockade is an artificial shortage that is designed to collapse and bankrupt the most dependent and vulnerable nations in the global periphery, which is a “triage” that preserves oil supplies for the wealthy nations in the long run. Like this triggers collapse, and then as a second order effect global demand will fall for energy which is in an irreversible depletion event. This is the only way the most developed nations extend their existence through the crash.

This is all an open secret, you can dig into technical papers and agency reports and academic publications, everything will say the same thing. However, this is not really a “mainstream” consciousness.