Nuclear is a great option for baseload electrical power. However, nuclear is not an answer to all of our energy needs by a long shot. Liquid transport fuel (diesel mostly) is key for mining, trucking, logistics, farming equipment, rail, and even the CREATION of nuclear plants (mining uranium, constructing, etc). We are not about to power mining and farming with electricity from nuclear plants. You must look at the big picture. Not just sources for electrical grid power. Furthermore, nuclear plants cost BILLIONS to build. There is a reason the US only just finished the first new plant in decades here in Georgia. It’s wildly expensive.
People will cope and say just use electric vehicles, as though there exists a fleet of mining machines that are electric or that an electric mining machine would even be practical/possible. It's all about the diesel.
If you don’t mind me asking, where in Georgia are you guys? Yall are awesome and I am a fan of what yall are doing who is also in Georgia! Keep up the work 💪
That's my goal too. I'm growing some of my own food but my dream is to live in a tiny mud hut or hobbit hole. The government would never allow it. Its ok to be homeless and live in a tent but not ok to build your own small shelter.
16:57 the problem here isn't Ability, it's resource distribution. The greatest fertilizer is a farmer's shadow the saying goes. You get so much more production on a small intensively managed scale. The problem is the way land is used, the way people are packed like rats into cities and the food shipped in. What we need is more of a village model, where each tiny farm is only feeding around 10-20 families a diverse swath of product. Right now we're arguably wasting millions of acres combine farming (and losing the soil it's farmed on)
@acornlandlabs I've been on this wave for quite sometime now! I'm disabled but I have an idea that would help make sustainable living, accessible to everyone, and it absolutely involves changing back to community based society.
The desire for local/ community /village model is what I've been hearing from so many over the past several years. I'm glad to hear it echoed here as well. The max number of healthy human relationships we can neurologically manage is 150. When many indigenous groups reach 150, they will split into two groups of 75 or three groups of 50.
Today’s hyper-capitalism is cannibalizing our once strong middle class. When corporations cannot grow with industry they start commodifying our housing, health, and even relationships (tinder, Facebook, etc).
I loved this video, and I believe you spoke nothing but the truth, based on tangible facts. This isn’t about optimism or pessimism-it’s simply reality. For a while now, I’ve noticed these changes myself. I grew up in South America, spent recent years in North America, and now live in Europe, and everywhere I go, the patterns you mention in the video are happening. The projections you discussed are highly likely unless some miraculous technological or scientific breakthrough occurs in the coming years to change things. Personally, I think humanity “lost its way” when we started seeing ourselves as the center of this planet, as superior beings who could control our surroundings. We forgot that we’re just one part of the Earth's biome. Honestly, it feels somehow fitting that “God, life, or nature” is teaching us a lesson in humility, reminding us that we are not exempt from the forces that shape the natural course of life. Just like any other species that upsets the balance of its population, we, too, are being driven back toward a natural equilibrium. This video should go viral, and people everywhere should start talking about this.
The decline you talked about is only caused by the Finite resources we have; mainly fossil fuel. Adding Wars, Diseases and Natural disasters will lead to an accelerated and a rapid fall. It's inevitable, but adapting quickly is the solution. No single person can fix the whole world's problems, but each one of us can change their own lives and help people close to them. That's how civilization survives and adapt.
@@acornlandlabs Agreed, I plan to start gardening come this spring in an effort to reduce food cost and waste for me and those I can share with. I might feel like the overall situation is hopeless, but I would like to contribute to it less and less while also supporting the people I love. I For sure agree that we would likely be a lot poorer soon but possibly happier, so many people live beyond their means because a life of wealth and convenience was promised to them even if the math says they can't afford it. If a lot more people were content with what they had, they would spend less time working to pay for those luxuries that they would be fine without. If you are working yourself to the bone, do you really benefit from keeping up with the latest games?, shows?, movies?, concerts?, phone?, High End Gaming Pc?, or luxury car? Unless you are already exceptionally well off you will be spending all your time paying for those things you don't need to be happy, and with little time or energy to enjoy them.
I thank you for your time and efforts to help others. Sometimes the reality of where we are and where we are heading can be daunting. I appreciate your honesty and candor. I’m not going anywhere. I have watched and rewatched many of your videos. I purchased your book and I am slowly planning out how to get out of the rat race. Thank you again! God Bless you and your family.
You’re very welcome! I’m glad this information has been a help for you. The future will be challenging, but not an apocalypse. In many ways I think it will help humans rediscover what it means to be human as we discard modern waste, consumerism, commuting to a cubicle, etc. God bless you as well!
@@acornlandlabsthe decade we ‘almost’ saved civilization to be something at least close to this with a fraction of the suffering. If we r lucky, and these next 5-10 years we fight like hell to stop before the tipping points, at least there will be a chance our beautiful mother wont suffer the same fait as us and 100s of billions of her children if we fail to completely change how we r treating our home. we will just to accept the sacrifice that implies and do everything we can for those we will lose along the way. We cant sink to the level of the bullies that got us in this mess,period. Recovery someday is possible with this scenario of upending society before physics upends us by force and without any say in the matter. How we rethink “civility” as restraint, not infinite luxury needs to become a widespread understanding so we can save as many people as possible by accepting our home for the way she is instead of trying to change her so much. Again, love you guys and thank you for all that you do. Together we stand❤ im working on something to hit our drug dealers where it hurts, right in their wallets and assets that are ripe for a disgorging… Just like the opiate dealers, no amount of money can save you from an angry team of people and the money we get will go right towards trying to solve the problem the drugs cause! Ill keep u guys posted for sure!
@@acornlandlabsnot planning on touching diesel btw! This attack would actually help their supply chains completely. If it’s the one evil we cant live without, we at least can buy ourselves more time but just keeping her till we figure something out… like a complete decentralizing of society could be a way to wack diesel if we run out of time saved there too! Anti-trust society basically lmao
So much of our global economy is absurdly wasteful. If we focused energy and resources on things people actually needed instead of making cheap crap and then practically forcing people to buy it, we could make what we have go a lot further.
What astounds me is that, like you said, the 70s and 80s were when we should have started planning degrowth. What's even more frustrating is that it's not like no one was talking about it back then. Most of the classic books of the subject came out during the Carter administration (for obvious reasons...most owing nothing to poor Jimmy). I mean, for frick's sake, Greer alone has been writing about this stuff for almost half a century at this point! I'm pushing 50 and have been following and implementing this kind of thing for just a little over 15 years. I'm jubilant to see younger folk taking up the thread. You and your your kids are the ones who are going to get smacked in the head by Western culture's willful blindness.
Since we’re downshifting now, I pray us and our little kiddos can adjust and cope with what’s coming. Most Americans are still deep in debt and living as large as they can. Everything you said is spot on. Humans won’t relinquish excess until it’s taken from us. Simple as that. The smart ones will live frugally now to prepare for less later. So glad you’re a fan of Greer! He is a gifted thinker.
@@donnyvu4792 Maybe, maybe not. The sun's poles shift every dozen years or so. I'm a HAM guy and actually right now, we're getting some really good distances on our transmissions because larger coronal mass ejections are ionizing the atmosphere allowing for better signal bounce. It's also why we're getting auras further and further south in recent years. What I think you're talking about is something like the Carrington Event back in the 19th century. That was a rogue solar storm that utterly nailed us here on earth. Telegraph lines ignited and some operators got third degree burns from their headsets. Those can happen at any time, but become more likely during a polar shift. You also need a hell of a lot of bad luck for something like that to hit us. Earth has to be right in the cross hairs of a storm like that with the flare trained right at us. As the sun is a 360 degree object, and earth is teeny tiny in comparison, usually storms like that fire off harmlessly into the depths of space. Should you be cautious? Sure. Should you be worried? Just a little, but I wouldn't lose sleep over it.
@ I watch suspicious observers channel and I am a Catholic. So I’m just basing my future on the revelation of Our Lady at Fatima. One of the miracle at Fatima is the miracle of the sun. So I’m assuming that to be the tool God will use to chastise us. Then I based my future in the book of Revelation where it mention a big earthquake. So if we have a polar shift that have a massive electrical static energy, in theory it can penetrate the ground and draw up water from below causing a massive earthquake around the world. So an earthquake that no one has ever measured. The truth is that the modern lifestyle can’t sustain itself long term. And God will step in to bring it back. A.D.
@@acornlandlabs I don't remember the study but I could have sworn there were multiple that proved that simpler lives are actually better for people and leads to more overall happiness. I bet 90% of what we have in highly developed lands is luxury and we are actually worse off as far as overall happiness goes.
Amen. Knowing that this is why things are, and how they will be, is indeed a "Lonely Burden". What's good to remember is that the most common "Safety Net" in recent examples of Crises (Collapse of the Soviet Union, Collapse of Greece...) was a Home and Land, owned free and clear by someone of the Extended Family, where you go to live with shelter and warmth, and grow food. It may get crowded.
It's very refreshing to hear someone speak about the underlying issue. I've yet to meet someone in person who understands this, and it gets quite lonely. At the end of the day, it's just a physics problem. What happens when you take a store of chemical potential energy and release that into a closed system? Well, you see warming that's outpacing the worst extinction event in earth's history, the Permian-triassic extinction event. We're exponentially outpacing that c02 production, and that event nearly sterilized the planet. Rough times ahead. Thank you for having the courage to post this on the internet.
Rest assured that as soon as diesel becomes more expensive than other options, the other options will be substituted wherever possible. Corporate America is the most powerful force on the planet. It will absolutely do whatever it takes to prolong the industrial age. I have no doubt that the US government will build nuclear plants whenever the corporate behemoth wants them too.
Well, the most powerful human force. Natural limits always win in the end. They will do everything possible for as long as they can. Much like the military industrial complex. They will only stop when profits dry up or resources fail them. I agree in general. Nature will have the last laugh though
Hi, I’m a college student in sustainability and I want to thank you for tackling this kind of topic that is much too often frowned upon, in favor of harmful denialism. However, as much as taking off the pink tinted glasses is necessary to see and handle the future, I have reasons to think there are a few things you didn’t consider that make you envision a future a bit grimmer than it will likely be. First, why would renewables like wind and solar not be enough (along with nuclear) ? When you say, “coal and oil are required for wind turbines and solar panel”, it’s only because they are the most commonly used sources for the energy required to manufacture them, not that they are the only option for those tasks. You mention their limited lifespan, but so are the turbines that create current in oil and coal power plants. I don’t think you’re doing it intentionally, but there’s this common fallacy of pointing out flaws in renewable energy assemblies that simply ALL mechanical assemblies, period, have. Every mechanical component wears down and needs replacement at some point, that’s not a flaw of renewables specifically. In the scenario I envision, petroleum will mostly be used for synthetic oils and lubricants. And that’s only if its rising price won’t have kickstarted innovations in bio-sourced lubricants. One key aspect of most renewables is that on top of their mechanical assembly, they don’t need a repeated supply of fuel that needs to be processed and transported. This means much less imports, making them not only great for self-sustainability, but also more efficient to run than fuels. Second, there is one thing you seem to not take into account : energy can be stored, and yes, electricity can make liquid fuel that can be transported and stored. It’s the power-to-gas system, where surplus electricity generated during peak renewables production is used to power methanisers and electrolysers to make biofuel from biomass and hydrogen from water. The methanisers I’ve discovered on this channel are an example of this, that produces storable energy in a more passive way. And those are far from being the only readily available energy storage methods. Finally, if population decreases as you and other experts say, then feeding the population of 2075 with permaculture might be easier than today ? I know I’m not gonna have biological children, and nihilism has nothing to do with it ; I just want to leave room for others and maybe reduce the weight our lives have on the environment, and I’m not bringing someone into this world before fixing it. If the exhaustion of modern society decreases in birth rate, it also means less people having to fight for limited resources, that can instead be shared. As grim as it sounds, the decrease in natality might very well have more ups than downs ; why should we fight it ? The world isn’t running out of people making children without really wanting them. On an ending note, I don’t want to sustain myself in my corner while the rest of the world gets more and more miserable because they failed to. Sure, we have most politicians and institutions against us, but I’d rather try anything that can work to teach and facilitate sustainability. And if that’s an approach you’re taking, I’d love to join.
EROEI is why there will never be production of synthetic liquid fuels by wind or solar in anything besides negligible quantities. How many KwHr's of electricity is required to make one KwHr of synthetic fuel? The EROEI is much less than 1. It's far better just to use the electricity produced straight up.
@acornlandlabs Thanks for replying 🙏 As you, I'm in the building process of building our 1st ever garden/food forest in a suburban environment. 500sqft currently, 2025 is another 1200sqft. We know this isn't the golden ticket per say, but this will reduce our dependency on what we have now. We are diving face 1st into Permaculture. I've always wanted a life that resembles how humans lived in the 1800s. = grow our food, parter for things we can't. Treat neighbors with dignity & respect building a small community in whice we all help eachother ❤️ Just wish I started this 20yrs ago. Please continue posting on this specific subject & your other regular programing. 🙏 Love from Canada 🇨🇦 ❤️
“With much knowledge comes great sorrow.” But it’s not all doom and gloom. Life is short, society is not eternal, I use this knowledge to live life with less fear. Quit the bad job, take the trip, have an adventure, sell the house and take the RV trip. Don’t take life too seriously I suppose :)
I read Chris Martinsons "crash course" many years ago before anyone talked about this. I was one of his earliest followers. I am on the GA coast. We were hit hard by Helene. It has been sobering. I want land in NE GA. Prices are high but so are the values here. Everythjng is changing fast. Enjoyed your analysis 👍
The desire for local/ community /village models over the past several years, is very encouraging. Smaller groups= more trust= better relationships= responsibilities/ commitment= more investment. (+ So many more benefits) In smaller groups, you either sink or swim, TOGETHER. The max number of healthy human relationships we can neurologically manage is 150. When many indigenous groups reach 150, they will split into groups of 75 or 50.
It’s important to note we will not all be going into that good night. That’s why it’s so important to educate ourselves and others as much as possible and hold on to our love for our fellow human beings. This is so we always remember what happened so our grandchildren learn from our mistakes. They will rise victoriously from our ashes if we do everything we can to protect them from the flames. There is a smaller, brighter, future we can save if we arm ourselves now with the tools and knowledge to keep as many people safe as we can. Always remembering the siblings we left behind, which will be many of us, will keep the human spirit alive. Team work makes the dream work. Stay safe and I love you all, Nolan
@@acornlandlabsAmen to that brother. Only together can we make the change we want to see in this world, even in the face of adversity. You guys have inspired me to educate any time I can bc that is the spark of change. Keep fighting that good fight till the cows come home!
Self-control. Either we manage ourselves or Nature will manage things for us. Stoicism is my goal. When things get "uncomfortable" for others, it's no big deal for me. Being raised by older generations was such a gift. I've never jumped in my car for every little thing, or picked up dinner every single day at the grocery store. Lights off & some appliances unplugged when not used. Not using the AC or heat for as long as possible. Buying on sale or in bulk, cooking large meals, & eating leftovers. Conserving is thoughtful. It extends resources for me, my family, and others.
have been telling this to people for a long time. nobody listens. only thing I can do is to prepare myself for the inevitable. If I reach the old age, I don't expect to receive a great help from anybody. Everyone else does. I feel like Cassandra from the Iliad. She knew things, but everyone ignored her saying she was crazy.
Thank you for the video. I think you are right about everything. I am single and have 4 dogs I am looking to go off the grid to be a Hermit for a couple of reasons. I can do it since it is just me. I am excited about the move and have been living at night with little or no electricity most days. For me, it is about returning to a simpler life and I am really happy. I am like no I longer want a new anything. I have sadly 2 computers for work because one of my job's websites is not compatible with a MAC. While I know it is going to be a hard life I also think it is going to be a rewarding life. Keep the videos coming and I really liked this video.
I'm proud to have gone nearly car free and have primarily rode my bike around for the past few years. It feels good to not care about the price of gas. But it would be naive of me to say that a significant price shock of oil and gas would not affect me entirely. I still rely on a network for my food and goods, all cogs of which depend on fossil fuels. This affects all of us, and is without a doubt the struggle of our species... yet also our triumph... ever since we controlled fire for the first time. I'm grateful live in a time and place to enjoy great comforts and exploits of modern life, but I fear on behalf of my descendants for the consequences of our lavish stint.
I've had numerous conversations with folks in my life about how getting back to the basics and living how people did back in the day is key. One particular response that annoyed me is that they said (not verbatim but in spirit), "that's fine if you want to live that way but let us who want to live in cities, live our way" but the point they're not understanding is, this isn't viable. This way of life, these cities, ARE NOT NORMAL. Not when you look at the history of the world. Not by a long shot. People think this is the new way of life, it's not. It's an experiment, that will collapse. Do you know how fast those big cities like NYC, Chicago, L.A will rot and perish? Because they're utterly useless when the world reverts back to what is sustainable. People lose sight of how damn privileged we are. I do too, I take it for granted a lot and I'm mad that I do. But I'm doing what I can to escape the system. People at large do not understand how fragile our systems are. All this political nonsense means nothing when people are out of food. So many scattered thoughts all over the place but anyway, it's going to be a shock for folks when they realize we're back to the 1800s.
Thank you. I was truely hoping you would touch on this issue that can be an reason for people start gardening and doing stuff in a more sustainable way. The party is over.
@acornlandlabs I briefly looked through your links and couldn't find the source for renewables like solar not being feasible. I understand the general arguement, that we can't power mining and factories necessary for solar with solar, but I'd like to see the source especially since it's the most surprising and one of your most repeated points. Love your work, thanks.
I do feel like things will change and personally don’t even have to try very hard to get ready, my garden is where I’d rather be. But I also think that betting against mankind is a dangerous bet. There’s a deeply intelligent balance in the universe and it will counter the evil and suffering caused by our mistakes. Sure, let’s all learn to raise chickens and sew shirts back together, but don’t forget that we are incredibly powerful beings.
I certainly hope for the best. However, I’m not betting against humanity. Just looking at the available data that illustrates we’ve grown too big for our britches globally and like any group of organisms in overshoot, there will be a correction. What would be dangerous is assuming today’s lifestyles will continue for much longer, like most people do. Humans are clever and will find ways to thrive. Just not 8 billion humans living the lives we do today. I agree with you on the garden bit! Best place to be
Look into the drought in Ecuador. Most of Ecuador is rainforest, so they have relied heavily on hydroelectric. But, now they’re lucky to get an hour or two of electricity from the grid each day.
I hate to say this, but the French have a great model. Small nuclear plants that are easy to contain and keep from big messes. Also, the tech has improved so much that it is a lot safer now.
Nuclear is a great toolkit for baseload grid electricity, but it does not replace liquid transport fuels for mining, transport, farming, or fertilizer production by a long shot. Those are critical for society and only diesel fits that bill. France did a great job with nuclear. We didn’t follow that model in the US. See my pinned comment for more 📍
I would largely agree for the following few years to decade. But over the next couple decades, we will undoubtedly unlock oil & gas that was previously inaccessible, as well as make leaps and bounds with nuclear. In the short to medium term, we will experience supply shocks for sure. But I don't see this as the "end of growth" for the long run due to a limited supply of fuel. There's plenty more, we just need technology innovation to access it.
We will certainly find out. We’re in for a bumpy ride either way. More oil to burn? Rough ride. Less oil to burn? Rough ride. Growth is clearly plateauing, and population declines are not easily reversed. That alone will cripple growth. It’s already here really. We could be surprised, but the downhill slope is on the horizon. It’s not all bad at all, just different
I think we will take up new technologies in the coming decade, not have to give up some because of price/resource limits. A lot of things will be coming because of AI, including self driving, which will reduce the cost of transportation (and will be electric).
AI and electric cars don’t really fix anything particularly. You’re haven’t done much deep research based on your comments. Thats ok, most haven’t. I encourage you to read the links I posted and learn more
We will have to adapt to a world with much less fossil fuels. I'm not looking to this video or others like it to predict anything, but we will have to come up with a more up-to-date way of life that isn't just trying to squeeze a 1950s lifestyle out of a rock. AI could be a useful tool in helping us solve these problems. AI isn't the solution in and of itself, rather, it's more of a helper. I honestly think humans could maybe overcome this crisis even without AI. Eight billion was kind of a crowd anyway, and the modern fossil fuel powered lifestyle isn't as great as people say it is.
In regards to the centralization of the market, I think an important point to mention is that those with access to politicians are going to use that access to benefit themselves economically. As such, the state heavily intervenes into the market to benefit a select few corporations at the expense of the competitors to those corporations as well as the consumers like you and me. This will always happen if the state asserts a right to intervene into the economy.
Definitely a great discussion of things I hadn’t fully considered. I do wish you had addressed efficiency increases though, since if we can now do more the 15 barrels of oil due to efficiency improvements than we used to do with 100 barrels of oil, and if efficiency improvements due to technology improvements can keep pace with decreased energy availability, that may somewhat compensate or slow this. Also, decreased population from lower birth rates means decreased energy consumption, this also slows things down, especially if we don’t lose productivity from lower population due to increases in technological efficiency (needing fewer people and less energy to achieve the same output). I wouldn’t say this negates your point entirely, but seems like a potentially large factor in the growth change rate equation
Efficiency is actually a very counter intuitive point. The more efficient our systems get we actually use MORE energy because production is cheaper and the excess energy is cheaper. This principle is called Jevons Paradox. Efficiency doesn’t actually help us conserve resources at all. As cars are more efficient you can use more gas to take more trips. And if you don’t use the fuel, somebody else globally will. As for population declines, this could help marginally after some massive declines, but the depletion won’t be stopped at this point. You’re thinking of these concepts properly, there are just some unintuitive reasons why efficiency gains won’t make a difference. More efficiency = less used fuels = cheaper fuels = more demand to use fuels for other purposes. Humans desires are infinite. Even with lower population, we will use all we can. Us Americans use 25% of global energy. We humans will use anything and everything we can.
Problem: we DON'T have lower population because we keep accepting immigrants from the places that are still breeding like rabbits. The legitimate solution is to allow the human population to balance to its local resources but the powers that be demand growth so they welcome immigration with open arms.
Problem is lower birth rates do nothing for this planet when the nations with lowered birth rates welcome an inflow from nations with higher birth rates with open arms. 'Growth' at any cost, comes at a high cost to the planet. Typically local populations will adapt to the resources, but if a place that can support 10 million is able to offload 1 million per year, they're going to maintain a local population of 10 million while exporting q lot of resource demand to asylum lands.
More or less, technology advances a lot, we just need to be more efficient to achieve a similar quality of life, let's not forget that our government is very inefficient, and this extra cost is a huge waste of energy. Just one example, in Mussolini's Italy the average tax was 15%... today this would be a tax haven.
Other than computing and digital tech, we haven’t developed meaningfully new tech since the 70s. Cars, ships, planes and grid technology are mostly the same. Some call this the “great stagnation”. Tech progress has almost all been digitally recently. Cool stuff, but it doesn’t feed us or heat homes.
@@acornlandlabsthat’s not really true though, is it? What about advancements in heat pumps, geothermal, and building materials, for example? As a software engineer myself, I find common ground with your views on systems and passion for sourcing inputs locally. However, I would urge you to read/watch content from those with opposing views to the degrowth movement - RethinkX is a good place to start - in order to balance the viewpoints you’re consuming. I’ll be heeding my own advice and having a look at the resources you mentioned in the video. Hopefully we can all work together to make the future a better place to live!
I hope we can sooner rather than later live in a happy and more or less healthy society without electricity or energy. Wood for heating, horses for travel… people caring for and farming with each other. Making our own goods as ones daily work. I hope we can embrace a time of peace and tranquility and take our modern knowledge of nutrition, medicine, and crafts with us.
That will be a hard life. It is coming though, but not soon. Modern life will continue and decline for decades. Population will be much much smaller then
Good points and insights for sure. Do beware of oversimplification like saying the war in Gaza is a war over resources - it may be a component but generally, that's hardly true and doesn't strengthen your other arguments which fundamentally are. Nonetheless, it's great stuff, and thanks for sharing
@@EliasModeMusic Not really. If there is an economic component I'd say it's more to do with oil and larger geopolitical dynamics concerning Iran and Saudi Arabia. Israeli elements' desire to annex Palestinian land has to do with religio-national reasons fundamentally. Not a desire for more farmland.
@@EliasModeMusic Not really. Palestinian farmland is hardly a consideration. Striving for annexation by Israeli elements is due to religious/national reasons - Not food production. If economics is a factor it is more to do with broader geopolitical dynamics involving oil and Saudi-Iranian relationship and Israel's role in countering Iran in the region.
This was an extremely well made and well thought out video. It's unfortunate that the renewable future many of us envisioned may not be possible, but if we live in small groups it could be more viable of a transitionary phase. The way I see it the name of the game is coming up with smooth transitions for society to prepare the western world for whats next. I have been working on this idea for about 8 years now and think what I have to share with the world could be very impactful. Would love to meet up with you sometime to talk about it. I am in Toccoa Georgia currently.
Thank you for the kind words, my goal is to help people want to live simply to reduce future pain. I agree with you John. The mission now is to parachute out of the falling plane instead of jump and plummet. You can survive falling from a plane if your parachutes work and you know how to use them. Industrial society is the plane. And the fall will take place over the next 75-120+ years. I’d like to hear your ideas you want to share. Sharing ideas is what I do too :) Reach out to my on our website contact form. I’m in Henry County GA.
Glad to hear it! I’ve learned to evolve my own prior doomerism into gratitude and exploration. The world is so amazing, but it’s finite. Just like our lives. Even the sun won’t last forever. But we’re here to learn and try to improve things to the best of our ability. I can handle a slow decline. I can’t handle being trapped in a cubicle letting life pass me by. I was more of a doomer trapped commuting in a big city with an office job. Getting out of that has helped immensely
There will always be ethanol which is derived from corn. Pure ethanol can be used to safely power Stirling engines (unlike powering internal combustion engines due to several known issues). The end of oil is not as dire as the video depicts.
Please research the EROI of ethanol. It’s woefully inadequate. I love stirling engines, I have a few. But there is a reason they are mostly limited to being children’s toys and miniature desk toys. Ethanol and stirling engines are novel, but there are far from a replacement for oil. You need to research more deeply. That’s ok, most people do. Perhaps stirling engines could help a fraction of a fraction of society one day. Some alcohol based fuels will be helpful. Neither solves problems for 8 billion people. This video does not depict a dire end. A long slow decline.
@@acornlandlabsI'm aware of the EROI being lower than that of oil but the point I was making is that ethanol and stirling engines are a working alternative that can be replenished quickly. Billionaires are probably already aware of this hence why they are buying all the farmland ahead of time. Nuclear is peak EROI, fusion followed by fission.
A homestead can't be self-sufficient, and maybe a small town can't be self-sufficient... But a 4,000 person City can be self-sufficient and they have been capable self-sufficiency since the ancient era without modern amenities. That means that you have to give up the modern amenities to be self-sufficient.
I think a large part of the issue is the absolute lack of recycling infrastructure and technology. Humankind has set up an absolutely wasteful way of life, the amount of electronic waste that could get recycled and the improper use of more difficult to recycle materials is absurd. (Styrofoam should have never been used as a disposable material) If nearly all produced materials were actually recycled we wouldn't need to produce as much, (even though we already over produce many goods.) and therefore we wouldn't be expending as much limited energy to extract more resources. A potential silver-lining: Current waste materials might eventually become more affordable to recycle than extracting new raw materials if untouched resources become scarce enough. We live in a world that was founded on corruption, greed, and excessive luxury. Most of the things we have in a first world civilization are luxuries, not necessities, we just became accustomed to viewing them as such because that is what the extremely wealthy industries want. Billions of dollars are spent on advertising and attempting to manipulate large amounts of people into buying things they absolutely do not need, and to upgrade to the greatest and latest: Streaming service, Gadget, Fashion, Exotic Pet, Car, and the next limited time junkfood special. These issues wouldn't exist if: A) Those with the power weren't irredeemably corrupt and instead had altruistic intentions. B) If people as a whole were content with less. c) If humans were wise enough to use and recycle the Earth's resources properly. They are not, and they never will be. Nature is infinitely complicated and fixing the damage done and preventing more while taking care of both mankind and nature requires a perfect solution. And you can't get a perfect solution or system from an imperfect source it is just impossible.
Well-meaning critiques, thanks. And some wonderful ideas. Postcapitalism emerging. Fusion, fission, sodium glass batteries, hyperlocalized walkable community production, aeroponics (90% more efficient water usage and fastest largest yield), lab meat, greater device efficiency, shared autonomous EVs, population stabilization, greater solar panel/battery recycling - with even better more efficient long-lasting tech ~20 years later, help from AI, etc ftw!
If people can get onboard with walkable communities / micro EV paths we’d be in a totally different world today. It will take time to guide folks, especially Americans. Many will only go when forced when they can’t afford a car and the infrastructure is built. Low tech will be the way. AI is more of a gimmick today and a massive energy hog. We’ll see if it actually fixes anything
@@acornlandlabs There are a bunch of gimmicky uses of AI for sure, the energy use is presently colossal, and it still often hallucinates. But it's also helping a ton with education / learning and project development so far. Can help with medical, legal, construction, product design, nonprofit startup, and more. It's also being used to try to figure out effective climate change remediation solutions. Helping us decipher the language of animals, etc.
@@acornlandlabs Many people would love to walk instead of drive if they had the option. Many people are forced to commute, or go farther distances out of food deserts. Thankfully our city Eugene, Oregon USA is very walkable. I haven't needed a car in years.
Both have been around since before the 70s. Granted, improvements can be made. The rapidly declining EROI of oil and our impending fiat money crisis will make financing nuclear and solar more challenging. And of course the oil subsidy for nuclear and solar cannot be forgotten. Here’s to hoping for miraculous breakthroughs ASAP that are cheap and defy thermodynamics :)
Hope you enjoy it! I’m not here to change anyone’s mind. This is just what I believe is happening based on 10 years of researching. It’s a fascinating set of issues we’re dealing with
This is a super interesting topic that on a fundamental level I would agree with lots you say in this video, but I have quite the opposite outlook on the future. Energy is by far the most important resource, and you seem to grasp that, but later you talk about how coal or oil matter, they don't. They were once cheap options for how to make power, and as core components on how we make many products, but we don't need to rely on what we can source from the ground when we can synthesize them from CO2 in the air if we need to. We don't do this now because of the cost, but we will one day reach the tipping point its cheaper to make oil then to drill it out of the ground. When it comes to energy, we have many options that are getting better by the day, renewables are getting cheaper and as more places switch over, the economies of scale will continue to bring down the prices. The same goes for nuclear, for the last 50 years we stalled construction due to cost and public perception, but that is changing and there are lots of plants in different stages of planning, building some large scale power, not to mention the private sector is also joining in as Microsoft and Google are building them to meet their growing datacenter power demands. I take issue with your points 20-26 are true at the moment, but do not need to stay this way. Capitalism does an amazing job at finding the cheapest way to do things, and once we reach the point when oil becomes too expensive we will move on, there are already some large mines that are switching over to fully electric trucks, metal refining using electrolysis in place of coal reduction and transportations using electric vehicles.
Agree with most of what you said here. I’ve been following Doomberg for a few years now. That team’s expectation is that in a global scale we will be burning more fossil fuels in the future. Poorer countries with less access to capital will move from coal, to oil, to natural gas but will hardly to get to renewables. More developed countries will rely more heavily on LNG and if they’re smart, nuclear. Solar is amazing for certain use cases but can’t power large scale grids especially those being used to charge electric vehicles.
Don’t place too much value on “cost” (money) and our free market system. Money doesn’t build nuclear plants. Energy does. Yes, public perception is part of what hampers nuclear. The massive energy costs required have been the other reason we haven’t seen more nuclear plants deployed recently. You sound like you’re still in a “techno optimist” phase. Most folks who just start researching these issues begin their journey there. I’d encourage you to read more of the links in the description for grounded analysis as to why capitalism isn’t a failsafe way to produce more energy. It’s just a human system for allocating existing resources. It can’t produce any new energy, no matter how badly we desire it to. I certainly share your hope in a future of breakthroughs. However, nothing substantial backs up any new breakthroughs in fusion or other blue sky projects. Producing oil from CO2 in the atmosphere is not a commercially viable technology - seems more like a fringe concept. We can’t rely on any vaporware technology at this point. Many tech bros make big promises on fantasy solutions that sound nice, but there are not working examples. You do grasp the importance of energy, just not the reality of what is possible today and how today’s world does indeed totally depend on oil and coal. I encourage you to keep following along and explore the links below. It’s a great deal to research but the picture becomes clearer over time.
Spot on! I like to emphasize how everything and what is happening all around us is all interconnected with fossil energy. Many friends in the past during these discussions always gave me those yeah right looks. Now not so much. P.S. The drill baby drill mentality also seems to have prevailed. But in the long run, Do nothing but hasten oils demise.
Yes, I believe that the global economy will suffer a serious contraction due to depopulation, but about oil production: Could ethanol and biofuels possibly substitute diesel in some sectors of the economy to safeguard oil for sectors that they are essential (mining, trains, etc.)
After the cost of extraction oil is essentially free and wildly powerful. Ethanol and biofuels take much energy to produce and provide little energy in return. Their low EROI (energy return on investment) makes them a non-viable oil alternative for today’s needs. They could be mildly useful for a few million people perhaps, but not billions. Nothing replaces oil - simply living with less
3rd time watching this, excellent!! Thank you!! A few things: 1) Fusion would just increase the extraction of rare earth materials, the mining, the clear cutting of the rainforests, the consumption, are you sure you want this version of ape to have access to unlimited power??? 2) Have you considered what will happen to the economies of the world when suddenly, the old, rich financiers realize that growth is over, and that getting interest is only possible with growth ... then the stock market crash would smash all records for losses, and keep losing, 3) Please consider this carefully, if a deadly virus struck humanity (it's happened many times before), but this time it was too deadly, and we lost enough people globally that all of our societies just collapsed (like Haiti today), then WHO WOULD SHUT DOWN THE NUCLEAR POWER PLANTS SAFELY??? If this doesn't happen, 440 nuclear power plants around the world would eventually meltdown, and spew into the atmosphere radiation for 10,000 - 50,000 years. Is that the kind of legacy we want to leave behind? I don't think so. Let's shut them down now, while we are still semi-functional and semi-capable.
You’re right! All excellent points that I agree with. I don’t see fusion happening. Society is toast but we can enjoy the time we have left fully with loved ones :)
Even with some fantastic new energy astrophysicists Tom Murphy has done the maths and he says at the rate we're using energy the waste heat alone would be enough to boil the oceans. Biodiversity loss is a huge problem that is solvable too.
This is a tough subject. At some point our national security decreases. Then your wealth is really what you can defend. I took my family to the guidestones & we moved out of our city for rural land. There’s a huge unknown population decrease that’s underway predicted in the Deagal report. Enjoying the energy of today but preparing my family for the decline.
If there's a push to decrease the population, then why is there such an international freakout about the fact that birth and conception rates are nosediving in many countries? Why the incredibly vocal pushback on so called "childfree cat ladies" who are minding their business and just disinterested in pregnancy and breeding?
@ we’re too dependent on the current system. It’s best to have a good circle of neighbors & friends with usable skills now. Produce what you can & be ready to protect it. Put yourself in the shoes of Western North Carolinians.
Thanks for the rational approach and reflection on the current state of our world. I fully follow your argument that future (or sustained) progress and prosperity is tightly bound to the energy available. However, you don't really mention the application of (current generation) nuclear power but also the possibility (perhaps even inevitability) of future breakthrough discoveries that allow us new ways to source the amounts of energy required.
Maybe those new sources of energy will come, but maybe they won't. If they do, will they come in time? Human innovation can, and has, overcome a lot of things. Time will tell.
Nuclear is a great toolkit for baseload grid electricity, but it does not replace liquid transport fuels for mining, transport, farming, or fertilizer production by a long shot. Those are critical for society and only diesel fits that bill. France did a great job with nuclear. We didn’t follow that model in the US. See my pinned comment for more 📍 Humans assuming that progress is inevitable is part of our problem. Fusion is a wonderful concept, but we need it NOW to help stave off decline. Hopefully there are breakthroughs to realize commercially viable fusion in the immediate future. Even then, we still need liquid transport fuels for today’s systems.
I have been thinking about this video for days since watching it, and I have to admit, it's a big paradigm shift, even while agreeing with most of your ideas already. I agree that we are on the decline side of a large energy bubble and our lives will become much simpler and slow-moving within the next few centuries. But the claim that we will predominantly return to a pre-industrial subsistence style of living? I'm not convinced. There are too many unknowns for me to draw that conclusion. 1. If oil does become unprofitable to extract, the demand will still be there for an energy source. Why wouldn't markets and investments adapt to fund other sources, prolonging the collapse? Nuclear is not as profitable as oil and has huge upfront cost- but there is a ton of fuel still left for it- and if oil becomes depleted, won't we shift to pursue it as a primary option, for example? I see this buying several more centuries of time. 2. You say that even with other energy sources, the crutch is a liquid transport fuel (diesel construction vehicles, for example). With the rate of battery efficiency and our improved energy storage, is lithium capable of replacing gas for a time, even if it isn't permanent? 3. The bottom line is that we are extracting nearly everything from Earth to the point that there are no resources left for us to exploit, leaving us with a pre-industrial society. But some energy sources are virtually limitless. Nuclear fuel is readily abundant. Geothermal energy is constant. The tech for extracting geothermal is still in its infancy. Whose to say there aren't innovations to be made that will significantly expand the use of that untapped energy? 4. Even if the worst-case-scenario happens and we become completely starved of modern energy sources permanently, we still have multiple centuries of benefits to build off of, all the ideas, infrastructure, products, inventions, concrete, electronics, etc.. things that we didn't have before the industrial revolution. How is it possible that we would regress completely with all these things to catapult from? This is a really great video, well presented, and I hope you explore some of this further, despite its depressing nature. I strongly agree with your definition of money, I have been saying this for a while, that money is a unit of power, a unit of energy, and spending it makes other people do things. It helps to understand the big picture of it that way. I would love to see someone more knowledgeable critique this video (as well as my comment). Thank you for reading this and good day.
This reminds me of a Corridor Crew video titled "how many solar panels are needed to power the entire world". One message they said is "we need to upgrade everything we use to be electric". So if the factories are running on electric power, maybe the energy output from one solar panel can be used to make another, giving us energy return on an investment. But even that, it will be energy intensive to convert everything to be electric.
Therein lies the issue. Sunlight is a diffuse energy source. Oil is a highly concentrated energy source. If one solar panel could create two new solar panels with the energy it collects in its lifetime, and have extra energy leftover for us to use, we could have a photovoltaic transition. However, this isn’t possible with today’s solar panels. We must have high energy density diesel for mining, transport, furnaces, and the heavy industry to make solar panels. Solar panels are amazing, they just cannot replace oil. Even at scale.
Right. What they can do is replace oil for diffuse uses such as homes and personal tools and vehicles. It’s super inefficient to mine oil, then ship it to a home to heat when sunlight can do that without being shipped. If we stop using oil for things that solar can do better, we’ll have more oil for the things that solar can’t do.
Yep, long before we run out of oil/NG/coal, the price of it will eventually exceed what most people can afford to pay for it. Nuclear will be a necessity, and even that is limited. People think energy is limitless. It is not.
Sure nuclear is limited, but it would take hundreds of years at least for us to run out of fuel sources for reactors, probably even longer. Nuclear power is one of if not the most efficient sources when you compare how many tonnes of ore is required for the fuel to make power (like x many tonnes for y amount of gigawatthours)
@@acornlandlabs sure, the Amish understand how to live without technology. But don’t overlook the massive psychological damage that people suffer when they are part of a high control religious group. Forced conformity and unquestioned “Devine right” leadership is the wrong cultural model in my view. I’d be looking at more solarpunk and anarchist models that prioritize personal autonomy and consent based decision making.
Man, thank you for making this video. I’ve been following Art and Nate for a while but it’s refreshing to see someone my age discuss these things openly. I totally agree with the general direction that you’ve laid out here.. my question is when do you think “the great simplification” as Nate calls it will truly make itself known? I recognize that it’s a process, not just an event, but I can’t help but wonder when this type of realization will be common knowledge amongst those of us in the privileged west. For example, how many more years of air travel do we have? How many more years of being able to put gas in our cars do we have? What do you think the political outcomes of this will look like? Would love to hear your thoughts on those things. Lastly, really admire and appreciate your perspective on gratitude. I can deeply relate at once I made it through the grieving stage, so many of my everyday experiences just started to feel like absolute magic. We truly are living at the peak.
We still are at peak in many ways. Gratitude is key. If you like Nate Hagens and Art Berman I think you’ll really like John Michael Greer. We’ve been in decline since the 70s in the USA. But it’s uneven. Rust belt has been in decline longest. I live in the booming sunbelt. Still good times here. But when energy is expensive this place will tank fast. The rich will keep flying, and filling up nice cars with gas or charging with EVs for the rest of our lives. Frankly, you and I will keep flying and driving for decades. I think the decline won’t register with many people until a shock occurs like an energy crisis or Great Depression. My gut says that the next 5 years will be fairly normal just with bad inflation. I’m bracing for a financial crisis within 5-6 years. By 2040 I’m bracing for widespread energy crisis or ramped up War. But it won’t be everywhere. The rich will keep partying until the roof caves in, think WW2 Germany. I have no crystal ball, but I think we’re in the final years of “normalish” compared to the 1990s and 2010s. Even the feeling of the 90s is long gone. Coffee will get more expensive and other luxuries. Meat will continue to. We might have some years when it feels like it’s getting better. But what goes up must come down. I’m not worried though. At this point it’s just another adventure. We should try to help those around us and keep a sense of humor :) Nobody gets out alive anyway!
They go away and you instead have to defend your land with force. That will be a long time from now in most developed countries. Already a reality in some places. The local “security” will want to want a protection fee from you.
It makes so much sense when you think about it! Wealth it energy, it takes energy to GET energy, and the energetic cost of getting energy is going UP. Easy to draw conclusions from there :)
The state of affairs that were now experiencing, and that you yourself, acknowledge, experts predicted, wouldn’t happen for 100 years from now but yet here they are today. Likewise, what you think is going to happen in 100 years from now will happen within the next 5 to 10 years. It is much More dire than you realize and what you think is 100 years off is less than 10 years. Prepare all the more.
We really don’t know. Some predictions arrived FAST. Others like peak oil missed the mark. I intentionally did not estimate dates and hard timeframes. It will be a long and ragged decline. The rest of the next 100 years will be hard. Financial collapse, energy crisis, shrinking population, wars, housing in affordability, famine. It’s all here NOW. But is not everywhere yet. It will be everywhere as times moves onward.
Dr Simon Michoux has a peer reviewed paper showing that we dont have any where near enough resources left to do the energy transition. Hes had a lot of opposition from high up people trying to keep him quiet.
I absolutely believe him. The logical researchers and thinkers have drawn this conclusion time and time again. People in power can’t afford for this to become common knowledge. Then their levers of power vanish. Marian Tupy is a good example of a shill saying we will expand and grow forever due to endless abundance
We’re not there yet needing to defend land thankfully. Hopefully that’s decades away or longer. If it gets that bad you need a strong village. That might be after our lifetimes, hopefully
@acornlandlabs We have experience of some African countries or Ukraine where an armed gang unalives entire village and take anything they want. I am from Ukraine, and my wife is from Nigeria. So it's from personal experience.
You make a good point, that is already here in parts of the world now. Tragic. I don’t have good answers for that. Migrate if possible or build armed community
I am of a similar sentiment for the end being near for our current way of life, as it is not sustainable. I think within my lifetime, I will become a reluctant vegetarian. I feel like I am currently priced out of beef, and even chicken feels like sometimes food right now. Likewise, I am curious about your thoughts on biodiesel. Do you feel like that is a viable transition energy until we can restructure our infrastructure while waiting for more sustainable renewables.
Sunshine is amazing. Trouble is no cheap solar panels without cheap oil. And even then solar won’t feed, heat and transport the needs of 8 billion. Sunlight will help a few hundred million live. Just not billions.
@@acornlandlabs its true we need oil to initially build solar panels and when we build enough they will provide the energy to build new ones.it takes just 1 to 4 years for a solar panel to replace the energy it took to produce it.solar panels have lives of 20 to 30 years.
4 years to payback the energy used to create them.that means you have 26 years of basically free energy to use to make more panels or for whatever you want to use it for.no more oil needed.
This is why China has built in under 2 decades the largest electrified high speed rail network on the planet. To prepare for the future, as much transportation infrastructure as possible needs to be put on the grid. Asia and Europe have done this. North America is uniquely horrible at it, and we will suffer to a greater extent because of it.
I want to open up and discuss the future seriously, with people my age or younger, who are going to inheret the world. I want to help build a fountation and system that allows for a healthy and sustainable coexistance of life. I need people better than me to realize this, but its always always always been on my mind, probably since i learned about dinosaurs lol 😅😅😅
I agree with most of what you said, except for planet not being able to support more than 1 billion people without fossil fuels because in my opinion we are currently producing WAY more food than we can eat, so if we could be less spoiled and eat locally accessible food in reasonable amounts, without throwing food, we could support more people.
We waste up to 1/3 of all good globally, yes, massive amounts. That food is only available to waste because it can be grown so cheaply with fossil fuels. Read up on some of the links in the description. Without fossil fuels there is no way we’re feeding more than 1 billion people, likely far less. All the surplus food we waste is gone without fuels. However, the fuels won’t vanish overnight. They will get more expensive and population will contract due to lower fertility, people having fewer kids, and many other factors (hopefully not famine, but it’s likely). Just look to history pre-fossil fuels. It was a hard life for those people, and global population was 1 billion. They even had the skills to grow food non-industrially, we’ve lost those skills today.
You bring up a lot of good points, but there's also a massive blind spot I think you're missing that also contributes significantly to capitalism's failings. Not only does capitalism (and most forms of socialism/communism we've seen since the 20th century) require infinite resources to fuel infinite growth, but it also requires infinite exploitation of human labor. The resource use of your average American is hundreds of times higher than the resource use of someone in the Global South. We cannot and should not prepare for a world beyond capitalism and beyond growth without also preparing for a just world beyond colonialism. Like you said, everything is interconnected. There's just way more that's interconnected than what you've brought up in this video.
It isn't about if the resource is cheap. We need to ask how do we use the resource in a sustainable and replenishment way. In our daily lives we buy things that will last us a week or a month because we do not want to go to the store daily or we can't. Gardening, rainwater collection, proper garbage disposal and use, culture change to shame women for promiscuity, culture change from a wasteful society into a sense of responsibility and care, and we NEED to build more 3 story tall buildings for living and we need to engineer them to last forever using methods that we know like Roman concrete.
Sadly most humans won’t change on their own - they will be forced to by nature. Society doesn’t use anything sustainably. You and I might garden, compost, try to walk, and live simply. However, most people absolutely don’t do any of that. Three story buildings are a wonderful thing, optimal size for human scaled living.
Wait, you said that we need culture change to shame women for promiscuity? Respectfully, shame is not the answer, it usually makes things worse. Also, it’s interesting that you only mention women. It takes two to make a baby. If the problem is too many babies, my solution is social change to teach everyone about consent and to allow access good quality birth control options. This has the added benefit of being good for everyone involved, including any kids that get born.
I don''t believe that we can live like this longer, and that the way things are going is really fucked and can lead us to a collapse. But i never heard so much bullshit about economics in my whole life.
We’re all mortal, so life itself is a predicament. I’m not even bummed about it at this point, it’s just how our world of humans works. This is a natural process that we always fall into
Dude, well rounded and consise presentation. Thanks for that. I believe your on the path of becoming ""full doomer " as you continue to self educate. I say this due to the influence list at the end. Welcome to living in two worlds based on what you know. Nate is brilliant regarding the topic and "limits to growth" should have been standard curriculum beginning in jr high a long time ago. Did you ever see the Georgia Guidestones before their destruction? Keep up the good work. Thank you
So glad you enjoyed this video! You know, I started feeling more negativity a while ago but I don’t want to have a doomer outlook. These authors are great, but I don’t think they’re all doomers - some are. I never got to see the guidestones but I did research their message! Did you? I absolutely want to keep self educating, and I will. The future is looking beyond challenging, but I think the doomer mindset is draining. Will we make it? Idk. Do I want to be joyful even in the face of what could be civilization ending? Absolutely! It’s funny to learn all this and still work hard to be joyful and happy. It is possible :) If people ask about it my views I share, but I stopped telling people in my life (not on RUclips) about all this unless they ask. I just want to help add some goodness even with all the issues. So much beauty left to enjoy.
@acornlandlabs PS, I don't see the term doomer in a negative light. I consider it a realistic lens through which collapse intersects our current times. You covered the basic tenants here. I do appreciate your outlook in the comment, I share the same feelings regarding the joys of life in this time. I'm blessed to travel in a feral RV lifestyle currently. I'm still in awe of the natural world remaining & grateful for opportunities to travel the US. You tend to prioritize differently through the lens of collapse. All the best on your journey!
I originally ignored this video about three times because of the thumbnail, but once I saw it was Acorn Labs I decided to watch it. The thumbnail made me think it was one of those AI voice channels 😅
Thorium power plants is the way I think we should go. Thorium salt reactors can be shut down quicker and thorium is plentiful around the globe. Yes. It does require more engineering and more expense to build the plants, but they're safer and less prone to natural disasters. I also think that stone housing will help to replace stick framed housing. Dirt is a pretty good insulator of temperature. The thicker, the better. A greenhouse below ground level would help as well. A solar sand battery can absorb heat during the day to provide heat during the night. There are lots of ways to do things differently, but it can't be accomplished if we destroy the system we have now.
I wish I could talk with you. My grandfather lived through the last great depression. I have an idea that might help you to go off grid and keep you warm in the winter. And it doesn't include burning. But it's just an idea. I'm going to try it out in the next couple of years. Wish me luck.
Yes, there’s so much we can do that’s relatively low tech and far more efficient in the long run. If we all had earth sheltered houses, we would not need nearly so much power to heat and cool them.
We also need to recognise the energy demands AI will place on the energy systems in place, and without being political people have become a resource over the last few years as the aging population issue bites, cheap labour or boosts to population numbers to try and maintain tax levels is real for governments to meet budgets.
Great point about AI. It’s a cool data science trick so far, but it uses a TON of energy. It’s not likely to fix our energy issues, but it will use massive amount of energy to generate fake images and music.
Interesting that you mention population growth being a priority for the economic machine. I wonder if that’s part of why the fundamentalist religions are so cozy with the corporates these days. It’s super convenient for them if people think what makes them money is also God’s will.
People are creating oil from plastics now and other materials so once big corporations lose profit from mining they’ll steal and use this idea from small inventors plus nuclear energy. We always innovate it what’s we do. Although I want to live on a homestead getting my own water food energy etc but I can see people as a whole will usually be fine and figure it out unless an asteroid of something takes us out
Overall a useful reflection on the future of (de)growth. You mention fiat currency, but I'd suggest it's more relevant than indicated--a fraudulently-expanding debt-based monetary system has played an outsized role in obscuring natural limits. Also, not sure if your timeline is accurate: re: energy in particular, recent price shocks have been the result of ideologically driven de-investment, not a lack of resources. E.g. In the US we are swimming in dirt cheap natural gas. If the political winds shift away from green fantasy, we have a solid century before your peak. And that's assuming no further innovations in material sciences. STILL: for contingency planning and all the moral and social perks you mention, my family and I are leaning amish--with plans to produce several thousand of us by 2100, and millions by 2200. So if the worst comes, our tight-knit family oriented tribe can colonize the heartland of America 😂
All this can be summarised by our need for Jesus. Politics, corruptipn, greed, wars, resource waste, etc etc comes down to our rejection of Christ. Without him, we live for ourselves, and that lifestyle only has the interest of self and not others. Our rejection of God, is why our lands remain unhealed. All these things are happening now because these are the birth pains of Revelation, before the Lord returns. Yes, some of these things happen like disasters, but the intenesity of these things will not be like before, and what is to come from this is the finalisation of Revelation. It won't get better, so put your trust in him, for he has overcome the world. He is coming back again to give life to those who have believed in him. The kingdom of God is one where there is no sin, no death or disease, no darkness and no tears, one of love, life, light and hope and justice and peace.
As a Christian I agree with this. Thank you. God created the earth, all science is his toolkit, our actions have consequences, and greed has put us here much like the Bible said it would. Our mission is to be thankful, meek, and quietly work with our hands. The Amish are not perfect, but seem to have been some of the ones trying to do that.
On the topic of using fossil fuels for energy vs renewables, I think our level of energy use for our quality of life can continue if we just used nuclear more. Modern nuclear reactors are super safe, certainly safer than fossil fuel plants. It's just that there is no political and social willpower to do it, because people hear the world nuclear and think barrel of green oozing liquid and the disasters that happened over the past forty years.
The era of endless growth is almost over. No energy source can change that. And human populations are declining almost everywhere now, and even collapsing in some places, like South Korea. In just 3 generations, South Korea will lose over 90% of its population. See? They don't need new energy sources ... they are going to have a hard time demolishing all of the abandoned homes and buildings. In Japan, there are 10,000,000 abandoned homes. Guess who is thriving though? The bears, the monkeys, the wild animals, and the plants are reclaiming the land.
Well, nuclear does have some rather large downsides. Getting rid of nuclear waste being one of the major challenges. I'm not against nuclear, I think we're going to need it eventually.
Nuclear is a great toolkit for baseload grid electricity, but it does not replace liquid transport fuels for mining, transport, farming, or fertilizer production by a long shot. Those are critical and only diesel fits that bill. France did a great job with nuclear. We didn’t follow that model in the US. See my pinned comment for more 📍
It would be great to see in that list of required reading material the works of David Holmgren and especially the Future Scenarios. You described very eloquently some of the descent scenarios and i see the comments are starting to attract the tech bros with the Techno explosion scenario 😅 My respects for illuminating what should be common knowledge but it's violently rejected by the oblivious crowds 😢
Techno optimists and Silicon Valley tech bros types (Tony) typically have something to sell. At this point I don’t like what tech guys have done to us globally. I’m not familiar with Tony. After scanning his predictions it would be nice if he’s right. A $5,000 electric car by 2030?! Sign me up! He is fully drinking the techno kool aid that they promised us in the 1950s. I highly doubt his predictions are accurate.
Tony Seba: “By 2025, gasoline engine cars will be unable to compete with electric vehicles.” He continued, claiming that internal combustion engine (ICE) vehicles “are toast.” Yeah, Tony isn’t grounded in reality. Hype.
@@acornlandlabs im only familiar with his on point predictions on the rate of solar adoption and how it would get exponential due to the cost decreasing, which is currently happening many places
What about oil from Algea and Kelp farms? Coal can be replaced by charcoal. I believe that it's possible, but we haven't had enough funding into these branches because of what you've seen.
Oil from corn, algae, kelp etc can be produced in small quantities. It’s nowhere near being energy dense enough to replace today’s oil usage. Ethanol was tried and failed in the US. Once you dig deep you’ll find there are no liquid fuel substitutes for oil
Nuclear is a great option for baseload electrical power. However, nuclear is not an answer to all of our energy needs by a long shot. Liquid transport fuel (diesel mostly) is key for mining, trucking, logistics, farming equipment, rail, and even the CREATION of nuclear plants (mining uranium, constructing, etc). We are not about to power mining and farming with electricity from nuclear plants. You must look at the big picture. Not just sources for electrical grid power.
Furthermore, nuclear plants cost BILLIONS to build. There is a reason the US only just finished the first new plant in decades here in Georgia. It’s wildly expensive.
People will cope and say just use electric vehicles, as though there exists a fleet of mining machines that are electric or that an electric mining machine would even be practical/possible.
It's all about the diesel.
If you don’t mind me asking, where in Georgia are you guys? Yall are awesome and I am a fan of what yall are doing who is also in Georgia! Keep up the work 💪
For sure, EVs are not a solution. And mining vehicles won’t have battery packs anytime soon if ever. Diesel is how 8 billion live today
So glad you like our work! We’re in metro Atlanta right now. Moving to rural TN or AL soon (1-2 years). Where are you?
@@acornlandlabs oh awesome! Also in Atlanta but also planning on leaving in the next few years but not sure where yet.
I don’t care what you say, my dream of being a crazy hermit lady will happen and I will enjoy every minute of it! 😂
Do it!!! I still want to be a crazy woodland hermit. I just know it’s not a foolproof solution now :). Enjoy the woods! I sure will.
That's my goal too. I'm growing some of my own food but my dream is to live in a tiny mud hut or hobbit hole. The government would never allow it. Its ok to be homeless and live in a tent but not ok to build your own small shelter.
This video is criminally under-viewed. I will be sharing it to all my friends
So glad you like it! Checkout the links to the authors that I read in description
16:57 the problem here isn't Ability, it's resource distribution.
The greatest fertilizer is a farmer's shadow the saying goes. You get so much more production on a small intensively managed scale.
The problem is the way land is used, the way people are packed like rats into cities and the food shipped in.
What we need is more of a village model, where each tiny farm is only feeding around 10-20 families a diverse swath of product.
Right now we're arguably wasting millions of acres combine farming (and losing the soil it's farmed on)
Agreed
@acornlandlabs I've been on this wave for quite sometime now! I'm disabled but I have an idea that would help make sustainable living, accessible to everyone, and it absolutely involves changing back to community based society.
This is the ideal I'm going for. Looking to get 100 acres and about 10-20 families to come join me.
The desire for local/ community /village model is what I've been hearing from so many over the past several years. I'm glad to hear it echoed here as well.
The max number of healthy human relationships we can neurologically manage is 150.
When many indigenous groups reach 150, they will split into two groups of 75 or three groups of 50.
And instead of 1% farmers, it'll be 30%
Thank you for this, from the bottom of my heart, God bless you.
I appreciate your ability to make a critique of capitalism in a relatively apolitical manner.
Today’s hyper-capitalism is cannibalizing our once strong middle class. When corporations cannot grow with industry they start commodifying our housing, health, and even relationships (tinder, Facebook, etc).
@@acornlandlabs I love the way you articulated that. "Commodifying our housing, health and even relationships" bang on.
I loved this video, and I believe you spoke nothing but the truth, based on tangible facts. This isn’t about optimism or pessimism-it’s simply reality. For a while now, I’ve noticed these changes myself. I grew up in South America, spent recent years in North America, and now live in Europe, and everywhere I go, the patterns you mention in the video are happening. The projections you discussed are highly likely unless some miraculous technological or scientific breakthrough occurs in the coming years to change things.
Personally, I think humanity “lost its way” when we started seeing ourselves as the center of this planet, as superior beings who could control our surroundings. We forgot that we’re just one part of the Earth's biome. Honestly, it feels somehow fitting that “God, life, or nature” is teaching us a lesson in humility, reminding us that we are not exempt from the forces that shape the natural course of life. Just like any other species that upsets the balance of its population, we, too, are being driven back toward a natural equilibrium.
This video should go viral, and people everywhere should start talking about this.
The decline you talked about is only caused by the Finite resources we have; mainly fossil fuel. Adding Wars, Diseases and Natural disasters will lead to an accelerated and a rapid fall. It's inevitable, but adapting quickly is the solution. No single person can fix the whole world's problems, but each one of us can change their own lives and help people close to them. That's how civilization survives and adapt.
Yes, time for people to chart their own course. The govt and corporations won’t speak about this until their institutions collapse
@@acornlandlabs Agreed, I plan to start gardening come this spring in an effort to reduce food cost and waste for me and those I can share with. I might feel like the overall situation is hopeless, but I would like to contribute to it less and less while also supporting the people I love.
I For sure agree that we would likely be a lot poorer soon but possibly happier, so many people live beyond their means because a life of wealth and convenience was promised to them even if the math says they can't afford it.
If a lot more people were content with what they had, they would spend less time working to pay for those luxuries that they would be fine without.
If you are working yourself to the bone, do you really benefit from keeping up with the latest games?, shows?, movies?, concerts?, phone?, High End Gaming Pc?, or luxury car? Unless you are already exceptionally well off you will be spending all your time paying for those things you don't need to be happy, and with little time or energy to enjoy them.
I thank you for your time and efforts to help others. Sometimes the reality of where we are and where we are heading can be daunting. I appreciate your honesty and candor. I’m not going anywhere. I have watched and rewatched many of your videos. I purchased your book and I am slowly planning out how to get out of the rat race. Thank you again! God Bless you and your family.
You’re very welcome! I’m glad this information has been a help for you. The future will be challenging, but not an apocalypse. In many ways I think it will help humans rediscover what it means to be human as we discard modern waste, consumerism, commuting to a cubicle, etc. God bless you as well!
Let's build our own cool new self sustaining towns , to get out of the rat race
If we limited resources strategically, we would have bought ourselves so much more time in the sun.
That would have helped. We needed to do that a few decades ago. 80s really. The landing will likely be hard
@@acornlandlabsthe decade we ‘almost’ saved civilization to be something at least close to this with a fraction of the suffering. If we r lucky, and these next 5-10 years we fight like hell to stop before the tipping points, at least there will be a chance our beautiful mother wont suffer the same fait as us and 100s of billions of her children if we fail to completely change how we r treating our home. we will just to accept the sacrifice that implies and do everything we can for those we will lose along the way. We cant sink to the level of the bullies that got us in this mess,period. Recovery someday is possible with this scenario of upending society before physics upends us by force and without any say in the matter. How we rethink “civility” as restraint, not infinite luxury needs to become a widespread understanding so we can save as many people as possible by accepting our home for the way she is instead of trying to change her so much. Again, love you guys and thank you for all that you do. Together we stand❤ im working on something to hit our drug dealers where it hurts, right in their wallets and assets that are ripe for a disgorging… Just like the opiate dealers, no amount of money can save you from an angry team of people and the money we get will go right towards trying to solve the problem the drugs cause! Ill keep u guys posted for sure!
@@acornlandlabsnot planning on touching diesel btw! This attack would actually help their supply chains completely. If it’s the one evil we cant live without, we at least can buy ourselves more time but just keeping her till we figure something out… like a complete decentralizing of society could be a way to wack diesel if we run out of time saved there too! Anti-trust society basically lmao
So much of our global economy is absurdly wasteful. If we focused energy and resources on things people actually needed instead of making cheap crap and then practically forcing people to buy it, we could make what we have go a lot further.
What astounds me is that, like you said, the 70s and 80s were when we should have started planning degrowth. What's even more frustrating is that it's not like no one was talking about it back then. Most of the classic books of the subject came out during the Carter administration (for obvious reasons...most owing nothing to poor Jimmy). I mean, for frick's sake, Greer alone has been writing about this stuff for almost half a century at this point! I'm pushing 50 and have been following and implementing this kind of thing for just a little over 15 years. I'm jubilant to see younger folk taking up the thread. You and your your kids are the ones who are going to get smacked in the head by Western culture's willful blindness.
Since we’re downshifting now, I pray us and our little kiddos can adjust and cope with what’s coming. Most Americans are still deep in debt and living as large as they can. Everything you said is spot on. Humans won’t relinquish excess until it’s taken from us. Simple as that. The smart ones will live frugally now to prepare for less later.
So glad you’re a fan of Greer! He is a gifted thinker.
If you look at the upcoming solar polar shift in 2030-2050, we will be forced to to quit anyway. So do it now or later. Does not matter.
@@donnyvu4792 Maybe, maybe not. The sun's poles shift every dozen years or so. I'm a HAM guy and actually right now, we're getting some really good distances on our transmissions because larger coronal mass ejections are ionizing the atmosphere allowing for better signal bounce. It's also why we're getting auras further and further south in recent years. What I think you're talking about is something like the Carrington Event back in the 19th century. That was a rogue solar storm that utterly nailed us here on earth. Telegraph lines ignited and some operators got third degree burns from their headsets. Those can happen at any time, but become more likely during a polar shift. You also need a hell of a lot of bad luck for something like that to hit us. Earth has to be right in the cross hairs of a storm like that with the flare trained right at us. As the sun is a 360 degree object, and earth is teeny tiny in comparison, usually storms like that fire off harmlessly into the depths of space. Should you be cautious? Sure. Should you be worried? Just a little, but I wouldn't lose sleep over it.
@ I watch suspicious observers channel and I am a Catholic. So I’m just basing my future on the revelation of Our Lady at Fatima. One of the miracle at Fatima is the miracle of the sun. So I’m assuming that to be the tool God will use to chastise us. Then I based my future in the book of Revelation where it mention a big earthquake. So if we have a polar shift that have a massive electrical static energy, in theory it can penetrate the ground and draw up water from below causing a massive earthquake around the world. So an earthquake that no one has ever measured. The truth is that the modern lifestyle can’t sustain itself long term. And God will step in to bring it back. A.D.
@@acornlandlabs I don't remember the study but I could have sworn there were multiple that proved that simpler lives are actually better for people and leads to more overall happiness. I bet 90% of what we have in highly developed lands is luxury and we are actually worse off as far as overall happiness goes.
Amen. Knowing that this is why things are, and how they will be, is indeed a "Lonely Burden". What's good to remember is that the most common "Safety Net" in recent examples of Crises (Collapse of the Soviet Union, Collapse of Greece...) was a Home and Land, owned free and clear by someone of the Extended Family, where you go to live with shelter and warmth, and grow food. It may get crowded.
It's very refreshing to hear someone speak about the underlying issue. I've yet to meet someone in person who understands this, and it gets quite lonely. At the end of the day, it's just a physics problem. What happens when you take a store of chemical potential energy and release that into a closed system? Well, you see warming that's outpacing the worst extinction event in earth's history, the Permian-triassic extinction event. We're exponentially outpacing that c02 production, and that event nearly sterilized the planet. Rough times ahead. Thank you for having the courage to post this on the internet.
Rest assured that as soon as diesel becomes more expensive than other options, the other options will be substituted wherever possible. Corporate America is the most powerful force on the planet. It will absolutely do whatever it takes to prolong the industrial age. I have no doubt that the US government will build nuclear plants whenever the corporate behemoth wants them too.
Well, the most powerful human force. Natural limits always win in the end. They will do everything possible for as long as they can. Much like the military industrial complex. They will only stop when profits dry up or resources fail them. I agree in general. Nature will have the last laugh though
They already are
Hi, I’m a college student in sustainability and I want to thank you for tackling this kind of topic that is much too often frowned upon, in favor of harmful denialism. However, as much as taking off the pink tinted glasses is necessary to see and handle the future, I have reasons to think there are a few things you didn’t consider that make you envision a future a bit grimmer than it will likely be.
First, why would renewables like wind and solar not be enough (along with nuclear) ? When you say, “coal and oil are required for wind turbines and solar panel”, it’s only because they are the most commonly used sources for the energy required to manufacture them, not that they are the only option for those tasks. You mention their limited lifespan, but so are the turbines that create current in oil and coal power plants. I don’t think you’re doing it intentionally, but there’s this common fallacy of pointing out flaws in renewable energy assemblies that simply ALL mechanical assemblies, period, have. Every mechanical component wears down and needs replacement at some point, that’s not a flaw of renewables specifically. In the scenario I envision, petroleum will mostly be used for synthetic oils and lubricants. And that’s only if its rising price won’t have kickstarted innovations in bio-sourced lubricants.
One key aspect of most renewables is that on top of their mechanical assembly, they don’t need a repeated supply of fuel that needs to be processed and transported. This means much less imports, making them not only great for self-sustainability, but also more efficient to run than fuels.
Second, there is one thing you seem to not take into account : energy can be stored, and yes, electricity can make liquid fuel that can be transported and stored. It’s the power-to-gas system, where surplus electricity generated during peak renewables production is used to power methanisers and electrolysers to make biofuel from biomass and hydrogen from water. The methanisers I’ve discovered on this channel are an example of this, that produces storable energy in a more passive way. And those are far from being the only readily available energy storage methods.
Finally, if population decreases as you and other experts say, then feeding the population of 2075 with permaculture might be easier than today ? I know I’m not gonna have biological children, and nihilism has nothing to do with it ; I just want to leave room for others and maybe reduce the weight our lives have on the environment, and I’m not bringing someone into this world before fixing it. If the exhaustion of modern society decreases in birth rate, it also means less people having to fight for limited resources, that can instead be shared. As grim as it sounds, the decrease in natality might very well have more ups than downs ; why should we fight it ? The world isn’t running out of people making children without really wanting them.
On an ending note, I don’t want to sustain myself in my corner while the rest of the world gets more and more miserable because they failed to. Sure, we have most politicians and institutions against us, but I’d rather try anything that can work to teach and facilitate sustainability. And if that’s an approach you’re taking, I’d love to join.
EROEI is why there will never be production of synthetic liquid fuels by wind or solar in anything besides negligible quantities. How many KwHr's of electricity is required to make one KwHr of synthetic fuel? The EROEI is much less than 1. It's far better just to use the electricity produced straight up.
@ You’d be surprised my the amount of compounds methanisers can create that you also find after oil refining
Excellent job and thank you for sharing your research & thoughts, I share your thoughts & ideas.
You’re welcome, I’m glad you enjoyed it. Encouraging to see others who have researched this thoroughly to understand.
@acornlandlabs Thanks for replying 🙏 As you, I'm in the building process of building our 1st ever garden/food forest in a suburban environment. 500sqft currently, 2025 is another 1200sqft. We know this isn't the golden ticket per say, but this will reduce our dependency on what we have now. We are diving face 1st into Permaculture. I've always wanted a life that resembles how humans lived in the 1800s. = grow our food, parter for things we can't. Treat neighbors with dignity & respect building a small community in whice we all help eachother ❤️ Just wish I started this 20yrs ago.
Please continue posting on this specific subject & your other regular programing. 🙏
Love from Canada 🇨🇦 ❤️
Amen to all that! Gardens are good. Love being in my garden. 🪴
- Your Friends in Georgia 🇺🇸
You've cursed me with knowledge.
“With much knowledge comes great sorrow.” But it’s not all doom and gloom. Life is short, society is not eternal, I use this knowledge to live life with less fear. Quit the bad job, take the trip, have an adventure, sell the house and take the RV trip. Don’t take life too seriously I suppose :)
I read Chris Martinsons "crash course" many years ago before anyone talked about this. I was one of his earliest followers. I am on the GA coast. We were hit hard by Helene. It has been sobering. I want land in NE GA. Prices are high but so are the values here. Everythjng is changing fast. Enjoyed your analysis 👍
You and Nate Hagens should collaborate. He's got a wealth of knowledge on this very topic.
Nate Hagens is one of the sharp minds that helped me become aware of this predicament. Love his work.
@@acornlandlabs contact him.
I tried once! Didn’t hear back. That’s ok though. He’s a busy guy
The desire for local/ community /village models over the past several years, is very encouraging.
Smaller groups= more trust= better relationships= responsibilities/ commitment= more investment. (+ So many more benefits) In smaller groups, you either sink or swim, TOGETHER.
The max number of healthy human relationships we can neurologically manage is 150.
When many indigenous groups reach 150, they will split into groups of 75 or 50.
Agreed. Dunbars number at work :)
It’s important to note we will not all be going into that good night. That’s why it’s so important to educate ourselves and others as much as possible and hold on to our love for our fellow human beings. This is so we always remember what happened so our grandchildren learn from our mistakes. They will rise victoriously from our ashes if we do everything we can to protect them from the flames. There is a smaller, brighter, future we can save if we arm ourselves now with the tools and knowledge to keep as many people safe as we can. Always remembering the siblings we left behind, which will be many of us, will keep the human spirit alive.
Team work makes the dream work.
Stay safe and I love you all,
Nolan
Amen to that Nolan. It won’t be easy, but it’s worth working towards. No other kind or good choice exists but to try.
@@acornlandlabsAmen to that brother. Only together can we make the change we want to see in this world, even in the face of adversity. You guys have inspired me to educate any time I can bc that is the spark of change. Keep fighting that good fight till the cows come home!
Stop having grandchildren
Self-control.
Either we manage ourselves or Nature will manage things for us. Stoicism is my goal.
When things get "uncomfortable" for others, it's no big deal for me.
Being raised by older generations was such a gift.
I've never jumped in my car for every little thing, or picked up dinner every single day at the grocery store. Lights off & some appliances unplugged when not used. Not using the AC or heat for as long as possible. Buying on sale or in bulk, cooking large meals, & eating leftovers.
Conserving is thoughtful.
It extends resources for me, my family, and others.
have been telling this to people for a long time. nobody listens. only thing I can do is to prepare myself for the inevitable. If I reach the old age, I don't expect to receive a great help from anybody. Everyone else does.
I feel like Cassandra from the Iliad. She knew things, but everyone ignored her saying she was crazy.
Thank you for the video. I think you are right about everything. I am single and have 4 dogs I am looking to go off the grid to be a Hermit for a couple of reasons. I can do it since it is just me. I am excited about the move and have been living at night with little or no electricity most days. For me, it is about returning to a simpler life and I am really happy. I am like no I longer want a new anything. I have sadly 2 computers for work because one of my job's websites is not compatible with a MAC. While I know it is going to be a hard life I also think it is going to be a rewarding life. Keep the videos coming and I really liked this video.
Everything you’re saying in this video I’ve been saying for the last 25 years
I'm proud to have gone nearly car free and have primarily rode my bike around for the past few years. It feels good to not care about the price of gas. But it would be naive of me to say that a significant price shock of oil and gas would not affect me entirely. I still rely on a network for my food and goods, all cogs of which depend on fossil fuels. This affects all of us, and is without a doubt the struggle of our species... yet also our triumph... ever since we controlled fire for the first time. I'm grateful live in a time and place to enjoy great comforts and exploits of modern life, but I fear on behalf of my descendants for the consequences of our lavish stint.
I've had numerous conversations with folks in my life about how getting back to the basics and living how people did back in the day is key. One particular response that annoyed me is that they said (not verbatim but in spirit), "that's fine if you want to live that way but let us who want to live in cities, live our way" but the point they're not understanding is, this isn't viable. This way of life, these cities, ARE NOT NORMAL. Not when you look at the history of the world. Not by a long shot. People think this is the new way of life, it's not. It's an experiment, that will collapse. Do you know how fast those big cities like NYC, Chicago, L.A will rot and perish? Because they're utterly useless when the world reverts back to what is sustainable. People lose sight of how damn privileged we are. I do too, I take it for granted a lot and I'm mad that I do. But I'm doing what I can to escape the system.
People at large do not understand how fragile our systems are. All this political nonsense means nothing when people are out of food. So many scattered thoughts all over the place but anyway, it's going to be a shock for folks when they realize we're back to the 1800s.
A return to sound money would alleviate the immediate pressure we all feel.
Thank you. I was truely hoping you would touch on this issue that can be an reason for people start gardening and doing stuff in a more sustainable way. The party is over.
It’s a good time to garden and live simply :)
@acornlandlabs I briefly looked through your links and couldn't find the source for renewables like solar not being feasible. I understand the general arguement, that we can't power mining and factories necessary for solar with solar, but I'd like to see the source especially since it's the most surprising and one of your most repeated points. Love your work, thanks.
I do feel like things will change and personally don’t even have to try very hard to get ready, my garden is where I’d rather be. But I also think that betting against mankind is a dangerous bet. There’s a deeply intelligent balance in the universe and it will counter the evil and suffering caused by our mistakes. Sure, let’s all learn to raise chickens and sew shirts back together, but don’t forget that we are incredibly powerful beings.
I certainly hope for the best. However, I’m not betting against humanity. Just looking at the available data that illustrates we’ve grown too big for our britches globally and like any group of organisms in overshoot, there will be a correction. What would be dangerous is assuming today’s lifestyles will continue for much longer, like most people do. Humans are clever and will find ways to thrive. Just not 8 billion humans living the lives we do today. I agree with you on the garden bit! Best place to be
Look into the drought in Ecuador. Most of Ecuador is rainforest, so they have relied heavily on hydroelectric. But, now they’re lucky to get an hour or two of electricity from the grid each day.
This was very well put together. I appreciate the time it took and sharing it with us. It’s a first I hear this perspective and it makes sense to me.
So glad you enjoyed it! Hope the videos are a help
big dog, nuclear energy
I hate to say this, but the French have a great model. Small nuclear plants that are easy to contain and keep from big messes. Also, the tech has improved so much that it is a lot safer now.
oooooohhhh nvm i see what your saying
It could work if we'd quit building them near critical bodies of water (Hanford) and earthquake faults (Diablo).
@rcjo2 yes! Exactly!
Nuclear is a great toolkit for baseload grid electricity, but it does not replace liquid transport fuels for mining, transport, farming, or fertilizer production by a long shot. Those are critical for society and only diesel fits that bill. France did a great job with nuclear. We didn’t follow that model in the US. See my pinned comment for more 📍
I would largely agree for the following few years to decade. But over the next couple decades, we will undoubtedly unlock oil & gas that was previously inaccessible, as well as make leaps and bounds with nuclear. In the short to medium term, we will experience supply shocks for sure. But I don't see this as the "end of growth" for the long run due to a limited supply of fuel. There's plenty more, we just need technology innovation to access it.
We will certainly find out. We’re in for a bumpy ride either way. More oil to burn? Rough ride. Less oil to burn? Rough ride. Growth is clearly plateauing, and population declines are not easily reversed. That alone will cripple growth. It’s already here really. We could be surprised, but the downhill slope is on the horizon. It’s not all bad at all, just different
I think we will take up new technologies in the coming decade, not have to give up some because of price/resource limits. A lot of things will be coming because of AI, including self driving, which will reduce the cost of transportation (and will be electric).
AI and electric cars don’t really fix anything particularly. You’re haven’t done much deep research based on your comments. Thats ok, most haven’t. I encourage you to read the links I posted and learn more
We will have to adapt to a world with much less fossil fuels. I'm not looking to this video or others like it to predict anything, but we will have to come up with a more up-to-date way of life that isn't just trying to squeeze a 1950s lifestyle out of a rock. AI could be a useful tool in helping us solve these problems. AI isn't the solution in and of itself, rather, it's more of a helper. I honestly think humans could maybe overcome this crisis even without AI. Eight billion was kind of a crowd anyway, and the modern fossil fuel powered lifestyle isn't as great as people say it is.
In regards to the centralization of the market, I think an important point to mention is that those with access to politicians are going to use that access to benefit themselves economically. As such, the state heavily intervenes into the market to benefit a select few corporations at the expense of the competitors to those corporations as well as the consumers like you and me. This will always happen if the state asserts a right to intervene into the economy.
Absolutely. Look to China for examples of this.
Definitely a great discussion of things I hadn’t fully considered. I do wish you had addressed efficiency increases though, since if we can now do more the 15 barrels of oil due to efficiency improvements than we used to do with 100 barrels of oil, and if efficiency improvements due to technology improvements can keep pace with decreased energy availability, that may somewhat compensate or slow this. Also, decreased population from lower birth rates means decreased energy consumption, this also slows things down, especially if we don’t lose productivity from lower population due to increases in technological efficiency (needing fewer people and less energy to achieve the same output). I wouldn’t say this negates your point entirely, but seems like a potentially large factor in the growth change rate equation
Efficiency is actually a very counter intuitive point. The more efficient our systems get we actually use MORE energy because production is cheaper and the excess energy is cheaper. This principle is called Jevons Paradox. Efficiency doesn’t actually help us conserve resources at all. As cars are more efficient you can use more gas to take more trips. And if you don’t use the fuel, somebody else globally will. As for population declines, this could help marginally after some massive declines, but the depletion won’t be stopped at this point. You’re thinking of these concepts properly, there are just some unintuitive reasons why efficiency gains won’t make a difference. More efficiency = less used fuels = cheaper fuels = more demand to use fuels for other purposes. Humans desires are infinite. Even with lower population, we will use all we can. Us Americans use 25% of global energy.
We humans will use anything and everything we can.
Problem: we DON'T have lower population because we keep accepting immigrants from the places that are still breeding like rabbits.
The legitimate solution is to allow the human population to balance to its local resources but the powers that be demand growth so they welcome immigration with open arms.
Problem is lower birth rates do nothing for this planet when the nations with lowered birth rates welcome an inflow from nations with higher birth rates with open arms.
'Growth' at any cost, comes at a high cost to the planet.
Typically local populations will adapt to the resources, but if a place that can support 10 million is able to offload 1 million per year, they're going to maintain a local population of 10 million while exporting q lot of resource demand to asylum lands.
Hard message but very necessary. Thank you for the video.
Glad you enjoyed it. It’s a hard conclusion, but rooted in common sense and critical thinking.
@@acornlandlabs As a lot of things it will surely not come without pain, but at least we can prepare and start thinking about how to minimize it.
Agreed. The time is late, but individuals can change their mindset. Mindset is the hardest thing to change
More or less, technology advances a lot, we just need to be more efficient to achieve a similar quality of life, let's not forget that our government is very inefficient, and this extra cost is a huge waste of energy. Just one example, in Mussolini's Italy the average tax was 15%... today this would be a tax haven.
Other than computing and digital tech, we haven’t developed meaningfully new tech since the 70s. Cars, ships, planes and grid technology are mostly the same. Some call this the “great stagnation”. Tech progress has almost all been digitally recently. Cool stuff, but it doesn’t feed us or heat homes.
@@acornlandlabsthat’s not really true though, is it? What about advancements in heat pumps, geothermal, and building materials, for example?
As a software engineer myself, I find common ground with your views on systems and passion for sourcing inputs locally. However, I would urge you to read/watch content from those with opposing views to the degrowth movement - RethinkX is a good place to start - in order to balance the viewpoints you’re consuming. I’ll be heeding my own advice and having a look at the resources you mentioned in the video. Hopefully we can all work together to make the future a better place to live!
big paradigm shift thank you for sharing.
I hope we can sooner rather than later live in a happy and more or less healthy society without electricity or energy. Wood for heating, horses for travel… people caring for and farming with each other. Making our own goods as ones daily work. I hope we can embrace a time of peace and tranquility and take our modern knowledge of nutrition, medicine, and crafts with us.
That will be a hard life. It is coming though, but not soon. Modern life will continue and decline for decades. Population will be much much smaller then
Good points and insights for sure. Do beware of oversimplification like saying the war in Gaza is a war over resources - it may be a component but generally, that's hardly true and doesn't strengthen your other arguments which fundamentally are. Nonetheless, it's great stuff, and thanks for sharing
It does come down to the continued abduction of palestinian farmland though, right? Even if a miriad of factors are the catalyst?
@@EliasModeMusic Not really. If there is an economic component I'd say it's more to do with oil and larger geopolitical dynamics concerning Iran and Saudi Arabia. Israeli elements' desire to annex Palestinian land has to do with religio-national reasons fundamentally. Not a desire for more farmland.
@@EliasModeMusic Not really. Palestinian farmland is hardly a consideration. Striving for annexation by Israeli elements is due to religious/national reasons - Not food production. If economics is a factor it is more to do with broader geopolitical dynamics involving oil and Saudi-Iranian relationship and Israel's role in countering Iran in the region.
This was an extremely well made and well thought out video. It's unfortunate that the renewable future many of us envisioned may not be possible, but if we live in small groups it could be more viable of a transitionary phase. The way I see it the name of the game is coming up with smooth transitions for society to prepare the western world for whats next. I have been working on this idea for about 8 years now and think what I have to share with the world could be very impactful. Would love to meet up with you sometime to talk about it. I am in Toccoa Georgia currently.
Thank you for the kind words, my
goal is to help people want to live simply to reduce future pain. I agree with you John. The mission now is to parachute out of the falling plane instead of jump and plummet. You can survive falling from a plane if your parachutes work and you know how to use them. Industrial society is the plane. And the fall will take place over the next 75-120+ years.
I’d like to hear your ideas you want to share. Sharing ideas is what I do too :) Reach out to my on our website contact form. I’m in Henry County GA.
@acornlandlabs sent!
I watched it the whole way through. Very inspiring and really helps me with my doomerism.
Glad to hear it! I’ve learned to evolve my own prior doomerism into gratitude and exploration. The world is so amazing, but it’s finite. Just like our lives. Even the sun won’t last forever. But we’re here to learn and try to improve things to the best of our ability. I can handle a slow decline. I can’t handle being trapped in a cubicle letting life pass me by. I was more of a doomer trapped commuting in a big city with an office job. Getting out of that has helped immensely
There will always be ethanol which is derived from corn. Pure ethanol can be used to safely power Stirling engines (unlike powering internal combustion engines due to several known issues). The end of oil is not as dire as the video depicts.
Please research the EROI of ethanol. It’s woefully inadequate. I love stirling engines, I have a few. But there is a reason they are mostly limited to being children’s toys and miniature desk toys. Ethanol and stirling engines are novel, but there are far from a replacement for oil.
You need to research more deeply. That’s ok, most people do. Perhaps stirling engines could help a fraction of a fraction of society one day. Some alcohol based fuels will be helpful. Neither solves problems for 8 billion people.
This video does not depict a dire end. A long slow decline.
@@acornlandlabsI'm aware of the EROI being lower than that of oil but the point I was making is that ethanol and stirling engines are a working alternative that can be replenished quickly. Billionaires are probably already aware of this hence why they are buying all the farmland ahead of time. Nuclear is peak EROI, fusion followed by fission.
Gotcha, makes sense.
How can i join you guys?
Send us a message on our website contact form. AcornLandLabs.com
Fill out our website form to say hello
@acornlandlabs will do later.
A homestead can't be self-sufficient, and maybe a small town can't be self-sufficient... But a 4,000 person City can be self-sufficient and they have been capable self-sufficiency since the ancient era without modern amenities. That means that you have to give up the modern amenities to be self-sufficient.
I think a large part of the issue is the absolute lack of recycling infrastructure and technology. Humankind has set up an absolutely wasteful way of life, the amount of electronic waste that could get recycled and the improper use of more difficult to recycle materials is absurd. (Styrofoam should have never been used as a disposable material)
If nearly all produced materials were actually recycled we wouldn't need to produce as much, (even though we already over produce many goods.) and therefore we wouldn't be expending as much limited energy to extract more resources.
A potential silver-lining: Current waste materials might eventually become more affordable to recycle than extracting new raw materials if untouched resources become scarce enough.
We live in a world that was founded on corruption, greed, and excessive luxury. Most of the things we have in a first world civilization are luxuries, not necessities, we just became accustomed to viewing them as such because that is what the extremely wealthy industries want. Billions of dollars are spent on advertising and attempting to manipulate large amounts of people into buying things they absolutely do not need, and to upgrade to the greatest and latest: Streaming service, Gadget, Fashion, Exotic Pet, Car, and the next limited time junkfood special.
These issues wouldn't exist if:
A) Those with the power weren't irredeemably corrupt and instead had altruistic intentions.
B) If people as a whole were content with less.
c) If humans were wise enough to use and recycle the Earth's resources properly. They are not, and they never will be. Nature is infinitely complicated and fixing the damage done and preventing more while taking care of both mankind and nature requires a perfect solution. And you can't get a perfect solution or system from an imperfect source it is just impossible.
Well-meaning critiques, thanks. And some wonderful ideas. Postcapitalism emerging.
Fusion, fission, sodium glass batteries, hyperlocalized walkable community production, aeroponics (90% more efficient water usage and fastest largest yield), lab meat, greater device efficiency, shared autonomous EVs, population stabilization, greater solar panel/battery recycling - with even better more efficient long-lasting tech ~20 years later, help from AI, etc ftw!
If people can get onboard with walkable communities / micro EV paths we’d be in a totally different world today. It will take time to guide folks, especially Americans. Many will only go when forced when they can’t afford a car and the infrastructure is built. Low tech will be the way. AI is more of a gimmick today and a massive energy hog. We’ll see if it actually fixes anything
@@acornlandlabs There are a bunch of gimmicky uses of AI for sure, the energy use is presently colossal, and it still often hallucinates. But it's also helping a ton with education / learning and project development so far. Can help with medical, legal, construction, product design, nonprofit startup, and more. It's also being used to try to figure out effective climate change remediation solutions. Helping us decipher the language of animals, etc.
@@acornlandlabs Many people would love to walk instead of drive if they had the option. Many people are forced to commute, or go farther distances out of food deserts. Thankfully our city Eugene, Oregon USA is very walkable. I haven't needed a car in years.
Solar and nuclear technology is currently in its infancy. It takes a few more breakthrough to be completely be energy sustainable
Both have been around since before the 70s. Granted, improvements can be made. The rapidly declining EROI of oil and our impending fiat money crisis will make financing nuclear and solar more challenging. And of course the oil subsidy for nuclear and solar cannot be forgotten. Here’s to hoping for miraculous breakthroughs ASAP that are cheap and defy thermodynamics :)
Very interesting content and food for thought❤👌
Glad you enjoyed it! No apocalypse, just a long slow (sometimes ragged) journey down.
I cannot wait to watch this!
Hope you enjoy it! I’m not here to change anyone’s mind. This is just what I believe is happening based on 10 years of researching. It’s a fascinating set of issues we’re dealing with
To quote an author I am sure you know about - "Collapse now and avoid the rush" - John Michael Greer
Great quote
This is a super interesting topic that on a fundamental level I would agree with lots you say in this video, but I have quite the opposite outlook on the future. Energy is by far the most important resource, and you seem to grasp that, but later you talk about how coal or oil matter, they don't. They were once cheap options for how to make power, and as core components on how we make many products, but we don't need to rely on what we can source from the ground when we can synthesize them from CO2 in the air if we need to. We don't do this now because of the cost, but we will one day reach the tipping point its cheaper to make oil then to drill it out of the ground.
When it comes to energy, we have many options that are getting better by the day, renewables are getting cheaper and as more places switch over, the economies of scale will continue to bring down the prices. The same goes for nuclear, for the last 50 years we stalled construction due to cost and public perception, but that is changing and there are lots of plants in different stages of planning, building some large scale power, not to mention the private sector is also joining in as Microsoft and Google are building them to meet their growing datacenter power demands.
I take issue with your points 20-26 are true at the moment, but do not need to stay this way. Capitalism does an amazing job at finding the cheapest way to do things, and once we reach the point when oil becomes too expensive we will move on, there are already some large mines that are switching over to fully electric trucks, metal refining using electrolysis in place of coal reduction and transportations using electric vehicles.
Agree with most of what you said here. I’ve been following Doomberg for a few years now. That team’s expectation is that in a global scale we will be burning more fossil fuels in the future. Poorer countries with less access to capital will move from coal, to oil, to natural gas but will hardly to get to renewables. More developed countries will rely more heavily on LNG and if they’re smart, nuclear. Solar is amazing for certain use cases but can’t power large scale grids especially those being used to charge electric vehicles.
Don’t place too much value on “cost” (money) and our free market system. Money doesn’t build nuclear plants. Energy does. Yes, public perception is part of what hampers nuclear. The massive energy costs required have been the other reason we haven’t seen more nuclear plants deployed recently.
You sound like you’re still in a “techno optimist” phase. Most folks who just start researching these issues begin their journey there. I’d encourage you to read more of the links in the description for grounded analysis as to why capitalism isn’t a failsafe way to produce more energy. It’s just a human system for allocating existing resources. It can’t produce any new energy, no matter how badly we desire it to. I certainly share your hope in a future of breakthroughs. However, nothing substantial backs up any new breakthroughs in fusion or other blue sky projects. Producing oil from CO2 in the atmosphere is not a commercially viable technology - seems more like a fringe concept. We can’t rely on any vaporware technology at this point. Many tech bros make big promises on fantasy solutions that sound nice, but there are not working examples.
You do grasp the importance of energy, just not the reality of what is possible today and how today’s world does indeed totally depend on oil and coal. I encourage you to keep following along and explore the links below. It’s a great deal to research but the picture becomes clearer over time.
Spot on! I like to emphasize how everything and what is happening all around us is all interconnected with fossil energy. Many friends in the past during these discussions always gave me those yeah right looks. Now not so much. P.S. The drill baby drill mentality also seems to have prevailed. But in the long run, Do nothing but hasten oils demise.
Yes, I believe that the global economy will suffer a serious contraction due to depopulation, but about oil production:
Could ethanol and biofuels possibly substitute diesel in some sectors of the economy to safeguard oil for sectors that they are essential (mining, trains, etc.)
After the cost of extraction oil is essentially free and wildly powerful. Ethanol and biofuels take much energy to produce and provide little energy in return. Their low EROI (energy return on investment) makes them a non-viable oil alternative for today’s needs. They could be mildly useful for a few million people perhaps, but not billions. Nothing replaces oil - simply living with less
3rd time watching this, excellent!! Thank you!! A few things: 1) Fusion would just increase the extraction of rare earth materials, the mining, the clear cutting of the rainforests, the consumption, are you sure you want this version of ape to have access to unlimited power??? 2) Have you considered what will happen to the economies of the world when suddenly, the old, rich financiers realize that growth is over, and that getting interest is only possible with growth ... then the stock market crash would smash all records for losses, and keep losing, 3) Please consider this carefully, if a deadly virus struck humanity (it's happened many times before), but this time it was too deadly, and we lost enough people globally that all of our societies just collapsed (like Haiti today), then WHO WOULD SHUT DOWN THE NUCLEAR POWER PLANTS SAFELY??? If this doesn't happen, 440 nuclear power plants around the world would eventually meltdown, and spew into the atmosphere radiation for 10,000 - 50,000 years. Is that the kind of legacy we want to leave behind? I don't think so. Let's shut them down now, while we are still semi-functional and semi-capable.
You’re right! All excellent points that I agree with. I don’t see fusion happening. Society is toast but we can enjoy the time we have left fully with loved ones :)
Even with some fantastic new energy astrophysicists Tom Murphy has done the maths and he says at the rate we're using energy the waste heat alone would be enough to boil the oceans. Biodiversity loss is a huge problem that is solvable too.
We will see
This is a tough subject. At some point our national security decreases. Then your wealth is really what you can defend. I took my family to the guidestones & we moved out of our city for rural land. There’s a huge unknown population decrease that’s underway predicted in the Deagal report. Enjoying the energy of today but preparing my family for the decline.
If there's a push to decrease the population, then why is there such an international freakout about the fact
that birth and conception rates are nosediving in many countries? Why the incredibly vocal pushback on so called "childfree cat ladies" who are minding their business and just disinterested in pregnancy and breeding?
@ we’re too dependent on the current system. It’s best to have a good circle of neighbors & friends with usable skills now. Produce what you can & be ready to protect it. Put yourself in the shoes of Western North Carolinians.
The Earth is not a completely closed system. We receive energy form out side, by way of the sun.
That right. We’re bathed in diffuse energy. The earth is not a closed system.
Thanks for the rational approach and reflection on the current state of our world.
I fully follow your argument that future (or sustained) progress and prosperity is tightly bound to the energy available.
However, you don't really mention the application of (current generation) nuclear power but also the possibility (perhaps even inevitability) of future breakthrough discoveries that allow us new ways to source the amounts of energy required.
Maybe those new sources of energy will come, but maybe they won't. If they do, will they come in time? Human innovation can, and has, overcome a lot of things. Time will tell.
Nuclear is a great toolkit for baseload grid electricity, but it does not replace liquid transport fuels for mining, transport, farming, or fertilizer production by a long shot. Those are critical for society and only diesel fits that bill. France did a great job with nuclear. We didn’t follow that model in the US. See my pinned comment for more 📍
Humans assuming that progress is inevitable is part of our problem. Fusion is a wonderful concept, but we need it NOW to help stave off decline. Hopefully there are breakthroughs to realize commercially viable fusion in the immediate future. Even then, we still need liquid transport fuels for today’s systems.
I have been thinking about this video for days since watching it, and I have to admit, it's a big paradigm shift, even while agreeing with most of your ideas already. I agree that we are on the decline side of a large energy bubble and our lives will become much simpler and slow-moving within the next few centuries. But the claim that we will predominantly return to a pre-industrial subsistence style of living? I'm not convinced. There are too many unknowns for me to draw that conclusion.
1. If oil does become unprofitable to extract, the demand will still be there for an energy source. Why wouldn't markets and investments adapt to fund other sources, prolonging the collapse? Nuclear is not as profitable as oil and has huge upfront cost- but there is a ton of fuel still left for it- and if oil becomes depleted, won't we shift to pursue it as a primary option, for example? I see this buying several more centuries of time.
2. You say that even with other energy sources, the crutch is a liquid transport fuel (diesel construction vehicles, for example). With the rate of battery efficiency and our improved energy storage, is lithium capable of replacing gas for a time, even if it isn't permanent?
3. The bottom line is that we are extracting nearly everything from Earth to the point that there are no resources left for us to exploit, leaving us with a pre-industrial society. But some energy sources are virtually limitless. Nuclear fuel is readily abundant. Geothermal energy is constant. The tech for extracting geothermal is still in its infancy. Whose to say there aren't innovations to be made that will significantly expand the use of that untapped energy?
4. Even if the worst-case-scenario happens and we become completely starved of modern energy sources permanently, we still have multiple centuries of benefits to build off of, all the ideas, infrastructure, products, inventions, concrete, electronics, etc.. things that we didn't have before the industrial revolution. How is it possible that we would regress completely with all these things to catapult from?
This is a really great video, well presented, and I hope you explore some of this further, despite its depressing nature. I strongly agree with your definition of money, I have been saying this for a while, that money is a unit of power, a unit of energy, and spending it makes other people do things. It helps to understand the big picture of it that way. I would love to see someone more knowledgeable critique this video (as well as my comment). Thank you for reading this and good day.
This reminds me of a Corridor Crew video titled "how many solar panels are needed to power the entire world". One message they said is "we need to upgrade everything we use to be electric". So if the factories are running on electric power, maybe the energy output from one solar panel can be used to make another, giving us energy return on an investment.
But even that, it will be energy intensive to convert everything to be electric.
Therein lies the issue. Sunlight is a diffuse energy source. Oil is a highly concentrated energy source. If one solar panel could create two new solar panels with the energy it collects in its lifetime, and have extra energy leftover for us to use, we could have a photovoltaic transition. However, this isn’t possible with today’s solar panels. We must have high energy density diesel for mining, transport, furnaces, and the heavy industry to make solar panels. Solar panels are amazing, they just cannot replace oil. Even at scale.
Right. What they can do is replace oil for diffuse uses such as homes and personal tools and vehicles. It’s super inefficient to mine oil, then ship it to a home to heat when sunlight can do that without being shipped. If we stop using oil for things that solar can do better, we’ll have more oil for the things that solar can’t do.
Do you have a Discord server for off-grid discussion?
We have a circle community. Community.acornlandlabs.com
Make a free account and I’ll upgrade you
Yep, long before we run out of oil/NG/coal, the price of it will eventually exceed what most people can afford to pay for it. Nuclear will be a necessity, and even that is limited. People think energy is limitless. It is not.
Sure nuclear is limited, but it would take hundreds of years at least for us to run out of fuel sources for reactors, probably even longer.
Nuclear power is one of if not the most efficient sources when you compare how many tonnes of ore is required for the fuel to make power (like x many tonnes for y amount of gigawatthours)
Let's learn from the Amish! Build a solid, local community.
@GUNNER. You’re absolutely correct here.
@robert And yes, the Amish were ahead of the game :)
@@acornlandlabs sure, the Amish understand how to live without technology. But don’t overlook the massive psychological damage that people suffer when they are part of a high control religious group. Forced conformity and unquestioned “Devine right” leadership is the wrong cultural model in my view. I’d be looking at more solarpunk and anarchist models that prioritize personal autonomy and consent based decision making.
Did you forget nuclear? You're off the mark so much brother
You absolutely didn’t watch the full video :) You have much to research my friend
Man, thank you for making this video. I’ve been following Art and Nate for a while but it’s refreshing to see someone my age discuss these things openly.
I totally agree with the general direction that you’ve laid out here.. my question is when do you think “the great simplification” as Nate calls it will truly make itself known?
I recognize that it’s a process, not just an event, but I can’t help but wonder when this type of realization will be common knowledge amongst those of us in the privileged west.
For example, how many more years of air travel do we have? How many more years of being able to put gas in our cars do we have? What do you think the political outcomes of this will look like?
Would love to hear your thoughts on those things.
Lastly, really admire and appreciate your perspective on gratitude. I can deeply relate at once I made it through the grieving stage, so many of my everyday experiences just started to feel like absolute magic. We truly are living at the peak.
We still are at peak in many ways. Gratitude is key. If you like Nate Hagens and Art Berman I think you’ll really like John Michael Greer.
We’ve been in decline since the 70s in the USA. But it’s uneven. Rust belt has been in decline longest. I live in the booming sunbelt. Still good times here. But when energy is expensive this place will tank fast.
The rich will keep flying, and filling up nice cars with gas or charging with EVs for the rest of our lives. Frankly, you and I will keep flying and driving for decades. I think the decline won’t register with many people until a shock occurs like an energy crisis or Great Depression.
My gut says that the next 5 years will be fairly normal just with bad inflation. I’m bracing for a financial crisis within 5-6 years. By 2040 I’m bracing for widespread energy crisis or ramped up War. But it won’t be everywhere. The rich will keep partying until the roof caves in, think WW2 Germany.
I have no crystal ball, but I think we’re in the final years of “normalish” compared to the 1990s and 2010s. Even the feeling of the 90s is long gone.
Coffee will get more expensive and other luxuries. Meat will continue to. We might have some years when it feels like it’s getting better. But what goes up must come down.
I’m not worried though. At this point it’s just another adventure. We should try to help those around us and keep a sense of humor :) Nobody gets out alive anyway!
@@acornlandlabs what do you think will happen with property taxes when everything falls apart?
They go away and you instead have to defend your land with force. That will be a long time from now in most developed countries. Already a reality in some places. The local “security” will want to want a protection fee from you.
EROI is fascinating thank you!
It makes so much sense when you think about it! Wealth it energy, it takes energy to GET energy, and the energetic cost of getting energy is going UP. Easy to draw conclusions from there :)
The state of affairs that were now experiencing, and that you yourself, acknowledge, experts predicted, wouldn’t happen for 100 years from now but yet here they are today. Likewise, what you think is going to happen in 100 years from now will happen within the next 5 to 10 years. It is much More dire than you realize and what you think is 100 years off is less than 10 years. Prepare all the more.
We really don’t know. Some predictions arrived FAST. Others like peak oil missed the mark. I intentionally did not estimate dates and hard timeframes. It will be a long and ragged decline. The rest of the next 100 years will be hard. Financial collapse, energy crisis, shrinking population, wars, housing in affordability, famine. It’s all here NOW. But is not everywhere yet. It will be everywhere as times moves onward.
Dr Simon Michoux has a peer reviewed paper showing that we dont have any where near enough resources left to do the energy transition. Hes had a lot of opposition from high up people trying to keep him quiet.
I absolutely believe him. The logical researchers and thinkers have drawn this conclusion time and time again.
People in power can’t afford for this to become common knowledge. Then their levers of power vanish. Marian Tupy is a good example of a shill saying we will expand and grow forever due to endless abundance
yt ain't pushing this one
Sure ain’t. I always wonder if they suppress this stuff OR if people just find it boring or gloomy. Could be a bit of both
Another question is, how do you defend your simple and quite rustic lifestyle?
We’re not there yet needing to defend land thankfully. Hopefully that’s decades away or longer. If it gets that bad you need a strong village. That might be after our lifetimes, hopefully
@acornlandlabs We have experience of some African countries or Ukraine where an armed gang unalives entire village and take anything they want. I am from Ukraine, and my wife is from Nigeria. So it's from personal experience.
You make a good point, that is already here in parts of the world now. Tragic. I don’t have good answers for that. Migrate if possible or build armed community
I am of a similar sentiment for the end being near for our current way of life, as it is not sustainable. I think within my lifetime, I will become a reluctant vegetarian. I feel like I am currently priced out of beef, and even chicken feels like sometimes food right now. Likewise, I am curious about your thoughts on biodiesel. Do you feel like that is a viable transition energy until we can restructure our infrastructure while waiting for more sustainable renewables.
What goes up must come down
Crazily enough, It’s as simple as that.
We don't have to always have cheap oil.Sunshine is way cheaper.
Sunshine is amazing. Trouble is no cheap solar panels without cheap oil. And even then solar won’t feed, heat and transport the needs of 8 billion.
Sunlight will help a few hundred million live. Just not billions.
@@acornlandlabs its true we need oil to initially build solar panels and when we build enough they will provide the energy to build new ones.it takes just 1 to 4 years for a solar panel to replace the energy it took to produce it.solar panels have lives of 20 to 30 years.
So after 30 years what then? Thats the issue. Its a delay, nothing more
4 years to payback the energy used to create them.that means you have 26 years of basically free energy to use to make more panels or for whatever you want to use it for.no more oil needed.
This is why China has built in under 2 decades the largest electrified high speed rail network on the planet. To prepare for the future, as much transportation infrastructure as possible needs to be put on the grid. Asia and Europe have done this. North America is uniquely horrible at it, and we will suffer to a greater extent because of it.
We need the Concept of an Arcology working on a Town Level. A Closed Energy Loop.
What’s that?
I want to open up and discuss the future seriously, with people my age or younger, who are going to inheret the world. I want to help build a fountation and system that allows for a healthy and sustainable coexistance of life. I need people better than me to realize this, but its always always always been on my mind, probably since i learned about dinosaurs lol 😅😅😅
Just live simply and build skills with others
Chris Martensen does a great lecture about this on his channel Peak Prosperity.
I agree with most of what you said, except for planet not being able to support more than 1 billion people without fossil fuels because in my opinion we are currently producing WAY more food than we can eat, so if we could be less spoiled and eat locally accessible food in reasonable amounts, without throwing food, we could support more people.
We waste up to 1/3 of all good globally, yes, massive amounts. That food is only available to waste because it can be grown so cheaply with fossil fuels. Read up on some of the links in the description. Without fossil fuels there is no way we’re feeding more than 1 billion people, likely far less. All the surplus food we waste is gone without fuels. However, the fuels won’t vanish overnight. They will get more expensive and population will contract due to lower fertility, people having fewer kids, and many other factors (hopefully not famine, but it’s likely). Just look to history pre-fossil fuels. It was a hard life for those people, and global population was 1 billion. They even had the skills to grow food non-industrially, we’ve lost those skills today.
This is a point where science would benefit your opinion
You bring up a lot of good points, but there's also a massive blind spot I think you're missing that also contributes significantly to capitalism's failings. Not only does capitalism (and most forms of socialism/communism we've seen since the 20th century) require infinite resources to fuel infinite growth, but it also requires infinite exploitation of human labor. The resource use of your average American is hundreds of times higher than the resource use of someone in the Global South. We cannot and should not prepare for a world beyond capitalism and beyond growth without also preparing for a just world beyond colonialism. Like you said, everything is interconnected. There's just way more that's interconnected than what you've brought up in this video.
It isn't about if the resource is cheap. We need to ask how do we use the resource in a sustainable and replenishment way.
In our daily lives we buy things that will last us a week or a month because we do not want to go to the store daily or we can't.
Gardening, rainwater collection, proper garbage disposal and use, culture change to shame women for promiscuity, culture change from a wasteful society into a sense of responsibility and care, and we NEED to build more 3 story tall buildings for living and we need to engineer them to last forever using methods that we know like Roman concrete.
Sadly most humans won’t change on their own - they will be forced to by nature. Society doesn’t use anything sustainably. You and I might garden, compost, try to walk, and live simply. However, most people absolutely don’t do any of that. Three story buildings are a wonderful thing, optimal size for human scaled living.
Wait, you said that we need culture change to shame women for promiscuity? Respectfully, shame is not the answer, it usually makes things worse. Also, it’s interesting that you only mention women. It takes two to make a baby.
If the problem is too many babies, my solution is social change to teach everyone about consent and to allow access good quality birth control options. This has the added benefit of being good for everyone involved, including any kids that get born.
I don''t believe that we can live like this longer, and that the way things are going is really fucked and can lead us to a collapse. But i never heard so much bullshit about economics in my whole life.
You aren't paying close enough attention
@ZulkSOD To what ?
Anxiety won't save us.
Blame won't save us.
Only the conscience can...? save us...?
Yeah, I agree. 😅
We’re all mortal, so life itself is a predicament. I’m not even bummed about it at this point, it’s just how our world of humans works. This is a natural process that we always fall into
Dude, well rounded and consise presentation. Thanks for that. I believe your on the path of becoming ""full doomer " as you continue to self educate. I say this due to the influence list at the end. Welcome to living in two worlds based on what you know. Nate is brilliant regarding the topic and "limits to growth" should have been standard curriculum beginning in jr high a long time ago. Did you ever see the Georgia Guidestones before their destruction? Keep up the good work. Thank you
So glad you enjoyed this video! You know, I started feeling more negativity a while ago but I don’t want to have a doomer outlook. These authors are great, but I don’t think they’re all doomers - some are. I never got to see the guidestones but I did research their message! Did you? I absolutely want to keep self educating, and I will. The future is looking beyond challenging, but I think the doomer mindset is draining. Will we make it? Idk. Do I want to be joyful even in the face of what could be civilization ending? Absolutely! It’s funny to learn all this and still work hard to be joyful and happy. It is possible :) If people ask about it my views I share, but I stopped telling people in my life (not on RUclips) about all this unless they ask. I just want to help add some goodness even with all the issues. So much beauty left to enjoy.
@acornlandlabs PS, I don't see the term doomer in a negative light. I consider it a realistic lens through which collapse intersects our current times. You covered the basic tenants here. I do appreciate your outlook in the comment, I share the same feelings regarding the joys of life in this time. I'm blessed to travel in a feral RV lifestyle currently. I'm still in awe of the natural world remaining & grateful for opportunities to travel the US. You tend to prioritize differently through the lens of collapse. All the best on your journey!
I didn't make it to the Guidestones. They were erased before I really had the opportunity to make the pilgrimage.
We’re on the same page. Rock on my doomer friend. We are about to join you on the road in our new (to us) camper
I originally ignored this video about three times because of the thumbnail, but once I saw it was Acorn Labs I decided to watch it.
The thumbnail made me think it was one of those AI voice channels 😅
That’s good to know. We will put a human face on the new videos. It makes sense people are skipping AI videos with the glut of them.
Thorium power plants is the way I think we should go. Thorium salt reactors can be shut down quicker and thorium is plentiful around the globe. Yes. It does require more engineering and more expense to build the plants, but they're safer and less prone to natural disasters. I also think that stone housing will help to replace stick framed housing. Dirt is a pretty good insulator of temperature. The thicker, the better. A greenhouse below ground level would help as well. A solar sand battery can absorb heat during the day to provide heat during the night. There are lots of ways to do things differently, but it can't be accomplished if we destroy the system we have now.
I wish I could talk with you. My grandfather lived through the last great depression. I have an idea that might help you to go off grid and keep you warm in the winter. And it doesn't include burning. But it's just an idea. I'm going to try it out in the next couple of years. Wish me luck.
Yes, there’s so much we can do that’s relatively low tech and far more efficient in the long run. If we all had earth sheltered houses, we would not need nearly so much power to heat and cool them.
Thermal mass is an excellent low-tech option. I think we will see more thermal batteries as well, to your point
So we can consume ourselves to extinction to make number go up
We also need to recognise the energy demands AI will place on the energy systems in place, and without being political people have become a resource over the last few years as the aging population issue bites, cheap labour or boosts to population numbers to try and maintain tax levels is real for governments to meet budgets.
Great point about AI. It’s a cool data science trick so far, but it uses a TON of energy. It’s not likely to fix our energy issues, but it will use massive amount of energy to generate fake images and music.
Interesting that you mention population growth being a priority for the economic machine. I wonder if that’s part of why the fundamentalist religions are so cozy with the corporates these days. It’s super convenient for them if people think what makes them money is also God’s will.
said the name Bojangles and he danced a lick.
What?
People are creating oil from plastics now and other materials so once big corporations lose profit from mining they’ll steal and use this idea from small inventors plus nuclear energy. We always innovate it what’s we do. Although I want to live on a homestead getting my own water food energy etc but I can see people as a whole will usually be fine and figure it out unless an asteroid of something takes us out
Overall a useful reflection on the future of (de)growth. You mention fiat currency, but I'd suggest it's more relevant than indicated--a fraudulently-expanding debt-based monetary system has played an outsized role in obscuring natural limits. Also, not sure if your timeline is accurate: re: energy in particular, recent price shocks have been the result of ideologically driven de-investment, not a lack of resources. E.g. In the US we are swimming in dirt cheap natural gas. If the political winds shift away from green fantasy, we have a solid century before your peak. And that's assuming no further innovations in material sciences. STILL: for contingency planning and all the moral and social perks you mention, my family and I are leaning amish--with plans to produce several thousand of us by 2100, and millions by 2200. So if the worst comes, our tight-knit family oriented tribe can colonize the heartland of America 😂
All this can be summarised by our need for Jesus. Politics, corruptipn, greed, wars, resource waste, etc etc comes down to our rejection of Christ. Without him, we live for ourselves, and that lifestyle only has the interest of self and not others. Our rejection of God, is why our lands remain unhealed. All these things are happening now because these are the birth pains of Revelation, before the Lord returns. Yes, some of these things happen like disasters, but the intenesity of these things will not be like before, and what is to come from this is the finalisation of Revelation. It won't get better, so put your trust in him, for he has overcome the world. He is coming back again to give life to those who have believed in him. The kingdom of God is one where there is no sin, no death or disease, no darkness and no tears, one of love, life, light and hope and justice and peace.
As a Christian I agree with this. Thank you. God created the earth, all science is his toolkit, our actions have consequences, and greed has put us here much like the Bible said it would. Our mission is to be thankful, meek, and quietly work with our hands. The Amish are not perfect, but seem to have been some of the ones trying to do that.
@@acornlandlabs amen
The great filter
What a great way to put it. It’s going to FILTER
On the topic of using fossil fuels for energy vs renewables, I think our level of energy use for our quality of life can continue if we just used nuclear more.
Modern nuclear reactors are super safe, certainly safer than fossil fuel plants. It's just that there is no political and social willpower to do it, because people hear the world nuclear and think barrel of green oozing liquid and the disasters that happened over the past forty years.
The era of endless growth is almost over. No energy source can change that. And human populations are declining almost everywhere now, and even collapsing in some places, like South Korea. In just 3 generations, South Korea will lose over 90% of its population. See? They don't need new energy sources ... they are going to have a hard time demolishing all of the abandoned homes and buildings. In Japan, there are 10,000,000 abandoned homes. Guess who is thriving though? The bears, the monkeys, the wild animals, and the plants are reclaiming the land.
Well, nuclear does have some rather large downsides. Getting rid of nuclear waste being one of the major challenges. I'm not against nuclear, I think we're going to need it eventually.
Nuclear is a great toolkit for baseload grid electricity, but it does not replace liquid transport fuels for mining, transport, farming, or fertilizer production by a long shot. Those are critical and only diesel fits that bill. France did a great job with nuclear. We didn’t follow that model in the US. See my pinned comment for more 📍
It would be great to see in that list of required reading material the works of David Holmgren and especially the Future Scenarios. You described very eloquently some of the descent scenarios and i see the comments are starting to attract the tech bros with the Techno explosion scenario 😅
My respects for illuminating what should be common knowledge but it's violently rejected by the oblivious crowds 😢
David Holmgren has been a huge inspiration! I need to add him to this list, thanks for the reminder
tony seba seems to go against a lot of what youre saying, regarding the trajectory of solar energy adoption
Techno optimists and Silicon Valley tech bros types (Tony) typically have something to sell. At this point I don’t like what tech guys have done to us globally. I’m not familiar with Tony. After scanning his predictions it would be nice if he’s right. A $5,000 electric car by 2030?! Sign me up! He is fully drinking the techno kool aid that they promised us in the 1950s. I highly doubt his predictions are accurate.
Tony Seba: “By 2025, gasoline engine cars will be unable to compete with electric vehicles.” He continued, claiming that internal combustion engine (ICE) vehicles “are toast.”
Yeah, Tony isn’t grounded in reality. Hype.
@@acornlandlabs im only familiar with his on point predictions on the rate of solar adoption and how it would get exponential due to the cost decreasing, which is currently happening many places
Cost is certainly decreasing due to economies of scale. Issue is renewable fabrication is all powered by non-renewable resources
It’s all coming to DO YOU KNOW MY SAVIOR JESUS. We will live forever and have a king that rules justly.
Times keep changing. Quite the human adventure down here. God bless
What about oil from Algea and Kelp farms? Coal can be replaced by charcoal. I believe that it's possible, but we haven't had enough funding into these branches because of what you've seen.
Oil from corn, algae, kelp etc can be produced in small quantities. It’s nowhere near being energy dense enough to replace today’s oil usage. Ethanol was tried and failed in the US. Once you dig deep you’ll find there are no liquid fuel substitutes for oil
Oil is the seconds largest abundant liquid on earth. Only 2nd to water….
Will never run out of oil or water on earth