Diario de ipomopsis
I am wondering how far off theme of this website I can get away with posting journal posts. I really want to expand my social network of like minded people because the world is a very lonely place for me. The future is guaranteed to be different and more challenging than anything we have experienced in the past 40 years and I want people in my life that can help us thrive in this challenging ecosystem ahead.
Peak oil is a term you never hear people talk about anymore. It was going around quite a bit about 15 years ago but disappeared. Why is that?
I’m not going to make this into a detailed article with citations but here it is in simple terms. Basically, oil WAS peaking and running out. If you research into this you will find that technologies were invented to make use of fracking and harder to get fossil fuels like tar sands. Also, I can’t remember which, I think it was Hillary Clinton that lead the way in fracking and natural gas. This postponed peak oil for a decade or so but we are here again and no one is talking about it!
First off. Most popular culture and most people these days have the opinion that technology will solve all problems. This is completely debunked. My saying is that technology isn’t good or bad but how people use it. Humans don’t have the current mental capacity to use modern technology ethically. This is because their minds just have not evolved that far past primal instincts yet. All technology has done is created more problems exponentially that people think technology will solve. This is because of bad actors and human mental states that just haven’t caught up to ethically knowing how to handle such powerful technologies.
Ok, let me digress. Here is why technology will never solve the energy problem. One barrel of oil contains enough energy to roughly do the work of one human doing manual labor for about 5 years! Natural gas and coal are others but oil is just the easiest. Think about this for a minute. No other technology has been invented to produce energy as well. (We’ll talk about nuclear, and debunk that later). There has been a MASSIVE explosion of energy and productivity in our lifetime because of oil. This is about to end!
Now if you talk to economists, they are blind. They think that a free market will just make technology to find more oil and be more efficient at using it. Or they think another technology will be invented. They think it's just a supply and demand issue that stabilizes price. This is bogous. The less oil there is, the less energy we have, the more expensive EVERYTHING is, because oil is behind global supply chains and mineral extraction. It’s a downward trajectory after peak oil. A rising price of energy will not economically make sense for more oil extraction or innovation but make it harder!!!
Because we got lucky with extracting harder to get oil as fracking came online, doesn’t mean we are going to suddenly find a massive amount of energy any time soon again. So technology isn’t currently there to save us this time like people are just assuming now.
The other problem is complacency. People have been living the high life with this abundant cheap energy and just not thought about it. I have studied and observed a lot of systems over my lifetime. They all have ups and downs and often crashes. Flip a coin 1000 times and you will get periods of all heads in a row or all tails in a row. That’s just how it works, deviating from baseline. This black gold discovery and rush was a massive blip in human history. Life as we know it is about to change dramatically.
I’m not a doomsdayer. I’m not even a prepper by common definition. I don’t want to predict the collapse of all higher life on the planet (even though that’s the direction of the current mass extinction event). I don’t want to predict this because there are a lot of unknowns and humans are adaptable. I can definitely see a high probability with almost certainty of humans bringing us down a dystopia path, but I also see a slight chance of leading to paradise.
A third reason is a manipulation of mindset by using alternative terminology to peak oil. the latest being the "green revolution" or "electrification". Humans have figured out the past 10 years how to really change terminology around to greenwash the planet.
In either case, the covid pandemic was just the beginning. That’s nothing compared to what is about to come. It’s not going to be easy going forward. Massive inflation, civil unrest, more wars, more disease. I could go into detail on why all those will be. Humans are just way beyond carrying capacity BECAUSE OF black gold and not mentally being able to handle the power that comes with all this energy we found.
The cool thing is, we have gotten to live in the most prosperous time ever. We have an abundance of entertainment and opportunity. Sadly, it’s downhill from here.
Let’s briefly talk about nuclear for a moment. Unless you spend several years researching and understanding how that industry works, you can be tricked into thinking nuclear is both going to save us from the greenhouse gas problem and fission is going to bring us massive amounts of clean energy. That’s also debunked. It would take me a week to do a writeup on what I know about that but put simply, nuclear power plants are complex centralized power stations that require a lot of inputs, have a lot of pollution, and a lot of dangers related to climate disasters and bad actors. They require massive amounts of energy inputs and mineral inputs that require mining before they can have energy outputs. No one does full accounting in their assessment of nuclear power plants taking into all the externalized costs. And NO ONE, EVER has solved the nuclear waste issue. Anyone who says otherwise is a complete fool.
I continually research the whole ecosystem of what’s going on in the world as I try to figure out my own survival. I got hooked recently on this peak oil topic because it’s stunning to me. We have so many different systems on the planet failing right now. They are all connected. But this is one that is going to cause a massive problem in our world. Our entire global financial system is built on continual growth based on a peaked, limited and now shrinking energy source.
Wait back up. I need to say something. Not only is fossil fuels peaking or have already peaked, but the price of oil (or fossil fuels) is linked to recessions. That’s a whole other complicated topic and cycles that I won’t get into here but economic contraction means less energy expenditure which means less strain on oil demand which leads to lower prices (usually). There is also a LARGE amount of oil still in the Russian arctic. So this Russian invasion and new Iron Curtain is actually doing us a major favor in bringing us to peak oil sooner than later. The sooner we can get to this point the better because we need to get this energy euphoria under control before it booms even harder making us crash all the harder.
I predict there could be cheap oil/energy again for a short period in the next couple years (mostly due to a recession) but basically high energy prices are here to stay.. forever! Unless someone really does come up with nuclear fission, but that’s decades off still. I also fear that immensely because just look at how destructive humans are with the energy they have now?
Renewables are not and will not take the place of fossil fuels because every new energy source that comes online just gets eaten up without much older sources going away. Sure you have new sources commissioning as older ones retire but it’s not shrinking. Energy use is always increasing with this greedy species.
Also, there isn't enough minerals or mineral extraction to do renewables to the extent to replace the current fossil fuel energy. To do that, we really will desimate the rest of the planet through mining. This is another reason the electric car industry is greenwashing rubbish. If they really cared and were smart, they would be retrofitting old vehicles to electric instead of the status quo of building new vehicles with all these new resources and fancy electronics that are unneeded like tv's and driverless car sensors, etc.
Ok back to the 5th paragraph up. So we have a financial system on the brink of collapse. Banks have shown they are creative so who knows what kind of scam they can come up with next in the face of a shrinking energy world. But you also have very complex supply chains built from this energy intensive network. Don’t forget our food system and agriculture that is already running out of arable land and freshwater aquifers. And now we have this stupid idiotic cryptocurrenty scam where people think that it’s a good idea to trade money for electroncs (one of the most abundant particles in the universe) that all uses massive amounts of energy. Then we have digital social network systems causing massive social unrest and polarizing ideologies, destroying democracy. And AI deep learning that is all another big joke and false hope now used by bad actors.
Ok, let me get back on track. Peak oil has past. Many say it was in 2019. Natural gas is taking the place of it, but that’s also causing greater and faster global warming because methane is 4 times stronger than carbon as a GHG, but it’s not as long lived in the atmosphere. Still decades rather than centuries. Gas supplies are in trouble too since Russia supplies a HUGE chunk to the world.
Apparently some physicists have also calculated that the waste heat from burning oil and natural gas alone is equal to how much excess heat is trapped by greenhouse gasses they cause. Energy usage and demand exponentially rises, while our supplies of this cheap energy shrink. We are entering an era of pain!
I often like to imagine a planet somewhere in the universe where a humanoid species developed paradise instead of destroying it. I got to thinking that what if there was the situation where fossil fuels didn’t exist on a planet. We would invent wind and solar. I haven’t done the calculation but I can’t imagine solar being able to produce that much solar. You need energy to extract the minerals for the panels and production. What is the amount of solar or wind needed to produce/manufacture more solar or wind in a net positive way? That is a good question. I know one thing. It would be much slower, cleaner and more stable than the discovery of fossil fuels. Imagine this species evolving more slowly with technology. Over centuries instead of decades. Their ethics would catch up, their thinking, and they would hopefully build paradise instead of destroying it.
Instead we have the classic energy bubble. People love to talk about bubbles since the dot com bubble. Housing bubble, you name it. For the past 5 years we hear about the EVERYTHING bubble. Well, what no one talks about is it's all related to energy. Energy is life. It's a life force. Humans got lucky discovering fossil fuels equal to something like 500 billion extra human's manual labor in operation right now. This energy source is past peak and now we are going into a HUGE contraction. No one expects this! No one is talking about peak oil anymore and yet it's more critical than ever! Rough times are ahead but if we expect that, they won't be as bad as they will be for people that expect more of the same prosperity.
So my hope is that after this fossil fuel frenzy is over, and as our energy account shrinks, we will get more back in tune with nature. Depressingly, this will be far past my lifetime. I do really wish I could live 1000 years to see how all this plays out. I have hope for the future, but certainly not in my lifetime. I have zero hope for my lifetime but I know that life will succeed far past my lifetime. My lifetime is probably going to continue to be miserable with this struggle to compete in an ethical way in an unethical world. To continue to hold onto my quality of life while it gets harder to maintain. I am trying to adapt but it's a lonely journey since no one out there seems to see the reality of the world.
So those are just SOME of the many thoughts on my mind this moment.
If there is one take-away I want you to get if you read that it's this. Energy is the most important thing in physical world of reality. It's what creates evolution even though I didn't talk about that. Every lifeform on the planet finds a niche maximizing energy in as lazy of way as possible to thrive. Humans evolved something special outside of the rest of the animal kingdom and came across this thing of fossil fuels. This gave us so much excess energy it's unthinkable how it leaped us so far above other species. We way overshot carrying capacity for our species. Now all that energy aka power has (pun intended) gone to our heads. We think we are invincible, but it's all about to come crashing down (TO BASELINE of the past 2 million years) as the whole complex system built on this abundant energy source runs out. Humility will have to ensue.
(I also mentioned but didn't explain the cycle of complex systems crashing into simple systems, and back and forth cycle, but that is a known and historically researched phenomena. We now have the most complex system to date! Global and very fragile!)
In this very interesting interview they talk about AI technology about to unleash a horror on society with one hope being we can use it to talk to other spices. The hope lies in changing human's world view that they are not the center of the universe just like the Earth isn't the center of the universe.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=xsE51MLNMvc&ab_channel=NateHagens
When I grew up I always had a strong dislike for Stellar's Jays squawking and waking me up. I also saw this perspective from that of my pet cat. To me, it seems like they would taunt it. I naturally took the side of my cat. Stellar's Jays are incredibly smart and out of all the birds my cat killed, they were the least in number.
As an adult and not having had a pet cat since that cat died (one main reason being they are wildlife killers), I grew to really like Stellar's Jays. They make all kinds of interesting sounds and fun to watch. Then about a year ago one of my neighbors got a cat and it hit me! The Jays are making that horrible squawking again! It's the cats!!!! In a world without domestic cats, Stellar's Jays are pretty cool birds that aren't annoying.
I just overheard my neighbor complaining about the birds squawking and waking them up and then made a comment about how that's why they have a cat to kill them. Ironically they don't realize it's their cat causing the problem. This is true across many many many things that humans do. They are blind to their own actions.
Tomorrow is the longest day of the year for the northern hemisphere.
That was just an excuse to write a journal post.
There are so many changes these days.
Everything around me as a whole is changing faster and more than ever before. I guess I'll be vague.
I'm not sure what to think about it all. Too much death around me, and the world keeps developing into this human world that doesn't agree with me.
sigh
Here is my laugh of the day.
There's a lot going on in this clip but a couple things that come to mind are population/evolution bottleneck and capitalism race to the bottom. :)
If you can't get the original link to work, here is a clipped version. https://youtu.be/k-RJZoWU76s?t=131
Hello,
Just wondering what anyone's thoughts or plans are for the 4th of July. Good OR Bad thoughts, opinions, rants, stories, anything.
Me personally, in short, I'd be happy to never see regular fireworks ever again after 3+ days a year of exhaustingly long displays and tourists.
I'm happy they are not doing regular loud explosive fireworks this year where I live and instead going to try out a drone display. Should be interesting.
