https://thehonestsorcerer.substack.com/p/2025-a-civilizational-tipping-point

Is his analysis valid? Fracking profitability starts declining as soon as 2025?

Environmental realists know there is no big solution to climate change and resource depletion. As time goes on we all get poorer and humans running on limited information will get angry and demand change. So I predict more one-term presidents of both parties in the United States and more large party shifts in parliamentary systems. Every politician will naively promise health and wealth for just a vote and fail to deliver whether the platform is far left or far right. Expect huge occillations. New communist planned economies in some countries, far right violent xenophobia in others, ultra liberalized corporatocracy in some, global debt balloons, all while the poor kill eachother over scraps in wars, civil wars, and gang violence. Remember this is no one's fault. Earth can't support all of us. We may be slaves on the plantation, but don't forget to dance.

Is it me, or does this make no sense? I thought fracking only paid off at $120/ barrel. Are there subsidies nobody is talking about?

Interesting presentation of produced water issues in the Permian.

https://youtu.be/E0WImM0l3rA

WTI crude oil futures dropped over 4% to $65.5 per barrel on Tuesday, approaching their lowest level since November 2021, after OPEC cut its demand forecasts for the second time in two months. OPEC now expects global oil demand to grow by 2 million barrels per day (bpd) in 2024, which is 80,000 bpd lower than its previous estimate. For 2025, OPEC revised its demand growth forecast to 1.7 million bpd, down by 40,000 bpd from earlier projections. These cuts are driven by weaker oil consumption in China, especially as the rise in electric vehicle sales reduces traditional fuel demand. The prospect of OPEC+ increasing production in December adds further pressure, with analysts predicting a potential surplus in 2025. Despite the overall bearish tone, losses were somewhat limited by concerns over Tropical Storm Francine, which threatens oil and gas production as well as refinery operations along the Gulf Coast.

trading economics

My Guilt Ridden trip to a new Target (USA).

The previous night was a blur. I woke up with my head resting on my Grindr date's hairy chest. I stroked his chest and abs and then told him it was fun and to hit me up whenever because I am DTF. I went to his bathroom with my night bag and took a shower. I like hot showers, there I was using up lots of energy just to wash myself after getting fucked all night. Loads of lubrication was used to sodomize me comfortably. I am a slut for the oil industry. I looked down at my clean thong as it lay between my feet. "At least my underwear consumes less, right?" I wasn't sure. I pulled it between my butt cheeks and donned by hot pink hijab and headed off to the grand opening of a new Target. My Qi power phone holder hugged my iPhone like my anus held my lover's dick last night. I asked Siri to play the Koyaanisqatsi soundtrack. That's my preferred climate doomer jam. I entered the newly paved parking lot, several American football fields in length and width. I parked in the far corner. I had my Nike Airs on and liked to get extra steps in wherever I could. I strutted across the parking lot thankful for my Toyota sedan which was so much unobtrusive than the Karen SUVs and trucks everywhere else. The glass doors pulled open for me, spreading faster than my asshole last night. The guard gave me a look of sexual shock. I'm a small waist, flat tummy, and a big butt that sexually awakens the teenage sons of all of the Karens with impure thoughts because I'm that bitch. I grab one of the very thick plastic hand baskets and begin shopping. First I looked for AAA batteries, I needed them for a graphing calculator I use at work to calculate pipe angles. I use a TI-83. The Emacs of graphing calculators. No one uses 90% of the features but people have used it for decades so they keep selling. At least I actually buy batteries instead of buying a new calculator with a sealed battery like other scientific calculators. I bought the Up and Up brand, Target's in-house brand. Next I went over to the office section. I bought an outrageously expensive notebook for 8 dollars, bypassing the more economical options just because I like the golden color on the side of the papers and the strap that holds the front cover. Not my most environmental or realistic purchase. Then I discovered something tragic, but normal for Target. I was looking for the regular sized paper clips, they only had small format paper clips. I can't use those. I'm glad I didn't buy them but I couldn't shake the thought that I demanded larger paper clips. I am a fussy cunt. Next the pencils, good god this was bad. I wanted to be economical and buy a package of #2 pencils, but there were no pencil sharpeners for sale. Pencils, pencil sharpeners, and block erasers are clearly more economical, but the economical choice is (us usual for Target) not even available. I needed a pencil to use so I bought an oil-guzzling package of mechanical pencils. I almost cried. After picking up some artery-clogging vegetable oil for my Mom I resisted shopping for middle school age lingerie (Target has a lot of this) and tried my best to divert my eyes from the humpable mannequins. Target is everything wrong with American capitalism. Packages enclosed in packages. Everything is a brand, even the food. Planks of plastic hang from the ceiling just to hold a red color to make you aroused for buying. All the images of humans dressed stylishly bombard the senses with the lie that consumption is happiness. I journeyed back to my car and almost crashed it as a line was forming for the new fast food chicken restaurant in the parking lot of the Target. I hope I never go there again.

Exxon Joins OPEC in Warning of Looming Oil Supply Crisis

According to the supermajor, global oil production is facing a natural decline at a rate of some 15% annually over the next 25 years. For context, the IEA sees the rate of natural decline at 8% annually. Exxon points out, however, that the faster decline rate is a result of the shift towards shale and other unconventional oil production, where depletion happens faster than it does in conventional formations.

Just posted to my substack, but shared here in full.

Why do people love horror movies and roller coasters? In this sanitised world many of us crave exhilaration. I often wonder if people who latch onto visions of imminent doom might be experiencing a similar phenomenon. The popular media cycle from one terrifying threat to the next to keep people tuning in. History is clogged with failed predictions of apocalypses of every flavour. How many of these doom scenarios are plausible, and how many are promoted for pure sensation?

A prominent saying among the collapse aware crowd is “You can’t have infinite growth on a finite planet”. This post seeks to explore if the same principle is true for doomsday scenarios. My personal outlook suggests the depletion of oil (and to a lesser degree coal and gas) will be the most critical driver of decline in this century. I hope to convince you here that the threat of oil depletion shoves all the other threats out of the way, which might be a relief if you are feeling overwhelmed by the sheer diversity of doom currently on the menu.

The most prominent threat discussed today is climate change. This apocalypse is based on computer models which project the atmospheric impact of fossil fuel burning, with projections usually terminating in 2100. The problem is that these models assume that fossil fuel consumption will continue to increase along historic trends right up to the end of the prediction window. If you combine various models for fossil fuel depletion with climate change (as NASA did in 2008) you have a hard time pushing the atmosphere much beyond 450 ppm of carbon dioxide. We are currently at 420 ppm, up from 280 ppm for the last few thousand years. This means that global warming should peak at non-catastrophic levels sometime in the next century and that the “Venus by next Tuesday” models are implausible. 

Sea level rise due to melting of polar ice from this amount of warming is modelled to take centuries to unfold. Studies of the likely rate of methane release (from melting permafrost for example) versus its lifetime in the atmosphere have undermine the theory of this “tipping points”. The ecological impact of higher CO2 on the rate of photosynthesis of different types of plants is however likely to cause significant ecological changes that are already unfolding (such as the spread of woody shrubs into former deserts as water use becomes more efficient).

Artificial intelligence is the other popular apocalypse of the month, inspired by the release of phenomenally complicated programs that can do astonishing things, like write a mostly coherent paragraph or tell a photo of a cat from a dog. A large number of competing models were released simultaneously, coinciding with Silicon Valley facing a venture capital funding crunch. This made the apparent rate of change appear greater than it really is (these models had been under development behind closed doors for years). Since the big release the models have struggled to demonstrate significant performance gains (in fact many have started deteriorating as the training data scraped from the internet is exhausted, and is polluted with a flood of low-quality AI generated content). 

Some of the tech demos of major companies have been revealed as fraudulent. The advances in robotics have likewise been slow, expensive and unimpressive for real world applications (well summarised by Sabine Hoffenstedter. The golden boy of tech hype, Elon Musk, announced development of a humanoid robot. The first press conference featured a live human being in a slinky robot suit, dancing like an idiot. The follow up demo featured a clunky machine which needed to be carried on stage to prevent it falling on its face. Specialised robots for controlled environments (like car manufacturing) or simple tasks (like roombas) are proven, but multipurpose robots (especially humanoid ones) are a pipe dream. All this high technology also relies on the output of high-end microchips, produced in a couple of factories in Taiwan, using the most complicated and fragile supply chain on the planet. AI and robots still have a decent chance to crappify the world a bit further, but their time in the sun will be limited by resource constraints. Another few decades where military drones can bomb your house isn’t off the cards, but don’t hold your breath waiting for sentient sex robots to appear.

Cyberattacks are also associated with this cluster headache of destruction. Cybercriminals are getting better at hacking systems (though usually by sweet talking passwords out of low level employees) and holding them for ransom. But the much bigger issue is just plain old cost cutting and neglect. The data systems of the largest banks are built on code written in the 1960s, facing a rapidly aging workforce of relevant experts and massive complications migrating to new systems. The net itself is degrading due to software rot and link rot, and the Dead Internet theory suggests it will soon be so clogged with scams, ads, bots and low quality AI content that live humans will abandon it. The good news is that the internet might become so unpleasant to use long before the electric grids fail, so maybe we will all get a few years of uninterrupted outdoor activity before civilisation collapses.

After the coronavirus fiasco the notion of deadly epidemics cutting down civilisation is another popular topic. Covid itself turned out to be a bit of a nothing burger compared to anything that qualified as a pandemic in the past. Based on more comprehensive data, covid kills about 0.66% of people infected, versus 30% for smallpox. While all the attention is on novel pathogens (either from spill over events from wild animals or engineered in laboratories) stocks of boring old pathogens like smallpox remain in laboratories in the USA and Russia, along with methods for mass production of weaponised forms. Smallpox was eradicated from circulation by a mass vaccination campaign, but access to this vaccine is now highly restricted so the global population has no natural immunity. Countless other pathogens, both new and old, have been squirreled away in such labs. Their potential utility as weapons is limited by the risk of blowback, though the ability to rapidly produce functional vaccines to any new pathogen (for example by the much vaunted mRNA vaccine technology that recently burst out of the lab) could make a future of biowarfare plausible. 

The most sophisticated methods for engineering novel pathogens rely on supercomputers and an even narrower supply chain, but simpler methods such as serial passage and directed evolution in lab animals or cell culture is relatively simple. Beyond any nefarious dealings, the reemergence of boring old pathogens that nobody in the west thinks about any more is almost guaranteed as modern health services crumble due to resource constraints. Multidrug resistant tuberculosis migrates from the developing to western world on a regular basis. Malaria used to be common in temperate regions before mass spraying of insecticides and is also developing drug resistance. Vaccines for both of these major diseases are experimental at best. As such this flavour of doom gets a passing grade, though the unexciting traditional forms of disease are the most likely threat due to plain old poverty and neglect. But as before these diseases will have a limited fatality rate since a pathogen must always be in balance with its host species. Even the worst engineered viruses are unlikely to reach a 100% fatality rate due to the pre-existing diversity of antibodies in human immune systems. 

Chemical weapons got their moment in the sun in the run up to the US invasion of Iraq. Does anyone else remember the media amplifying the false narrative of Saddam having any number of hidden chemical weapon laboratories that justified mass bombing of Baghdad? Maybe I’m just weird but that episode of history plays inside my head every time I watch the nightly news (which isn’t often). Chemical weapons have always had a distribution problem, since just pouring them over the landscape mostly has a psychological effect. Drones equipped with autonomous AI could solve this limitation, creating a terrifying new weapon class that could clear moving targets without destroying infrastructure, but the age of this technology would be short lived since the high technology cannot be sustained in the face of fossil fuel resource limits. 

You might be worried about forever chemicals and microplastics, along with countless other forms of scary pollution. The first point to make here is that the technology that detects these substances in “every drop of rain on the planet” can identify single molecules. The dose is the poison, and data on what levels of exposure cause specific health risks in humans are basically non-existent, so the idea we are all being continuously poisoned is at this stage hypothetical. Our arsenic and lead eating ancestors from the 1800s would laugh at today’s level of paranoia over trace substances with hypothetical health effects. Much of the chronic disease in the west could be coming from changes in macronutrients in the diet, or utterly unsexy pollutants like the particulates produced by cars. At any rate resource limits will mean these pollutants will stop being produced at some point, and even “forever chemicals” are broken down by microbes

Are you starting to see the pattern here? Resource limits are scary, but they cut just about every other doom scenario off at the knees.

What about nuclear waste? Isn’t that supposed to last for thousands of years? Aren’t the cooling ponds full of waste at risk of catching fire without active cooling, which could spread nuclear smoke over large areas? Again the issue of highly sensitive detection of radiation is coupled with the utter mystery of the effect of long term increases in background radiation levels. People who refused to evacuate the contaminated zone around Chernobyl have not showed any evidence of direct health impacts (https://world-nuclear.org/information-library/appendices/chernobyl-accident-appendix-2-health-impacts). Once again science has been good at determining limits for acute exposure to high doses of radiation, but can only model the impact of long-term exposure to lower doses by drawing a straight line on a graph and multiplying small risks by millions of people exposed to get noticeable (theoretical) numbers of victims. The few places that will end up with concentrated nuclear waste will be easy enough for humans to avoid. Radioactive waste that spreads across wider areas will probably be too diluted to cause a significant threat compared to the everyday stresses of post-industrial life. If humanity is smart they may make a final effort to dump their nuclear waste into the ocean while we have the technology to do so. I can imagine hordes of middle aged Japanese volunteering to pull the carts to the sea to save future generations.

What about the nuclear war that we have all been promised since the end of WWII? Isn’t that an imminent threat of total annihilation? Not so much when you dig into the details. Firstly, the world’s nuclear weapon stockpile has been shrinking dramatically as it is reprocessed into nuclear fuel to keep the lights on (thank you encroaching energy resource limits).

Only around a quarter of those warheads are in active use (the others would require time and resources to activate).

If nuclear missiles were put into use, they would probably be used on military targets. Cities adjacent to major military bases might be in the firing line. Nuclear weapon blasts make for impressive photos and videos, but they do more or less the same job as conventional missiles in a more concentrated package. People forget that Tokyo was first burnt to the ground by plain old fire bombing. The residual radiation in Hiroshima and Nagasaki was negligible. The main projected impact of a major nuclear exchange would be the destruction of supply lines, leading to people in cities and suburbs risking starvation and civil unrest (the same slow-motion stresses that come with fossil fuel resource limits). 

Much has been made of the resulting “nuclear winter” following the use of nuclear weapons. This theory was built on a very simple models in the 1970s, based on the mass destruction of wooden cities in Japan, that made every assumption possible to argue a massive plume of soot would be forced into the upper atmosphere, cooling the planet dramatically for many years. More recent analyses of this model have shown it is utterly implausible. Comparable releases of soot from the destruction of the Iraqi oil fields and major forest fire events have proven nuclear war would probably barely create a brief nuclear autumn.

What about a solar flare, or some more exotic form of space weather. A major solar flare hit Earth in the late 1800s, causing the new telegraph systems to melt down due to the massive voltages induced. Modern power grids and microprocessors are even more sensitive, and we have narrowly missed similar flares in recent years. This is a situation where either creeping resource limits or a spectacular chance event will have more or less the same long-term impact. Modern power grids are highly dependent on transformers- devices that convert high voltage electricity from long distance transmission lines into lower voltage electricity for local use. These contain all sorts of nasty chemicals, so their production has shifted to places like China. As a result the supply chains producing these vital components are long and fragile, and already struggling to keep up with demand to replace transformers as they wear out. A coordinate loss of a large number of units could cripple electric grids for a long time. Power grids are being hardened to isolate vulnerable components in the event of a solar storm, so the impact is unlikely to be total. So that just leaves waiting around for grids to gradually become unstable due to neglect and the insurmountable challenges of balancing intermittent renewables with shrinking baseload capacity.

We should probably take the time to briefly talk about the risk of financial collapse. Except the western financial system already collapsed, back in 2007-8 when the US government bailed out the banks and insurers en masse. Traditional financial systems based on gold were vulnerable to permanent dysfunction in the event of such stresses. By contrast, our modern financial system has become so detached from the physical economy and unrestrained from any notion of internal logic that digital currencies are for all intents and purposes infinitely flexible. The only thing that will kill them is either the collapse of the computational infrastructure that makes them possible, or increasing numbers of people abandoning the formal economy to eke out an existence in the informal economy.

Demographic collapse is another story where people love to make simple mathematical models and run the graphs to infinity. A decreasing birth rate is a sensible response to the current situation, provided at least some of us continue having a few children. We also hear a lot about how Earth is going through its sixth mass extinction. If we have already gone through five of them, then aren’t they kind of normal by now? I would also point out that extinction rate statistics are mostly derived from simulated models, since the supposed species going extinct were mostly never described. Given the shaky foundations for the species concept, I prefer to focus on ecosystem function impact, and by this metric the last few white rhinoceros in a zoo represent a species which has been functionally extinct for centuries (or in the case of most of the planet’s megafauna, for tens of thousands of years). The main driver of species extinction is habitat loss, and this is almost entirely enabled by technology dependent on fossil fuels. Abracadabra, another problem that resource limits will magic away.

What does that leave? Super volcanoes? The Mt Toba eruption bottlenecked the hominin population but also triggered the emergence of Homo sapiens, so if the planet has more of that delicious evolution juice handy then I say bring it on. Mr Musk likes to argue that we have to hurry to colonise Mars in case a meteor hits the Earth again. I would point out that the middle of Antarctica will be more hospitable to complex life the day after a dinosaur killing meteor hits Earth than Mars on a good day. That meteor favoured the survival of highly mobile generalist species. If birds and rats could make it then so will we. 

Did I miss anything? All that is left on the table is an alien invasion, and I’m still confused as to why they would come all that way to see us. The aliens in V just wanted a glass of water and a fresh rat. How could we refuse? If they want our knowledge, then we can give them a copy of Chat-GPT to answer their questions. If they want nookie, then modern culture has spawned all the sexual deviants they could want. Based on the grainy footage of UAPs they just seem to like hooning about. Maybe Earth is the cosmic equivalent of that empty field on the edge of town, perfect for pulling donuts and fishtails.

Getting serious again, I suspect our culture of modern techno-catastrophism has deeper roots, stretching back beyond the various religious incarnations to the annual struggle to produce surplus food before the harsh season, as experienced for millennia in the majority of agricultural civilisations. Living in an ecosystem that doesn’t try to kill you every spring is foreign to people today, but it seems to have been the norm for farms for thousands of years. Hunter-gatherers lived in a world of constant, everyday threats that probably felt mundane (just like we zone out the constant threat of being crippled in a car crash). That is the enduring nature of human psychology: our attention is most easily grabbed by novel, dramatic and fast-moving threats. We shrug off the familiar and creeping disasters. Peak oil is firmly in the latter camp, outside of occasional spikes in oil price or shortages at the petrol station that stir the masses from their slumber. Then the prices drop a bit, and we go back to watching the dashed white line running to the horizon, automatically steering our ton of hurtling metal, barely conscious of our destination.

We can't be told that resources were used/squandered unsustainably!