“Total Chaos” – Cyber Attack Feared As Multiple Cities Hit With Simultaneous Power Grid Failures

The U.S. power grid appears to have been hit with multiple power outages affecting San Francisco, New York and Los Angeles. Officials report that business, traffic and day-to-day life has come to a standstill in San Francisco, reportedly the worst hit of the three major cities currently experiencing outages. Power companies in all three regions […]

Confounding Collapse

“As brilliant as your conceptual breakthrough may be, there is no escaping your cultural milieu.” The Paris Agreement calls for deep decarbonization by 2050 (net neutrality) and drawdown of all the legacy carbon thereafter, returning humans to the comfortable Holocene from which we evolved. A recent study by Energy Innovation Reform Project (a pro-nuclear, pro-coal […]

That time Noam Chomsky scared the bejesus out of me

I had never read Noam Chomsky before or seen him speak, but I’d definitely heard about him over the years. Most recently when watching the movie “Captain Fantastic,” when the main characters — a super smart, back-to-the-land family — all celebrate “Chomsky Day” as if it was Christmas. There was a lot of hype for […]

America, The Waning Days

Potential earthquakes and black swans are right ahead of us. What else is new? On April 16, Turkey has a referendum to decide whether Erdogan will become de facto supreme ruler. What happens if he loses the referendum is completely unclear, undiscussed even, but it’s obvious a loss would have the country shake on its […]

Why ‘Peak Oil’ Or ‘Peak Gold’ Or ‘Peak Anything’ Is ‘Peak Nonsense’

Claims of “peak oil” and “peak this” and “peak that” have been around for a long time. Falling for them is one of the most common errors in the entire resource market. Betting on Substitution, Conservation, and Innovation is far more likely to pay off. I’m sure you’re familiar with this serious problem… The world […]

The Big Contraction – An Interview With James Howard Kunstler

James Howard Kunstler is an American author, social critic, public speaker and blogger. His thinking gained prominence after the publication of his book The Geography of Nowhere (1994), a history of American suburbia and urban development “because [he] believe[s] a lot of people share [his] feelings about the tragic landscape of highway strips, parking lots, […]

John Michael Greer, James Kunstler, Chris Martenson, & Dmitry Orlov 3-25-2017

This is a repost of a panel with John Michael Greer, James Howard Kunstler, Chris Martenson, Frank Morris, and Dmitry Orlov at the CFPUP Summit in Lancaster PA, on March 25, 2017.

KunstlerCast — David Collum, Fun with Financial Markets

Today I’m yakking with return guest David Collum, the Betty R. Miller Professor of Chemistry at Cornell University, who has become a popular presence on the internet commenting on the financial system and the related predicaments of our time. He’s also been involved in the campus culture wars and is not too shy to talk […]

The great fossil cycle and the story of a family.

  My great-great grandfather, Ferdinando Bardi (1822-?). The story of the branch of the Bardi family to which I belong is unextricably linked to the great world cycle of the fossil fuels. There was a time, long ago, when the Bardi’s of Florence were both rich and noble. But that branch of the family disappeared […]

The Dysfunction of Civilization

The collapse of civilization quite frankly isn’t half as interesting to me as the dysfunction of civilization is. The main elephant in the room is that this drastic increase in our standard of living might have led to material wealth, but it has merely lead to an epidemic of miserable dysfunctional people, kept alive by […]

David Rockefeller, Grandson of Standard Oil Co-Founder, Dies at 101

David Rockefeller, the billionaire businessman and philanthropist who was the last in his generation of one of the country’s most famously philanthropic families, died Monday. He was 101. Rockefeller died in his sleep at his home in suburban Pocantico Hills, New York, according to his spokesman, Fraser P. Seitel. He was the youngest of six […]

Zombie Apocalypse: will it be our future?

   Caution, this is probably the most catastrophistic post I ever published: famines, cannibalism, mass extermination and more. But, hey, this is just a scenario! (Image from “teehunter“). For those of us who delight themselves in studying long-term trends, the rise of zombies as a movie genre is a fascinating puzzle. There is no doubt […]

Peak Oil – Apocalyptic Environmentalism and Libertarian Political Culture: Review

In 2011, while working toward a Ph.D. in American Studies at the University of Minnesota, Matthew Schneider-Mayerson began a study into the peak oil community. Approaching his subject from the perspective of a social scientist, he conducted his research by way of surveys, interviews, field notes and participant observation (the latter two gleaned through attending […]

Have We Been Denying Our Human Nature For 400 Years?

Eurocentric modernism has unhinged us from our human nature, argues Rajani Kanth in his new book Across the globe, a collective freak-out spanning the whole political system is picking up steam with every new “surprise” election, rush of tormented souls across borders, and tweet from the star of America’s great unreality show, Donald Trump. But […]

Life Coach and Author Carolyn Baker Tosses a Lifeline to Depressed Collapsitarians

In this historical first interview ever on the new and improved Humptydumptytribe, your old Depressed Collapsitarian sits down and chats with life coach and author Carolyn Baker about the state of the planet, and what we can do to keep from falling into existential despair when we think about it too much. If you would […]

Peak Oil — The Game

Peak Oil on BoardGameGeek: https://www.boardgamegeek.com/boardga…

Charlie Hall on ERoEI

Charlie Hall on ERoEI

Are Oil Prices Really Driven By Supply And Demand?

For most people the reflexive answer to the title question is yes. Consider, however, that over various time spans since 1980, the price of oil has dropped 75, 76, 78, and 75 percent, and risen 320, 265, 370, 196, and 254 percent (The Socionomic Theory of Finance, Robert Prechter, page 458). Prices for most goods […]

The Magic Lantern Show

The philosophy of Arthur Schopenhauer, which we’ve been discussing for the last three weeks, was enormously influential in European intellectual circles from the last quarter of the nineteenth century straight through to the Second World War.  That doesn’t mean that it influenced philosophers; by and large, in fact, the philosophers ignored Schopenhauer completely. His impact […]

The End Of A 100 Year Global Debt Super Cycle Is Way Overdue

For more than 100 years global debt levels have been rising, and now we are potentially facing the greatest debt crisis in all of human history.  Never before have we seen such a level of debt saturation all over the planet, and pretty much everyone understands that this is going to end very, very badly […]

Catastrophism is popular, but not necessarily right.

  “The Hill’s Group” has been arguing for the rapid demise of the world’s oil industry on the basis of a calculation of the entropy of the oil extraction process. While it is true that the oil industry is in trouble, the calculations by the Hill’s group are, at best, irrelevant and probably simply plain […]

Famine is back

For the first time in six years, there is famine in the world: a real, United Nations-declared famine, with more than 30 percent of the affected population suffering acute malnutrition and more than a thousand people dying of hunger each day. And there are three more countries where famine may be declared any day now. […]

‘Doomsday vault’: Emergency Arctic facility receives 50k seed deposits

Hidden away in a ‘seedy’ part of the Arctic, an international transaction of huge importance occurred on Wednesday. No money was moved, instead there was a massive haul of seeds for storage in a vault designed to protect them in case of global catastrophe. The recent deposit to the Svalbard Global Seed Vault consisted of […]

A Muddle of Mind and Matter

The philosophy of Arthur Schopenhauer, which we’ve been discussing for the last two weeks, has a feature that reliably irritates most people when they encounter it for the first time: it doesn’t divide up the world the way people in modern western societies habitually do. To say, as Schopenhauer does, that the world we experience […]

Oops! The economy is like a self-driving car

Back in 1776, Adam Smith talked about the “invisible hand” of the economy. Investopedia explains how the invisible hand works as, “In a free market economy, self-interested individuals operate through a system of mutual interdependence to promote the general benefit of society at large.” We talk and act today as if governments and economic policy […]

Civilization and Collapse

The transformation of risk & the predicament of risk management, by David Korowicz, 19 janvier 2017 – Institut Momentum We have entered a period where the risks we face as a species are becoming potentially far more extreme in their impacts, more probable in their likelihood, and potentially irreversible in their duration. These risks are […]

Thoughts on living with uncertainty

Switch on the TV news, follow Twitter or read a paper and it can feel like we are living in an era of high, perhaps unprecedented, uncertainty. We certainly seem, over time, to have become more aware of uncertainty. Since the 1940s references in English language books to uncertainty, volatility, complexity and ambiguity have soared. […]

Failing States, Collapsing Systems: Biophysical Triggers of Political Violence

While trying to get to the bottom of the underlying reasons for geopolitical events has always been enough of a challenge, an unfortunate side-effect of the explosion of information that the Internet has provided us with is the even further erosion of the signal-to-noise ratio. The mainstream media can pretty much be ignored altogether unless […]

The World as Representation

It can be hard to remember these days that not much more than half a century ago, philosophy was something you read about in general-interest magazines and the better grade of newspapers. Existentialist philosopher Jean-Paul Sartre was an international celebrity; the posthumous publication of Pierre Teilhard de Chardin’s Le Phenomenon Humaine (the English translation, predictably, […]

Love, Intelligence and Art — Musings on the Natural World

Derrick Jensen reflects on the bird and frog songs he loves, and the richness of longtime relationships with natural places where one lives. By contrast, and especially in cities, our sensory input is largely mediated by machines (computers, television, radio, cars, etc.) Being surrounded only by human input, it can be very easy to forget […]

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