Energy Collapse

As salaamu alaykum, dear readers! Any new day without a nuclear winter is a good day!

We all had a sense that “The System” would collapse soon, but never connected the dots that indicate it would be by deliberate actions of total morons. And yet here we are, again witnessing the corrupt functioning of the male brain - or is it as well: paretic neurosyphilis: exhibiting dementia and delusions of grandeur - believing they have extreme wealth or power. Remind you of anyone? Those talking heads, a human form, but contorted into that supposed power edifice by testosterone, yet again seem to easily push civilization into needless wars. I had what I though was a great post, which took a lot of work to create, in August 2023, Men Are the Problem, which outlined these male brain issues quite well, but has had only 35 views and two Likes!

As well, control of everything that happens on a macro scale has shifted up the economic ladder, actually very high up the economic ladder, even to certain morons suffering from delusions of wealth. And this is no accident, it is deliberate social restructuring:

“On the largest scale--the entire socio-political-economic system--the buffers against risk have been transferred from the lower classes to the upper class, corporations and insiders, all of whom hold privileges enforced by the government.” (from Charles Hugh Smith: “Risk and Privilege”).

And along that same theme,

“The system relentlessly selects for these predatory actors who are most willing to ruthlessly maximise the Wealth Siphon (α → 1). The sociopaths are successful because they are flawlessly executing the thermodynamic programming of the ‘Strong Enlightenment’ architecture.” (from Steven Newbury: “The Humanist Firewall: Why Good Intentions are Thermodynamically Fatal”)

Yet here we stand, at the edge of what Steven Newbury calls the Resource Entropy Singularity wherein supply of high-entropic (usable) energy falls below the level to maintain a functioning, complex society:

This is where the political economy emerges from the biophysics. When a civilisation hits the RES, it cannot generate real wealth (surplus energy) fast enough to service its existing debts.

It faces a choice:

1 - De-complexify (Collapse/Simplification): Accept a lower standard of living.

2 - Cannibalise: Use financial/political power to strip-mine the future or the periphery to feed the core.

We chose option 2.

Thus the exit from the fossil energy trap is purported to be “renewables” but they are either not scalable in the present time frame or consume too much of declining fossil energy availability to be constructed. We missed that bus, and that reasoning is the counter to Prof. Warwick Powell’s article which I cross-posted a few days ago, “We need more than price controls - A hasty, provisional thermoeconomic response to the unfolding hydrocarbons crisis” Here’s a few paragraphs:

The bottleneck is not merely market structure; it is the dependence of market structure on a fossil metabolism. If that is the case, then policies that merely dampen price spikes while preserving fossil dependence risk becoming conservative in the most literal sense: they conserve the old order at the very moment when renewal is required.

One gets a politics of permanent triage, which mask systemic gangrene. Each crisis is met with a new patch: release reserves, subsidise bills, cap margins, negotiate temporary relief, then wait for markets to “settle.” The result is not transition but managed stagnation, with the public effectively paying to defer a reckoning.

That is why the present moment should be read as one of accelerated renewal rather than merely disciplined restraint. We should not treat the crisis mainly as a problem of inflation governance, when it is equally and more fundamentally a problem of civilisational energy transition. To stabilise prices without transforming energy systems is to confuse the symptom for the disease. One can suppress the immediate distributive violence of the shock and still leave intact the hydrocarbon dependency that makes the next shock all but inevitable.

We are living through the exhaustion of a hydrocarbon-centred regime and the opening of a struggle over what comes next. In that setting, the priority should not be to subsidise fossil normality, even in softened form. It should be to use every available lever to hasten electrification, reduce hydrocarbon exposure and build a more resilient energetic order.

This is countered by Newbury’s article, The Catabolic Correction: Redefining Carrying Capacity (K) at the Entropic Event Horizon, stating:

Most importantly, adaptation requires a massive upfront investment of surplus exergy. To build the infrastructure for a post-fossil world (localised water systems, millions of hand-tools, resilient micro-grids), you need immense amounts of energy. But the crisis is defined precisely by the sudden absence of this energy.

Over the edge of this entropic cliff lies a quandary which is like a quarry from which you mine imponderables.

Bear in mind that the Great Depression was on average about a 9% drop in world GDP, and we are looking at essentially permanent shut-in of over 20% of essential maintenance energy for running the present civilization.

Brace for impact.