Before we get to the Planetary Assessment Report, I’m going to walk you through four facts about biology.

None of what I’m about to tell you is controversial, it’s more like biology 101.

FACT 1: Every species has exponential growth built into its reproduction, meaning all populations grow exponentially until something stops them.

FACT 2: Feedbacks (death) are what keep exponential growth in check. Things like starvation, predation, disease and so on.

FACT 3: Every individual would remove those feedbacks if they could, because nobody wants to die.

Let’s make this concrete and talk about reindeer, what happens to them and then let’s give them a rifle.

A reindeer can produce 1 calf per year and in a lifetime she might have 6 or 7 if she’s lucky enough to survive that long. What this means is that any given reindeer herd, large or small, can theoretically triple every generation. And sometimes they do but not for long.

What usually happens is that many, especially the calves, get eaten by wolves, bears and lynx. Others starve and some die from accidents, parasites or disease. Only a few of them make it to adulthood.

While that sounds like an awful tragedy, that’s just how nature works and the predators also want to survive and reproduce. What some perceive as “balance” in nature is actually the temporary result of this brutal arithmetic and the necessary conflict that emerges from every biological organism pushing as hard as it can to survive and reproduce.

But do you think the reindeer want to die? Do you think they enjoy watching their babies get eaten alive? I don’t think so.

And do you think if the reindeer had some way of preventing those deaths she wouldn’t take it? I bet she would.

So let’s give the reindeer a rifle. Let’s give them a fighting chance.

We can’t actually give them rifles but in 1944 the U.S. Coast Guard accidentally ran this experiment for us when they released 29 reindeer onto St. Matthew Island. It was a no-death paradise with no predators and lots of food.

What did the reindeer do?

They kept doing exactly the same thing they’ve always been doing. They did not change at all. The only thing that changed was that fewer of them died, which meant exponential growth. So naturally, in a span of twenty-two years those 29 reindeer turned into 6,000 on an island that could sustainably support maybe 1,600.

Why didn’t they stop at 1,600 and live in “balance” with nature?

They didn’t stop because there was no feedback stopping them. As long as there was food to eat today they kept eating and surviving and breeding. The fact that they were consuming their food source faster than it could regrow was invisible to them.

By the time there were 6,000 reindeer it was already far too late. They had no choice but to keep eating what was left in order to survive and what was left was not going to be enough.

They kept eating until they ran out of food and then in the winter of 1964 they starved to death.

So much for saving the reindeer… turns out the “no-death paradise” was a trap that killed them all.

FACT 4: Removing all feedbacks without reducing births unleashes exponential growth which leads to population overshoot.

To not overshoot the reindeer would need to (1) perceive that the population is approaching carrying capacity; (2) understand that continued breeding will cause collapse; (3) choose not to breed despite being healthy and fertile; and (4) do this collectively not just individually.

They can’t possibly do that.

The only species that can even conceptualize overshoot is us and we’ve done exactly the same thing.

Except… well, let’s look at that report.

I.D.I.O.T. Planetary Assessment Report (2026)

The Interstellar Division for Investigating Overshoot Terminations (I.D.I.O.T.) was established to identify, document, and catalogue instances of biosphere-terminating overshoot events.

The dominant species on Planet 7-39-Delta has destroyed its own life-support systems and forced a catastrophic planetary state shift.

The causal agent is H. sapiens, the surviving species of a genus that has been progressively overriding ecological limits for approximately 2 million years. Through standard evolutionary processes the genus developed bipedal locomotion, precision grip, shoulder rotation for projectile throwing, and sweat-based cooling for long-distance pursuit.

This anatomical combination enabled tool use and ultimately the controlled harnessing of combustion (fire), which accompanied and accelerated the development of an unusually large cerebral cortex capable of abstract thought, causal reasoning, and cumulative cultural transmission.

The distinguishing feature of H. sapiens is that each time an ecological limit was reached, a technological or social adaptation was developed that temporarily raised the effective carrying capacity;

(1) weapons and fire extended their range and food options; (2) energy surplus (food) from animal domestication and agriculture dramatically increased the population; (3) sanitation and medicine suppressed disease further accelerating population growth; and (4) fossil fuels temporarily removed all resource constraints and enabled planetary-scale industrial complexity.

The pattern is a ratchet-trap dynamic. Each adaptation, most of which were predicated on unsustainable resource extraction and ecological degradation, enabled further population growth (that’s the ratchet). And each adaptation was irreversible because the population it produced could not survive without the adaptation (that’s the trap).

As the species clustered into oversized ape-colonies beyond what they could naturally coordinate (150 individuals), three things emerged; (1) shared fictions to maintain cohesion (gods, origin myths, currencies, endless growth, progress), (2) specialization and coordination tools to manage complexity (writing, accounting, bureaucracy, law, corporations); and (3) power structures (hierarchies, caste systems, armies, police) to enforce it and control the surplus. These are emergent properties of the scaling problem facing any social species operating beyond its cohesion limit.

This dynamic produced progressively larger and increasingly delusional survival units competing under the Maximum Power Principle in an accelerating consumption of finite resources.

The following sections document the state of each planetary system.

⚠️ PLANETARY ALERT ⚠️

ATMOSPHERIC ANOMALIES

• CO₂: currently 430ppm, the highest concentration in approx. 14 million years. +53% above baseline and accelerating, with roughly half in just the last 30 years. Cause: H. sapiens fossil fuel combustion and land use change.

• CH₄: currently 1,920ppb, +166% above baseline and accelerating. Cause: H. sapiens agriculture (livestock, rice paddies), fossil fuel extraction, and landfill decomposition.

• N₂O: accumulating beyond natural cycling capacity. Cause: H. sapiens synthetic nitrogen fertilizer application and fossil fuel combustion.

• Synthetic halogenated compounds present. Cause: H. sapiens industrial manufacturing.

THERMAL FORCING

• Mean surface temperature: +1.3°C in ~70 years and accelerating. Cause: H. sapiens greenhouse gas emissions.

• Ocean heat absorption: +400 ZJ in ~25 years and accelerating (no geological precedent at this rate). Cause: H. sapiens thermal forcing.

• Self-reinforcing feedbacks initiated: permafrost methane release, ice-albedo loss, forest dieback, ocean stratification. Cause: H. sapiens triggered; now operating independently of emissions.

HYDROSPHERE STATUS

• Cryosphere: compromised (ice mass loss exceeding melt-refreeze equilibrium). Cause: H. sapiens thermal forcing.

• Permafrost: methane feedback initiated. Cause: H. sapiens thermal forcing.

• Thermohaline circulation (AMOC): weakened approximately 15% in 50 years. Cause: H. sapiens thermal forcing via freshwater input from ice melt.

• Underground aquifers: declining at rates far exceeding natural recharge. Cause: H. sapiens industrial-scale extraction for agriculture and urban supply.

• Freshwater systems: deficit state (snowpack loss, altered precipitation, seasonal disruption). Cause: H. sapiens thermal forcing compounding extraction.

OCEAN CHEMISTRY

• pH: -0.1 units in 150 years (norm: 10,000+ years; equivalent to 30% acidity increase). Cause: H. sapiens CO₂ emissions absorbed by ocean.

• Dissolved oxygen: declining globally (warming reduces solubility; thermal stratification inhibiting vertical mixing). Cause: H. sapiens thermal forcing.

• Anoxic dead zones doubled since 1960s. Cause: H. sapiens nutrient runoff from agriculture and thermal stratification.

BIOGEOCHEMICAL CYCLES

• Carbon cycle: destabilized. The species is transferring geological carbon into the atmosphere. Cause: H. sapiens fossil fuel combustion and land use change.

• Nitrogen cycle: saturated (synthetic fixation exceeding all natural fixation combined). Cause: H. sapiens industrial fertilizer production (Haber-Bosch process).

• Phosphorus cycle: disrupted (one-way flow from mined rock to ocean via agricultural runoff). Cause: H. sapiens mining and agriculture.

BIOSPHERE INTEGRITY

• Species extinction rate: 1,000x baseline. Food webs unravelling as species disappear. Cause: H. sapiens habitat destruction, pollution, overexploitation, and climate disruption.

• Net primary productivity: declining, both terrestrial and marine. Cause: H. sapiens land conversion, soil degradation, ocean warming, and pollution.

• Forest coverage: contracting (equatorial and boreal systems). Cause: H. sapiens clearing for agriculture, logging, development, and climate disruption.

• Topsoil: eroding 10–100x faster than it forms. Cause: H. sapiens agriculture.

• Pollinator networks: collapsing (>70% population decline in monitored regions). Cause: H. sapiens pesticides, habitat loss, and climate disruption.

• Insect biomass: down ~75% in monitored regions in 30 years. Cause: H. sapiens pesticides, light pollution, habitat loss, and climate disruption.

CONTAMINATION PROFILE

• Synthetic polymers (plastic): present in every biome including deep ocean trenches and polar ice. Fragments into microplastics now found at every level of the food chain. Cause: H. sapiens industrial production.

• Persistent organic pollutants: accumulating in living tissue planetwide. Cause: H. sapiens industrial and agricultural chemistry.

• Endocrine disruptors: reproductive abnormalities documented in fish, amphibians, birds, and mammals. Cause: H. sapiens industrial chemistry.

• PFAS (forever chemicals): contaminating groundwater globally. Will never break down. Cause: H. sapiens industrial manufacturing.

The species is in the early stages of a systemic collapse of their planetary-scale industrial systems. However, because H. sapiens requires thermal energy for basic survival (heat, cooking, water purification) emissions will persist at significant levels for decades regardless of whether industrial systems survive or fail.

In the former scenario, the species continues burning fossil fuels to maintain infrastructure, supply chains, and the construction of what it calls “clean energy” (which require fossil fuels to build, which is irrelevant regardless, as the method of powering an unsustainable system does not make the system sustainable). In the latter, industrial systems fail and the surviving population burns whatever combustible material is available (biomass, waste, residual fossil stocks) as no other option exists. The most probable trajectory combines both simultaneously across different regions.

Given that; (1) there is no plausible scenario in which the species ceases emitting greenhouse gases; (2) the planet is far from reaching thermal equilibrium from current greenhouse gas concentrations; (3) a significant portion of committed warming is currently masked by aerosol loading; (4) self-reinforcing feedbacks are already initiated (albedo loss from ice retreat, carbon sinks transitioning to net sources, permafrost carbon release, vegetation die-back); 3–4°C of warming within this century is unavoidable, with long-term equilibrium warming of 8-10°C above baseline over the following centuries. A threshold that will terminate the biosphere as it currently exists.

To understand why this rate of change is terminal, it is necessary to establish what the planet’s biological systems are adapted to.

The planet’s climate is governed by two processes that have operated for billions of years: orbital forcing and plate tectonics. Under normal operation, both produce change in temperature and precipitation at rates biological systems can adapt to, generally no more than 1°C and correspondingly gradual precipitation shifts per thousand years. All current life is adapted to these rates, as any lineage that could not tolerate them was eliminated.

On rare occasions, a forcing event exceeds the rate at which biological systems can reorganize, triggering a mass extinction event. In all previous cases, these events struck a biosphere at full capacity with intact soils, high biodiversity, stable ocean chemistry, functional biogeochemical cycling, and zero synthetic contamination. Recovery nonetheless took millions of years.

The current event is fundamentally different.

H. sapiens has systematically pre-destroyed the biosphere, degraded every major biogeochemical cycle, contaminated oceanic and terrestrial systems with persistent synthetic compounds, all prior to the onset of thermal forcing that is now proceeding at a rate without geological precedent.

PROGNOSIS: TERMINAL

The species’ scientific community has documented everything in this report. These are accomplished facts and the data is public. The species knows. The outcome was predicted and is now observed.

Monitor for post-collapse ecosystem recovery.

END OF REPORT

Thank you to the team at I.D.I.O.T. for this thorough assessment.

Despite everything you just read, you will be told not to worry. Politicians will insist on economic growth and promise innovation. Corporations and techno-optimists will sell you their “sustainable solutions”. The media, and most people around you, will repeat the same nonsense, insisting that technology can fix this.

As if we’re not already collapsing. As if we have unlimited energy and materials to build whatever we want, deploy it wherever we need to, and maintain the global supply chains, infrastructure, and cooperation required to do any of it, while our water supply dries up, our agricultural base collapses, our economies implode and governments lose control around us.

These people are bargaining with reality, lying to your face and are asking you to believe in magic.

Let me make this as clear as possible. We are facing multiple predicaments that are going to happen entirely on their own, at the same time. I’ll split it into two major predicaments.

PREDICAMENT (A) is a thermodynamic trap.

Global industrial civilization is an incredibly complex and unsustainable planetary-scale pyramid scheme that requires continuous energy and material throughput, global supply chains, stable food production, and solvent financial systems, all simultaneously, all the time, with no major interruptions.

The whole thing runs on the fossil fuel platform, petroleum in particular. Almost everything you see around you exists because of petroleum whether you know it or not, and whether you like it or not.

Petroleum powers the mining equipment extracting resources, the container ships moving them across oceans, the trucks moving them across countries, the tractors planting and harvesting your food. It’s the feedstock for the fertilizer growing the crops, the chemicals manufacturing semiconductors, the plastics in every device, the asphalt under your feet, and the pharmaceuticals keeping you alive.

Take away petroleum and it all goes.

As the flow of petroleum decreases, gets disrupted, or it simply gets too expensive (and it will, because finite means finite) the system can’t maintain its complexity, and so it unravels.

The only question was when.

As I’m writing this, the Strait of Hormuz has been running at less than 5% of normal shipping capacity for a month, and a large part of the energy infrastructure around the Persian gulf has been blown to shit.

Read this:

…so far deliveries to markets around the world haven’t declined because shipping oil from the Persian Gulf to major markets takes 4-6 weeks. As a result there was a large quantity of oil already at sea, outside the Strait, when the war began.

However, this grace period is about to end… tankers from the Gulf will stop arriving at various destinations. Deliveries to Asian markets will end this week; deliveries to Europe will end next week. (Paul Krugman – 31.3.2026)

This means inflation and a higher cost of living with all the political and economic repercussions. It also means there are going to be physical shortages in the coming months not just in terms of transport fuel but natural gas for electricity generation and feedstock for fertilizer production, right at the start of planting season.

You may want to read this article warning of mass starvation by this summer (whatever you think of the politics, which I don’t agree with, the supply chain math is straightforward).

Even as we muddle through this energy crisis, the collapse will keep accelerating from every direction; economic contraction, fiscal crisis, rising unemployment, other essential resources like copper and phosphorus running out, water shortages, whatever. These are all coming, many of them at the same time.

The outcome of this predicament is the collapse of industrial systems and the end of the petroleum-based lifestyle that came with them. This will happen regardless of climate change or biodiversity loss or any other environmental issue. It’s an entirely separate predicament rooted in thermodynamics.

Further reading:

• The Party’s Over: Oil, War and the Fate of Industrial Societies - Richard Heinberg

• Immoderate Greatness: Why Civilizations Fail - William Ophuls

• We’re Saved! A Collection of ‘Solution’ Critiques, Volume 1 - Steve Bull

PREDICAMENT (B) is the damage caused by (A)

Building and maintaining the industrial systems that provide our modern lifestyles required destroying the planet’s life-support systems. The result is everything you just read in the Planetary Assessment Report.

And because of (A), because we’re losing our entire technology stack, which requires global supply chains which run on fossil fuels which depend on a level of stability and coordination that is disappearing fast, the technological responses most people are still counting on to respond to (B) will be off the table.

And (B) returns the favor with crop failures (food shortages), droughts (water crisis + food shortages), fishery collapse, extreme weather destroying infrastructure, mass displacement, and ecosystems dying faster than anyone predicted, which accelerates (A) and tears the whole thing apart faster.

That’s the unstoppable trajectory we’re on.

Let’s go back to the four questions we asked of the reindeer and apply them to us.

Can we perceive that the population is approaching carrying capacity?

The question asks whether we can perceive it before crossing it and the answer is that we didn’t. We’ve been crossing it for millennia and never stopped.

Every carrying capacity we reached was a temporary ceiling achieved by using unsustainable technologies to draw down finite stocks of soil, water, minerals, and fossil fuels. What we’ve done is created the illusion of it (phantom carrying capacity) while degrading the long-term carrying capacity, just like the reindeer did.

But sure, since the 70s we’ve been measuring pieces of the damage and some people have a rough idea of what the short-term human carrying capacity actually is (could be zero by the end of this century).

So do we pass question one? Partially. Some of us can perceive it. Didn’t matter.

Can we understand that continued growth will cause collapse?

Malthus figured out the basic math in 1798. Ehrlich warned about the population bomb in 1968. And in 1972, some nerds at MIT built a computer model and discovered that infinite growth on a finite planet leads to collapse. Really blew some minds.

Since then there have been thousands of studies, hundreds of international summits, and increasingly desperate IPCC assessments all confirming the same thing in increasingly alarming language that increasingly nobody reads or cares about.

So do we pass question two? Some of us understand it. Doesn’t matter.

Can we choose to reduce reproduction / consumption despite being healthy and able?

There are already 8 billion of us. So… too late.

To answer the question, yes, people can and do decide not to have children for all kinds of reasons. Many also voluntarily simplify their lives. But there are dependencies that nobody is giving up voluntarily. No country is going to abandon electricity or modern medicine. No individual is going to walk into their living room tonight and tell their family “I’ve been reading about overshoot and I think we should give up modern medicine and electricity”.

That said, these technologies are going away whether we give them up or not and consumption is going to come down whether people want it to or not.

Can we do this collectively, at a global scale?

Obviously not. The time for collective action was the early 70s. We missed it, just like the reindeer.

Now the reckoning is here. We have wars breaking out everywhere, nationalism surging, institutions collapsing, and leaders who are openly criminal. People can’t even agree on what’s real anymore. We can’t agree on basic facts. Nobody is listening to anyone. Nobody is in charge. And it’s getting more insane every single day.

Does ANY of this sound like a species that’s about to coordinate some “global response” to the most complex predicament in its history?

No. It does not.

What would a global response even look like? Consider these questions:

What do we do about industry? Which ones do we shut down? In what order? Because every industry is connected to every other one requiring the entire industrial system. How many people die in this “transition” and who decides what’s acceptable? Do the wealthy get to keep their assets and land? Does anyone? If we confiscate and redistribute, who decides? Walk me through how you do this without it turning into a war. What about militaries? Who disarms first? When governments collapse, who steps in? When the only way to generate electricity is burning coal or biomass, who is going to say no? When entire regions become uninhabitable, where do those people go? When there’s not enough food, who eats and who dies?

Does anyone have a plan for any of this, or are we just saying words? I think the honest answer is that nobody has anything even close to a plan because there is no humane way to do this. And even if there were a “plan” there’s no global authority that could enforce it, or political process that could deliver it, or population that would accept it voluntarily.

It’s total fantasy.

There’s a reason we didn’t do anything meaningful in the 70s, 80s, 90s, last year, last week, or yesterday. We can’t. Just watch, we won’t do anything meaningful tomorrow, next week, next month, or next year. We are just going to collapse and keep reacting to whatever crisis hits us next.

When you think about it, the best-case “collective response” would have, in many respects, looked like collapse, because it means deindustrializing, building with local materials, growing food locally, and a dramatic reduction in population and material living standards. That was never going to happen voluntarily.

The question now is how do we navigate this? Can we respond locally with some basic coordination and decency, use what’s left of functioning supply chains to soften the blow, or do we get there the hard way and descend into the kind of horror that follows a famine.

Our destination is the same either way. I’ll write more about that next.

For now, I’ll leave you with this.

If you follow the logic all the way through it’s hard to avoid the conclusion that some version of this was inevitable, and I don’t mean the timing, I mean the outcome.

Given a species with our anatomy and the ability to transmit knowledge across generations, the odds of us not eventually stumbling into agriculture, not finding the coal, not burning the oil, and not overshooting are extremely small.

Nobody chose overshoot. As individuals and groups we chose survival and those are the same choice. A mother cooked food because her kids were hungry. A farmer planted grain because he wanted his family to survive. A government built a hospital because people were dying.

Most of those choices seemed like a great idea at the time to whoever made them, and those choices got us here. That’s why 7% of all humans who have ever lived are alive right now, in this moment.

We live in a world defined by its inability to agree on anything. The other day I received a comment from someone saying how he agreed with everything in this article except global warming, which he thinks is a hoax.

I honestly don't know how someone can understand fossil-fuel-powered overshoot but not global warming, since both are about extracting ancient carbon, adding them to an active carbon cycle in a very short period of time which overwhelms carbon sinks, meaning much of the carbon lingers in the atmosphere trapping heat.

Go figure.

Anyway, I thought it could be interesting to do a little poll.

We all know that the future is uncertain and impossible to model, but there are physical limits and laws that simply cannot be broken.

Here's what we know is true:

• Thermodynamics is real.

• The depletion curves are real.

• The feedbacks are real.

• A mass extinction is already happening.

So when you put it all together, everything you know about energy, matter, ecology, climate, and human behavior, where do you actually land?

Here's a slightly different article where I ask you what you think. 10 questions. Feel free to skip them.

Quick definition:

Overshoot symptoms = These are the consequences of exceeding planetary limits: global warming, ecosystem collapse, resource depletion, and contamination.

Industrial civilization = Population × Energy throughput (primarily fossil fuels) = Industrial overshoot

With that established, let's look at these two physical drivers first.

1. Population (2100)

The UN World Population Prospects projects human population reaching 10 billion by 2080 with 95% confidence.

Methodology: take current birth rates, death rates, and migration patterns, then extrapolate forward. That's it. Believe it or not.

But what matters most is consumption and how many people are living industrial lifestyles. We all know that consumers in rich countries are driving most of the damage.

Take a look at the four charts below.

Here's what the charts say:

(Left) High-and-upper-middle-income countries are projected to start declining before mid-century, while their populations get older.

(Right) China (30% of global manufacturing1) is already declining, and projected to drop to 700 million by the end of the century. Even worse aging problem.

These projections also assume (shown below): (1) fertility will stabilize/rebound in high-and-upper-middle-income countries (I’ve talked to Gen Z and Gen Alpha, I don't buy it), and (2) life expectancy keeps increasing globally (because… progress).

What this looks like to me… is that the consumer base is disappearing.

• Less consumption and fewer workers means lower tax revenue. Governments can't afford welfare and pension promises. The social contract is mathematically broken.

• Every asset priced for endless growth –– basically everything in modern finance, from stocks to bonds and real estate –– is about to get slammed. Their value is based on a future population and consumer base that won't exist.

This demographic shift forces the whole system into contraction.

That's bad enough, but you know what the population models DO NOT include?

Climate change, energy shortages, economic contraction, resource depletion, ecosystem collapse, soil degradation, aquifer depletion and freshwater scarcity, fishery collapse, biodiversity loss, pollinator decline, plastic contamination, microplastics in every living thing, war, famine, pandemics, antibiotic resistance, political disintegration, supply chain failures, social unrest, infrastructure decay, AI disruption etc.

None of it.

Many of these are not hypothetical risks, they are real physical consequences of industrial overshoot that are already unfolding. But the models our governments and institutions rely on don't even include them. I get that modeling complexity is extremely difficult, but if you ignore reality… what's the point?

With that in mind, what's your guess for 2100?

2. Fossil Fuel Availability (2050)

There's this principle called Liebig's Law of the Minimum. It states that a system is limited by its scarcest essential input.

Industrial civilization is no different. Food production, water treatment, infrastructure maintenance, and technology all fundamentally depend on the energy density and logistical advantages provided by oil, gas, and coal. Fossil fuels still power virtually every part of the modern world; they are, therefore, the limiting factor of our current system.

And we don't have to run out completely. We just need to fall below the energy level the system needs to keep running. Once that happens, contraction begins.

The second physical variable dictating our future (and future emissions) is fossil fuel availability.

Whatever you think about “peak oil”, the reality is that we're depleting the master resource that powers nearly everything.

Here's the petroleum situation:

• Conventional oil production peaked around 2008

• Discoveries peaked in the 1960's

Look at the graphs below, specifically the dark blue in the first two (conventional oil). Notice how production keeps dropping unless we keep finding new fields that may or may not exist.

As oil becomes scarcer, more expensive, and yields less net energy, it will likely drag everything else with it, including the broader economy. Whether that happens gradually or abruptly is anyone’s guess, but the physics points in one direction.

You've probably seen projections like this, where CO₂ emissions climb to 100 Gt per year by 2100:

Forget the Net Zero fantasy (global cooperation, massive carbon capture). These charts assume endless economic growth and endless fossil fuels, even as climate change, ecological collapse, and resource depletion get worse.

Now to my question. In 2024, total fossil fuel emissions were 38.6 Gt according to Our World in Data. Given everything we just covered, what do you expect annual emissions to be by 2050?

3. Global Warming (2050 & 2100)

Warming is driven by several things:

• Cumulative emissions: mostly fossil fuels, but also things like deforestation and agriculture. These scale with (1) population and (2) fossil fuel availability, if either drops, economic activity and emissions drop too. [RED + GREY LINE]

• Aerosol masking: burning fossil fuels produces particles that reflect sunlight and cool the planet. We're probably still masking 0.3-0.5°C of warming23. When fossil fuel use declines, that mask comes off. [BLUE LINE]

• Earth system feedbacks: permafrost thaw methane feedback, forest dieback (Amazon, boreal + others shifting from sink to source), ice sheet collapse reducing albedo, methane from wetlands and seabeds. Each one pushes temperatures higher. Some take thousands of years, some happen in decades.

• Ocean thermal inertia: oceans have absorbed over 90% of the excess heat4, which has slowed the warming we feel on land but that heat is still in the climate system. The oceans will keep releasing it back into the atmosphere for decades.

We're almost at 1.5°C of transient warming, that’s the temperature we feel today. This is not the same as equilibrium warming. The atmosphere heats almost immediately, but it takes time for everything else to catch up.

Last time CO₂ was this high (~3 million years ago), temperatures were 2-3°C above pre-industrial56. That's what we're locked into even if we all disappeared tomorrow. By 2100, we would be most of the way there but not fully, because true equilibrium takes centuries. Plus there's still fuel to burn.

One thing to remember: most warming projections, including IPCC scenarios and Hansen's higher estimates assume infinite fossil fuel availability. None of them account for the depletion curves you just looked at. The high-end scenarios (3–4°C+) assume we keep burning at scale indefinitely.

Back to guessing.

Near-term warming is mostly about emissions. Emissions depend on population (demand) and fossil fuel availability (supply). You've already made your guesses on those.

What's your guess for warming by 2050?

Rough math: every 40 Gt of emissions adds about 0.025°C. At current rates (~40 Gt/year), that’s roughly 0.25°C per decade from emissions alone.

And for 2100:

Collapse Questions

Next, a few questions on collapse itself.

However you answered, here's what the insurance industry, the people whose job it is to NOT be wrong about risk, thinks 2°C and 3°C means.

• At 2°C: over 2 billion deaths, 25% decline in GDP

• At 3°C+: over 4 billion, 50% decline in GDP

That's the insurance industry saying something no economist, mortgage broker, or politician will say out loud:

The future will look nothing like the past, and we're not betting our money on pretending it will.

I'm not saying they're right, but might be worth a conversation.

We're heading into a lower-energy, hotter, more resource-constrained world. The real question is whether we glide down or crash.

That's it. Thanks for playing!

I'll post a follow-up with the results and some thoughts.

The Inevitable Correction: A Few Thoughts

Here are my thoughts on the short-term. This is highly speculative and my guess is as good as anyone else's.

Looking around, and knowing myself, I believe that we're incapable of responding to this proactively in any meaningful way. This is a collective predicament that requires collective action and we just aren't built for that. Most people are and will remain preoccupied with immediate survival (for good reason).

Case in point: I was thinking about the recent floods in southern Thailand. Massive rain, huge destruction. And I thought about how most of the people affected will replace their cars, motorbikes, mattresses, furniture, clothing, appliances and so on. And the government will repair the damaged infrastructure (roads, grid, buildings etc.) if they can.

More consumption, more extraction and more emissions. Another feedback loop.

Then I thought about how I would likely do the same. When something important breaks, I replace it. Sometimes second-hand if I can find it. But I'll keep doing that until I can't.

And I don't think that's some moral failing. Because at the end of the day, we're biological organisms and like every other species, we try our best to survive each day following our neurological reward system. And as a hypersocial species, we act like a superorganism that grows until it can't.

Throughout history we've adopted strategies that helped us and our tribe survive. The strategies that worked (in the short-term) spread, because those people survived and multiplied. Then we told stories about why they worked, and those stories shaped our beliefs and systems. But the system that's defined our reality is clearly breaking down in front of us.

Many of us will soon start losing our jobs as the broader economy slows down, while AI and automation rip through job markets. Not all at once, but in waves. First it will be the obvious targets like customer service, data entry, basic coding, content writing. Then it spreads.

And people will respond the way people always respond. They'll wait it out at first, burn through savings, try to find another job in their field. But when that doesn't work, they adapt. Some will take whatever work is available. Some will start local businesses. Some will move in with family or friends to split costs. Some will team up with others in the same boat and figure out new survival strategies like community gardens, repair collectives, and informal economies.

Whatever needs to be done to survive.

But no matter what, aggregate consumption declines because when people lose their income they stop buying stuff. They can't afford new cars, new phones, vacations, eating out, all the discretionary spending that keeps the economy running.

This accelerates the collapse of an economic system already on the brink from unsustainable debt and resource limits. The consumer economy depends on consumers consuming. Take that away and the whole Ponzi scheme unravels; stock values crash, companies fold, more layoffs, less consumption, repeat.

Basically the system destroys its own consumer base. Bottom-up collapse.

This will lead to a fundamental transformation. It would be reductionist to assume that our stories and beliefs will stay frozen in the current paradigm while the system collapses, as ridiculous as assuming population will smoothly peak at 10 billion while the planet burns. Our politics, economics, beliefs, and behaviors will change as people look for new survival strategies that are aligned with what's actually possible. That could go a million different ways. Some good, some bad, some catastrophic.

Gen Z and Gen Alpha (who will soon represent a major voting bloc) have grown up watching this system completely fail them. They are not going to defend it. They are going to torch the rulebook.

In the meantime, our overshoot starts solving itself. The correction mechanism is collapse, it was always going to be collapse. We just kept delaying it. But the math always works out, just not how we want.

Population decline reduces overshoot and eases pressure on ecosystems. Fossil fuel depletion means less plastic, fewer chemicals, lower emissions. Economic contraction forces consumption down. Climate feedbacks, resource scarcity, and system collapse will cut humanity’s footprint faster than any policy ever could.

Some of you might be thinking “We're doomed anyway. We've got plastics in our brains and a mass extinction underway.”

That's true. But we're not there yet. We live in the present moment. And we don't know with certainty (1) if we've already crossed critical contamination thresholds, and (2) if we have (which does seems likely), we don't know how fast that plays out. We just don’t, because this is a new planetary experiment with no control group.

The only certainty is uncertainty and we'll be living through the results in real time.

The fate of industrial civilization was sealed the moment it began because every complex human society, from Rome to ours, is built by using up resources faster than nature can replace them, a self-destructive process known as ecological overshoot.

Overshoot is the root cause behind almost every crisis we face: climate change, deforestation, pollution, soil loss, water scarcity, resource depletion, ocean acidification, mass extinction, economic collapse, and societal breakdown. What makes our current civilization unique is not our advanced technology, it’s that we’ve scaled this historically doomed pattern into a planetary-level catastrophe.

The ultimate tragedy is that we’ve already crossed seven planetary boundaries (up from three in 2009), lining up multiple extinction-level events in the coming centuries. Popular technological “fixes” (like clean energy, carbon-capture, high-tech agriculture) are an exercise in DELUSION. They do not address the core problem and rely entirely on the very fossil-fuel system they are supposed to replace. As our industrial world enters its final collapse stage, the infrastructure and resources needed to maintain those solutions will cease to exist.

Here we are, staring into the abyss.

Does knowing the exact road we took matter? Maybe not. But here’s why I’m writing this: the only way out of overshoot is to reduce it by consuming less and allowing our population to shrink. If we refuse to do this, the correction will still happen, but through famine, war and chaos of a scarcity-conflict death spiral.

Overshoot: Energy & Ecology

It all starts with energy because nothing happens without it. Not a damn thing.

Humans rely on energy in two ways. First, there’s endosomatic energy, the calories we consume to keep our bodies functioning. Second is exosomatic energy, this is the energy controlled outside our metabolism (e.g. thermal energy from fire). Our DEMAND for exosomatic energy has no meaningful per-capita limit. We can always want more. A bigger car, a larger house, or some pointless monument.

But let’s revert to the first principle, because population has always been, and will always be, a function of food availability. No food = no population. The logic is pretty straightforward:

• When food is abundant (other negative feedbacks like predation, disease, and competition being equal) the population, exhibiting zero foresight, undergoes exponential growth.

• When food is scarce, mortality increases, and the population contracts.

How much food is available depends on ecosystem productivity, ultimately powered by the sun. Net Primary Productivity (NPP) measures all the biomass an ecosystem produces in a given area over time. This represents the total pool of energy available for ALL organisms. Each species consumes only a tiny fraction of the ecosystem’s NPP, depending on its diet and ecological role.

Different species evolve different energy-capture strategies to get their necessary share of the NPP. This drive to capture and consume energy is a fundamental law of ecology and thermodynamics called the Maximum Power Principle (MPP). It states that any organism that’s better or faster at grabbing and using resources to survive and reproduce will always win, no matter the long-term cost.

Think of this way: at the individual level, survival is the immediate priority. If food is available, it gets consumed. The idea that organisms “live in balance” with nature is a myth. What looks like balance is simply the result of external constraints (predators, disease, resource limits, or environmental stress) keeping populations in check.

The MPP means we favor strategies that get us the biggest short-term gain. This is why traits like psychopathy (present in roughly 1% of the population) thrive in positions of power. These people are good at exploiting others and ignoring the long-term damage for a quick win, setting our whole society on a path to overshoot. Here a good podcast episode from Nate Hagens if you want to dig deeper.

Our energy-capture strategies are shaped by TECHNOLOGY; the tools, methods, and organized systems we use to capture, store, and deploy energy. Major technological leaps, from stone tools and fire, to agriculture and fossil fuels, increased calories (share of NPP) available to humans, and in a very predictable response, our population expanded to consume that surplus.

This brings us to a simple truth: if a technology allows our population to grow, we cannot maintain our population without it. Lose the technology, lose the surplus, lose the people. So naturally we choose not to abandon the technology. This is survival-dependent technological lock-in (or path dependence).

Two lock-ins that really define our species:

• Heat

• Agriculture

Lock-in 1: Heat

Our dependence on heat is our most basic lock-in. It increased what we could eat (higher portion of NPP) and where we could live (increasing total NPP).

First, fire expanded the human-accessible portion of NPP by enabling protein denaturation (cooking) and sterilization (boiling), turning previously “useless” biomass into calories we could consume (roots, tubers, grains, meat). Second, it made us apex predators by providing active defense (reducing mortality) and tools for habitat manipulation. Third, and perhaps most importantly, it allowed humans to spread across the world, expanding available habitat (total NPP) to include harsher climates that would have been impossible to survive in without heat.

Despite this expansion, our population density (and thus the total human population) was limited by the rate of local NPP regeneration i.e. caloric math. The reason is simple:

• Daily foraging: humans can only walk so far in a day, limiting daily foraging to roughly a 5 km radius (depending on the terrain), and there’s only so much edible food in a given area at a given time.

• Territorial range: we needed large territories to account for plant regrowth, animal migration, and seasonal shifts.

Because of these realities, we lived in small mobile bands of 10–30 people (extended family), often part of larger tribes sharing language, tools, and rituals. In highly productive areas, a tribe of 250-300 might survive on as little as 50 km², but in low-productivity regions, they required thousands of km².

A fixed group of 5,000 individuals would immediately overshoot local carrying capacity because there wouldn’t be enough calories nearby to sustain everyone on a daily basis. They would have scattered to smaller bands long before reaching that point. This type of mild overshoot is perfectly normal in nature and self-corrects.

If we account for ALL habitable land humans could now access (roughly 107 million km²) this study suggests an average population density of 0.05 people/km², yielding a maximum hunter-gatherer population of roughly 5-6 million. And wouldn’t you know it, archaeological estimates suggest that by 8,000 BCE the human population hovered around 5 million.

We were approaching the ceiling.

As we neared this ceiling, our actions became highly destructive. The systematic extinction of megafauna across several continents was a mass ecological purge, disrupting complex food webs and predator-prey dynamics. Hunting prey to extinction is an obvious sign of overshoot.

Human population had grown to a size supported by abundant species like mammoths. When we hunted them to extinction, we destroyed a part of our own food base that had allowed our population to grow in the first place. The MPP in action.

While the “fire technology” itself was sustainable (sort of), the 5 million global population could never be maintained without it. People in cold regions would die without heat, and those relying on the better nutrition from cooking (allowing higher population density) would have to scatter or starve.

Humanity was irreversibly locked in.

Pushing beyond the 5 million ceiling demanded new energy strategies.

Lock-in 2: Agriculture

Then came agriculture and animal domestication. Emerging slowly and independently in multiple regions, enabled by the Holocene climatic optimum and driven, as always, by the maximum power principle. Also important to note that this was enabled by the mastery of fire, because cooking is what unlocks the dense caloric value of crops like grains.

This transformation switched humanity from living off the ecosystem’s “interest” to spending its “principal”. We began LIQUIDATING ecosystems to feed ourselves by chopping down trees, mining the soil, diverting rivers, and exterminating other species to make room for our crops and livestock. This process is called Human Appropriation of Net Primary Productivity (HANPP).

Early agriculture delivered up to 100 times more edible calories per km² than foraging, by reducing potential natural NPP and redirecting a large fraction to ourselves (40%) from a given patch of land. Unlike hunter-gatherers, who consumed what they could forage each day, agriculture created a STORABLE SURPLUS, allowing people to keep food for later. This was like having food in the bank, letting them survive bad harvests or hard times. Naturally, this created a huge incentive to grow as much food as humanly possible.

This idea of a storable surplus is the foundation of the modern illusion that money will always buy essentials. It won’t.

That surplus supported larger and denser populations, while our new sedentary lifestyles shortened birth intervals, which caused our population to surge:

However, this apparent increase in carrying capacity is an ILLUSION, because it is temporary and unsustainable. While small-scale farming might be sort of sustainable under very local, limited conditions, the agricultural strategy as a whole is not. Because large permanent settlements (a consequence of agriculture) also CONCENTRATES resource depletion and ecological exhaustion to the surrounding landbase. Not only that, this farming-based life instantly MULTIPLIED our per-capita demand for exosomatic energy (for construction, irrigation, metallurgy, storage etc.) by three to four times (much higher now).

The huge population boom was paid for by rapidly depleting resources. It’s like living off your savings. It works until it doesn’t.

Agriculture-driven overshoot is self-reinforcing. It enables populations to grow by actively converting and destroying ecosystems, trapping the population into severe overshoot. Unlike natural overshoot, which self-corrects, this overshoot can be EXTENDED (up to a point) by destroying the environment even further. So we did.

As for climate change, ever since our survival depended on heat, we’ve been burning something every single day (releasing CO₂) just to stay alive. More people means more burning. Agriculture amplified this by driving a population boom AND because clearing land releases carbon, while forest loss reduces CO₂ sequestration. Domesticating animals also requires clearing land and adds methane, amplifying emissions.

Humans have been altering the climate for thousands of years, because burning something and disturbing ecosystems is built into how we feed ourselves and survive.

So what’s the agricultural ceiling, and what are the consequences of this lock-in?

The maximum population reached by agrarian societies is irrelevant because the entire energy-capture method is an overshoot mechanism fueled by spending down nature’s savings.

1. Was this technology sustainable? No. It required mining natural resources like soil and water, and it created large, permanent settlements that are physically incapable of staying in balance with nature.

2. Were we in overshoot? Yes. People living in those large, permanent settlements were in severe overshoot, depleting resources and causing local collapses. The smaller groups who weren’t farming were later displaced, exploited, or slaughtered by the very overshoot societies that temporarily succeeded.

3. Could we abandon the technology and maintain our population? Absolutely not. The agricultural “revolution” drove the global population from roughly 5 million to over 700 million by 1750 CE. Humanity was locked in. Abandoning agriculture would instantly wipe out the food surplus, causing mass famine and a demographic crash.

Some estimates (from systems ecologists) suggest that a globally dispersed population of roughly 100–500 million people might remain within sustainable limits but only under very narrow conditions (meaning we can probably rule this out due to the MPP). And even then, collapse cycles would likely still occur at local and regional levels whenever populations or consumption exceeds regenerative capacity.

If there’s one overarching truth to take away here, it’s this: Every major leap in energy use pushes humanity into a state of severe ecological overshoot we can never walk back from without causing mass suffering, so we never do.

All large human societies are by definition in ecological overshoot. We might as well call them ecological overshoot societies

Next, let’s look at how and why they always collapse.

Ecological Overshoot Societies

From a physics standpoint, civilizations are like huge, unstable machines that grow by sucking in energy and matter, creating waste and pollution, and destroying the land they stand on. By damaging their own foundation, they guarantee their own collapse.

We can think of civilization as a prosthetic “life support system” of infrastructure, food-, water- and energy systems stitched together to supply the energy and material flows the overshoot apes depend on for survival. This ranges from the daily needs like food, water, and heat, to the energy and materials that keep infrastructure, supply chains, and social systems running.

The key point to understand is these systems require a constant FLUX of energy and materials to maintain themselves. It’s like a rocket that needs constant fuel just to stay in the air.

• Increase flows → growth

• Keep flows steady → stress and stagnation

• Slow flows → rapid collapse

• Stop flows → catastrophe

When the energy and material flows stop growing, everything starts to unravel. If the flows stop abruptly, which is possible in a highly interconnected complex global civilization, the crash can be instantaneous and CATASTROPHIC.

You might think “Why not just scale down slowly?”. The answer is twofold:

1. The Maximum Power Imperative: Slowing down means losing power, and the powerful people and institutions that run the system will fight against it tooth and nail. The MPP ensures that any faction or state attempting to scale back will quickly be outcompeted and displaced by those who continue to maximize power.

2. The Mechanical Hurdle: Even if we wanted to scale down (e.g. degrowth), the system itself won’t allow a gentle landing. It’s too complex, too dependent on its high-tech parts (technological lock-in), and costs too much energy to run (high metabolic cost).

Complexity & Metabolic Cost

Complexity basically means lots of interconnected parts. For human societies it means people, roles, institutions, technologies, and the physical infrastructure and material webs such as roads, buildings, machines, water systems, energy systems, supply chains and so on.

But complexity is not free. Every structure we build and every system we create requires continuous flows of energy and materials to maintain. The baseline metabolic cost is the energy and material needed to keep the system running. The more parts and dependencies a system has, the more tightly its survival depends on maintaining every part. You can’t remove one part and expect the system to keep functioning.

The baseline metabolic cost is either growing or fixed (if it’s shrinking, you’re already collapsing). But surplus energy is always temporary because energy obeys the laws of thermodynamics.

The First Law states energy cannot be created or destroyed, only transformed. We cannot just make energy appear.

The Second Law states that energy (and matter) can only be changed in one direction i.e. from usable to unusable, from available to unavailable, from ordered to disordered. Once something is spent, it’s gone forever.

The point being that flows always slow down eventually. It’s a thermodynamic certainty. When you reduce the flows, the most complex, specialized systems break first (complexity breaks). We can’t switch back to simpler methods because those methods can’t feed or support the current population (technological lock-in). We also have to spend more and more energy just to get the same amount of resources (drilling deeper for oil, mining lower-grade ore). If we cut the fuel, we can’t pay the maintenance bill, and the necessary systems fail fast.

Because the technologies that created population growth are now tangled up in an interdependent machine, the entire structure must be maintained to keep any part working, but it CANNOT be maintained.

In practice, collapse can start even as total energy increases. When energy becomes difficult and more expensive to extract (it always does), or population grows faster than aggregate energy (energy-per capita declines), living standards will fall even as total energy is increasing. When food, heat, and the basics become more expensive, economic activity slows (recession/depression), and politics often shift toward extremism or authoritarianism, sending the system into a downward death-spiral.

That is why societies tear themselves apart long before the flows start to decline.

The Pattern of Overshoot-Collapse

When we put these concepts together, the recurring pattern is very clear:

• Stage 1: Resource grab – Using up soil, water, metals, and energy.

• Stage 2: Growth – The temporary surplus creates population growth and complexity.

• Stage 3: Overshoot – We start consuming faster than the environment can regenerate. Attempts to “fix” problems with more complex tech only raise the metabolic cost.

• Stage 4: Collapse – Complexity breaks down = society collapses.

Every past civilization, from Sumer to Rome to the Maya, followed this pattern. Collapse is inevitable. The only question is how long you can delay collapse by keeping the flows going, either by expanding or adding new energy sources.

Let’s look at an example of delaying collapse.

Pre-industrial Europe relied on biomass for energy (firewood, charcoal) and materials. Between 400 AD and 1600 AD, European forest cover fell from roughly 80% to 20%. Many societies had hit Peak Wood and overshot local carrying capacity. Avoiding collapse meant innovating new technologies and importing the necessary resources from elsewhere, through trade and…other means.

European powers, mainly Britain, France, Spain, Portugal, and the Netherlands, seized land, killed and enslaved Indigenous peoples, shipping resources back home. Colonialism was, among other things, an energy and resource grab, and a way to avoid collapse at home by exploiting land and labor abroad.

This example shows us two things:

1. Even a low-tech, pre-industrial society with a much lower population density couldn’t survive sustainably within its own ecological limits, because it’s impossible. Anyone who thinks billions could live a peaceful, subsistence, environmentally friendly lifestyle doesn’t understand ecological limits. Even basic subsistence fails at scale, especially when you’re in planetary overshoot, ecosystems have been destroyed and polluted, and the climate destabilized.

2. It also shows the maximum power principle in action: when local limits are reached, the most powerful expand and dominate to keep their party going. As our civilization collapses, remember this: who has the weapons, has the power. Unfortunately.

For all of history before the 18th century, overshoot and collapse were local or regional. Societies exhausted soils, cleared forests, diverted rivers, or overfished waters, population decline, migration, or conflict inevitably followed.

• Local civilization = local overshoot = local collapse

• Regional empire = regional overshoot = regional collapse

We could have kept repeating this pattern of local and regional overshoot-collapse for thousands of years, because in many cases, the worst of the overshoot symptoms were confined and ecosystems could often recover over a few centuries (though not always, such as Mesopotamia).

Then came fossil fuels.

• Global civilization = planetary overshoot = planetary collapse

Planetary Civilization Overshoot

Every society builds itself around the energy and resources it has access to. Just as all previous societies relied mostly on a “biomass platform” for energy and materials, using slaves and animal power for scale, our civilization relies on fossil fuels for energy, materials, and flow throughput at a global scale.

With industrial-scale extraction and global transport, local limits no longer impose an absolute brake on our growth. Food, water, minerals, and energy can flow across continents, allowing societies to bypass local scarcities and temporarily avoid collapse.

Fossil fuels dramatically (but temporarily) increased the number of people the Earth can support, again:

• Mechanized agriculture, irrigation, synthetic fertilizers, and chemical pesticides and herbicides let one patch of land produce way more food than is naturally possible, feeding billions. This decoupled our food output from the Earth’s natural limits.

• Global trade enables billions to survive entirely imports from distant regions. Think of massive desert cities (Dubai, Las Vegas) or huge cold regions (Canada, Russia), and megacities (Tokyo, London), they all rely completely on imported food, water, and energy.

• Industrial production and modern medicine also reduced mortality rates by almost 80% and more than doubled life expectancy, fueling a massive population boom.

Every aspect of these systems depends on fossil fuels. Remove them today, and infant mortality would soar, diseases would spread, and billions would die within years.

Fossil fuels allowed us to raid the entire planet’s resources, turning local overshoot into a terminal, planetary-scale catastrophe. To understand why this disaster is unavoidable, we need to look at the foundations of our modern life.

The Fossil Fuel Platform

The complexity of industrial civilization is beyond human comprehension. But its foundation is quite simple: the Fossil Fuel Platform. Fossil fuels are fully embedded in nearly every human system and underpin almost everything we manufacture, supplying material feedstocks for more than 6,000 products, from plastics to pharmaceuticals to fertilizers to semiconductors.

Fossil fuels a complete lock-in.

Maintaining this way of life and our current population of 8.2 billion without fossil fuels would be even more impossible than trying to keep an old society running without wood. And because fossil fuels are finite, we won’t be able to maintain this. We already know this. We’ve known this since we started using them. It’s insane!

Our dependence rests on three physical pillars:

• The Material-Thermal Lock-in

• The Logistics Lock-in

• The Interdependency Trap

The Material-Thermal Lock-in

Fossil fuels are the source of the materials that literally define our modern world: steel, cement, concrete, plastics, and synthetic fertilizers.

Products like fertilizers, plastics, and pharmaceuticals are made chemically, straight from oil molecules. For virgin steelmaking, carbon (in the form of coke) is a non-negotiable chemical ingredient. This is a chemical lock-in. We CANNOT create these essential materials at the current scale or cost any other way.

Making massive amounts of steel, cement, glass, and aluminum requires extreme, continuous high-temperature heat. Fossil fuels are the only way we currently deliver this thermal energy at the density, scale, and reliability needed. This capability is far beyond what global electricity grids can consistently provide.

Even if “alternative” methods exist for some of these (like electric steel or green ammonia), they cannot be produced at the necessary SCALE or affordability to support 8 billion people. And we know what happens when things get too expensive...

The Logistics Lock-in

The sheer scale and speed of our modern way of life depends entirely on the power and logistical simplicity of oil. Oil is the Master Resource that dictates the rhythm of the entire system.

Our modern way of life depends on massive EXTRACTION of raw materials daily. Every ton of coal, barrel of oil, kilogram of metal, or cubic meter of timber requires industrial machinery that is powered by, and built with, fossil fuels (steel, lubricants, plastics). This is not just about the junk we buy. It’s about the grid, the internet, hospitals, and all the infrastructure that keeps us alive.

TRANSPORTATION is at the heart of the flows. Materials are useless unless they move from A to B to C at the required throughput. Oil must flow through pipelines, tankers, and refineries before it becomes fuel or plastic. Lithium must move from a mine to a refinery, cobalt from Congo to China, nickel from Indonesia to battery factories. This global web of transportation requires fleets of ships, trains, and trucks + our fossil fuel-based infrastructure and machinery.

Some people wonder “Couldn’t we electrify / use hydrogen for most of this and recycle materials?”

It’s surprisingly difficult to find global fleet data, considering how essential it is to know whether this so-called “transition” is even remotely possible. But I managed to dig some up:

Take a look at this list of heavy equipment and understand that 99% of them still run on oil, and all of them require fossil fuel–derived feedstocks to manufacture, even the electric machines. Agricultural machinery, mining equipment, global truck fleet, shipping fleet, and aviation. And that’s just the obvious stuff.

Alternatives like batteries or hydrogen can’t match the power, range, or speed needed for giant mining machines, ships, and heavy trucks. But most importantly, electrifying the entire global fleet is blocked by limited mineral and metal reserves (more on that later).

The energy transition is not even possible in theory, so it’s definitely not possible in practice.

There’s also nothing actually “clean” about renewables or nuclear or hydro. Not the energy they produce and certainly not the civilization they keep alive. Every watt we generate just feeds modernity, our gadgets, devices, appliances, lights, consumption, EV’s, industry. How is that a solution? Renewables depend on mining, digging up mountains, scouring deserts, destroying ecosystems, and polluting rivers. Hydrogen is no different since it depends on either natural gas or electricity.

Renewables are cleaner but not clean. We’re solving for the wrong variable.

The Interdependency Trap

Finally, all of this extraction, transportation and processing relies on our FOSSIL FUEL-BASED INFRASTRUCTURE. Look around, what do you see? Roads, highways, bridges, pipelines, ports, railways, airports, power grids, satellites (well, you probably don’t see all of them). This is the physical infrastructure that keeps everything running and moving at current throughput. Most of this infrastructure is made from materials like steel and concrete, which are themselves fossil fuel-dependent for scale.

This creates an unbreakable loop. The fossil fuel platform (T1) is the foundation, yes, but it now depends on the complex systems it supports (T2) because we keep embedding new technologies into everything, including T1. Our current way of life is basically one giant fossil-fuel circle jerk.

Everything depends on everything else.

For example, electricity is a total lock-in. We need it 24/7/365 to keep the oil flowing and 8 billion people alive. It powers water, hospitals, food, trade, and the internet. The internet, the backbone of all global systems, dies without continuous electricity. Of course, electricity is overwhelmingly dependent on fossil fuels for its consistent production, distribution, and maintenance.

That’s just two lock-ins. Multiply that across all interdependent systems (agriculture, transport, medicine, logistics), and you have a loop of multiple lock-ins and insane maintenance costs.

We cannot scale it down without triggering systemic collapse, and we cannot sustain it indefinitely because it depends on finite resources and ongoing ecological destruction.

THERE IS NO WAY TO MAINTAIN THIS LIFESTYLE. Not even close. And it wouldn’t be sustainable anyway.

Some people think we could cut “waste” (streaming servers, fast fashion, travel). Biologically, yes, we could. We don’t need all of this junk. But no matter what we cut it will hit the economy hard and lead to unemployment, which reduces the tax base and collapses the top layer (T2) and everything else. And let’s be honest, a lot of people think climate change, resource limits, or ecological collapse are some kind of hoax or political control scheme. So asking them to radically change their lives before it’s too late isn’t going to work.

Degrowth will happen, just not voluntarily.

Next, let’s look at the flows of energy and materials required to keep this circus running. It is here that the fantasy of “swapping out energy sources” (pretending we can maintain civilization while continuing to destroy the planet) collapses. This technological DELUSION ignores the fundamental physical limits of materials and energy.

Energy & Material Flows

All usable energy ultimately comes from two broad sources: flows and stocks.

• Flow energy is energy that arrives continuously from ongoing natural processes like sunlight, wind, rainfall, rivers, tides, and geothermal heat. These flows are effectively constant on geological timescales, though they fluctuate daily, seasonally, and locally.

• Stock energy is stored energy, accumulated over time. It comes in two forms:

  • Non-renewable stocks like fossil fuels, uranium, and thorium.

  • Renewable stocks like wood, crops, and animal fats.

Stocks exist independently for extraction. But the “devices” used to capture and store flow energy (wind turbines, solar panels, batteries, dams) only exist if we build them. And building them requires energy, materials, infrastructure, global extraction, processing and transport networks. Without business-as-usual, these devices cannot be maintained at scale, replaced at scale, or frankly, built at all.

Global industrial civilization gets roughly 80% of primary energy from fossil fuels and 6% from biomass. The rest is a mix of hydro, wind, solar, and nuclear. But these only exist at industrial scale because fossil fuels built, maintained, and integrated them.

It’s important to note that fossil fuels are counted at full chemical energy (in the chart), and much is lost as heat or during conversion, so they don’t provide 80% of the final usable energy. Still, they’re the backbone of global industrial civilization.

Declining Returns: EROI & MROEI

People obsess over total energy production (exajoules or gigawatts), while ignoring that the renewables they celebrate are entirely enabled by fossil fuels.

What really matters is net energy.

This brings us to Energy Return On Investment (EROI). Our current complex world needs an EROI of roughly 10:1 just to maintain itself. EROI 10:1 means we’re spending 10% of all the energy we have on capturing more energy. The rest (90%) is available for everything else.

Two caveats:

1. Not all energy is equal. Even if we generate massive amounts of electricity from renewables at a 10:1 EROI, that doesn’t automatically keep materials flowing. Materials still need to be extracted, processed, and transported, and infrastructure has to be maintained. You can’t just solve net energy and assume this lifestyle can continue.

2. EROI declines with depletion. We always exploit the easiest resources first. Over time, we’re forced to go deeper and farther, spending more energy just to get the same return. (Note: increasing the extraction rate does not improve EROI but it keeps the required daily flow going longer, accelerating depletion while postponing collapse.)

Declining EROI also applies to nuclear, hydro, solar panels, wind turbines, and batteries because they require non-renewable metals and minerals. As ore grades decline, the energy required per unit rises, and thus EROI declines.

We can look at copper as an example. Early mines had over 10% copper content. Today most mines are below 0.5% and new discoveries are rare. To produce 1 ton of copper:

• At 10% ore grade, we need to mine 10 tons of rock

• At 0.5% ore grade, we need to mine 200 tons of rock

That means more effort (energy) to get the same 1 ton of copper, while producing more waste. We can call this Material Return On Energy Invested (MROEI). Every material we depend on is finite and costs more energy to get as quality drops.

The graph below shows approximately how much we’re extracting now and how much is left.

The next graph shows how much our extraction would need to scale to pull off the so called “energy transition”.

That’s 5 to 15 times current levels, while ore grades are declining, EROI is declining, and both human and Earth systems are becoming increasingly unstable.

Even if we had endless energy, declining MROEI drags us down. And a shortage of any one material will choke the system.

Master Resource

In reality, total EROI has little to do with industrial-scale flows. Oil is the master resource, and we’re using around 100 million barrels per day to keep this system running. Here’s a chart showing how that oil is used:

Without cheap, abundant oil, we lose the ability to extract and move ALL materials at the scale required for civilization. That includes all the other energy sources like coal, timber, uranium etc.

Some people think: “But if we electrify most transportation, we won’t need gasoline and diesel, so we’ll have plenty to do the other things. Problem solved!”

That’s wrong, for several reasons, but let’s just look at how oil is refined. When we refine crude oil we get a spectrum of products like gasoline, diesel, kerosene, heavy oil, alongside the petrochemical feedstocks. The ratios depend on the oil and the refinery setup. Refiners can tweak those outputs a bit with processes like catalytic cracking or hydrocracking, but there are thermodynamic and economic limits.

This means that even if we drastically cut demand for gasoline and diesel, we would still have to keep extracting crude oil at near-current rates (impossible) just to get the other products that keep this system running.

So, when do we run out of oil?

Never. But what matters is:

1. How long can we extract oil at current throughput (flow)?

2. How much energy it takes to do so (too expensive and the system self-terminates)?

On both fronts, we’re in trouble.

Peak oil is the point at which we’ve extracted half of all the conventional oil that will ever exist. That first half is the easiest to reach, the cheapest to produce, the highest quality, and the most economical to refine. The remaining half is harder and more expensive to extract.

The US hit peak conventional oil in 1970, as predicted by M. King Hubbert. There was still plenty of oil (offshore, Alaska, global markets) but it was the year America realized it couldn’t feed its own oil habit and would have to start importing larger quantities from the rest of the world.

Globally we’ve already hit peak conventional oil. Some say 2006, some closer to 2019. Doesn’t matter, it’s already in the rear-view mirror.

Conventional oil initially had an EROI above 100:1. Today, conventional oil averages around 20:1, and the largest fields are depleting at around 5% per year.

Then there’s unconventional oil, such as tar sands which are semi-solid sludge requiring huge energy input to upgrade into usable fuel. Typical EROI is 3:1. There’s a lot of it, but not the kind of energy surplus that sustains complex societies.

Tight oil is conventional oil but it’s trapped in dense shale rock with tiny pores, so the oil doesn’t flow easily. That’s why it’s called “tight”. Extraction requires horizontal drilling and hydraulic fracturing. This is energy-intensive, expensive, environmentally destructive, water-hungry, and earthquake-inducing. In other words, it’s an environmental disaster, to absolutely no one’s surprise. Typical EROI: 5:1-10:1.

Each well loses up to 80% of output in just three years. Constant new drilling is needed just to maintain flows. Nothing sustainable about it. Here’s what that looks like:

In their 2024 Global Outlook report, ExxonMobil states a natural decline rate for oil production:

In the absence of any further investment, oil supply would be expected to quickly decline at ~15% per year, leading to major shortages of critical energy supplies. Similarly, natural gas supply would decline by ~11% per year without investment.

Here’s what that might look like:

In 2023, we discovered around 3.8 billion barrels of oil but we consumed 36 billion. This is not a new trend. All large fields have been found.

You don’t need a PhD in math and geology to understand that the era of cheap abundant oil is drawing to a close. Going after sludge and shale is a clear sign of desperation.

Oil is the input to watch. Art Berman is a good source.

I’m not saying we will hit a hard wall limit. But the flows will absolutely get interrupted by events already happening: financial crashes, political chaos, resource wars, and accelerating climate change. Add pandemics, AI risks, and general social unraveling. The unexpected keeps piling on.

I’m also not saying we shouldn’t build any renewable energy or pursue recycling, but let’s be realistic. We should be reducing consumption, phasing out most vehicles, rethinking education, rethinking work, redesigning cities, localizing supply chains, food, our monetary system, and using the remaining minerals and metals very wisely (if at all). Not wasting them on EV passenger cars, AI data centers, and crypto mining.

But here we are, doing the dumbest possible thing.

In reality, we’ll keep building renewables as long as we can. Then collapse will stop the buildout, and we’ll be left with whatever scraps survive. But anything that survives will likely be short-lived, because it can’t run long without replacement parts that require global supply chains. One big storm, or a single part failure, and your locally sustained future is toast.

When the Music Stops

To recap, we’re in planetary overshoot, hanging by a thread. The world is already objectively collapsing, anyone paying attention can see it. Economies are contracting. Jobs are vanishing. Cost of living is skyrocketing. Young people are watching their futures dissolve. The climate is fucked. Wars are escalating. Politics is completely deranged, and that’s an understatement if there ever was one.

We are locked into an accelerating crisis cascade: a permanent energy crisis, a permanent climate crisis, a food, water, and resource scarcity crisis, and a global economic and demographic unraveling.

How we respond is still an open question, but it’s not looking good.

A “soft landing” is unlikely, but not impossible. It would mean a slow, uneven descent instead of a sudden crash. Energy use would fall as oil becomes too costly to extract, and instead of replacing it, we would simply adapt with less travel, more local production, smaller economies.

Populations would decline rapidly over a few generations. Cities would shrink, and people would move closer to food and water sources. Money would lose meaning as economies reconnect to physical reality. Trade would be local, and survival would depend on cooperation. Central governments would weaken while local communities take over basic needs. The myth of progress would finally end. People would focus on endurance and meaning instead of growth. If we’re lucky, emissions would fall fast enough to give the planet a bit of breathing room. Not a utopia, just a smaller, steadier, more grounded way of life that survives the landing.

While we can’t rule this outcome out entirely, the analysis of the Maximum Power Principle and the mechanical hurdles of our system gives it a low probability. Most likely, we are not going to be smart about this. The decline from Peak Oil will lead to a forced, violent contraction.

Bottleneck 1: Civilizational Collapse

The first bottleneck is the collapse of industrial civilization. Systems will crash, money will fail, technologies will vanish, and millions (maybe billions) could die. It could happen fast or slow. Nobody knows.

But we do know a few things.

Past collapses involved local or regional supply chains. When they failed, the contraction was relatively slow. Societies could adjust, and critical materials mostly still existed. Today, every country depends on global trade for food, water, energy, and basic goods. If global supply chains break suddenly, the speed of failure could overwhelm every government on Earth.

In past collapses, 80–90% were subsistence farmers who knew how to produce food, manage soil, store seed, and raise animals. Most (95%) lived outside city centers and could survive on local resources. Today, things are very different. Most of us live in cities, dependent on complex systems and skills that only exist with electricity. Even helpful knowledge is mostly trapped in servers and the cloud. When electricity goes, so does access to it.

Even if everyone learned basic farming, much of the land is already degraded. Soils are nutrient-depleted, ground water is contaminated, and industrial inputs (fertilizers, pesticides) are needed for growing food on this dirt.

Still, the physical potential exists. There is enough land to feed people, especially as population declines. We currently use 38 million km² to feed livestock, which provides only a fraction of the calories crops could. A shift away from industrial meat toward local, regenerative plant-based farming could feed far more people using the same land.

But the question is not if we can physically feed ourselves, but will we be smart enough to cooperate and make that massive, immediate, painful shift, or will we just fight over what’s left and destroy ourselves in the process.

There’s another problem, which leads to the next bottleneck.

Bottleneck 2: Earth System Feedbacks

Unlike previous collapses, we are collapsing under an extinction-level climate shift. Similar events have happened before (volcanoes, heating oceans), but we are doing it faster. Ecosystems couldn’t adapt to rapid change then, and most of them died.

Current projections are grim. The Institute and Faculty of Actuaries released this report estimating that 2°C by 2050 = 2 billion deaths and a 25% decline in global GDP. Below are projections from NASA, NOAA, and Berkeley Earth for when global temperatures could reach +2°C, +2.5°C, +3°C, and beyond.

In reality, by 2.5°C, industrial civilization probably won’t be around to keep emitting CO₂ at today’s pace. That’s the good news. The bad news is that even in collapse, we’ll keep burning something (wood, coal, diesel where we can get it) most likely releasing more CO₂ than is sequestered.

Warming will continue for decades due to delayed feedbacks from climate tipping points, loss of aerosols, and thermal inertia in the oceans until the planet reaches the equilibrium temperature of the CO₂ already in the atmosphere (that takes centuries), but we will keep raising it. The long-term heating slows, but it doesn’t stop.

The long-term effect of climate change on ocean acidification and biodiversity more or less guarantees a mass extinction will occur. Does that mean humans go extinct? Not necessarily, we are very adaptable and can change our diets to almost anything. I’m not sure that’s very comforting to most people though. Yes, a few humans might survive “Okay, phew, I was worried there for a while.”?!?

On top of that, we’ve poisoned ourselves and the planet. Microplastics and persistent chemicals are already everywhere in humans, wildlife, soil, water, and air. They contribute to reproductive issues, endocrine disruption, and higher cancer risk.

Studies estimate that human brains currently contain around 0.48% plastic, a 50% increase over 8 years. Even if plastic production stopped today, existing plastics will continue fragmenting into micro- and nanoplastics for decades to centuries. If brain concentrations rise 5 % per year, they could reach several percent by 2070. While we don’t know the toxicity tipping point, it’s reasonable to assume one exists.

When the soil we rely on for food turns toxic, stripped of nutrients, and blows away in dust storms. When lakes and rivers run dry or become poisoned. When forests die, collapse, and burn. When the climate spirals out of control, making entire regions uninhabitable and triggering cascading failures across agriculture, water, and ecosystems. When oceans acidify, and marine food webs unravel. When glaciers and ice sheets collapse, and freshwater supplies vanish. When the air is choked with pollution, chemicals, and microplastics. When species vanish, ecosystems unravel, and food webs collapse. When our bodies are saturated with plastics, chemicals, and industrial toxins, rendering us functionally extinct, how exactly are we going to maintain any kind of life? We won’t.

We are climate-changing overshoot apes. We built a civilization based on a technological lock-in (fossil fuels, industrial agriculture, global logistics) that created planetary overshoot. We could never have stopped this expansion without causing massive suffering and population contraction, and because of the Maximum Power Principle, we simply will not choose that voluntary suffering.

We will be stopped by collapse instead.

Our short-term prospects are grim, and our long-term prospects are bleak beyond comprehension.

The only upside of this knowledge is perspective. It forces me to see what truly matters and to focus on the present, because everything else is just noise. Life is now. Now is all we have. It’s all we’ve ever had.

THANK YOU FOR YOUR ATTENTION TO THIS VERY IMPORTANT MATTER.

Further reading:

Overshoot: The Ecological Basis for Revolutionary Change - William R. Catton Jr.

Life and Energy - Isaac Asimov

The Human Planet: How We Created the Anthropocene - Simon Lewis, Mark Maslin

The Collapse of Complex Societies - Joseph Tainter

Energy & Civilization: A History - Vaclav Smil

Immoderate Greatness - William Ophuls

More and More and More: An All-Consuming History of Energy - Jean-Baptiste Fressoz

The Party’s Over - Richard Heinberg

Electrifying The Titanic - Willam Ophuls

Peak Everything - Richard Heinberg

In this article, I’ll share how I woke up to the reality of our predicament. Then I’ll explore some of the psychology and neuroscience behind why so few of us can see it (it’s not exactly a conscious choice), and how that blindness is fueling denial, conspiracy thinking, and rising authoritarianism, a pattern that’s becoming harder to ignore.

These are thoughts I had at the time, as the events unfolded. My understanding of them has changed significantly since then.

For me, things started to wobble in 2016 with Brexit and Trump.

Up until then I had believed in things like “competent leadership”, “smart people are working on these issues”, and “we’ll probably solve this climate thing”. You know the comforting idea that things are under control.

But then the world said NOT REALLY.

First came Brexit. It was a giant middle finger to the EU and the political establishment. People were upset about immigration, rising costs, low wages, and housing shortages, and were told that leaving the EU would fix all that, so Brexit passed (barely).

Of course, it didn’t fix anything. Because it was never going to. And honestly, I doubt the UK would be thriving today even if they had stayed.

Then came Donald Trump.

Trump was different. From the moment he came down that gold escalator, he was ranting about immigrants being criminals, job-stealers, and a threat to “real” American culture. He promised to BUILD THE WALL, ban Muslims, and deport millions. He said things normal politicians wouldn’t dare, but also lied openly and shamelessly. I mean, he just made shit up!

His narcissism and ignorance were so over the top, it was almost impressive. He called climate change a hoax, mocked disabled people, pushed racist conspiracy theories like Obama “Birther” lie, and bragged about sexual assault.

Any one of these scandals would have ended a normal political career (at the time). But Trump supporters didn’t care about any of that. Even with his long list of scams and failed business ventures like fake universities, unpaid contractors, fraudulent charities, and several bankruptcies, people looked at him and said “Yup, this is our guy”.

It was like a car crash: nobody could look away. Every absurd thing he said became a headline. The ratings were incredible, so the media gave him the mic and just let him run with it.

Then he won.

When he got elected, it became clear that we do not have competent people in charge. We do not have smart people working on our most pressing issues. As for climate change, well, we’re probably not doing much about that since the most powerful man in the world is saying it’s a “Chinese hoax”?

Then came COVID-19.

I watched as more and more people lost trust in science and public institutions. When people didn’t know who to trust, of course conspiracies filled that void, and social media spread them faster and wider than ever before.

People started flat-out rejecting all vaccines and all science. Some believed Bill Gates was injecting microchips, spread conspiracies about 5G towers causing COVID-19, or that COVID was a “plandemic” to install 5G towers that would then kill us with their “frequencies”. And some of these very same people took ivermectin just because some guy on the internet said it worked.

Say what you will about the vaccine and response, but everyone I know, myself included, took the vaccine. Nobody died and nobody had any serious side-effects. But statistics and facts don’t matter to some people. Still today, whenever anyone dies for any reason whatsoever, they’ll ask “vaxxed?” As if death itself didn’t exist before 2021.

That doesn’t mean I blindly supported every government policy during the pandemic. But you can criticize overreach without spiraling into insanity.

Then came January 6th, 2021.

Trump lost the 2020 election but refused to accept it. Dozens of courts, including the Supreme Court, looked at the claims and found NO evidence of fraud that could have changed the outcome. Even state election officials (including many Republicans) confirmed the vote was secure and fair.

But in Trump’s narcissistic mind, if he doesn’t win, the system MUST be rigged. He even said that months before the election, so we all knew it was coming.

Basically, he said he would accept the results if the election isn’t rigged, but also claimed the only way he doesn’t win is if it is rigged.

So when he lost, he claimed fraud and told his supporters the election was “stolen” (as expected). And most of them believed it (still do). Then thousands of Trump supporters stormed the US Capitol, trying to stop Congress from certifying the election results.

It was a clear sign of just how bad things had gotten in the US. Trust in institutions was gone.

And what did we do? Not much. We just...moved on. Back to business as usual. Bidenomics!

Sure, congress held hearings and prosecutors opened cases. Trump was indicted multiple times over hush money, election interference, inciting insurrection, and hoarding classified documents. But none of it stopped him. None of it worked. His popularity among his base just grew. What does that mean? It’s a cult.

At the time, I just saw chaos and thought “How can so many people be this stupid?” I always knew people can be stupid, but I wasn’t ready for stupid to be in charge. And even though the world was clearly losing it, the only existential threat I was aware of was climate change. But I hadn’t read the science, just the mainstream articles, and I still saw it through a reductionist lens as solvable i.e. mostly a matter of cutting emissions and switching to renewables.

I also genuinely believed the economy could grow forever and technology could accomplish anything (no limits). So naturally, I figured this was just a rough patch, that with better leadership, technology and policies, we would eventually get back on track.

That changed in 2023.

I was on the path to financial independence, and like most people, my entire plan assumed growth would continue forever. That was the foundation of my future, security, and worldview.

So I ran the numbers, I projected my expenses, investment returns, and long-term scenarios. The usual 7% annual growth assumption kept showing up, and I asked myself: How solid is that, really?

Where does this growth actually come from? What fuels production? What drives demand? What keeps this whole system running? The more I looked, the more the problems I found.

It became clear that this “historical” growth was anything but normal, and would be impossible to sustain. Because it was driven by three things:

1. Exponential extraction of cheap fossil energy (not sustainable)

2. Exponential growth of populations (not sustainable)

3. Exponential extraction of every resource we could find, some renewable, some non-renewable (not sustainable)

Killing the planet with a temporary surplus energy from fossil fuels is the foundation of our economic growth and consumer lifestyles. Once I saw that clearly, it was obvious this can’t last. The math doesn’t work.

At first, I thought I must have misunderstood something. It just seemed too big. “This is insane!” I thought. “How could all the banks, institutions, economists, politicians, everyone, be so terribly wrong? How could we have built a global system that's so obviously unsustainable?”

It was hard to believe, because every smart person I knew thought growth was good. All my university professors (PhDs, researchers, well-read and intelligent) took it as a given. We celebrate stock markets and GDP going up like that’s a sign of health. Even smart, well-meaning politicians promise to grow the economy like it’s the highest good.

So…is everyone wrong? Blind? Lying? Are they stupid? Not exactly. But somehow, despite all their intelligence and credentials, they never seem to question the core assumption.

And there I was, just a normal guy, sitting in disbelief, staring into a void that almost nobody else seemed to see.

Surely, the experts knew something I didn't. Right? RIGHT?!

WRONG.

I kept reading (list).

Limits to Growth by the Club of Rome, Overshoot by William R. Catton Jr., Immoderate Greatness by William Ophuls, The Collapse of Complex Societies by Joseph Tainter, and watched the The Great Simplification and There’s No Tomorrow.

I read the latest peer-reviewed climate science, learned about EROI, fossil fuels, resource depletion, freshwater stress, soil loss, biodiversity loss, ocean acidification, the water and carbon cycles, anthropology, ecology, carrying capacity, overshoot, paleoclimatology, planetary boundaries. Everything I could find.

I desperately wanted someone, anyone, to tell me I was wrong or overreacting. But when I went looking for that reassurance it wasn’t there. What I found was optimism bias, wishful thinking, reductionism, and denial. Almost no one was thinking in systems. Just endless faith in markets, progress, technology, and a deep refusal to admit there are limits.

That's when it happened. It was a complete psychological rupture. Like my mind broke open. The entire story I had been living in (progress, stability, endless growth) just collapsed.

I realized that infinite economic growth on a finite planet is a logical impossibility. But it’s not just growth that’s unsustainable, it’s our way of life. We will not be able to maintain this because it’s entirely based on depleting non-renewable resources, which is by definition unsustainable. And it’s so obviously suicidal it should be a goddamn joke, but for some reason it’s the core logic of every economy, government, bank, and institution.

I saw this civilization for what it truly is: unsustainable, extractive, pathological and built entirely on a one-time fossil fuel bonanza that’s already running out, meaning this way of life is coming to an end no matter what we do.

Our so-called solutions are mostly desperate attempts to keep this unsustainable system alive for a few more decades. To extend the life of a civilization that’s quite literally devouring and polluting the planet. For how long? 20, 30 years? Then what? What’s the plan after 2050? There is no plan.

When we talk about solutions we need to ask: what exactly are we trying to solve? A solution for what? To maintain business-as-usual (BAU) and preserve our lifestyles?

Because if the goal is to keep business-as-usual going with EV car culture, air travel, endless consumption, THEN WE’VE ALREADY FAILED. Because BAU is the problem. The system itself is the problem. Our high-energy, high-consumption way of life is the problem.

Any “solution” that tries to preserve our lifestyles is not a solution at all. It’s just a distraction, sold to us by the same system that’s killing us.

This is the insanity we live in.

As I put these pieces together, of course I lost faith in our current institutions and media, but unlike MAGA and other disillusioned groups it wasn’t because I thought they’re deliberately lying to us. No, it was because I could see that they aren’t thinking in systems. Most of them genuinely believe they’re doing the right thing by “growing the economy”. The problem is they’re stuck inside the same narrow worldview that’s driving us toward disaster.

And unlike conspiracy theorists I didn’t stop believing in science. In fact, science is exactly why I came to these conclusions, because it’s based on math, logic, evidence, and reason. That’s why it’s powerful and reliable.

Even some of the more extreme-sounding ideas like trying to delay climate change by stopping ice sheets from melting, can make sense mathematically and scientifically. But once you factor in physical limits, energy constraints, and the full system dynamics, most “solutions” fall apart.

We need to stop thinking of the current system as something fixed or inevitable. We made this system. We designed the rules. We can change them. There are real solutions, but first we need to admit the truth: the current system an ecological disaster (it’s killing us), fundamentally unsustainable (it will collapse anyway), and it makes people miserable (so why keep trying to preserve it?).

When it really hit me I remember going for a walk here in Chiang Mai and watched a Homo sapiens drive past me on a motorbike, thinking “How absurd is this? There goes a fire ape in synthetic clothes, riding a machine built from mined metals and ancient sunlight.”

Then I looked around and thought about what this place used to be. This exact spot was once a lush floodplain alive with teak, bamboo, and fig trees. Monsoon rains would swell the rivers feeding wetlands full of birds, reptiles, monkeys, elephants, and tigers.

Over centuries we destroyed it. We cut down the forests for materials, cleared the land for farms, houses, roads, and the sprawling, suffocating concrete of human infrastructure. We replaced a self-sustaining ecosystem with a monument to our own insatiable consumption.

It was a surreal experience. I had somehow slipped out of a shared hallucination and could finally see what was actually happening.

But nobody else seemed to notice or care. When I tried to explain it, even just a little bit, people looked at me like I was crazy. But how am I the crazy one for pointing out reality?

I felt completely disconnected. I wanted to know what had happened to me and why almost no one else can see it.

The Ego & Social Constructed Reality

To understand what was going on with me, I started looking into psychology and neuroscience. There are a lot of theories out there, but one thing is clear: we all carry around a strong internal sense of self. Some people call it the ego.

Carl Jung broke the psyche into several parts:

• Ego – The “I” that thinks, worries, and tries to appear in control.

• Persona – The mask you wear to fit in. You act different at work, with friends, and with family.

• Shadow – The parts you hide: jealousy, fear, greed, anger, shame, selfishness.

• Self – The whole you, including everything parts you don’t want to see.

• Collective unconscious – Shared feelings and symbols all people seem to know deep down, even if they’re not aware of it.

You don’t need to memorize all that.

What matters is this: your ego is everything you’ve absorbed about who you are, how the world works and what’s “normal”. Think of it as a mental operating system made of beliefs, values, and habits, that helps us make sense of life and survive in the reality that we’re operating in.

But let’s step back and look at what we mean by “reality” first, and then look at how our sense of “normal” is shaped.

Two Realities: Built vs. Biophysical

We live in two different realities. One simply exists, working whether we believe in it or not. The other is a human invention.

There’s physical reality, which includes things like gravity, photosynthesis, thermodynamics, and water boiling at 100°C. These are laws of nature, understood through formal sciences like math and logic, a language for describing patterns and cause and effect. Natural sciences (physics, chemistry, biology, Earth science) are based on observation, experimentation, and evidence. This is how we build real knowledge. That’s why planes fly, phones work, and modern medicine exists.

The second is social reality, things like 7-day weeks, money, borders, laws, human rights, and nations. These are not physical facts, they are collective beliefs that function because we all agree on their meaning. Fields like economics, politics, and much of what’s called “social science” try to explain this invented world, but they’re not grounded in natural laws. For example, economics pretends to be science, but most of it is theory built on flawed assumptions like “humans are rational” or “infinite growth is possible”. It ignores physical limits.

Both realities shape our lives, but most people confuse the two because we’ve blurred the lines. We treat made-up things as if they’re laws of nature (especially economics), and ignore the actual laws of nature as if they’re optional.

It’s like we’re trying to legislate gravity out of existence, or declare that water boils at 50°C because it's more convenient. Sounds pretty stupid, right? That’s exactly what we’re doing.

The problem isn't that we create social constructs. We’ve done that for hundreds of thousands of years, and they're essential for organizing large, complex societies. Especially one’s with billions of people.

The problem is that our socially constructed reality is built on top of a non-negotiable foundation which is the physical world and its limits. It’s about energy, matter, and ecological limits. The laws of physics and thermodynamics. How much fresh water, metals, fossil fuels, and minerals Earth has. How energy moves through nature. How long it takes for soil to form, forests to grow back, or species to evolve.

These are non-negotiable limits.

Right now, our civilization is crashing headfirst into these biophysical limits. But instead of acknowledging these limits, we’re trying to bend reality to fit our imaginary systems. What we need to do is the opposite: reshape our human-made world to fit within the boundaries of the real one.

This disconnect between the socially constructed reality (which is made up) and biophysical reality (governed by non-negotiable natural laws) is the root of most of our problems today. From climate collapse to economic instability, we’re trying to run a civilization on beliefs that ignore the laws of nature.

How we experience and accept this social reality depends heavily on the environment we grow up in and the communities around us. In the next section, we’ll explore how our surroundings shape what we see as “normal” and why that matters so much.

The Conditioned Sense of "Normal"

Most of what we think of as “normal” takes shape very early in life. This early programming made sense for most of human history. For thousands of years, life barely changed from one generation to the next. Families passed down what they knew, and quickly learning the rules of your world was a survival advantage. You adapted once, and then carried that version of “normal” for life.

But today, where everything shifts every few years, that same early conditioning becomes a liability.

From the moment we're born, our nervous system starts soaking in everything around us and building our sense of “normal”. We copy the world we grow up in. Monkey see, monkey do.

As an infant, everything is just noise. Bit by bit we notice that making the sound “mamma” makes a certain face smile. That’s interesting. Our brain gives us a little hit of dopamine when something works. Eventually, we're speaking a human-invented language without choosing to, we just copied sounds of people around us and associate meaning to those sounds.

Then we watch how the people around us act and start doing the same. At home, we see how our parents talk to friends, how they act around strangers, how they treat money (very seriously), and how they talk about their jobs (very important). We see the five-day workweek, weekends, and the occasional vacation. We don’t question that, it’s just reality.

Many of our desires come from ads, TV shows, movies, music, parents, and friends. As kids, we want candy, cartoons, and toys. And we quickly learn those things cost money. Later, we want cars, phones, clothes, vacations, lifestyles. We want status. We want sex. We want approval. So we buy stuff. And to buy stuff, we need money.

We’re also picking up cultural narratives. We learn what food is normal (and what’s not), how to dress, what religion is “true”, what jokes are funny or offensive, what’s right and wrong, and what success or failure looks like.

But more than that, everyone reading this grew up during a unique time in history (the carbon pulse) where things got “better” and more convenient, at least on the surface…or so we were told.

New technologies appeared constantly (we went from VHS to DVD to Blu-ray to 4K streaming). Internet got faster, better and cheaper. Life became more convenient with more products on store shelves, more TV channels, new technology, cheaper flights and more destinations to travel to. And over time, that steady upward trend became baked into our idea of what’s “normal” i.e. people have (or had) an expectation that things just get better by default.

This unspoken “shared story” was fueled by fossil fuels, and shaped by industrial capitalism, pervasive media, consumer culture, and Western thought. It has led to two fundamental, but false, beliefs:

• Endless growth is possible and always good.

• Limits can be overcome with technology and growth.

These beliefs are taken as common sense.

And sure, growth seems rational inside this human-made world. It means more jobs and more money (for some), and it keeps the current system from crashing. Of course people want more money and prosperity. Ask anyone: Do you want more or less money? We all know the answer. And almost no one wants the economic system to implode because that would wipe out their savings, pensions, and their income. That’s the kind of “collapse” politicians are focused on avoiding, and frankly, the only kind they seem to understand.

And in our constructed reality, money decides where you live, what you eat, how safe you are, and what kind of life you get. You can trade it for food, fuel, electricity, housing, healthcare, breast implants, or a private jet. Whatever you want.

So it makes perfect sense that people, including our dear leaders, believe that growth is inherently good, because it means less poverty.

And if you don’t recognize limits (most people don’t), if you think money runs the world and technology can solve anything (most people do) then it’s completely rational to believe things like “We can solve [problem] with more money and better technology.”

But that’s not how the real world works and none of this is “normal”.

Money is just a promise or claim on those real things. Energy does the work, things are built from materials (resources), and ecosystems keep us alive. We could print a gazillion dollars or give everyone a million dollars tomorrow, but it wouldn’t change how much lithium, oil, topsoil, or fresh water exists on this planet.

And what we think is normal was put in our heads by our parents, teachers, friends, government, and media. This conditioning, which really depends on when and where you grew up, shapes a huge part of who we are and what we think is “normal”.

To prove the point, imagine you were adopted as a baby by a muslim family in Saudi Arabia. You would still be you (same DNA, body, and brain), but your worldview would be completely different, right? You would have a different name, speak and think in Arabic, practice Islam, consider alcohol a sin, maybe believe homosexuality is immoral, and think Western culture is morally bankrupt (okay, maybe not wrong on that one).

Now imagine being born at a different point in history. Let’s say as a peasant in 14th-century Europe. Your "normal" would revolve around the seasons, probably some local lord, the village church, and the constant fear of not having enough food or getting sick and dying. You wouldn’t really expect your life to improve. And your children would expect to live the same way, as peasants.

In short, we’ve lived through an exceptional moment in history, and our brains have mistaken it for normal. Now that those conditions are slipping away, we’re struggling. Our expectations no longer match reality, and that disconnect is causing a lot of confusion and frustration, leading to denial and growing conspiracy thinking.

To understand why denial is the natural response, we first need to understand why our ego formed, and what it’s trying to protect.

The Dawn of Worry & Defense Mechanisms

At some point in our evolution, humans became self-aware. We started making tools, developed complex language, and somewhere along the way we realized: I exist. And one day I won’t.

Most animals don’t face this dilemma, they live in the now. A zebra can stand a few meters from a lion and stay calm. It only freaks out when the lion actually charges. Then stress hormones flood its system, it runs for its life, and if it escapes, two minutes later it’s calm again back to chewing grass like nothing happened.

Our stress system was built for similar short-term physical threats. But when we became self-aware we hijacked that system to deal with abstractions. We started asking questions “What is this? What happens if…?” and began thinking about ourselves and what might happen today, tomorrow, next week, or after we’re dead.

And that came with some side-effects.

We became aware of death, loss, failure, and everything that could go wrong. This means we have the capacity to worry (sometimes a lot) about things that haven’t even happened yet. Meaning we live in a constant state of low-level anxiety, because we’re scared of what might be coming. That includes the collapse many of us haven’t fully faced yet. We're imagining future scenarios inside our brains.

To handle this anxiety, the brain made a kind of mental shield.

It protects us from things that threaten our sense of self and our view of the world (what we think is normal). When something doesn’t fit, the ego doesn’t try to understand. It deploys defense mechanisms:

• Denial: Refusing to accept uncomfortable truths

• Rationalization: Making excuses or justifying beliefs

• Minimization: Downplaying the severity of a problem

• Projection: Blaming others for our own issues

• Compartmentalization: Pushing truths out of awareness

These mental defenses helped humans survive for thousands of years. We evolved as social animals, wired to cooperate, trust, and believe in shared myths because for most of human existence, being kicked out of your tribe meant death. That’s why our brains evolved to prioritize social belonging over truth.

But now they’re protecting a fantasy world built on infinite growth, money, control, and consumption. A worldview we’ve all been conditioned to believe is “normal”. But it’s an ecocidal fantasy. One that the ego is designed to protect at all costs.

So if you’ve ever wondered why people can’t be reasoned with, why facts don’t change minds, why people double down when presented with evidence, it’s because we are designed to believe what our tribe believes.

Now fast-forward to today. People live in algorithm-fed echo chambers (the new digital tribes) and our sense “normal” is falling apart. Nothing fits the story we were told. Our brain doesn’t like that.

When faced with our terrifying reality, the mind quickly goes looking for something that makes it all feel okay again. Maybe it’s Fox News saying it’s all a hoax. Or Bjorn Lomborg saying climate change isn’t such a big deal. Or maybe it’s a TED Talk promising that AI and solar panels will fix everything. Or a book called Abundance or Not the End of the World whispering comforting lies in your ear.

And just like that, you’re back asleep. The illusion is intact. The dream continues.

But staying asleep is getting harder without falling into conspiracy thinking because to maintain the illusion of normal you have to create an alternate reality to explain away all these obvious symptoms of systemic breakdown. And to keep that fantasy alive, you must reject anything that threatens it, including science, evidence, and basic logic.

That’s why denial of climate change keeps growing even as climate breakdown becomes extremely obvious. We get ridiculous ideas like Jewish space lasers, hurricane machines, and chemtrails. These wild fantasies explain the symptoms of climate breakdown without accepting climate change itself. If it’s not my fault, then I don’t have to change.

Anything but the truth!

They’re seriously implying that 99% of climate scientists across every country, university, and research lab, are all in on some giant global conspiracy to… what? Get rich? From who?

“Follow the money” they say. Okay, let’s do that.

The only climate scientists getting big money are the very few who deny it, and they’re funded by fossil fuel companies and libertarian think tanks with billions of dollars and every reason to delay action.

If climate change were a hoax, every climate scientist would gladly accept millions from Exxon, Shell, or Koch Industries simply to tell the truth. Why would 99% of scientists lie so they can make less money? That makes no sense. Fossil fuel companies are desperate for it not to be real and they’re filthy rich. There’s no funding shortage. So why haven’t more scientists taken the money just to “tell the truth”?

Here’s the real conspiracy: fossil fuel companies knew. Exxon’s own scientists predicted modern warming back in the 70’s. They buried the science and spent millions on denial campaigns. It’s right there in the link.

Another narrative (often from the far-right) is that climate action is a “plan to control us”. Really?

Climate scientists are not running our governments and are not saying “Everyone must buy an EV and adopt these specific measures”. They’re saying the science is clear and we should stop emitting greenhouse gases or the warming will accelerate. That’s it.

The fact that politicians and corporations decided to capitalize on climate change (shocking) and push EV’s, carbon capture, solar, wind etc. is a response to the scientific consensus and a desperate attempt to maintain BAU. But that does not mean the science is wrong.

Governments have mostly failed to listen to scientists, preferring to listen to economists instead. They haven’t passed serious climate policies. They have done almost NOTHING about climate change. There are no real carbon taxes, no bans on gas cars in most places, and no limits on consumption.

So what exactly is this “control” these people are talking about? Where is it?

The Unraveling of Shared Reality

I’m sure you’ve had this experience: someone close to you, maybe a family member, a friend, or even your partner, is living in another reality. They’re deep into conspiracies, saying things completely detached from what you know to be true.

From your perspective, they’re denying facts and living in a fantasy. But if you ask them, they probably think you’re the one who’s blind, hysterical, brainwashed, and naive. Sound familiar?

This is what happens when everyone gets their own feed, their own facts, and their own “truth”. It doesn’t matter if what they’re seeing is objectively true or total bullshit, the algorithms don’t care. They just push whatever keeps people scrolling and makes money. No editors. No fact-checkers. No shared reality. Just profit-driven dopamine.

This complete breakdown in our ability to agree on basic facts is one of the clearest signs that we’re already living through the early stages of societal collapse. It’s like watching a slow, stupid faceplant in real time.

The unraveling is here and our response is painfully stupid and short-sighted. We’re not even bothering to name most of the existential threats staring us in the face: climate chaos, mass extinction, resource depletion, economic instability, increasing risk of collapsing health and food systems. Instead, we’re denying reality and still chasing economic growth.

Around the world, facts no longer seem to matter. This opened the door for far-right movements to rise by offering simple answers to complex problems, flooding the public with misinformation, rejecting science, spinning false narratives, and distracting from the systemic breakdown happening all around.

This is how overshoot feeds authoritarianism. It’s not that most people crave fascism or oppression, they just want their “normal” back. They want the comfortable lifestyles they once had. Authoritarian leaders promise fast, easy fixes, even if those solutions are cruel, dishonest, or doomed to fail.

History makes one thing clear: it never ends well. And by the time people realize what they’ve signed up for, it’s usually far too late…

The Emergence of the Self

For some of us the truth becomes too obvious and undeniable. Something breaks you open, like it did for me. Carl Jung said real awakening happens through crisis, and waking up to our predicament is one of the deepest psychological ruptures a person can experience. Losing your “normal” means the ground beneath your feet shifts. It kills all the stories you’ve been telling yourself, and denial no longer works.

When the old story dies, you start seeing the world as it really is.

This process is often called ego death, but that phrase is a bit misleading. Our sense of self doesn’t go away, and your brain doesn’t stop simulating “you”. What changes is you become aware of your ego, and see it for what it really is: a story, a mask, a conditioned performance.

In Jungian psychology, that rupture, the moment everything stops making sense, is the start of individuation. The long and painful process of uncovering the Self, and becoming the real you.

When that happens, you start feeling different. You lose interest in the game everyone else is playing. Things that used to matter like work, money, and chasing goals, don’t feel important anymore. Being in an office, or a Zoom meeting about “increasing sales” or “optimizing conversion rates” feels surreal. Like you’re trapped in a fake world where everyone’s pretending.

You sit there thinking “Are we seriously still wasting time on this bullshit?” because the pretending becomes unbearable. What you actually want is to quit, walk away and smash your laptop.

Some relationships won’t survive this shift. You sit with friends or family and listen to them complain about their job, traffic, climate protesters blocking roads, the price of flights or gas or groceries. They talk about some trivial TV show they’re addicted to, their investments, retirement plans, and their next vacation.

You just sit there, nod politely, but inside you're thinking: None of this makes any fucking sense. Because it doesn’t.

What you feel, whether it’s anxiety, confusion, grief or anger, is a sane response to a species in collective hypnosis, barreling toward self-destruction. Your emotions match the reality of the world you live in, and how hard you’ve been pretending to seem functional in a society that suffers from the denial of reality.

Eventually, after all the grief and frustration, something else starts to come through. It’s a quieter kind of awareness that doesn’t care about status, productivity, performance, or what other people think. It just observes.

You start noticing small things you used to overlook like birdsong in the morning, how the wind moves through the trees, ants carrying crumbs, or a gecko warming itself on the pavement. You notice rust spreading on old bridges, buildings decaying, and cracks forming in roads that no one seems to fix.

This shift in awareness is the emergence of ecological consciousness. A recognition that you’re not separate from nature, you are nature. When the Earth suffers, you feel it. It’s like a voice rising from your bones and blood. A whisper from the collective unconscious reminding you who you truly are.

Some people have always carried this awareness. Having it doesn’t mean you fully understand every part of our predicament, but once you do understand, this connection becomes impossible to ignore.

I used to see everything through an economic lens: is this good for growth? Is it profitable? I mostly thought about money, work, and what to buy next. How to fill the void. I tried to fill it with consumption, goals, accomplishments, and status. Always chasing something, always needing more, and never feeling satisfied for more than a few minutes.

But then that void got smaller and my attention shifted.

Now I pay attention to the natural world. I see the world as one vast, connected system, where everything affects everything else. And most mornings I wake up perfectly happy. Despite everything I know about the world, it doesn’t weigh me down like it used to. It’s just part of me now, something I live with.

As the collapse unfolds, it’s worth remembering that while our conclusions are based on systems thinking, biophysical limits, and hard data, the future hasn’t happened yet. Which means uncertainty, assumptions, and blind spots. So don’t let waking up to reality turn into giving up.

However, a few things are very clear, in the decades to come we’re going to have less energy, climate chaos, and lifestyles that are much simpler and fundamentally local. That’s the best-case scenario, if we have a future. And whether you realize it or not, you’re already preparing for it.

The unraveling is already happening, and now each of us has a choice: wake up or disappear into delusion.

You’ve already made your choice, you’re out of the hypnosis.

And that’s liberation.

Abrupt climate change. The sixth mass extinction. Collapsing forests. Dead soil. Dry rivers. Acidic oceans. Coral reefs bleaching. Insects vanishing. Plastic in the air. Microfibers in your lungs. Nanoplastics in your blood. In your brain. In birds. In fish. In babies.

Fossil fuels and ores depleting. Every barrel, every watt, more expensive. Drilling and scraping garbage rock. Less and less, needed by more and more.

Prices rising. Inequality exploding. Systems unraveling. Institutions failing. Minds breaking. Leaders lying. Attention spans frying. People dividing. Culture fracturing. Authoritarianism rising. Truth dying. Bombs flying.

“How the f*** did we get here?”

It’s not a coincidence that we’re facing all of these issues at the exact same time. It’s not bad luck and it’s not random. Because it’s all connected. These are symptoms.

In case you don’t know: we’ve exceeded the limits of what this planet can support and are crossing several planetary boundaries. We’ve depleted non-renewable resources like oil, gas, coal, minerals, and phosphorus, things that don’t come back. We’ve used up renewable resources like forests, fish stocks, freshwater, and topsoil, faster than they can regenerate.

At the same time we’ve drowned the biosphere in waste, with CO₂ and methane in the atmosphere, plastic and toxic chemicals in the oceans, nitrogen runoff in rivers, heavy metals in the soil, and mountains of toxic garbage piling up around the world.

Our fantasy of endless growth has slammed into biophysical reality, triggering environmental, political, social, and economical disasters.

And that’s why everything is collapsing at the same time.

This pattern was modeled decades ago in 1972 by the Club of Rome in their Limits to Growth study. They looked at what would happen if growth kept going on a finite planet, and their Business-as-Usual trajectory showed us tipping into decline right about...now.

It wasn’t really a prediction, but a warning about the risks of continued growth on a finite planet. But looking around today, it seems like they nailed it. The collapse is here and the evidence is conclusive.

How are we responding?

Mostly by normalizing the insanity and not really doing anything about it. There was a good piece in the Guardian from Adrienne Matei about a concept called Hypernormalization.

“What you are feeling is the disconnect between seeing that systems are failing, that things aren’t working … and yet the institutions and the people in power just are, like, ignoring it and pretending everything is going to go on the way that it has,”

The dysfunction is obvious now, especially in the US.

The Hypernormalization documentary from Adam Curtis, released in 2016 on BBC, shows how governments and media have kept people passive by simplifying reality and denying the bigger patterns. It’s more relevant than ever and I recommend you watch it.

Now, about the response. Most people can feel the collapse because it’s right in front of them. It’s no longer abstract because they’re living it. It’s on the TV and all over social media. They see Trump, the chaos in the US, and a rapidly crumbling world order. They see prices going up, struggling economies, and their standard of living declining. They see the war in Ukraine, the genocide in Gaza, and increasingly destructive natural disasters. So they focus on the visible symptoms and try to fix them. Get rid of Trump and get “back to normal”. Fix the economy. End the wars. Solve climate change.

Some argue, vote, protest, and blame. Many have checked out entirely, lost in echo chambers, conspiracy groups, or cult-like communities (MAGA). And nearly everyone still worships the economy above all else. Seriously, it’s always about “saving the economy”. No exceptions. No matter what it costs.

Republicans want tax cuts to save the economy from Trump's tariffs.

The EU wants new power lines to save the economy. First it needs cash and local support.

China's latest stimulus package: is it enough to save the economy?

Yawn.

I keep seeing articles like this “The precipitous decline of birthrates throughout the world poses a serious threat to humanity. What is to be done?”

More consumers, more growth…is this guy smoking crack? I guess he’s worried he may not get a pension. Yeah, he probably won’t, but a lack of consumers is not the reason. It’s because the biosphere is collapsing, and that’s happening because of unchecked growth and consumption, so maybe we don’t need more of that?

And this “Progressives should care that the global population is set to fall”

Give. me. a. fucking. break. Carbon tunnel vision. Ecology blind. Energy blind. Materials blind.

Richer societies consume an insane amount of resources, generate massive amounts of waste, have outsourced emissions and have not been heading in the right direction, ever. And as long as we rely on global supply chains, measuring emissions by country is pure greenwashing.

Let’s zoom out so we can understand how we got here.

Stage I: Instinct, Energy & Technology

As with all species on this planet, hominids (including Homo Sapiens) evolved to do two things: survive and reproduce. That’s the biological mission, and to do that you need energy. Every species is wired to seek energy to stay alive and pass on its genes. If a species doesn’t find enough energy and reproduce, it goes extinct. So yes, these are hard-coded instincts.

Unfortunately, there’s nothing in that programming that says “stop now” or “save some for later”. There was no need for that. And that’s a big problem for us. Look no further than how fat many Homo Sapiens are today, and all the other addictions we struggle with. We’re wired to chase dopamine, and most of us don’t stand a chance.

For most of our history, nature kept our growth in check. Predators, disease, competition, and starvation. If a population grew too much, something would knock it back down. Usually famine, because there wouldn’t be enough food to support the population that had grown too much.

But we got clever. Our ability to think in abstract terms let us invent tools and technology that pushed us past natural limits. We call this “progress”, but these are what Ronald Wright called progress traps in his book A Short History of Progress i.e. solutions that solved problems at the time but backfired later, by creating even larger problems.

The first major technologies were fire, stone tools, weapons, language, and teamwork. Fire let us cook, which meant more calories with less chewing and digestion. That gave us more energy for our growing brains. Fire also kept us warm, scared off predators, cleared forests, and helped shape better weapons. Tools gave us sharp edges, spears gave us range, language let us coordinate hunts, share knowledge, and strategize, making us apex predators.

With these technologies we could kill animals from a safe distance. And just like that, we jumped to the top of the food chain.

This may not sound like much to us today, but it changed everything. We now had the power to destroy entire ecosystems, and some of us did. To see why this matters, we need to understand how evolution works.

Evolution is very slow. Getting faster legs, better camouflage, better vision, or longer arms usually takes hundreds or even thousands of generations. The way it happens is through random genetic mutations. Most mutations do nothing. But sometimes a mutation helps survival, and if it does, it will spread over many generations through natural selection.

Usually it’s a response to the environment. Maybe prey gets faster, a new predator shows up, or the climate shifts. Suddenly speed matters more or camouflage becomes life or death. The animals that happen to have an edge (mutation) will survive and reproduce. The ones that don’t, die. Simple as that.

But we found a shortcut. The real breakthrough was abstraction i.e. our ability to deal with ideas, not just events. We could imagine things that didn’t exist yet, such as a hunt before it happened, a tool before it was built, a god in the sky, or a future we wanted.

Combine this with technology, and we didn’t have to wait for evolution, we could just make a new tool. For example:

• We couldn’t skin animals with our teeth or nails, but with a sharp rock we could.

• We couldn’t kill large animals with our hands, but with weapons, traps and teamwork we could kill anything.

• We couldn’t survive harsh winters with our naked skin, but with fire and clothing we could.

Basically, we broke out of the biological upgrade cycle. Our bodies no longer had to adapt through evolution, we could simply use technology and take evolution into our own hands. This was the beginning of our overshoot.

As we expanded into new territories, we encountered megafauna who had never seen a hairless monkey carrying a flaming weapon. We were small, so they didn’t see us as a threat because they hadn’t evolved to. Their mistake. We killed them and transformed (destroyed) entire ecosystems.

This is how it started. We’re wired to survive and reproduce as much as possible. We didn’t choose this path, we just followed what worked. The more energy you grabbed, the better you did.

Stage II: Agriculture & Civilization

Then about 12,000 years ago the climate stabilized and everything changed again. With a stable climate, we no longer had to follow slow-moving climate shifts. This meant that we could settle permanently, develop agriculture and domesticate animals, and store surplus energy. That surplus energy gave us more babies, hierarchies, bearded men with spears yelling about territory, and eventually cities.

Welcome to civilization. Now you need money to survive.

What’s money? We made it up. But you need it to pay taxes and buy back access to the planet you were born on.

What are taxes? That’s the cover charge to live on land we already stole, plus a subscription fee for roads, armies and wars

Can I opt out? No. Your choices are: become a warrior, a servant, or a corpse.

Welcome aboard. No refunds!

Agriculture and civilization completely changed us. Before that, our values and beliefs were rooted in nature because we lived as part of it. We were animistic. Some believed everything had a spirit: trees, rivers, animals. And yes, we killed animals, but we respected them. We saw ourselves as part of nature, not separate from it.

There was no concept of time or history, and we didn’t know much of anything about the world. We didn’t know how large it is. We couldn’t explain things. Rain? I don’t know. The sun? I don’t know. An earthquake? Who the hell knows. There was no science. No books. No Google. Nothing. So we made up all kinds of silly stories, but they were mostly harmless.

But agriculture and civilization reshaped our relationship with nature and our beliefs. We stopped living in nature, and began exploiting it. Our stories stopped being silly and became insane and violent. Justifying everything from slavery to ecocide.

Think about what it takes to get an ox to plow. You have to break its instincts, force it into submission, and make it obedient enough to pull a plow day after day while you whip it. You can’t treat an animal that way and still respect it.

As we learned to control and reshape the environment, many societies started seeing nature as something to conquer and exploit. This was the birth of human supremacy.

Early civilizations expanded their farms, cities, and armies. The ones that grew faster and stronger outcompeted others. So endless growth became a necessary survival strategy, and then it became a cultural value. If you didn’t grow and build weapons, you risked getting slaughtered by others that did.

For thousands of years, large and small civilizations went through cycles of self-destruction mostly for the same reasons. They consumed surrounding resources, chopping down forests, depleting water sources and stripping topsoil. Then they grew, expanded and consumed more, and eventually collapsed because they ran out of the resources they needed to maintain their societies. Rinse and repeat.

Stage III: Modern Industrial Civilization

Then came science, fossil fuels, industrialization, and capitalism. That’s when things really took off. We hit the energy jackpot. Our basic instinct to grow got supercharged by fossil fuels and an economic system that runs on infinite growth. Yes, infinite. On a finite planet. Who the fuck signed off on this?

So we threw a big party wasting it on combustion engines, plastic crap, and shopping malls. Polluting ourselves to death.

Why? Because like all living things, civilization is a dissipative structure, a thermodynamic system that sustains itself by consuming as much energy as possible and releasing waste (heat and pollution). And fossil fuels have so much energy that they were simply irresistible. At least to some people, and that was enough. With fossil fuels we had the power to destroy the entire planet. And….we did!

We grew from 1 billion people in 1800 to over 8 billion today, and at the same time, our average energy consumption increased more than twentyfold. From about 2,000-2,500 calories per day (just enough to stay alive) to over 50,000 calories per day when you include the fossil fuels, electricity, and industrial processes that we rely on (that’s the global average). That means our total thermodynamic footprint is now equivalent to more than 160 billion Homo Sapiens roaming the Earth.

The only reason we grew this much is because of the abundant and cheap energy provided by fossil fuels. All we had to do was extract them, and then they did the heavy lifting. We have machines working for us 24/7. Trucks, tractors, factories, and power plants, mostly running off coal, oil, and gas. This allowed us to specialize into all kinds of useless bullshit jobs.

What could possibly go wrong?

Everything went wrong. We’re in deep overshoot. We’re consuming forests, topsoil, water, and fossil fuels as if they’re infinite. And destroying life-support systems we depend on for air, water, food, climate, biodiversity.

What we’re living through right now is a one-time boom. A cosmic sugar rush powered by fossil sunlight, fantasy economics and delusion. It’s not going to last. It’s physically impossible. The entire system is crashing. Because that’s what happens when a species exceeds the limits of its environment. A die off.

And that’s overshoot in a nutshell.

Drivers of Overshoot

I used to think the problem was overpopulation and overconsumption. Too many people, consuming too much, and polluting too much. Which is absolutely true, that is the problem. But it’s obviously just an outcome. Because even if we suddenly cut our population to three billion, not much would change unless we also changed how we think, how we live, and what we value.

So the real question is: Why did we grow and consume beyond limits?

Well the short answer is because we could. But there are multiple driving forces behind it, and any solution has to account for all of these forces. Here’s a framework I use:

In short, our biological primal instincts drive us to consume and reproduce, while strategic dynamics, rooted in energy and physics, push individuals and countries to extract faster, expand quicker, and never hold back. And our delusional beliefs of human supremacy, endless growth, and techno-salvation justify it and blind us to reality.

Put all this together, and you get a system designed to keep growing and grabbing, no matter what. That system is modern industrial civilization. It’s the massive machine built on fossil fuels, factories, global supply chains, finance, and nonstop trade. This system has to die or the biosphere dies. Because the two aren’t compatible.

Let’s take a closer look at these driving forces.

4. Systemic Drivers & False Solutions

There’s this massive cognitive dissonance that we can have our cake and eat it too. That we can keep the comforts of modern life and fix the system that’s destroying the planet. But we can’t.

Most people focus on politics, economic reform, or blaming fossil fuel companies, because those are the parts they can see and understand. It feels manageable. They think if we just tweak capitalism, regulate emissions, or vote for greener policies, we’ll be fine. But that’s the contradiction. They want change without sacrifice. They want sustainability without giving up their cars, flights, meat, heating, Amazon deliveries, or global infrastructure. That’s why every attempt to fix the system fails because the system is the lifestyle. And that lifestyle is unsustainable.

There is no version of the future where we keep this way of living and avoid collapse. That world does not exist. You can’t live like this and have a livable planet. One has to go.

These systems are amplifiers of our behavior, not root causes. The truth is that it makes almost no difference what economic system we use, who the leader is, or how we power our civilization, unless we radically change how we live. But people don’t want to change voluntarily.

Capitalism & Economic Systems

Some people have this fantasy that there’s an alternative economic system where we can still keep cars, houses, gadgets, roads, internet, electricity, global shipping, massive infrastructure and everything that goes along with modern life, without it ending in disaster. And if you believe that, you don’t understand the problem.

A lot of people, especially on the left, think capitalism is the problem, but capitalism is not the root cause. It’s just an unfair distribution model that accelerated collapse. But the problem is not distribution, the problem is extraction.

Socialists and communists also extract resources, bulldoze forests, deplete topsoil, poison rivers, and burn fossil fuels. You can name the system whatever you want, but if it extracts from nature to maintain human comfort, it’s not sustainable and ends in ecological disaster.

People hate capitalism mainly because it creates massive inequality. It’s a profit-driven market system that privatizes shared resources, rewards extraction, and concentrates wealth. The mechanism is quite simple: capital compounds, labor does not. The more you own, the more you can control. What this means is that the rich keep getting richer faster.

But redistributing monopoly money across the population wouldn’t solve the core issues. In fact, it could make things worse, because it might increase total consumption. Sorry, but making everyone richer just speeds up extraction and collapse. I’m all for equality though, which means consuming less, together. All of us.

Today, billionaires have a lot of wealth on paper, but most of their wealth doesn’t really represent consumption. They hardly spend a fraction of it. They don’t eat 100,000 meals per day or drink 100,000 cappuccinos every day. Their wealth is more about influence and power, and we need to dismantle that power.

Reforming capitalism, or even replacing it, will not undo ecological overshoot. That ship has sailed. But a fairer system could help soften the landing.

Politics & Democracy

There’s this naive hope that better leaders can turn it all around, as if the problem boils down to who’s in charge. But that’s just another fantasy. Changing the captain of a sinking ship won’t stop it from sinking.

And it’s easy to point fingers at leaders, but it’s also mostly bullshit. Look at what the average voter supports:

Yeah. We’re fucked. Try running for office on a platform of “consume less” or “accept limits”. Nobody wants to hear that and nobody wants to vote for that. They want their pensions, their flights, their cheap goods. A future just like the past. So the system keeps spiraling, trapped between the physics of limits and the politics of denial.

What this means is that democracy is not going to save us, for now. Because democracy is the will of the people, and right now, the will of the people leads to collapse.

Obviously it would be great if someone actually acknowledged that the ship is sinking, like Dave Gardner in the 2024 election, and had some responses that made sense. But most people never heard of him and even fewer are ready to accept his agenda:

I’m running for U.S. President so I can tell the public the truth about why our system is failing us and our continued existence on the planet is so tenuous. It’s an emergency that calls for clear, decisive, leadership and all-hands-on-deck action. This is not a time for compromise and half-steps. We will make no more dead-planet decisions. Only bright-future pathways will be chosen.

On day one I’ll declare a national emergency and mobilize government, business, media and the public in an urgent project to shrink our nation's ecological footprint:

• contract GDP

• decarbonize and go on an energy diet

• work less

• consume less

• support and accelerate the current trend toward choosing smaller families

Now that’s real talk! Maybe next time?

Donald Trump and the rise of far-right politics

We’ve seen this before. Back in the 1920’s and 1930’s, the world was a mess and people were broke, angry, and scared. That’s what helped bring Adolf Hitler to power in Germany, and Benito Mussolini in Italy. When life gets hard and the system stops working, people look for someone to blame and someone who says they’ll fix everything.

Donald Trump is a symptom of a declining American empire in late-stage capitalism, and a global industrial civilization that has blown past planetary limits. Wealth inequality has reached extreme levels, and our system built on endless extraction and growth has hit the ceiling and started to unravel.

As resources get harder to find, prices go up. Life gets harder. People expected things to get better, or at least stay the same. That’s what they were promised. But that didn’t happen. So they get angry and want easy answers. That’s how you get fascism.

Then a strongman comes along promising to fix everything and bring back the good old days of abundance. He gives people someone to blame. Migrants. Elites. Liberals. Scientists. And he promises to make everything great again, not by facing reality, but by denying it.

But the world people want no longer exists because overshoot symptoms have already destroyed the conditions that made it possible.

Now, that doesn’t mean we shouldn’t get rid of Trump. Of course we should. He’s a narcissistic authoritarian who causes real harm. But he’s a symptom and getting rid of him doesn’t change biophysical reality.

The right denies science. The left denies math.

Yes, the right rejects science, thinks climate change is a hoax, and blames the left, immigrants, and environmental regulations for economic decline. They’re not even on the fucking map.

But mainstream liberal politics is also in denial of reality, and hasn’t offered a fundamentally different path or done anything about the existential problems we’re facing. They still pretend the system can work with a few tweaks. They also remain very committed to economic growth. They also deny limits. It’s the same story, over and over. More growth, more abundance, just around the corner.

Still the same suicide mission.

Notice how every “climate solution” has modern civilization and growth as a given. It’s non-negotiable. EV’s, carbon capture, solar panels, hydrogen airplanes, all built on the idea that we’ll keep car-culture, highways, global shipping, smartphones, and cheap flights. The only debate is how we power it. There’s no serious discussion of scaling down economic activity, or changing our economic system, or even embracing a declining population. Just cleaner ways to keep the party going forever.

Green Growth & Fossil Fuel Companies

Some people believe that we can eliminate emissions and keep this system going with green growth and clean tech. That’s not true.

First of all, modern life is built on fossil fuels. It’s not just about gasoline and diesel. It’s asphalt, plastics, cement, steel, glass, foams, carbon fiber, grease, synthetic rubber, synthetic fibers, solvents, fertilizers, pesticides, herbicides, detergents, pharmaceuticals and on and on. Nearly everything depends on oil, coal, or gas.

Secondly, there is no clean version of global industrial civilization. Even if you solved emissions, you would still be destroying ecosystems with mining, pollution, and habitat destruction. And we would still be running out of critical resources like topsoil and freshwater, things we can’t live without.

And no, it wasn’t the fossil fuel companies that did this to us. Sure, Exxon and Shell lied, buried the science, and ran denial campaigns. But they didn’t force anyone to buy a car, book a flight, or fill up a shopping cart.

In every election, people vote to keep this lifestyle going, demand convenience and low prices, which requires fossil fuels. We wanted speed, comfort, and convenience. They delivered. We bought the plastic, the concrete, the tires. We burned the oil. We are the polluters.

Having said that, I’m all for fining oil and gas companies, and phasing out fossil fuels ASAP. I just think it’s hypocritical to blame it all on them, because it lets the rest of us off the hook.

But I know that quitting fossil fuels would collapse this ecocidal civilization, so we won’t do it. Because this is not a problem, it’s a predicament. We can’t live without the thing that’s killing us.

3. Ideological Drivers & Delusional Beliefs

As I already mentioned, civilization shifted our beliefs from seeing ourselves as part of nature to seeing ourselves as above it. That’s where human supremacy and the religion of growth began.

As problems got worse (running out of resources, fighting each other, destroying surrounding environments) people often looked to technology for answers and they found them. That’s not new. The Romans used machines, roads, and aqueducts to grow their empire. All civilizations used tools to survive and expand.

But something changed in modern times. Technology became a religion. We started saying: “If we just invent the right thing, we can fix everything and keep growing forever”. That’s techno-salvation. The idea that technology will magically save us from the mess we made.

Let’s take a closer look at how delusional these beliefs really are.

Techno-salvation: The belief that human ingenuity and technology will always save us.

Why it’s delusional: Techno-salvation is delusional because it treats technology as a magic fix for problems that are rooted in physical limits. Every new technology still runs on finite energy and materials, often shifts the damage elsewhere and has negative externalities.

Despite this, many people still think technology is going to fix everything. That some genius is going to come along with a breakthrough if we just wait long enough. A magic carbon vacuum. A fusion breakthrough. I used to believe that too. It’s a comforting thought, but it’s still delusional.

What most technology actually does is extend our overshoot. It allows us to keep doing something we’re not supposed to be doing. Here’s how it usually goes. We grow. We hit a limit. That creates a crisis. We use technology to “fix” the problem so we can keep going. That technology creates new problems. So we invent more technology and new problems appear. Adding complexity. And round and round it goes.

Let’s consider two examples.

The Automobile

In the early 20th century, cities were overcrowded, streets were filthy, and horses were the main source of transportation. The streets were full of horse shit, diseases spread, and people looked for solutions to this problem.

Along came the automobile. Problem solved. Cities got cleaner and transportation was faster and more convenient. People could live further out so suburbs exploded while roads and highways multiplied.

What did that lead to? Climate change, air pollution, oil dependence, car dependence, traffic deaths, urban sprawl and much more. We solved one problem and created 10 bigger problems.

The Green Revolution

By the mid-20th century our population was growing fast and people were worried we wouldn’t be able to grow enough food to feed ourselves.

Naturally, instead of addressing our exponential population growth, we launched what’s now called the Green Revolution. High-yield crops, mechanical irrigation systems, chemicals, and synthetic fertilizer made through the Haber-Bosch process. Everything dependent on fossil fuels and machines.

It worked. Global famine avoided. Population exploded.

Now we’ve got dead zones, degraded topsoil, depleted groundwater, biodiversity loss, a food system completely dependent on oil and gas, and billions of people dependent on a fragile web of supply chains. Once again, the solution just kicked the can down the road and made the problem bigger.

That’s not to say all technology is bad, especially considering we’re stuck in this dystopian timeline.

Some technology could help us reduce suffering, adapt, and downshift during collapse. Basic, simple tech like solar water heaters, composting toilets, hand tools, bicycles. Stuff that actually fits the scale of what’s possible. I’m also not against building some renewable energy to help us adapt to whatever comes next.

But that’s not what we’re doing. Instead, we’re pouring energy into AI fantasies and high-tech magic tricks to keep the machine running, chasing endless growth, and dodging the hard questions. And the longer we do that, the worse the crash will be.

Techno-salvation is a story we tell ourselves so we don’t have to change. We’ve wasted decades chasing miracle solutions for a system that’s fundamentally unsustainable. Now we’re out of time and out of runway.

Endless growth: The belief that there are no limits to growth.

Why it’s delusional: Growing forever on a finite planet is impossible, so obviously it’s delusional. It’s basic math.

I’m not even sure how many people truly believe infinite growth is possible, but it’s surprising how few ever stop to question it. Maybe that’s because it’s the story we’ve been sold our entire lives. And even though it only takes about 30 seconds of honest thinking to realize it’s complete bullshit, most people never go there. Because questioning growth means questioning everything.

But in case someone doesn’t get it, let’s look at why endless growth is delusional.

Even the tiniest growth rate hits a wall eventually. For example, if we keep growing our population at just 0.1% per year, which is almost nothing, by the year 5000, roughly 3000 years from now, we would have a population of 150 billion. Obviously the planet could never support that many humans.

Even at 0.01% growth per year, practically flat, in the year 50 000 we would have a population over 1 trillion and the curve gets vertical.

The point is that any constant growth rate is unsustainable.

It’s clear that at some point growth will have to stop. Even 0.01% annual growth is unsustainable in the long run.

But growth is now a necessary fantasy, because our financial system is built on this insane idea that exponential growth has to go on forever. To keep the current financial system from collapsing, we have to grow something like 2-3% every year.

That means more energy, more materials, more consumption. If growth stalls, debts can’t be paid, defaults rise, and the system collapses. If we try to cheat by printing money we just devalue the currency i.e. we get inflation and eventually the whole thing unravels.

Obviously we won’t keep growing forever. But can we level off, reform our economic system and keep modern life going forever with a stable population? No.

Resource depletion

When we grow, we’re depleting resources faster every year. But even if we stop growing, we’re still depleting resources that will eventually run out. Permanently. So it’s not just growth that’s unsustainable. It’s the entire thing. Yes, civilization is unsustainable, that’s why they all collapse eventually.

Let’s put climate change aside for a second, pretend it’s a hoax. Also no environmental crises at all. Basically, pretend you’re a modern-day republican.

Now take any physical product. Let’s say an air conditioner. Every unit needs aluminum from bauxite mines, copper from open-pit mines, steel (made with iron ore and coke from coal), plastic made from petrochemicals (oil), and refrigerants (synthetic chemicals made in petrochemical plants).

But that’s just the materials for an air conditioner.

You need energy and infrastructure to mine, refine, manufacture, assemble, ship, install, maintain, and power it. Every step requires its own machines, tools, fuel, and materials. And because of entropy (the second law of thermodynamics) everything breaks down, meaning everything needs to be replaced, eventually. Every machine, every road, every building, every part of the grid. And we will keep doing that year after year...forever?

Ohh-kay. Let’s think about this.

• Do we have infinite oil, coal and gas? No.

• Do we have infinite copper, bauxite, iron ore? Also no.

• Do we have infinite rare earths, lithium, phosphate? Still no.

You can do this same thought experiment with any product, even the “sustainable” products. A solar panel. A wind turbine. An electric vehicle. Whatever. Every product depends on materials we extract, process, and eventually run out of. And it all depends on massive infrastructure that requires an endless flow of materials and energy to maintain.

“What about recycling?” You can’t fully recycle a car, a building, a road, a solar panel, or a data center. Not really. You can recover bits and pieces. But the process requires lots of energy, transportation, machines, infrastructure, and labor. And it’s never 100% efficient. We lose material, quality, and energy. Always. Recycling is better than nothing, but it’s simply a slower spiral down.

“What about decoupling/digitalization?” Digitalization still means servers, cables, devices, batteries, cooling systems, and mining. If your solution looks like The Matrix with humans in pods, fed by tubes, everything uploaded to the cloud, you need to take a step back and slap yourself in the face. Why would we sleepwalk into that dystopia in the name of growth and efficiency? But it doesn’t matter, even that future collapses, because it still depends on extraction, energy, and ecosystems.

That’s not to say we shouldn’t try to decouple as much as possible. It also doesn’t mean that civilizations cannot exist, clearly they can, but they’re always temporary. None of them are sustainable in the long run, and that’s okay.

Any way of life that depends on depleting finite resources is by definition unsustainable. Maybe not tomorrow. But give it a few decades or centuries. Think in geological time and the delusion becomes obvious.

Human supremacy: The belief that humans are superior to all other life forms and therefore entitled to dominate, exploit, and destroy the rest of the natural world for our benefit.

Why it’s delusional: It’s delusional because we’re animals, the biosphere created us and we’re entirely dependent on it for our survival. Destroying the biosphere is suicidal.

But are most people really human supremacists? I don’t think so. We’re not born human supremacists, but the system makes us into that. I think it happens in two ways:

1. Civilization disconnects us from nature and the destruction.

2. We’re taught to prioritize the economy above all, without realizing what it means.

The way we live today is very unnatural. We live in cities part of an industrial system that delivers resources to our doorstep. We use money to get what we want, but we never see where it comes from. And because money equals survival, we treat the economy like a god.

Disconnected from nature

Most people say “I would never hurt an animal” and that’s probably true. But most people eat meat. Those animals suffer a lot. They live in cages, in fear and pain, and we pay someone else to kill them. We don’t see the factory farm, the clearcut forest, or the poisoned river. Modernity takes care of it for us.

But could you kill a pig yourself? Grab it, listen to it scream for its life, and slit its throat? I’m not sure I could. And even if I had to do it for survival, like our ancestors did, I would still feel bad about it. I would respect the spirit of the animal and remind myself it’s part of the circle of life. My body will one day go back into the soil, and the nutrients will cycle back to another pig.

Today, when I put some salami on my sandwich, I don’t feel anything, it’s just a package that says salami. I don’t feel bad about the animal that suffered because I didn’t have to see it happen or kill it myself. That’s the problem. This applies not only to food, but also materials we use that all come at the cost of some ecosystem somewhere on the planet.

Modern life has separated us from the consequences of our actions so completely that many have forgotten we’re part of nature.

Economy above all

Then there’s money and the economy. Even when we try to care about nature, we make it about us and the economy:

• “We need bees because they pollinate our crops!” Not because they’re a living species with their own right to exist. No, they’re just little unpaid workers buzzing around for our benefit.

• “Losing the coral reefs will be devastating for tourism and jobs!” Not that we’re killing the oceans and some of the most diverse ecosystems on the planet, but that Jan and Bob might not get to snorkel on their honeymoon.

• “Let’s build an airport on this worthless wetland!” Because if a place doesn’t make us money, we consider it worthless and pave it to give it “value”.

When leaders talk about saving the environment it’s often “Will this hurt the economy? What about jobs? Will it slow down supply chains?”

Who the fuck cares? We’re watching the biosphere collapse. If we don’t stop growing and consuming, we’re dead. What kind of idiot species puts GDP above clean air, drinkable water, and a stable climate? It’s suicidal.

The only thing on this planet that is truly sustainable is nature itself. It runs on sunlight, recycles everything, and doesn’t need anything from us. It worked for hundreds of millions of years before we showed up. Ironically, it’s the very thing we’re destroying in our attempt to “save the planet”, because we’re not trying to save the planet, we’re trying to save this civilization. But again, the two aren’t compatible.

Are the beliefs finally dying?

Not in my opinion. Sure, people know something is terribly wrong. The future doesn’t seem bright anymore (it looks like shit). But most people haven’t stopped wanting to be rich, travel the world and live a modern lifestyle. They still want it. They just don’t believe they’ll get it. That’s not the same thing, it’s not an awakening.

We’re just losing faith in the old stories. Maybe that leads to better stories? Time will tell.

2. Strategic Drivers & The Nail in the Coffin

The truth is that this was kind of inevitable because of energy and physics.

All living things, including civilizations, grow by capturing energy, until they run out. Then they die. Our civilization exploded thanks to fossil fuels, and this time our overshoot is global. We grew all the way to the edge of Earth’s limits and we’re in the process of destroying the whole thing.

Add to that our deep lack of trust between individuals and between nations, and the situation gets even worse. It leads to game-theoretical traps like the tragedy of the commons, the free-rider problem, the prisoner’s dilemma, and the multi-polar trap. Even when cooperation is clearly the smarter, long-term choice, we still defect, making collapse all but certain.

Tragedy of the commons & free-rider problem

First let’s look at individual psychology.

You’re reading this so you’re aware of the issues and their causes. But chances are you’ll eat food from a supermarket today that was planet, harvested, processed, and transported using diesel trucks. You’ll sleep in a comfortable bed with soft sheets, in a house with heating or air conditioning, electricity, internet, running water, and all the other modern comforts.

I’m not judging. I live in it too. I’m just pointing out the truth.

Individually, we all tell ourselves the same story: “It doesn’t matter if I do this little thing. I’m just one person. My overall emissions are low. I recycle.” Or actually, many simply deny reality and don’t give a shit.

Meanwhile, 8 billion people are thinking something along those lines. That’s part of the problem. We convince ourselves that individual choices don’t matter because in isolation they actually don’t. But taken together they absolutely do. We are the collective. So yes, what you do matters, just not in the way you might hope. This is the tragedy of the commons.

Then there’s the free-rider problem where we think “why should I sacrifice if my small action won’t matter and others aren’t doing it either?”. So we’re like fuck it, let’s just burn it all down, because people in China and Brazil aren’t going to change.

Can we do better? Yes and no. Several Indigenous peoples lived for thousands of years without destroying their surroundings, despite having weapons, fire and other basic technology. They lived with respect for the land because they understood it was the only way to keep going. I’m sure they had their share of psychopaths, and dealt with them accordingly.

But it didn’t end well for them, did it?

Enter the maximum power principle. Ecologist Howard Odum put it like this: systems that maximize power tend to outcompete others. In other words, those that can capture and use energy the fastest usually win. Doesn’t matter if it’s smart or sustainable. If you’re extracting energy faster, reproducing more, and building deadlier weapons, you can overpower the people trying to live within limits. Even if you destroy your own environment in the process, you still win for now. You pass on your genes, your culture, your system.

That’s how we crushed Indigenous cultures that tried to conserve. They saved, we didn’t. And in the short term, not saving wins. We kept extracting and expanding. That’s why we now live in a global capitalist system. It's the most effective structure ever created for turning nature into profit and power. And now everyone’s fucked.

The multipolar trap

The multipolar trap is basically a global scale prisoner’s dilemma. Countries don’t trust each other, so they feel forced to race full steam ahead, no matter the consequences. This applies to economics, military power, technology, resource control. All of it.

For example, if every country radically cuts emissions and pulls carbon from the air, maybe we have a chance at avoiding the worst of climate change. But if just a few keep extracting and polluting while others scale down their economies and populations, then the polluters will become more powerful.

Those “business-as-usual” countries will convert resources into people, weapons, and technology. When resources like oil, rare earth minerals, or fresh water run scarce, these powerful countries can overpower weaker countries to secure what they need.

So no one cuts. Not really.

It’s the same with military spending. No country wants to be the first to disarm because they don’t trust that others will follow. They always suspect some secret bunker with a few left, just in case. So everyone keeps building more weapons, more nukes, and now AI-powered systems that nobody really wants but feel forced to develop. If they don’t, someone else will. We’re in a race to the bottom.

Ecological awakening and eco-villages

Some people talk about an ecological awakening. It’s a nice idea and it’s great if you actually do it. But it’s not going to change our overall trajectory.

Let’s run a thought experiment.

Imagine 75% of humanity wakes up. They see through the myths of growth and progress. They understand what industrial civilization is doing to the planet and they walk away.

You might ask, why only 75%? Because you’re never getting 8 billion people to agree on anything. We can’t even agree on vaccines, gods and basic facts. You really think we’ll unite around degrowth, limits, and less? Not a fucking chance. The powerful won’t give up power. The comfortable won’t give up convenience. Without some type of global ecoauthoritarianism (also a nightmare) it’s not happening.

So this 75% stop flying, stop driving, stop scrolling. No more oil, no more steel towers or supply chains. They grow food, rebuild communities, and live within ecological limits. A full-scale rejection of the industrial machine. Emissions collapse. The global economy crashes.

But the other 25% doesn’t really change. And why would they? With 75% of the world gone quiet, their share of everything just tripled. They now have more resources per person. More oil, gas, coal, metals, timber, rare earths and so on. The system resets in their favor. It’s a golden age for the psychos. They keep all the infrastructure, all the weapons, have even less resistance, and can reproduce faster. So did the problems go away? No, they got delayed and concentrated.

Ask yourself, does it look like Putin’s Russia or Trump’s America are going to cut emissions or downsize their military power?

As long as there’s abundant energy and powerful technology, those who want to grow and dominate will almost always overpower those who live with restraint.

But that abundance won’t last forever. So perhaps there’s potential for something better. The people who keep pushing to maximize power will keep hitting limits. And eventually, they’ll run out of excess energy. When that happens, the game changes, and they’ll be forced into a more equal struggle.

But will there be a habitable planet by then?

Stage IV: The Collapse

It’s disappointing how much denial still exists around climate change. I can’t believe I even have to say this, but here we are.

People will seriously ask, “How can you predict the temperature 50 years from now if you can’t even get tomorrow’s weather forecast right?” Are we really this dumb?

When you heat a pot of water, you can’t predict where the bubbles will rise, but you can predict with 100% certainty that it’s eventually going to boil. It’s physics.

Despite all of our wealth and pathetic efforts, atmospheric CO₂ concentration increased at a record level in 2024. We’re still accelerating. Almost every year there’s more CO₂ released into the atmosphere than the year before. That’s exponential growth in emissions, meaning the warming will also be exponential. Not linear.

Our global emissions barely grew last year, so why did atmospheric CO₂ concentration increase by a record 3.5 ppm as shown above? Because carbon sinks are starting to fail. Forests, soils, oceans have buffered some of our emissions, reducing atmospheric CO₂, and making the warming seem more linear. But not any more.

This means more methane is escaping from thawing permafrost. More wildfires are releasing carbon into the air. More dead soil and drying peatlands are releasing methane and CO₂. At accelerating rates. When these ecosystems collapse, they don’t recover quickly. And they stop sequestering carbon.

That’s just greenhouse gases trapping heat in the atmosphere. On top of that, there's reduced albedo amplifying the warming, which is about how much sunlight Earth reflects back into space. White surfaces (ice, clouds, and certain aerosols) reflect sunlight. But when the ice melts, cloud cover is reduced, and we remove sulfate aerosols, we lose that reflectivity. Less reflection means more absorption, meaning even if we stop emissions, warming is going to speed up.

The graph below shows how Earth's albedo has been decreasing since 2000.

0.5% may not sound like much, but a 0.5% drop in Earth's albedo leads to an increase of about 1.5 W/m² in radiative forcing, which has roughly the same warming effect as going from 400 ppm to 550 ppm of CO₂.

Abrupt Climate Change

The situation is now out of control and the Earth has never seen anything like this. Abrupt climate change is going to wipe out many species and ecosystems. Maybe all. We don’t know.

What we do know is that we’ve unleashed an irreversible extinction-level climate shift. We know this because 1) it’s happened before and 2) we understand how plants and animals adapt to changing conditions.

There have been several mass extinction events where massive volcanic activity released CO₂ into the atmosphere over longer time periods where oceans acidified, the planet warmed up, and life died. Here’s a table showing the average annual rate of emissions.

You can see that our emissions rate is now several times faster than any previous mass extinction event. And it’s not about total CO₂ released, it’s about how quickly the planet warms up and how quickly the climate changes. That’s what counts because that’s the reality for plants and animals. Now look at the chart below.

Extinction

Much of life couldn’t adapt to the previous events, there’s no fucking way it can adapt this time. Because when the climate changes, ecosystems and animals have three options:

• Migrate

• Evolve

• Die

Many animals can’t migrate because they depend on specific ecosystems, particular plants, prey, water sources, temperature and rainfall. If the ecosystem doesn’t move with them, they can’t migrate. And everything is tied to seasons. Plants flower, seeds germinate, and young are born at specific times. But climate change is disrupting seasons, confusing animals and plants.

People who think animals will adapt or evolve are ecologically illiterate. As I mentioned earlier, evolution takes hundreds or thousands of generations. But the climate is shifting in decades. They can’t evolve in a decade.

Animals have thermal limits, temperatures beyond which their bodies can’t cool down, meaning they overheat and die even in the shade while resting. Monkeys, our distant relatives, are dropping dead from trees killed by heat alone. Think about what that means. They've survived millions of years, adapted through ice ages and warm periods. But they can’t handle this.

And we’re only at 1.5°C. That should scare the shit out of everyone.

What about plants and ecosystems? Plants can’t walk. Trees are stuck where they grow, and rely on seeds to spread by wind, animals, and gravity. But that only moves them a few hundred meters per year at best. That’s nowhere near fast enough for what’s coming.

Many forests will probably die off, burned by wildfires and killed by heat and drought, and everything that depends on them follows.

Of course it’s not just climate change. Below are the planetary boundaries as defined by Stockholm Resilience Centre from 2009 to 2023.

Each one is a line we were never supposed to cross. Every single one has the potential to be an extinction-level event. We’re crossing all of them.

We’ve flooded the world with materials that life has never seen before. Plastics, synthetic chemicals, heavy metals, artificial nutrients. None of these things existed in nature until we made them. No species evolved to deal with them. They don’t break down or disappear. And now they’re everywhere. Soil, water, air, inside us, inside animals. In blood, brains, and breast milk. Life has no defense against this.

Endocrine disruptors are already impacting human fertility, and you can be damn sure animals aren’t immune either. Human sperm counts have decreased roughly 50-60% in 50 years. How long until we’re down 99%? This is going to hit every species. It already is.

Nobody planned for this to happen. But it did.

Living through collapse and uncertainty

The “good” news is that collapse will kill the machine, maybe soon.

It doesn’t actually matter if some people want to keep industrial civilization going forever, because it’s not possible. Belief doesn’t change physics. The system is breaking down whether we like it or not. It was always going to end.

Populations are already shrinking in many countries, and no one had to vote for it. We’re hitting the wall on cheap energy and materials. We drilled the easy oil, and mined the best ores first, and now we’re digging through garbage rock. Every unit of production takes more input and gives less output. Eventually, it’s not worth doing.

Fewer people buying things. Less cheap energy. No more growth. The machine slows down. We stop pulling stuff from the Earth. Factories stop. The economy falls apart. Banks close. Governments collapse. The whole system falls apart.

Then abrupt climate change finishes the job.

When you truly internalize the depth of our predicament, or what some call becoming collapse aware, it hits hard at first. Something breaks inside you. You’re no longer the same person because your entire worldview changes. What used to look normal looks insane. Progress looks like delusion. Growth looks like cancer. The future you imagined goes up in smoke. Poof.

Then you look around. People go to work. They book flights. Plan for retirement. Talk about mortgage rates and career goals. It’s not that people are completely unaware, most of them feel it too. But they keep up the act. Keep pretending. We all do, for a while. Maybe the system holds a bit longer? Maybe it won’t fully crash in our lifetime?

But you see the trajectory. You see the pattern. You know what’s coming. You can see through the illusions. You understand why things are falling apart.

Eventually, you come to terms with it. You normalize collapse. The wildfires, the floods, the extinctions, the rising cost of living, the conflicts, the insane politics. None of it surprises you now.

This is what collapse looks like. Predictable. As expected.

The hardest part is accepting that it’s real. That it’s already happening. But acceptance does not mean giving up. It’s how you stop suffering. It’s how you stop lying to yourself. It’s how you find peace. It’s how you start living differently, slower and more present.

You stop waiting for things to go “back to normal” because now you know that they never will, and they shouldn’t.

This is the collapse…of the American Empire. This messy reality we’re already living through. And yes, it’s going to get a lot worse. By a few decades, or by the end of this century, it could very well be apocalyptic. But we’re not there yet.

In this article, I’m sharing some thoughts on the idea that the collapse of our systems probably won’t be some quick total apocalypse some doomers are planning for, but it’s also definitely not going to be some shiny utopia like the techno-optimists think.

Back to this later.

I live in Chiang Mai, a popular tourist town in Northern Thailand that attracts travelers, especially solo-travels (often willing to have a conversation), from all over the world. I occasionally (or maybe more often than I should) find myself at the local pubs for a bit of socializing and the past few months have been no different. I’ve had conversations with strangers from the all over the world (US, UK, France, Germany, Denmark, Sweden, Australia, Greece, Argentina, Malaysia, Japan, you name it) and one thing that stood out to me is the shared feeling that things are seriously going off the rails.

Of course, this is hardly news to most people, considering what’s going on in the US.

Seriously. What the fuck?

About half the people I’ve talked to were climate-change-denying MAGA types or held similar views. In many respects, these people are lost causes. But even they think that collapse is looming. Whether it’s the economy, geopolitics, or the environment, everyone senses something BIG is around the corner. That shared awareness might be the starting point we need. Honestly, maybe it doesn’t matter why people think big change is coming, what matters is that they’re mentally bracing for it. To me, that’s a small win. If you think neoliberalism or capitalism is the only problem, I’ll take it, for now.

For the record, I’m not bringing up doomsday scenarios in bars. Usually, just asking where someone’s from and how things are back home is enough to spark the conversation. I just listen.

The seeds of change are already being planted in our plastic-filled brains. Even though we don’t have any concrete answers, we’re definitely feeling the shift. And that matters. The old ways of thinking, the stories we were told about endless growth and progress, are shattering in real time. The fact that most people are sensing something is terribly off, even if we don’t know what to do about it, is the first step toward something new.

Collapse is NOT binary and won’t be evenly distributed

After countless books, articles, blogs, scrolling r/collapse and watching nearly every episode of The Great Simplification and other similar podcasts, I found myself drowning in so many intertwined issues that I had to start writing them down to make my own conclusions. That process led to my first article, End of Growth & Collapse, after which I wrote about climate change, ecological overshoot and the meta crisis in a few more articles.

I had painted a picture of the future in my head, and damn it was ugly.

Since then my perspective has shifted. I’m no longer as pessimistic and fatalistic about how we will navigate the decline of our global industrial civilization. I still believe that decline is inevitable, and I don’t think we can do much about climate change, our plastic and chemical poisoning, or avoid the unpredictable mess of geopolitics.

The end result seems clear, but how we get from here to there, and how fast, is very uncertain.

But I’ve realized a few things.

I think many of us struggle to imagine a different way of living because this is the only life we've ever known. When we realize this way of life is coming to an end, at some point, it's easy to think that must mean total collapse.

The collapse won’t be binary. It’s not a choice between this civilization or a Mad Max / The Road scenario. Well it’s not really a choice, but you know what I mean. There are countless paths we could end up on, all of them leading to a life in decline in some form. We will probably not choose the path, it will simply unfold. It already is. Some paths will be far more favorable than others, and it can change at any time, again and again. Right now, we’re on a pretty bad path. Hold on tight.

Consider this:

• The idea that people instantly turn violent and chaotic after a disaster is mostly nonsense. In reality, the first response is usually solidarity, where people help each other, organize, and figure things out.

• I often read about how resources such as oil, coal, gas, metals, minerals, forests, topsoil, water, whatever, can’t keep up with demand. This is true. But that often assumes demand will stay the same, or assumes demand will keep increasing. Because, you know, the economy. GDP must double. Again. Well of course resources won’t keep up with that pace. That’s ridiculous and not even desirable. It’s a good thing we can’t keep up. This parasitic extraction economy must and will die. It’s unsustainable, meaning it cannot be sustained.

• We are extremely wasteful with energy, food, and water (well basically with everything).

  • Think about how much energy you waste. I could easily cut my electric bill in half, if I had to. Why don’t I? Because it’s so cheap, and financially it makes no difference to me. Actually I don’t use that much.

  • Think about how much oil is burned every day for completely meaningless things, like driving to some stupid job or just joyriding, or a truck carrying useless garbage from A to B. Oh how horrible if we can’t keep doing this, it truly is the end of the world!

  • Think about how much food is thrown out by households, restaurants, or rots in supply chains.

  • Think about how much water is wasted in industrial agriculture and industry, or just to keep lawns and golf courses green.

We’ve been extremely wasteful because we didn’t understand limits. But that won’t be the case for much longer. We can do much better.

All of that said, here’s how I see it right now: the world is rapidly descending into chaos, but the decline won’t look the same everywhere, this should be obvious to everyone.

This is why trying to map out a universal collapse model is completely pointless, because it won’t unfold the same way everywhere.

How your life plays out in the coming years and decades depends on where you live, the local culture, the level of development in your country (how far you’ll fall), what resources you have, your neighboring countries, your country’s relationships with them, and whether your leaders are aware of the bigger picture or just clueless (or corrupt).

A more useful approach is to look at individual countries and regions, which I’ll do for Chiang Mai, in the final part of this article.

Shocks to the system

I’m not saying this will be smooth sailing. We’re going to face serious shocks from our overshoot symptoms, such as trade wars, financial meltdowns, resource scarcity, natural disasters, extreme politics, conflicts, and more. But let’s take a step back and consider a few scenarios and how they might actually unfold.

Contracting supply chains and global trade

Trump’s (or should I say President Musk’s) American circus has been a rude awakening. As a result, many countries have started shifting toward a more rational approach. It definitely feels like focus is moving away from relentless economic growth and more toward local production and security.

The Trump Musk administration kick-started this trend in their attempt to “Make America Great Again”, likely for all the wrong reasons and in the most chaotic, self-destructive way possible. But despite the idiocy, the core idea of reducing dependence on fragile global supply chains makes sense given what’s coming.

When countries reinvest in local production, they reduce their reliance on a fragile global industrial system while cutting the massive energy costs of long-distance transport. Essential goods should be made locally (if possible), ensuring more stable jobs that aren't tied to an unsustainable, energy-hungry supply chain stretching across the planet.

We will probably trade high-value and high-tech goods as long as it’s physically possible. Medicine is a clear case for continued global cooperation. Many countries do not have expertise or infrastructure to produce complex pharmaceuticals, and supply chains for key ingredients are interconnected. High-tech components (like semiconductors) will also justify international trade. These items are generally lightweight relative to their monetary value, meaning significantly higher energy costs won’t be a showstopper for trade (because it’s still a small part of the total cost of the product).

But a large share of what we trade today is neither high-value nor essential. Shipping cheap plastic junk across oceans, outsourcing basic food production, or transporting raw materials multiple times just to save a few cents on labor is madness.

There is no sane reason to ship fruit from South America to Thailand for packaging, then send it to the US or Europe. There’s no good reason to cut down forests with fossil-fuel-powered machinery, haul the logs to a pulp factory, process them into paper, transport them to supermarkets, drive to the store in an SUV, just to wipe our asses with that tree. It’s absurd. This level of waste is indefensible.

These are the kinds of inefficiencies that will end, and that’s a great thing. Local production should cover the basics such as food, textiles, household goods, construction materials (ideally through recycling), while global trade should be reserved for things that genuinely require a complex international supply chain. I think that’s where we’re headed due to the energy crunch and geopolitics. Won’t be a smooth process. But it’s kind of inevitable.

The financial system is about to implode?!

I used to worry that a financial meltdown would trigger total anarchy. Now? Not so much. Sure, markets will struggle. Debt will increase. Prices will rise. Most countries will see stagflation. But we’ve seen this before. Zimbabwe, Turkey, Argentina, have all faced massive inflation, and yet, life goes on. A financial collapse won’t take down every country. The parasitic global financial system as we know it is dying, but governments will throw everything they’ve got (debt forgiveness, money printing, economic band-aids) to keep it going.

Investors will lose their shirts and move on. Pensioners will suffer, but honestly, young people are already barely scraping by, so why should boomers and Gen X expect to keep living the high life while the planet burns? We all need to compromise.

So what can you do with your money that matters right now? Instead of investing in Coca-Cola shares, why not invest locally? Think about what you actually need. Pool your money with others to start local cooperative businesses, invest in decentralized energy, or make something else that directly helps your community. That’s the kind of investment that pays off in the long run, both for you and for everyone around you.

When the dust settles, will you be sitting on a pile of meaningless paper, or will you have invested in something that actually matters?

What about mass unemployment?

I also used to fear mass unemployment and civil unrest, but a declining global economy doesn’t mean local economies collapse and everyone sits idle. There’s plenty of real work to be done, work that isn’t about staring at a screen in an office. In addition to localizing production of basic needs, we need to build resilience, redesign cities, rewild ecosystems, and clean up the mess we’ve made. Some of that is already happening, most of it is still down the road.

The system needs to reward the right kind of behavior. I don’t know exactly what that system will look like yet, but I do know this: I’d gladly spend my days restoring nature, no salary required, as long as my basic needs are met. There has to be a way to make that happen.

If oil prices jump 300% we will all die!

I used to worry about energy shortages, but now? Not so much. As we burn through the easiest and cheapest fossil fuel deposits, energy prices will rise, though not everywhere at the same time. When they do, people and businesses will use less energy, simply because they won’t be able to afford as much. Yes, people will be pissed off, and probably vote for some idiot, again. But eventually they’ll have to accept this reality, because there’s no going back.

The real crisis isn’t a lack of energy, it’s our refusal to use it wisely. And it’s our fear that economic growth will stop (which it will) that’s holding us back.

Imagine fuel prices increasing 300% in just a few months. Does that mean society collapses? Hardly. There are biofuels, strategic reserves, rationing, and most importantly, human adaptability. People will drive less, carpool more, rethink travel, and adapt in various ways to higher gas prices. Businesses will optimize logistics, maybe shift to electric, rail, or even cargo bikes, localize supply chains if possible, because they care about their profits too much not to do that. Many businesses won’t be viable (look at the German economy without Russian gas), and that’s okay, they’ll go bust. Governments will be forced to rethink critical sectors like food and transportation, moving toward more localized, efficient systems.

Will supermarkets be empty in a week? No. Oil is an input in food production, but that doesn’t mean shelves go bare overnight. There will be alarm bells ringing and actions taken, way before we get to that stage. Sure, you might not get Norwegian salmon flown in from across the world, but you’ll eat something else. Having said that, in the case of natural disasters tearing up critical infrastructure, yes, you may see real shortages.

Consider an organic farmer whose truckload of produce is worth, let’s say $3,000. If fuel costs increase 300%, transport costs might jump from $100 to $400, that doesn’t mean food prices triple. The actual increase at the supermarket might be 10%, not 300%. Of course, this is a bit simplified, as it depends on the entire planting and harvesting process, how the tools were made, and on and on. But you get the point. It’s not immediate. There’s time to adapt.

A bad harvest is a different kind of problem, but that too doesn’t mean empty shelves, it means some produce is more expensive or not available. But when it comes to oil, we can adapt. We don’t need to haul food across continents. We can grow it locally, without fossil fuels or chemicals, and transport it with other methods.

Well what if there’s no oil at all?

While it's unlikely, because we can make biofuels and still have large reserves, but it would certainly make things a bit harder. That’s why we should be focusing on localizing essentials now, and we are. Even without diesel or gasoline, we could still move the basics using rail, electric vehicles, and bikes. Sure, the infrastructure will deteriorate over time without the resources to repair and maintain it (steel, asphalt, plastics, etc.) but we can make do for a while. It won’t be an overnight collapse. In the meantime, we can rethink and plan for the next phase of decline.

But climate change is going to kill us anyway?

It really does seem like we’ve shifted gears and are now facing abrupt global warming. Look at Hansen’s latest work. One thing is certain: climate change will displace hundreds of millions of people in the coming decades, and many will die in natural disasters. That much is locked in.

But what about food and water? I would like to challenge the usual story about the agricultural revolution, which goes something like this: the Holocene brought climate stability, which enabled agriculture, which in turn gave rise to civilization.

What came first: agriculture or the Holocene?

The truth is that humans were experimenting with agriculture long before the Holocene. The Holocene did not enable agriculture, it enabled permanent settlements. That’s the real game changer. We could stay in place and build our little human villages.

The transition from glacial to interglacial periods was slow but steady. Ice sheets retreated at about 100 meters per year, that’s an 8 kilometer shift in an average lifespan of 80. I know most people didn’t live that long back then. Sea levels rose by roughly 12 millimeters per year, nearly a meter in a lifetime. The total rise was 120 meters. That’s enormous. Temperatures also rose significantly (total of 5°C), altering ecosystems along the way. Grasslands became forests, coastlines drowned, and entire biomes shifted.

This constant and gradual change prevented permanent settlements in many areas. Tribes probably stayed put for a generation or two or three or four, then moved on as their environment shifted.

My point is that this isn’t the end of agriculture. Food will still grow, just not the same food in the same place. And it will keep changing every few years.

This is the kind of stuff I like to see happening: Türkiye develops plant guide for 81 provinces to fight climate change

So now that our climate is changing at least 10 times faster, we’re fucked?

I don’t know. Maybe. But unlike our ancestors, we know it's coming. And unlike other species, we are very adaptable, have the knowledge and the ability to prepare, plan, and adapt. We’re not pandas or koalas that rely on a single food source. We’re detritivores. We can eat almost anything: rodents, bugs, seaweed, dandelion roots, moss, and even cypress knees. Whatever works.

Currently, around 30-40% of global food is wasted, according FAO, and it’s especially high in wealthy countries. If fertilizer shortages or climate change impacts (droughts, floods, heatwaves) start wiping out 20-30% of crops, a logical response would be to waste less of what we already produce, especially as food becomes scarcer, and if we do that successfully, we could still have enough.

Many people are already consuming more than they need, look at obesity rates, so cutting back wouldn’t be the worst thing.

What about water?

We waste an obscene amount of water. When scarcity hits, we’ll have no choice but to use it wisely. Since 90% of freshwater is consumed by industry and agriculture, rethinking these sectors would significantly reduce the waste. Smarter irrigation, drought-resistant crops, and water recycling. We have options, but we haven’t been desperate enough to adopt them yet. Very few people currently bother collecting rainwater. It’s an easy thing to do.

I’m not downplaying climate change, and I’m not suggesting the future will be easy. Far from it. But it doesn’t have to be apocalyptic, at least not right away. Many species will go extinct, and this will impact us too. But we can probably still manage to grow some crops, even if we have to push the limits.

Collapse: Thailand

I live in Chiang Mai, Thailand, so I already eat bugs. Yes, I’m way ahead of the curve. Chiang Mai sits in a valley at about 400 meters above sea level, so I don’t have to worry about the ocean swallowing my home. We’re surrounded by mountains, with the Ping River flowing through and several large reservoirs nearby. All things considered, it’s not a bad place to be as the world changes.

Energy in Thailand

Right now, energy in Thailand is relatively cheap, with gas and diesel around $1 per liter, and electricity about $0.15 per kWh. Most of the electricity production comes from natural gas, and they have around 3-4 years of reserves left. After that? Who knows. They’ll need to import it (or something else) and the price of energy will most likely be higher.

Thailand gets a lot of sunshine, but sadly, local governments haven’t made much progress with solar energy. Only 2% of electricity production comes from solar, and it’s been stuck at that level since 2018. It could easily be at 30-40% by now. There’s been some talk about small nuclear reactors. But talk often doesn’t lead to action, so we’ll see what happens.

I plan to install my own solar system eventually. The grid often gets overloaded here, especially during heatwaves when everyone is blasting their AC, which is a recipe for disaster.

Thai economy

Thailand isn’t as developed as Europe or North America, which will probably make the decline easier. There’s simply less distance to fall. Many of my neighbors grow some of their own vegetables, raise chickens, and even have cows, water buffalo, and pigs. If global supply chains start to falter, they’ll likely manage just fine, at least if the decline happens at a slower pace.

Industry here is mostly low-wage factory work, some of it already moving away (automotive industry). Service jobs are mostly low-paying (around $300-500 per month), 6 days a week, 10-12 hours a day.

I doubt these jobs will be missed when they’re gone. It’s essentially just slavery.

Thai people are incredibly resourceful, and the country's relaxed regulatory environment makes it easy to start small businesses, like selling street food. If you’ve ever been to Thailand, you know exactly what I mean.

Tourism plays a major role in the Thai economy, but it’s an industry unlikely to survive at current levels in the long term. We got a glimpse of what a tourism collapse looks like during COVID. What happened? People moved back to their family farms and waited it out. That fallback option still exists.

Thailand is now connected to China by rail, which opens up the possibility of trade between the two countries powered by electricity. They need our food, and we want some of their goods. That relationship could help buffer the worst effects of disruption.

Population in Thailand

Thailand has a population of 71 million, and the country is already ahead of the curve in one regard: population decline. The population peaked in 2022, and the fertility rate has dropped to just 1.20, this is one of the lowest in the world. If current trends continue, the population will shrink to 50 million by 2050-2060, and as low as 30 million by the end of the century. Of course, factoring in the impacts of climate change and the decline of industrial civilization, this process could accelerate significantly, or go the other way with migration from neighboring countries.

Is it challenging? Absolutely. But, in my view, a declining population is NOT a bad thing.

Food in Chiang Mai

There’s plenty of food and fertile land in Chiang Mai. We have a climate (still) that allows year-round growing. We should be able to feed the millions who live here and still have surplus to send elsewhere. While worsening floods and heatwaves have already impacted agriculture, the effects haven’t been extreme, yet. Last year, tomato prices spiked nearly fivefold after failed harvests during the April-May heatwave. Guess what? I didn’t buy tomatoes for a few months, but I survived the tomato famine.

Water access in Chiang Mai

We currently get around 1,200 mm of rainfall per year (that’s 47 inches for the Americans), a similar amount of rainfall that Portland, Oregon receives. Chiang Mai has the Ping River, which is not dependent on upstream countries that could cut off supply. Most of our water comes from local rainfall, which feed into the river through creeks and fills up our many reservoirs.

Biggest climate change risks: heatwaves, droughts, floods, wildfires

According to this study we’re predicted to see a 10% increase in rainfall by the end of the century. They also predict that the number of consecutive dry days will decrease, and heavy rainfall events will become more frequent. Okay, that’s a nothing-burger.

However, this study on the potential collapse of the AMOC says it could disrupt the monsoon season, possibly leading to shorter wet seasons and longer dry spells (droughts). Damn.

We need to stay prepared and flexible for a range of scenarios, just like every other country.

Heatwaves

Being in Thailand, one major concern is extreme heat, especially wet bulb temperatures and grid failures. But there are ways to prepare.

First, having your own solar energy system would be a solution. If you have a car, it probably has AC, so you could sleep in your car if necessary. Many supermarkets here already have solar panels, so if a record-breaking heatwave knocks out the grid, I would just cycle to one of them to cool down. Bonus: plenty of food and water there too.

Of course, I’ll probably have my own solar system set up by then, and maybe I’ll have car, so it probably wont be necessary. But it never hurts to have a plan B, C, and D.

Later this century, we may not have these tech-solutions and the heat will be even worse. But for now, we have these options.

Flooding

Flooding is a serious issue here. Last year, we experienced the worst flood in recorded history when a typhoon from the Pacific dumped massive amounts of water over the entire region. Animals drowned, homes and furniture were destroyed, and countless motorbikes and cars were totaled. Farmland was submerged, and many crops were wiped out.

But there were no shortages or price spikes.

If you visited today, you wouldn’t notice it happened. Most of the cleanup was done within a couple of weeks.

The government is working on flood resilience, with new flood control projects and other improvements underway. Some areas remain vulnerable, but it’s not a crisis affecting the entire region.

Yes, some of the "fixes" come at a cost. A beautiful local forest was bulldozed to create a flood control project. I often ride past it on my way to the Crying Dog Waterfall (don’t ask me why it’s called that), then bomb down the single track on my mountain bike. What used to be a lush green space is now a construction site. Oh well. Better than letting thousands of homes and farmland get flooded with all the toxic runoff that comes with that.

Wildfires

Wildfires are getting worse in Thailand, especially up north. Rising temperatures and weird rainfall patterns are making things worse, and during the dry season, fires can rip through forests and farms. Although it’s not very windy here, which helps.

As climate change picks up speed, we're probably going to see even bigger and more frequent fires, with less resources to fight them. We will see how that goes. Air pollution will probably remain a major problem here.

I’ve witnessed these forests burn, but I’ve also seen how quickly the vegetation rebounds when the monsoon season arrives. It’s quite astonishing. Tropical forests regenerate rapidly. Sadly, the animals don’t recover as quickly.

Politics

I’m not going to comment on local politics, but, my plans could quickly go to shit if Thailand decides to take a turn toward nationalistic authoritarianism, like what we’re seeing with Trump and in some other countries. So, I’m staying flexible.

Why the sudden optimism? Honestly, I’m not sure. I believe the future won’t be as grim as I once thought. Or maybe I was right all along, and it’s going to be an absolutely horrific, apocalyptic, Mad Max-style nuclear nightmare!

Either way, we’re going to find out in the years and decades to come.

Grab your goggles and get ready!

Man, don’t you just hate those fossil fuel executives? Proceeds to fill up car with gas, consuming products subsidized by fossil fuels, driving on roads made of petrochemical products.

And those greedy corporations destroying the planet for profit? Supports greedy corporations, adds useless junk to Amazon cart, places order.

Our food system is literally poisoning us! Shops at Wal-Mart for the cheapest, unhealthiest processed food available, stops at McDonald’s on the way home.

But hey, what can we do? We’re just powerless, right? Turns on Netflix for distraction.

And don’t even get me started on the Big Tech Oligarchs. Spends hours mindlessly scrolling on their platforms, generating ad revenue for them.

What could we possibly do to strip them of their power? Sigh, pops a painkiller.

You know what, I need a break from all this. Books a holiday to Thailand.

The reason a handful of people have so much power is because they have obscene amounts of money. And the reason they have obscene amounts of money is because we keep giving them our money.

So, I have an idea. Let’s stop giving our money to these massive corporations. Every dollar we spend with them feeds their power. If enough of us stop giving them our money, their revenues drop, their profits shrink, and their operations are forced to scale down. Remember, the wealth of oligarchs and high-net-worth individuals is tied to future earnings, an illusion built on a house of cards. By starving their corporations of cash flow, we expose that illusion, and their wealth and power begins to crumble.

Great, so we can overthrow the oligarchs, distribute their wealth among ourselves, and go back to living comfortably like nothing happened?

No, we can’t save this way of life because it was never sustainable to begin with. We still have the same limited amount of resources no matter how much money exists. By making everyone wealthier, we will simply accelerate extraction and consumption, and our own demise.

But we can start dismantling the oligarchy and figure out the rest as we go. We don’t have time to wait for the perfect plan anymore. The less money we funnel to the system that’s killing us, the more power we take back for ourselves. We need that power, not to save this unsustainable way of life, but to reduce the suffering from what’s coming.

We can vote with our wallets to dismantle the oligarchy, and at least get some justice, if nothing else.

Inevitables

We’ve built a system that eats itself alive. A relentless machine driven by the pursuit of growth and profit, no matter the cost. In the process, we’ve wrecked the natural world, and now we’re left to face the fallout. The way we live today is unsustainable, and pretending otherwise won’t change the facts. The era of endless expansion is over. We need to come to terms with that.

While the future hasn’t been written yet, some outcomes are simply inevitable due to biophysical reality i.e. the laws of thermodynamics, biological limits, and the physical constraints of living on a finite planet.

• Less energy availability

  • We will run out of cheap and abundant fossil fuels, this is simply a fact. While renewables can help cushion the impact, they will never fully replace what fossil fuels provide for our civilization in terms of transportation, heavy industry, and materials like steel and plastics.

• Resource scarcity

  • We won’t run out of materials and minerals completely, but we will run out of easy-to-extract resources, and probably sooner than we think. This will be enough to destabilize our economic, social, and political systems, all of which are built on the assumption of massive and (still) growing material flows.

• The end of global industrial civilization

  • As energy becomes more expensive and resources dwindle, we will no longer have a global industrial civilization. I’d argue we’re already seeing this unraveling. There will still be trade, but it won’t be anything like the scale we’ve seen in past decades.

• Declining global population

  • The human population is nearing its peak and will soon start to decline. This is already baked into the system due to population dynamics. Our societies weren’t built for a shrinking population, and this will put a lot of pressure on systems. Several countries are already facing this reality.

• A rapidly changing climate

  • Global warming will continue for decades and centuries to come. While we might slow the rate of change, the warming will continue, likely at a rate that will be harder to manage than we expect.

All these inevitabilities will lead to the collapse of our current economic and financial systems. Because economic activity relies on massive flows of materials and energy, and they are beginning to dry up. Financial markets of course rely on the assumption of future cash flows, but the future will look nothing like the past 70 years of energy abundance and population growth. The coming decades will be more like the Great Depression of the 1930s, except it’ll be permanent, with climate change layered on top.

A major initial challenge for societies will be balancing unemployment and decreasing tax revenues as economies contract, this is already playing out in most Western countries. The old way of doing things, taking on debt and paying out various benefits, hoping people eventually find employment in a new sector, is not going to work. It would be extremely foolish not to start planning for what to do when unemployment reaches 30-40% and homelessness goes through the roof. It could be sooner than we realize.

These inevitabilities are going to happen and our systems aren’t ready. I believe that our efforts should focus on two things:

1. Minimizing suffering during the decline. This doesn’t mean clinging to comfort or convenience, forget about those things. It’s about ensuring the basics i.e. food, water, shelter, and safety from violence. If we can focus on these essentials, all hands on deck, we can reduce the chaos and hardship that will inevitably come. We will focus on them eventually, because we won’t have a choice

2. Restoring nature and undoing the damage we’ve done. Without healthy ecosystems, long-term survival is impossible. This is the foundation for any future. We’ve taken way too much, disrupted too many systems, and now it’s time to give back. It may be too late, but we should try.

When I say “our” efforts, I mean it. We can’t wait for the government or some distant authority to step up, they’re probably not going to. Change has to happen at the local level. We’re the ones who need to step up. The clock is ticking, and we don’t have time to rely on systems that have already failed us.

Things in our favor

What should give us reason to keep fighting is the fact that we still have choices. Choices about how we face collapse and how we act as it unfolds. We should work to reduce suffering, to create a more controlled and less chaotic descent.

• We already know collapse is coming. That means we can start planning for it. We have some understanding of how things might unfold and which parts of our system are unsalvageable (nearly all of it, eventually). We can choose to preemptively dismantle some of the most destructive elements of our society in a controlled way. I won’t hold my breath though. Most will live in denial until the bitter end.

• We know the kind of lifestyle we’ll ultimately need to embrace. Initially we should focus on reducing consumption, building more resilience, and local self-sufficiency. Eventually we need to live in balance with nature, but this can only be done after the population bust, assuming we still have a habitable planet. We can’t quit industrial civilization overnight, but we can transition in stages, reducing suffering along the way.

• The internet is still a powerful tool. It allows ideas, both good and bad, to spread faster than ever. This can be an asset. We’ve seen how quickly misinformation can shape the world, but the same speed applies to constructive ideas. The internet won’t be with us forever, now is the time to educate and spread ideas. Who knows, maybe something really big is right around the corner.

• Many people are sick of the current system. People are exhausted by the grind, crushed by debt, and suffocated by the endless push to produce and consume. People are hungry for alternatives. Many would jump at the chance to live a simpler, more self-sufficient life, if only that opportunity existed.

• Population dynamics will eventually shift in our favor. A declining population will reduce the strain on resources and pressure on ecosystems.

• Reality is on our side. People can deny climate change all they want, but eventually, it will punch them in the face and hit them where it hurts. They can cling to the myth of endless economic growth, but sooner or later, the limits of this finite planet will make themselves painfully clear. The truth is inevitable. We have the strongest ally in the fight: biophysical reality itself.

The state of the world

For my American readers, your situation is particularly dire right now. The American Empire is collapsing in front of your eyes. Your institutions are crumbling under the weight of corruption, polarization, and the delusion of endless growth. But the Empire is not the same as the American people. There’s a breaking point coming and with it, a revolution, sooner or later.

We’re watching oligarchy take hold in the US, and seeing a dangerous rise in delusional right-wing extremism across the world. But their policies will ultimately fail under the weight of their own falsehoods. They can’t deliver what they promise because they are promising the impossible. But the same can be said for nearly all political parties, left, right and center. As conditions worsen, prices rise, resources dwindle, systems fail, reality will force even the most deluded to wake up. It is time for honesty.

Leaders must make the stakes crystal clear, no more sugarcoating. Governments must own up to the mistakes made in prioritizing economic growth over ecological stability, in bowing to corporate interests, and in ignoring the warnings of scientists for decades. Honesty is non-negotiable. Transparency is non-negotiable. Without these, no government can expect public trust, and without public trust, no meaningful action can occur.

For decades, people have been fed comforting nonsense, myths about endless growth, limitless resources, and human exceptionalism. Unfortunately, explaining the science has failed. Rational appeals to logic and data haven’t worked. We need a different approach: brutal honesty.

But forget about the circus for a moment. The only thing we can realistically control is our local community, and that’s what we should focus on.

Just give it up

Most leaders are still clinging to the idea that economic growth is the solution to all problems. But economic growth isn’t the solution anymore, it’s the problem. It’s no longer sustainable or even attainable.

Economic growth made sense when we had a growing population, you would expect growth by default. More people means more people working and producing something. It means more consumption. Of course, the economy grew.

But now? Declining populations, shrinking energy supplies and resources, and climate chaos. How exactly is economic activity supposed to keep increasing? More consumption per capita? Is that really necessary? Don’t we have enough? I can’t believe how difficult this is for people to grasp.

The question isn’t how to keep it going, it’s how to adapt and survive when it falls apart. Because it will fall apart. If you’re not convinced, perhaps read this article.

The truth is that what’s good for GDP is mostly bad for us, and definitely bad for the biosphere, and what’s bad for GDP is mostly good for us.

Consider this: if you sell your car and switch to a bicycle, stop buying Starbucks coffee daily, stop flying, consume less, get healthier and need less healthcare, this is all terrible for GDP.

The truth is that most of the “growth” we've seen in the last three decades has gone to the ultra-wealthy. So when people talk about economic growth being a good thing, it’s mostly bullshit. No one is going to lose sleep if Bezos, Musk, and Zuckerberg don’t see their net worths go up another $100 billion in the next two years. The so-called growth isn’t doing much at all for the majority, it’s just increasing the “net worth” (on paper) of the ultra wealthy.

Time to abandon this system.

Collapse is coming

Prepared or not, at some point, circumstances will force governments to abandon some of their illusions, not all, but some. They’ll have no choice but to prioritize essentials like food, water, basic necessities and survival. We can only hope they don’t leave it too late.

Collapse won’t happen overnight, but there will be shocks. Overall, it will unfold gradually, in different ways and at different times around the world. We’re not going to run out of oil in a day, it’ll be a slow burn. First, prices will rise, and keep rising. This will ripple across every product, because nearly everything is propped up by oil. People will ditch their gas-guzzlers, some will switch to EVs, others will find entirely new ways to get by.

The same pattern will play out with other resources that are becoming scarce. As things get more expensive, more people will get priced out. Those who can’t keep up will be forced to adapt, finding new ways of living and doing things outside the system.

The economy won’t collapse overnight. It will unravel slowly, as unemployment rises and consumption falls. Step by step, people will get priced out, gradually abandoning the entire system of industrial civilization.

These changes are coming whether we like it or not, so it’s not like we have much choice, but we do have control over how we prepare, how we respond and how we live during the decline.

Don’t expect some utopia where everyone’s holding hands and singing kumbaya. This is what I’d call the best-case scenario, a much tougher life, no luxuries, but potentially more fulfilling until climate change inevitably gets completely out of control.

Economic decline and mass unemployment

More and more people will lose their jobs to AI, automation, and the unraveling of our global industrial civilization. This is inevitable.

Do we want those people to become self-sufficient, or do we want them roaming the streets desperate for food, clinging to shrinking government handouts, waiting for an economic miracle that isn’t coming?

I believe that people will naturally form self-sufficient communities because, quite frankly, they won’t have a choice. As systems break down and resources become scarcer, relying on external support will become unsustainable. Communities will take matters into their own hands, finding ways to meet their own basic needs without depending on distant governments or corporations. This shift toward self-sufficiency will be a survival strategy, not a lifestyle choice.

Not everyone needs a farm. Cities and suburbs will reclaim land. Abandoned buildings will be torn down. Roads we don’t need anymore (nearly all of them) will be dismantled and repurposed for farming or green spaces. The asphalt and concrete will be recycled and repurposed.

Regenerative farming techniques will help communities feed themselves and restore the land over time. As populations decline, more land will be restored, all we have to do is leave nature alone.

Declining energy and materials

Our energy future is limited. Less energy means less movement, which means goods won’t travel as far. Our world will shrink. Fewer cars, and one day, no cars at all (I hope I get to witness this).

As fossil fuels decline, industries like manufacturing, mining, and industrial agriculture will naturally fade. With declining populations, the demand for materials will decrease. Recycling existing materials will replace mining and mass production, while local resources, like clay for bricks and pottery, will become more important.

We’ll live in smaller, walkable communities, not because we’re woke hippies, but because we won’t have a choice. Local food production and basic services will dominate, simply to avoid starvation, supporting whatever population they can sustain. Governments will strive to feed their people and provide emergency services. In some areas, electric trucks or trains might still move goods, but on a far smaller scale.

The grid won’t last forever. The most prepared and organized communities will rely on decentralized energy systems for essentials like cooking, refrigeration, heating, and cooling. Shared spaces, like cooling centers during heat waves or community kitchens, will become the norm.

Not everyone will have their own stove, bicycle, guitar, or $2,000 toolset. Smart communities will adopt shared resources: tool libraries, communal appliances, and cooperative spaces. Need something? Walk to the shared tool library and borrow it.

Obviously most of these comforts will eventually be phased out when they can’t be maintained or replaced.

Declining population

Our population will decline rapidly, with an initial stage of very high dependency-ratios i.e. a large older population and smaller working population. This will put immense pressure on the pension system, and many will choose to opt out entirely, embracing self-sufficiency and taking care of their own families.

As bad as that sounds, keep in mind that there are many countries that have no pension systems at all, and guess what, they still have functioning societies. They organize around family units, with multiple generations living together under one roof. Would it really be so terrible to live with your parents or in-laws? Okay, yes, that’s going to be an adjustment, but it’s how humans lived for most of history, and it worked.

We won’t have “jobs”. We’ll help around the community, grow food, start local “businesses”, and care for aging members (instead of a social worker visiting twice a month). We’ll be active members of a community, pitching in wherever needed, doing the work that keeps things running.

This is starting to sound pretty good.

Dealing with climate change and the ecological crisis

We don’t know exactly how climate change will unfold, but the scientific evidence points to a catastrophic outcome by the end of this century. That doesn’t mean we should let it crush our spirits or live as if it’s already over. We’re still here, and serious hardships lie ahead, we should do everything we can to reduce suffering on our way to the apocalypse.

Storms will grow stronger and more destructive. Heatwaves will become longer, deadlier, and more frequent. Droughts will stretch further, crippling ecosystems and agriculture. As the jet stream destabilizes, weather will swing to greater extremes. Rising sea levels will infiltrate coastlines, swallowing cities, ports, and entire communities.

Governments and individuals need to prepare for more intense natural disasters, unpredictable temperature shifts, changes in precipitation, and all the consequences that will have on food systems, water availability, and infrastructure. What we saw in 2024, and what we’ve seen so far in 2025 is not the new normal. This 1.6°C. We are headed much higher in the coming decades.

We have some idea of which regions will become uninhabitable in the near future and by the end of the century. It’s time to face that reality and start relocating to safer areas. The alternative is far worse.

As for the ecological crisis, we won’t do much of anything about that because the problem is us, but the collapse of industrial civilization will be a step in the right direction. This will reduce our overshoot, and that will ease the pressure on ecosystems.

Obviously there’s a lot more I could have discussed here, but I think that’s about as far as I’ll go in this article. The point is that collapse is coming, it’s going to play out differently in different places, and your focus should be on your local community and environment, not what Donald Trump is doing.

A few things to consider:

• Consume less, especially from large corporations. Support local farmers and businesses. Yes, their prices may be higher, but you’ll need them to stay afloat when things start to unravel. If you think food is expensive now, just wait.

• If you can, quit the bullshit job (that you hate) and do something that actually matters. Not all jobs are bullshit jobs, but many of them are.

  • Most corporate jobs aren’t just useless, they’re harmful.

  • People do these jobs for money, and I totally get that. If you’re living paycheck to paycheck, hang in there and look for something more meaningful.

  • The reason people want to accumulate more money than they need, is because it gives a false sense of security. People believe money guarantees access to resources (food) in the future, but this will not be the case. Instead of hoarding money, focus on securing access to the actual resources you need (food and water) and forget about the money.

• Focus on self-sufficiency

  • Not everyone needs to grow food, though I encourage everyone to learn the basics. You can start small, with a few plants.

  • The future economy will be focused on providing basic needs, restoration, repairing and recycling. Think about what you can do to support your local community, whether it’s repairing electronics and bicycles, making candles, baking, brewing beer (we’ll need it), or pottery. You can start learning these skills already.

• Consider your location and the impact from climate change

  • Many places will be uninhabitable within a decade or two. Do your research and get out before the rush.

  • Don’t wait for global warming to hit 2.5°C, or until your house burns down or floods.

• Focus on your own health

  • Access to healthcare will likely diminish in the future, and with more manual labor ahead, staying healthy is critical. The better your physical condition, the higher your chances of surviving the challenges ahead.

• Emergency preparedness

  • Keep 1-2 weeks of supply (food, water and medicine), hand crank radio, first aid kit, and some cash.

Some of you might see this as hopium or wishful thinking, but I don’t think it is. I don’t believe we’ll avert climate change or the ecological crisis, we can at best delay.

We’re already living in a collapsing civilization, and I think it’s worth trying to make this collapse as humane as possible. And who knows, maybe some of us will make it. If you’re one of them, do the rest of us a favor, try not to screw it up next time.

So where are we headed? We all know the answer: straight into the shitshow of catastrophic climate change, the collapse of global industrial civilization, and mass extinction, a result of our full-blown overshoot and ecocidal culture.

Isn’t it strange that humanity never had a real, long-term plan for the future? No vision for how we’d sustain ourselves for the next 10,000 years, or even 1,000 years. If there was a memo, I must have missed it.

Okay fine, we had the fantasy of Net Zero by 2050. Our grand vision for the future. Well, that’s pretty much abandoned now, not that it was ever realistic or remotely sufficient. It only addressed one of several existential threats, while actually worsening the others in the process. But at least we used to pretend we cared about climate change, at least there was some lip service to the idea. Now, we’re doubling down on fossil fuels and environmental destruction with plans like Project 2025. It’s not a plan, it’s a death sentence. It’s a tragedy. It's a stunning, heartbreaking failure of leadership and humanity itself.

We’re hurtling full-speed into a post-truth world, where science and facts are nothing more than inconvenient obstacles. Climate change? A hoax! CO₂? The more the better! Woke hurricane machines, Jewish space lasers, and let’s not forget the lizard people pulling the strings. What the fuck is happening? It’s not just ignorance anymore, it’s willful, dangerous delusion.

I guess I shouldn’t be surprised. Denial of reality is a defense mechanism as old as humanity itself. Our culture has always been built on stories and myths, the narratives we tell ourselves to make sense of the world. Even today, billions of people follow religions like Christianity, Judaism, and Islam, entire systems of belief rooted in pure fiction.

We like to think of ourselves as highly intelligent beings with big brains and a deep understanding of science and the world around us. What happened to actually following the science? What was the point of it all, if we just ignore it? Because the science has been clear for decades. Was it too inconvenient when it clashed with our absurd belief in endless growth? Did it challenge our culture, values and beliefs?

We’ve handed over control to new, destructive technologies without a second thought, letting them steer us wherever they please. We never stop to question where that path leads. Instead, we’re just swept along by the current, oblivious, cheering all the way. Woohoo!

In this article, I want to discuss how we got here, starting with our disconnection from nature through technology, our addiction to exploiting energy, and how our culture, values, and beliefs became so misguided and delusional.

This isn’t going to be a very science-heavy article. Science can measure a lot, but some things can’t be explained with data or numbers, only clear thinking is required.

Disclaimer! These are just my views, I may have overlooked something critical, and you may disagree with much of it.

Disconnection from nature through technology

Let’s go back to the beginning, starting with how we get our food (energy) with the use of technology, and how our connection to nature was lost over time, because I believe this is critical in understanding our failure as a species in the balance of nature.

Living in balance with nature

Living in nature teaches you something agriculture, and especially civilization, has made us forget: limits.

Imagine spending your entire life in nature, say an area of 50 square kilometers, as humans once did. Over time, you’d learn how much of each resource exists and the natural cycles that sustain them.

You’d see with your own eyes how many deer, rabbits, squirrels or other animals live in the area and at what rate they reproduce. You’d watch plants and trees grow slowly, understanding their role in the ecosystem. This wouldn’t just be knowledge, it would be instinct, a deep sense of balance. You’d know more or less how much you could take before throwing the whole system out of balance.

You’d have some understanding of how many humans the land could support, keeping population growth in check. Sure, extra hands might help with hunting and gathering, but there’s a limit you’d instinctively respect. Cross that limit, and nature wouldn’t hesitate to remind you. Only a certain amount of food grows every year, that’s your limit.

For one reason or another we crossed the limit. Probably out of necessity (survival).

Agriculture – Losing the balance

Now think about agriculture. First, you clear the land, or actually, no, that’s too gentle. You obliterate an ecosystem. Before you got there, it was alive with plants, animals, nutrient cycles, the whole thing. You kill the plants outright, ripping them out, burning them, chopping them down. The animals get displaced if they’re lucky. Dead, if they’re not.

And what’s it all for? The soil. That precious soil, built over centuries by trees falling and decomposing, leaves feeding the earth, animals recycling nutrients with every bite and every poop, decomposers doing their quiet, vital work. All of it, gone.

Now, you’re trying to grow food on what’s left. But you’re fighting natural forces. This isn’t what would naturally grow here if left to its own devices, and this isn’t an ecosystem anymore. And you’re siphoning water from elsewhere, depriving other ecosystems to force life into this stripped-down patch of land. And it works, for a while. But soon, the soil’s nutrients are depleted. Erosion kicks in. The land is tired, dead. So what do you do? Clear more land.

And then there’s the domestication of animals. You capture them, breed them, and make them your tools. Animals that once roamed freely are now fenced in, forced to plow your fields, and provide your food. Entire species reshaped to suit your needs, their lives reduced to cycles of labor, reproduction, and slaughter.

With agriculture the focus shifts entirely to your crops and livestock. Not nature. Not balance. Squeezing out as much as possible. After a few generations you’ve completely lost touch with the balance of nature.

If you were born into that way of living, you’d defend it with your life. Why wouldn’t you? Your survival depends on it. You wouldn’t see the system as the problem, it would be your way of life, the only reality you’ve ever known. It’s just how things are.

More people? No problem. Clear more land. There are no limits!

From an individual’s perspective, the world feels unlimited, or at least it did at the time. Sure, if it were just a few plots of land, agriculture wouldn’t be a problem. But when you have 8 billion people relying on this system, it becomes a massive issue. 19. billion acres or 38% of the world’s land area is dedicated to agriculture. That’s the scale of the ecosystems we’ve obliterated just to feed ourselves.

The same applies to everything we do and consume. It’s about the aggregate.

There are better, more sustainable ways to farm, such as regenerative agriculture, where you try to mimic natural processes, things like rotating crops, keeping soil covered, and letting animals play their part. Or permaculture, where you aim to create an actual ecosystem, where it’s not about squeezing out every last calorie from the land but building a balanced, resilient environment that happens to produce food.

The reality is that these ways of farming could never scale to feed 8 billion people, and it would be vastly more “expensive”. And we know what the people want. The people want cheap eggs. The people want fast, low-cost food, no matter the environmental cost. Well, we’ll see how that works out for us.

Industrial agriculture

Here’s the way we do much of our agriculture today:

1. Pump degraded soil full of fertilizers to force out crops.

2. Drown them in herbicides to kill the weeds and pesticides to kill the bugs, making sure nothing else but our food survives.

These chemicals don’t stay where we spray them. Herbicides and pesticides leach into the soil and runoff into rivers, destroying ecosystems, killing life and creating dead zones in oceans. Some break down into toxic byproducts, others persist, building up in the food chain. And they don’t stop there, they end up in us, contaminating our bodies and contributing to chronic health issues.

This whole chemical-intensive system we’ve been relying on is barely 70 years old. It’s a massive, uncontrolled experiment with our environment and ourselves, and we have no idea how devastating the fallout will be. Well, we have some idea, and it’s not good.

And let’s not forget about water because crops don’t grow without it. To meet our massive demand for food, we’re draining rivers, lakes, and aquifers at completely unsustainable rates (because of course we are). Agriculture alone sucks up about 70% of the world’s freshwater, and water scarcity is already here. This isn’t going to work much longer.

It doesn’t end there. Our current food system is entirely dependent on cheap and abundant fossil fuels. They power the machines that plow the fields, plant the seeds, and harvest the crops. They’re the basis of the fertilizers that force production from degraded soil. They fuel the trucks, ships, and planes that transport food across vast distances to keep shelves stocked. Without this constant energy input, the entire house of cards will collapse.

And that’s just the crops. What we do for meat and dairy is so disgusting, I don’t even want to get into it.

Modernity – Complete disconnect from nature and ourselves

Today, everything is out of sight and out of mind. Products come from faceless supply chains, neatly packaged and shipped from who-knows-where. We don’t see the forests clear-cut for our furniture, the rivers poisoned for our electronics, or the factory farms churning out our meals. The destruction is hidden behind a wall of convenience and consumerism.

And then there’s the waste. The amount of waste we produce is staggering. We extract, consume, and discard without a second thought about where it all ends up. “Two guys in a garbage truck pick it up on Wednesdays and Sundays”, and that’s the last we think about it. Our garbage piles up in landfills, chokes rivers, and poisons oceans. Every day, we produce around 6,000,000,000 kg of waste. If you lined up garbage trucks, each 8 meters long, the line would stretch roughly 5,000 kilometers, longer than the distance from New York to London. Every day. That’s mind-blowing.

The planet is now drowning in plastic, toxic runoff, and e-waste. But we don’t see it. Out of sight, out of mind.

We’ve completely lost the plot.

Here’s a question: has civilization ever done anything genuinely beneficial for nature or the biosphere?

I can’t think of a single thing. Can you? As I’ve outlined, civilization is built entirely on disturbance and extraction, thriving on the destruction of the very systems it depends on. There’s no benefit for nature in the way we live because our entire way of life is rooted in tearing it apart.

From stone tools to skyscrapers, everything we build takes from nature, and nothing lasts forever. Buildings deteriorate, roads erode, tools break, batteries die, screens shatter, and fixing or replacing them always demands more materials. Wood, metal, sand, lithium, whatever. Even those “green” solar panels, wind turbines and electric vehicles rely on massive amounts of mining and manufacturing that destroy ecosystems. And they need to be constantly replaced. This endless demand for materials makes civilization fundamentally unsustainable.

Fire Apes – Energy exploitation

What enabled all of this to happen? Was it just our ingenuity? Are we really that clever? It started with energy exploitation, and it started a long time ago. Without energy, nothing happens.

Like all forms of life, we need energy to survive, but we've taken it far beyond necessity. We've used it not just for survival, but for comfort, convenience, power, control, and to fuel our addictions and distractions.

In nature, animals hunt or forage, using energy to find more energy (food). If an animal burns 500 kcal per day while looking for food, it must find more than 500 kcal to avoid long-term starvation. This is called Energy Returned on Investment (EROI). If you invest 500 kcal and get 500 kcal, this is an EROI of 1. An EROI under 1 means starvation, an EROI of 1–2 is typical for animals, giving them enough surplus energy to rest and focus on essentials like food, water, shelter, and reproduction.

Fire apes burning biomass for energy – EROI 1.5-2

Humans and our ancestors began harnessing fire a long time ago, using it for heating, cooking, and tool-making. Fire enabled us to extract more energy from our environment and quickly became essential to our survival. This reliance on burning external energy sources, like wood and biomass, was our first major leap in energy exploitation. It allowed us to survive in different climates and expand the human enterprise.

Exploiting plants, animals and humans for energy – EROI 4-6

Then came agriculture (a technology), where we started exploiting renewable resources for our own growth. Domesticating plants and animals gave us an energy advantage. Early technology like plows and irrigation systems boosted food production, while domesticating animals, like using oxen to plow fields, let us harness the energy of other species. We also began farming animals for food, tapping into their stored energy by eating them. Hunting became less necessary, reducing effort and increasing our energy return on investment (EROI).

This combination of plant and animal domestication created food surpluses, which allowed tribes to expand, specialize, and accumulate power. Surpluses led to wealth, as resources could now be stored, traded, and controlled, giving rise to ownership and hierarchies.

Land, animals, and goods became property, and with property came inequality, some had more, while most labored to maintain it. To manage this growing complexity, money emerged as a way to exchange value and facilitate trade.

As societies grew, they became targets, triggering the need for protection, organized defense, and centralized authority, laying the foundation for governments, armies, empires and religions. What started as a way to feed ourselves evolved into systems of control, inequality, and expansion.

Slavery was the foundation of powerful empires like Ancient Egypt, Ancient Greece, the Roman Empire, and the empires of Mesopotamia (Sumer, Akkad, Babylonia and Assyria). Millions of enslaved people powered these societies, providing the backbreaking work behind agricultural systems, construction of architectural feats like the pyramids and aqueducts, and military logistics.

And let’s not forget European colonialism and slavery in the U.S., which persisted less than two centuries ago.

Global industrial civilization – EROI 15-20, and declining rapidly

The discovery and widespread use of fossil fuels marked a monumental shift. Cheap, energy-dense, and easy to extract, fossil fuels rendered human labor inefficient by comparison. A human produces work of roughly 0.7 kWh per day, while a single liter of oil contains 10 kWh of stored energy and costs around a dollar. Feeding, clothing, and maintaining a slave became expensive compared to fossil fuels.

The fossil fuel revolution built and powered modernity, propelling us into a world of consumption and energy dependence. But this energy bonanza won’t last forever, fossil fuels are nonrenewable, and their end is inevitable.

Any way of life that relies on nonrenewable resources is going to end when those resources run out. It's simple logic, a no-brainer, yet too many people fail to see this inevitable outcome. Our entire civilization depends on several finite resources, and the result is inevitable: it’s all going to end.

I’m not only talking about fossil fuels. We are consuming sand, gravel, metal ores, limestone, phosphate rock, copper, lithium, cobalt, and rare earth elements (not a complete list) at unsustainable and accelerating rates. All of these resources are finite and will eventually run out. Permanently.

Additionally, the unsustainable exploitation of renewable resources like freshwater, soil, forests, and fish, faster than they can regenerate leads to their depletion and the eventual collapse of the systems that sustain them. In other words, even the way we lived thousands of years ago would have been unsustainable if scaled to today’s levels, and the history of collapsed civilizations stand as a testament to this.

More energy is not the solution. Now, we’re scrambling to replace fossil fuels with renewables to keep these massive energy flows going. Why? Just look at the damage we’ve already done. It’s clear we can’t be trusted with limitless energy.

Domination – Global culture, values, and beliefs

How did this system and worldview come to dominate? Why have we chosen such a self-destructive and ecocidal path?

Most people were likely forced into it at first. Conquered, coerced, or manipulated. But after a few generations of captivity, having been born in to it, it became ingrained, and now it’s the framework we all live by. It takes a lot to challenge the assumptions you’ve been surrounded by your entire life, especially when the system rewards compliance and punishes dissent.

For example, imagine a peaceful tribe living in balance with nature. But one day, a violent, expansionist civilization decides it must take their land, needing more resources to fuel its endless growth.

The peaceful tribe has three choices:

1. Abandon their land and allow the violent civilization to expand.

2. Submit to the demands and let the violent civilization expand.

3. Fight back and most likely get slaughtered, allowing the violent civilization to expand.

This is one way the culture of empire, expansion, colonization, and the pursuit of power, slowly spread across the world.

Then there’s religion, which played a big role in shaping the exploitative worldview we see today. It often justified conquest and colonization with ideas like the Christian civilizing mission and the divine right of kings, which provided moral excuses for expansion and reinforced hierarchies. Many monotheistic religions also taught that humans are separate from nature, encouraging its domination and exploitation. By replacing nature-focused beliefs with ones centered on control and growth, religion severed humanity’s connection to the environment.

Genesis 1:28:

"Be fruitful and multiply, and fill the earth and subdue it; and have dominion over the fish of the sea and over the birds of the air and over every living thing that moves upon the earth."

For the last 500 years, Europeans have perfected a culture of domination, and behaved like an invasive species, colonizing lands, exploiting people, and stealing resources. First, through direct violence and colonization, later, through systemic oppression. Just read the history. It's all there, in plain sight. The expansion, the exploitation, and the unchecked thirst for power and wealth. The patterns are undeniable, and they’ve shaped the world we live in today.

To be clear, this isn’t the first or only violent culture to seek world domination, there have been many throughout history. But European colonialism stands out as the most successful. Whether we like it or not, we’re all part of it. Some have benefited immensely, enjoying wealth, power, and comfort, while others have endured unimaginable suffering, with their lands stolen, cultures erased, and freedoms stripped away.

When Europeans and North Americans discovered fossil fuels, they gained the power to supercharge exploitation, fueling not just their industries but also exporting toxic beliefs and values across the globe. World War II and the globalization that followed cemented this dominance. They didn’t just win the war, they set the cultural and economic rules for the entire planet.

This dominant culture has effectively brainwashed and trapped the world into believing its way of life isn’t just the right way, it’s the only way. Through debt, rigged economic systems, technology, and an unrelenting flood of propaganda via media, advertising, the educational system, pop culture, nearly every nation and every person has been swept up in this ideology. Now, most leaders speak only of economic growth, and the general public desires the same. As much as possible, as cheaply as possible. Growth is good. Greed is good.

Some will argue that this has been great for humanity, but that’s only because they’re idiots. In the very short term, it did seem to work; people made more money, consumed more, enjoyed better healthcare, and grew more comfortable. Sounds great! Any consequences to that?

Yes, the entire biosphere is on the brink of collapse.

The human zoo – trapped with no way out

When I take the blinders off and look at the world around me, what I see are animals, primates, that have lost their fucking minds. Mentally ill, caged animals, living in little bubbles, completely disconnected from the real world of animals, plants, soil, water, and the natural forces that produce everything that’s of any meaning whatsoever on this planet.

Conditioned and disconnected, the animals mindlessly follow values and beliefs they've been fed, with no understanding of how to survive outside the confines of the system. They don’t forage, hunt, or gather their own water. Their basic needs are fully provided by a few who set the rules of the zoo. Caged for so many generations, they no longer see the prison bars. Like a dog bound by its leash, they mistake their limited view for the entire world. They believe this is the only way to exist. And now, they have no idea how to survive without the system that sustains them.

The reality is that we’re now dependent on this system. Of course the majority of us will defend this system because our lives really do depend on it. Water on tap, food at the supermarket, electricity with the flick of a switch, these conveniences are our lifelines, and we’ll protect them at any cost. If the tap runs dry or the shelves are empty, we wouldn’t know where to begin. Without civilization, most of us would be dead in a week.

Everything we rely on is outsourced to corporations, to governments, to farmers, to factories, to global supply chains that stretch across continents. A handful of people now own and control most of it, wielding immense power and writing the rules to serve their interests. We’re not just living in an oligarchy anymore, I think we’ve reached the grand finale.

Not only are we trapped in this system because we lack the skills to live without it, but most of us cling to it because we’re addicted. Processed foods, sugary drinks, cigarettes, vapes, online shopping, gambling, work, alcohol, drugs, Facebook, Instagram, YouTube, Netflix, TikTok, porn, video games, reels, Tinder, Reddit, Substack. It’s endless. Deep down, we know it’s making us miserable. But we keep going back, unable to stop.

The vast majority, yes, even the self-proclaimed activists and environmentalists, don’t want to give up their comforts. Most people want cheap goods, free services, and convenience without considering the true cost. They’re willing to sacrifice nature itself to keep this machine running, because that’s what it takes to sustain this lifestyle, and most people are fine with it.

From what I can see, many of the people railing against the rich would gladly switch places with them if they were given the chance. Most people blaming oil executives don’t mind benefiting from the cheap energy and would hate to live without all the other essentials they provide, such as affordable food, pharmaceuticals, roads, clothing, and materials. Raise gas prices to $20 a gallon and watch society unravel.

People want to enjoy the perks of this system while criticizing it. It's the classic case of wanting their cake and eating it too, demanding change, but unwilling to give up the comforts and conveniences that sustain the very system they condemn. Imagine a government banning aviation, private cars, or cutting off cell phone service. There’d be riots within days.

No judgement here, I’m sitting here in my own cage, typing away on my overpriced Apple computer. I’m not about to ditch it all and head off to live in the jungle tomorrow. I’m addicted.

Tick-tock, time’s up…

It’s too late to avoid catastrophic climate change. It’s already here, it’s accelerating, and it’s going to get much worse. It’s going to crush this civilization like a bug. We won’t stand a chance.

Even if we all came together, we did everything possible and we did everything right, it wouldn’t be enough to stop it, at best, we can delay. But here’s the problem: the things we could do to slow it down, radical reductions in consumption, halting fossil fuel use, practically ensures societal collapse and the death of billions. We can’t feed 8 billion people without fossil fuels. If we want to stop using fossil fuels now, we’re essentially calling for at least 3-4 billion people to die, probably more. Is that a good solution? I don’t think so.

But climate change isn’t the only problem we face. We have overshot the carrying capacity of the planet and we will collapse, no matter what. Even without climate change, resource depletion, pollution from novel entities and the destruction of the natural world would still push us toward complete disaster.

This is a predicament, not a problem. At this point, there are no solutions, only tradeoffs with severe consequences. Change is coming, and you can’t solve change. You can only adapt to it.

The sad truth is that this system has stripped us of our natural instincts and need for connection. We evolved to live in nature, move freely, and rely on close-knit communities. Now, we live isolated lives, surrounded by people but starved for real connection, hooked on technology instead of each other. We've lost the simple, vital ways that once made us human.

Part of truly seeing things as they are is feeling the deep isolation and alienation we've created, not just from each other, but from ourselves and the natural world. When you really take that in, when you truly experience it, the natural response is grief. Deep grief at the loss of connection. It’s the grief of realizing how far we've drifted from what truly matters.

But first, I still get the occasional comment that climate change is a hoax, or that more CO₂ is great for life, so let’s set the record straight.

(1) The problem isn’t high CO₂ itself, but how quickly it changes. Greenhouse gases trap heat in the atmosphere, acting like a thermostat, which drives rapid warming and ocean acidification. This triggers feedbacks that further accelerate warming as the Earth shifts toward a new equilibrium. When CO₂ levels and temperatures rise gradually over thousands of years, ecosystems, flora and fauna can migrate and adapt, because the overall conditions they evolved in are still largely the same. No major issue.

But a sudden increase or decrease in CO₂, and ecosystems can’t keep up.

High CO₂? Not a problem. Rapidly changing CO₂? Disaster.

Bottomline: Any abrupt shift in the conditions that plants and animals have adapted to over millions of years will be catastrophic. There is zero evidence to support that they can adapt to rapid changes. Show me the evidence of when life thrived during a rapid increase of CO₂? It doesn’t exist.

(2) All mass extinction events share a common thread: a rapid environmental change that outpaces the ability of species to adapt. Many of these events were triggered by massive volcanic eruptions that released CO₂ and other gases into the atmosphere.

These eruptions often caused an initial cooling phase due to sulfur dioxide (SO₂), which reflected sunlight and cooled the planet for months or years. But what followed was a prolonged warming period lasting millennia. This warming destabilized ecosystems and food chains. This was the kill-mechanism.

Bottomline: Rapid release of CO₂ has always led to mass extinctions, the evidence is clear. This will no exception. It’s all about (A) the pace of change, and (B) how well the Earth’s systems, like the oceans, forests, soil, and the carbon cycle, can buffer these shifts by sequestering CO₂.

(3) Right now, we’re cranking up the thermostat by releasing CO₂ at the fastest rate in at least 66 million years. Yes, it’s us. And yes, this is likely the fastest rate ever, but we can’t definitively prove it.

And how are the Earth’s systems doing? As far as we know, the Earth’s ecosystems have never been in such a degraded state at the onset of a mass extinction event. Here’s a chart from a 2021 study that illustrates the scale of our environmental destruction:

Bottomline: This is a complete disaster, and no amount of green energy will fix it. If anything, it would make things worse because it allows us to keep doing what we’ve been doing: destroying the planet under the illusion that we’re “saving” it. Having said that, it’s still vastly better than burning fossil fuels at current rates.

So, let’s look at what we’re facing in the coming decades and centuries, but first a quick recap of climate history.

Leaving the Holocene

Our entire way of life is rooted in agriculture, a practice that began just 10,000 years ago, thanks to the stability of the Holocene. As far as we know, agriculture only works in these stable climate conditions. Without that stability, it simply doesn’t work. It’s also crucial to understand that our cities and infrastructure were built for conditions (temperatures, precipitation, sea-level) that are already in the rear-view mirror.

• Temperature range: 0.5–1°C

• Atmospheric CO₂ range: 20 ppm

Civilization is a 5,000-year experiment and it’s already failed repeatedly. It hasn’t had to survive glacial cycles or extreme climate shifts, instead, it has collapsed every time under the most stable conditions Earth has ever provided. Civilizations collapse for many reasons, but at their core, they are inherently unsustainable, inevitably depleting resources and exceeding the carrying capacity of their environment.

Modernity, the version of civilization we live in now, has barely been around for a couple of centuries and managed to wreck and pollute the planet beyond recognition.

But we’re not only leaving the Holocene behind us.

Leaving the Quaternary

For 2.6 million years, we’ve been in the Quaternary period, during which Earth's climate has fluctuated within a somewhat predictable range between glacial and inter-glacial periods. These fluctuations were driven by orbital forces called Milankovitch cycles, which refer to changes in Earth’s orbit, tilt and wobble that affect how solar radiation (heat) reaches the planet.

• Temperature range: 5–6°C

• Atmospheric CO₂ range: 120 ppm

These cycles, repeating roughly every 100,000 years, did not trigger any major extinction events, as forests, plants, and most animals had time to adapt and migrate at this natural pace.

We left the Quaternary behind decades ago when we surpassed 350 ppm, probably even earlier than that. Had we stopped at 350 ppm, radically changed our way of life, and kept our population in check, perhaps we could have avoided this disaster and experienced a more gradual collapse instead, retreating back to simpler lifestyles over a few centuries or millennia, similar to the decline of the Roman Empire.

I wish that were still possible. But it’s not.

IPCC, Tipping Points, and Warming in the pipeline

First of all, you can forget the RCP scenarios, which we are often shown, because they do not factor in all tipping points or feedbacks.

Not included:

• Permafrost thaw and methane release

• Amazon rainforest dieback

• Antarctic and Greenland ice sheet collapse

• AMOC slowdown

Meaning, they are not at all realistic.

This is why we constantly see those faster than expected headlines. But even with just 2°C of warming from human GHG emissions, tipping systems could push us onto the RCP8.5 path, driving temperatures to 5.4°C by 2100 through feedback loops.

Trajectories of the Earth System - Steffen et al. 2018

In this 2018 study, Will Steffen, Johan Rockström and other researchers examined potential pathways for the Earth System, focusing on when we might reach a tipping point that could destabilize the entire system and push us toward a “Hothouse Earth”.

They identify the following tipping points, or feedbacks (below). The color shows the temperature at which they are likely to tip, and the arrows show how they interact, potentially leading to tipping cascades.

I will get back to these later when we review the current state of things and how a tipping cascade can unfold.

Key takeaways:

• They conclude that warming of 2°C is the limit, beyond that, we lose control of the situation and could see a tipping cascade

• They argue that the only way to avoid catastrophe after crossing 2°C of warming is through human intervention (massive carbon sequestration)

Global warming in the pipeline - Hansen et al. 2023

This study is even more alarming than the last. The authors analyzed climate sensitivity, our climate system’s delayed responses (inertia) and amplifying feedbacks, and reached some chilling conclusions: we already have 8-10°C of warming in the pipeline, even if we stopped emissions today. What?! It's the feedbacks. These can be broken down into three categories:

1. Slow feedbacks: Tipping points like ice sheet changes (albedo), ocean currents, and vegetation shifts

2. Fast feedbacks: Water vapor, cloud formation, and sea ice loss

3. Ultra-fast feedbacks: Earth's energy imbalance, stratospheric warming and cooling

This is more than just about how much CO₂ we emit and how that might raise temperatures in a simplistic, linear model (AOGCM). It’s about how that heat is absorbed by the atmosphere, oceans, and land, and how it triggers feedbacks over decades, centuries, and millennia, ultimately driving even more warming and more emissions.

What to expect according to the study:

The role of Sulfur Dioxide - Aerosol Masking

Remember how mass extinction events from volcanic activity often have an initial cooling phase? The study proved that we’ve essentially been replicating a massive volcanic eruption, especially in terms of sulfur dioxide (SO₂).

Over the past century, we've released 3-5 times more SO₂ into the atmosphere than normal volcanic activity, which has been masking the heat and causing an initial cooling period (yes, this was the cooling phase). But as we cut SO₂ emissions from industries and shipping, that cooling effect is fading, and we’re heading into a dangerous phase where things are about to spiral out of control.

Key takeaways from the paper are the following:

• Accelerated warming is inevitable, with 2°C of warming guaranteed by 2040, based on Earth’s Energy Imbalance (personally, I think we’ll breach 2°C as soon as 2032, possibly with the next El Niño).

• We are already committed to 8-10°C of warming if no action is taken.

  • This warming is driven by feedbacks

• Human-made aerosols are currently masking about 1.5-2°C of warming

• They also conclude that the only way to avoid this warming is through human intervention (massive carbon sequestration)

If that all sounds a bit confusing, you can watch this video where James Hansen and other authors walk through the key findings. It’s highly technical, but worth diving into.

Feedbacks – The Power of Ice

The big fear about ice sheets is not sea-level rise, it’s the huge amplifying effects of a runaway albedo-ice feedback.

The terms Hothouse Earth and Icehouse Earth refer to two contrasting states of Earth’s climate:

• A Hothouse Earth is a hot, ice-free planet with extreme warmth and high sea levels. In this state, the Earth experiences little to no polar ice, and temperatures are much higher than today.

• An Icehouse Earth is a cooler planet characterized by large ice sheets and glaciation, with significant ice coverage at the poles. During this state, Earth’s temperatures are much lower, and ice plays a major role in regulating the climate.

The main difference? Whether or not ice exists.

We are currently in an icehouse state, and have been for millions of years. How did we get here?

Long story short, around 34 million years ago, the opening of the Drake Passage, led to the formation of the Antarctic Circumpolar Current (ACC). This current, which now encircles Antarctica, isolated the continent, allowing it to cool, triggering the growth of ice sheets.

This marked the official start of our current Icehouse Earth and the beginning of permanent ice sheets.

Several slow feedback mechanisms followed, amplifying the cooling:

• Increased albedo: The lighter ice surfaces reflected more sunlight, reducing heat absorption and cooling the planet further.

• Cooler oceans: Cooler oceans helped lower atmospheric CO₂ levels by promoting the burial of organic carbon on the ocean floor.

• Drier, cooler atmosphere: As the climate cooled, tropical and subtropical forests were replaced by dry woodlands and expansive grassy areas, further increasing albedo and reducing atmospheric moisture.

On the opposite side of the planet, the Arctic didn’t become permanently covered in ice until about 2.6 to 3 million years ago. While it wasn’t as dramatic as Antarctica, the closure of the Isthmus of Panama around 3 million years ago played a major role.

• When the Isthmus of Panama closed, it altered ocean currents, particularly strengthening the Gulf Stream. This shift in circulation led to increased evaporation and snowfall in the Arctic, helping to trigger its ice buildup.

Why is this relevant? The polar ice caps and ice sheets are melting at an unprecedented rate, and this rapid loss of ice could single-handedly push Earth’s systems past a critical tipping point.

When The Dominoes Fall – Tipping Cascades

Let’s take a closer look at those tipping points and how a tipping cascade will likely unfold in the coming decades, based on Will Steffen’s 2022 video presentation.

The Arctic sea ice is already mostly gone, drastically reducing the Earth’s albedo and increasing temperatures in the Arctic. This tipping point has essentially been crossed. The Arctic is now warming far faster than other regions, as shown in the graph below.

This accelerated warming drives the melting of the Greenland ice sheet, further reducing albedo and releasing massive amounts of freshwater into the Atlantic. This influx of fresh water slows down the Atlantic Meridional Overturning Circulation (AMOC), which regulates global climate.

At the same time, reduced albedo and rising temperatures are thawing permafrost, releasing previously trapped greenhouse gases (methane and CO₂). This creates another amplifying feedback loop that further intensifies global warming. The warming also increases methane emissions from wetlands worldwide, compounding the problem.

A severely weakened AMOC will have cascading effects.

It will reduce rainfall over the Amazon by roughly 50%, making the region much drier and more prone to fires. This will lead to the Amazon rainforest transitioning into a savanna, releasing enormous amounts of CO₂ into the atmosphere and further driving warming.

In Europe, it will lead to more extreme weather, harsher winters, and reduced rainfall.

In North America, it will cause more intense storms, disrupted weather patterns, shifts in agricultural zones, and sudden sea-level rise along the eastern coast.

Additionally, a severely weakened AMOC will accelerate ice loss in the West Antarctic ice sheet and the Wilkes Basin by redistributing heat to the Southern Hemisphere, altering ocean circulation, and shifting atmospheric patterns.

These interconnected tipping points are not distant, they could all unfold before 2045.

It’s already in motion.

The Arctic could be ice free by summer 2027

Scientists warn of collapse of the Atlantic meridional overturning circulation AMOC

For the 28th year in a row, Greenland's ice sheet is shrinking

Unavoidable future increase in West Antarctic ice-shelf melting

Looking Ahead – Anthropocene 2100-2300

Wherever we’re headed, it’ll start with a bang. What comes next is anyone’s guess.

We’ve already cranked up the CO₂ thermostat to 426 ppm as of this writing (closer to 500 if you factor in other greenhouse gases i.e. CO₂e), and the Earth’s energy imbalance is locked in to push temperatures up, way faster than nature can adjust.

As Earth’s systems spiral into chaos, global industrial civilization faces inevitable collapse from a convergence of crises, as outlined in these articles:

• Global Warming and the Great Unraveling

• Climate Change is a Symptom – The Human Predicament

• Population Decline & Overshoot

• End of Growth & Collapse

This means there will likely be no large-scale, coordinated human intervention to prevent catastrophic outcomes triggered by climate tipping points. An effort both studies identify as crucial.

Even if civilization collapses soon or emissions are drastically reduced voluntarily, atmospheric GHG levels will still reach the equivalent of around 550 ppm by 2040, and would keep rising from human emissions for a long time.

Why?

We are Fire Apes and our fundamental problem is overshoot. Think about it. As long as modern humans exist in vast numbers, emissions will keep rising. Because long before fossil fuels, we burned biomass for cooking, heating, and survival, and we’ll keep doing so, collapse or not. Fire has been central to agriculture too, from clearing land for crops to managing grazing areas. Even with a reduced population, say 3 billion people by 2050, burning just 3 kg of biomass per person daily adds up to 6 billion tons of CO₂ annually.

Here are a few articles indicating this will likely be the case:

• People in Poland Are Burning Trash to Stay Warm This Winter

• ‘People will burn anything’: energy poverty and pollution hit eastern Europe

• Burning trash to keep warm in Syria town cut off by war

Whatever happens, we will see global temperature rise of 3–5.4°C by century’s end, probably sooner.

As we pass through tipping points, the thermostat will keep rising. Projections like those from Hansen et al. suggest we could ultimately see 12–14°C of warming, though that may take centuries or millennia.

While the oceans will absorb some CO₂ over the coming centuries, making them even more acidic, much of it will remain in the atmosphere for thousands of years. The oceans will eventually release stored CO₂ back into the atmosphere, amplifying the warming.

With much of Earth’s carbon sinks destroyed and ecosystems crippled, the natural processes needed to draw down CO₂ have been impaired. As a result, it will take an unfathomably long time, tens of thousands of years or more, for CO₂ levels to meaningfully decline.

We will likely face a scorched planet long before it can begin to recover, and even then, it will do so in a completely different climate. The planet will remain unbearably hot for thousands of years, with the journey to that future defined by catastrophic destruction.

To sum up, the emissions we've already released guarantee massive disruptions to Earth's systems, no matter what path we choose. Large-scale CO₂ sequestration, whether through natural methods (afforestation, reforestation, soil restoration) or engineered solutions (CCS, BECCS, DAC), will not be enough to stop this, as outlined here.

• Whether we collapse by 2040

• Whether we aggressively cut emissions by 2050, or any other arbitrary date

It likely won't change the long-term outcome much. However, the pace of change does matter. Reaching a tipping point is dangerous. Racing past it is catastrophic.

That’s why, despite this hopeless situation, it’s still worth fighting to preserve nature. Every fraction of a degree, every patch of unspoiled wilderness, every spared species, it all matters in the fight against environmental collapse.

At the same time, social tipping points, critical moments when collective human behavior shifts dramatically, could become an opportunity. While it’s hard to predict exactly what that might look like or what the impact could be, we’re likely to witness extreme changes in our societies. Maybe we end up with something great, like an eco-conscious, egalitarian society. Or maybe it’s a total disaster, like Nazi Germany on steroids, with authoritarian regimes and violence everywhere. Throw in the risk of nuclear war, and it’s clear these tipping points could save some of us or finish us all off fast.

Can this civilization prevail? Not a chance.

Can a global agriculture-based civilization prevail? No, not for a long time.

Can humans prevail? Maybe, but not many.

Can life prevail? Sure, some life will persist and eventually recover.

As I mentioned in my previous post, there's little we as individuals can directly control. But we do control how we spend our time and what we choose to do with it.

Make it count, and always be mindful of its impact on nature.

“Everyone, deep in their hearts, is waiting for the end of the world to come.”

– Haruki Murakami

Murakami-san and dear reader, it seems I bring good news: the end of the world as we know it isn’t just inevitable, it’s imminent. Events are unraveling far faster than anyone anticipated. Even The Guardian is catching on, as shown in their article from December 28, 2024.

I want you to think about this question:

If you found out you only had 5 years to live, would you change anything about your life today?

Reality Check: 2024

2024 was the hottest year on record, again. Crops are failing across the globe, and food insecurity is worsening. Inflation is spiraling out of control, pushing basic goods beyond the reach of millions. Cities are running out of water, with droughts and mismanagement draining essential supplies.

Donald Trump was re-elected as US President, with backing from the richest man on the planet, Elon Musk, effectively turning the US into a kleptocracy. Meanwhile, Russia continues its bombardment of Ukraine, and sabotaging European infrastructure. Climate disasters are intensifying, economies are teetering, and the global order is crumbling. I think you get the picture.

The health of the biosphere has been in steady decline for millennia, and its collapse has been unstoppable for some time. That’s right, this is no longer something we can stop.

Why do I say that?

Key tipping points, like the thawing of permafrost, the melting of polar ice, ocean acidification, and the dieback of forests due to drought, pests, and changing climate conditions, have already been crossed.

Now think about what it would take to reverse these processes. We wouldn’t just need to stop emissions, that’s not enough. We would have to drastically reduce CO₂ concentrations in the atmosphere, sequestering billions of tons of CO₂ and other greenhouse gases. If you run the numbers, it becomes clear that achieving this on meaningful timescales is simply not possible, especially considering how quickly temperatures are rising and the warming already in the pipeline. We will have climate chaos this century and the next, it’s locked in.

On top of that, mass extinctions are in full swing, far beyond the point of return, with cascading effects dismantling food webs and collapsing ecosystems across land and sea. Reversing these trends would require not only the above impossible measures related to global warming, but also halting nearly all human activity to give nature a chance to heal.

And yet, these irreversible changes are still falsely being framed as "avoidable" by those desperate to maintain a facade of control. At best, we might slow the trajectory, but stop it? Impossible.

Institutions like the IPCC, IEA, UNFCCC, UNEP, mainstream media, politicians, and even many scientists have become masterful sellers of what can only be described as legal hopium1. They water down the truth, downplay the urgency, and keep offering promises of solutions they know are impossible.

They’ll never come out and say, “We’re totally fucked”, even when it’s painfully obvious. They just won’t. It’s not because they’re evil (well, not all of them). Some of them genuinely don’t know, and the ones that know wont’t say it. Why?

President Orlean: You cannot go around saying to people that there's 100% chance that they're going to die. You know? It's just nuts.

And what would that achieve anyway?

But even if someone did come out and tell the unvarnished truth, it would probably be dismissed as alarmism, insanity, pessimism or ignored entirely.

The truth is that a comforting vision of the future now requires defying the fundamental laws of physics, biology, and ecology. We’re on a collision course, and we’re not even trying to hit the brakes.

Most people will deny this reality. Some of you reading this right now might be among them. Please leave a comment. They’ll cling to distractions or chase any illusion of "hope”, even when it’s just a well-packaged lie.

“if everyone magically comes together, scale up lab experiments, ignore resource limits in materials and energy, and pretend ecological reality don’t exist, then we can keep going”

I would ask: what are you trying to save, and for how long? Most plans would buy us a few years if they could be implemented, but they often can't, and none of them are sustainable in the long term.

The Metacrisis – Predictions for 2025-2050

I’m going to focus on the following:

• Resource exhaustion and peak power
  Fossil fuels, freshwater, forests, soil, minerals, metals, and fish stocks are being consumed at rates the planet simply can’t sustain. Most of the resources that underpin our civilization are finite, and maintaining the status quo demands an ever-flowing supply of energy and materials. But we’re burning through what’s left. The easy stuff is gone. Hard limits exist. Energy and materials will start to decline. The cracks are already showing.

• Civilizational collapse
  As energy availability declines and resources become scarcer, political and economic instability will lead to the collapse of modern civilization and our way of life. This is no surprise, civilization is essentially a long-running Ponzi scheme, surviving by exploiting nature, borrowing from the future, and pillaging its surroundings until there’s nothing left. Good riddance.

• Biosphere breakdown
  Biodiversity loss, ecosystem collapse, climate change, and pollution from chemicals, plastics, and other waste are all accelerating. Much of the damage is already done and locked in. The best we can hope for now is to delay.

At the root of it all is hubris, anthropocentrism and overshoot, our relentless overconsumption that exceeds the planet’s capacity to sustain life and our complete disregard for nature, other animals and the biosphere.

If you’ve never heard of any of this, I suggest reading some of my previous articles first. This one and this one, because I won’t be referencing all of the scientific papers in this article.

Instead, I’ll lay out my predictions for the next 25 years, a worst-case, yet entirely possible vision of where we’re headed.

How this unfolds is impossible to predict, with many unknowns and the wildcard of human behavior in the mix.

Peak Power & Civilizational Collapse

I predict that the collapse of modern civilization will not be slow. Why? Because it depends on:

• Extreme complexity and an interdependent global trade network

• Very high net energy demands

• Massive material flows of finite resources

• A relentless growth imperative dependent on a growing population

The early stages are already here; protectionism, resource struggles, and rising instability. We can all feel it. It’s so obvious.

When a complex system like ours tips past its breaking point, collapse comes rapidly.

It’s a bit like the game Jenga, which I played with my niece and nephew the other week. In every round, there comes a point where everyone knows there are maybe 2–3 pieces left that can be moved. Then, with one move, it all comes crashing down. Modern industrial civilization is similar: one essential country or resource falters, and the whole system can unravel. We just don’t know which piece will trigger it.

We will hit peak civilizational power by 2035 or sooner2, and this will be a massive turning point. Prices will soar as everything relies on cheap, abundant energy. Much of the food we eat is grown with fertilizers derived from fossil fuels, harvested by oil-powered machines, and shipped across the globe. Medicine, machinery, and spare parts for critical infrastructure? All dependent on energy-intensive manufacturing and global supply chains that will start to falter, slowly, at first.

Aviation, shipping, petroleum extraction, agriculture, mining, trucking, and everything else will become more expensive, leading to the contraction of supply chains and the economy. Without affordable fuel, the movement of essentials like food, medicine, and raw materials will decline. Soaring fuel prices, shrinking energy supplies, and geopolitical instability will make long-distance trade nearly impossible. The suburban lifestyle, reliant on cheap energy and long commutes, will no longer be viable.

As resources dwindle and global trade falters, infrastructure will deteriorate. Repairs will be delayed or abandoned entirely. Roads will crumble, buildings will sit empty, and the landscape of progress will transform into one of neglect and decay. Potholes and ruins will be the new normal. Railroads might see a resurgence in countries that have prepared, but they won't be enough to reverse the tide.

Politics will radicalize beyond recognition. What we’ll see is authoritarianism colliding with anti-intellectualism.

Oh wait, we’re already seeing that.

At the same time, the illusion of stability will crumble, meaning financial markets will implode. The increased prices and uncertainty, or the crushing reality that there’s no viable future on the horizon, will bring the financial markets to a standstill. Investments and liquidity will dry up like in 2008, and loans will disappear as banks buckle under the pressure. With businesses collapsing en masse, the global economy will spiral into freefall, triggering widespread unemployment, homelessness and civil unrest.

Global cooperation, what was left of it, will have completely disintegrated. There will be no COP meetings, no coordinated response to the crises at hand.

The housing market won’t be spared. With declining populations, without loans, without insurance, the demand for and value of homes will plummet. Some areas will become ghost towns, abandoned by those who once relied on them. If you own a home, you’ll eventually reach a point where it’s practically unsellable, at least not for anything close to its former value. Maybe you can trade it for a bicycle or some food. You’ll be stuck in place, unable to escape, or you can leave it behind with nothing to show for it.

With declining tax revenues, governments will resort to printing money, handing it out like a bandage on a bullet wound. But you can’t print the essentials that keep society functioning. Money is merely a claim on resources. If there are no resources it’s a claim on nothing. It’s a piece of paper, or more likely, a line of code in a computer.

Due to the inevitable printing of money, fiat currencies like the US dollar, euro, and yen will spiral into rapid inflation, losing their value as confidence evaporates. Bitcoin might skyrocket to absurd levels, briefly hailed as a safe haven, until reality intervenes. Both cryptocurrency and AI are deeply rooted in the infrastructure of industrial civilization: massive energy demands, advanced hardware, global logistics, and constant internet connectivity. These technologies are only sustainable as long as modern civilization remains intact.

As smaller nations and economies collapse, the remaining resource-rich states will fight for what’s left. What follows could be worse than the darkest days of Nazi Germany, with the US potentially emerging as the most ruthless player in this chaos, unless Trump or Musk manage to collapse it first.

Many will refuse to accept the harsh new realities of lower energy availability and soaring prices. The Pentagon will likely stop at nothing to secure more oil, committing any atrocity necessary to maintain its grip on power.

Former allies won’t know how to respond when the US starts seizing land and resources or outright invading weaker countries. Who will have the courage to challenge them?

Putin has already set the stage for this decade, invading Ukraine and escalating tensions in the Nordics and former Soviet states while testing NATO’s resolve. If the US pulls out of NATO, European nations will be caught with their pants down. With very little oil and a weak manufacturing base, they will stand no chance.

Putin has been preparing for this moment for years. With Russia’s vast reserves of oil, gas, and coal, they’ll wait for Europe’s collapse, ready to swoop in and plunder with minimal resistance. Will nuclear weapons start flying? Who knows.

Eventually, even the resource-rich kleptocracies will collapse under the weight of chaos and lack of energy. Without a central authority and fossil fuels, there will be no military capable of maintaining global control. The structure that enabled military dominance will disintegrate, leaving fragmented forces unable to assert power.

By 2040, modern civilization will have largely collapsed. What was left of global trade will cease, leaving the last nations isolated and scrambling to survive. Strategic reserves, if they exist at all, will be rapidly depleted. As resources vanish, expect rationing, political chaos, and violence fueled by denial of the root causes.

Nations will turn inward, fighting over what little is left, while the world fractures into self-serving factions, each struggling to maintain control in a collapsing system.

There are 440 nuclear reactors worldwide, relying on a continuous supply of water and energy for cooling and are entirely dependent on the infrastructure of modern civilization. If these reactors are abandoned rather than properly decommissioned, multiple nuclear meltdowns are inevitable. Many will experience catastrophic failures similar to Chernobyl or Fukushima, triggered by power grid collapses and natural disasters.

The lights will go out in most places. No electricity, no internet, no public services, no water on tap, no sewage system, no garbage collection, no reliable information, no healthcare. Lifesaving medicines like vaccines and antibiotics? Gone. Police and justice systems? A distant memory. Emergency services tasked with delivering food and water? Forget it. Own a house or some piece of land? Says who? In the end, it’s all up for grabs, and what you thought was secure will be anything but.

Under this pressure, society will fracture and disintegrate. Lawlessness will reign as people resort to theft, violence, and worse. While not everyone will be morally bankrupt, there will be enough out there (psychopaths, sociopaths, and power-hungry individuals) to make survival difficult for the rest. With no consequences to stop them, desperation and chaos will take over.

News will become scarce, unreliable, or nonexistent. You won’t know who’s in charge or if nuclear war has already broken out. You’ll be in the dark about whether half the planet is gone or if global warming is spiraling out of control. You won’t know if a hurricane is headed your way. You won’t even know if your family and friends, especially those far away, are alive or suffered some horrible death. The critical flow of information will stop, leaving you clueless about the world’s fate. Radios may still exist, but they’ll only offer local updates, and soon even they’ll break down.

Climate Chaos Adding Fuel to the Fire

As if the collapse of industrial civilization weren’t enough, global warming will only accelerate, with a realistic possibility of reaching 2.5°C by 2050 even if we collapse before then.

We don’t even need to reach 2.5°C for things to unravel. As 2024 has shown us, 1.5°C is more than enough.

The impacts of climate change will shock the world and even our most seasoned scientists.

The biggest food crisis is on the horizon, with crop failures, resource shortages, and the collapse of agricultural systems already unfolding (link, link, link, link, link).

By the 2030s, increasingly erratic and extreme temperatures and rainfall will make food production nearly impossible in most regions. Groundwater reserves, already dwindling, will be exhausted, and rivers once sustained by glaciers, snowmelt, and predictable rainfall will run dry most of the year.

Meanwhile, extreme rainfall events or "rain bombs” (like these in 2024 link, link, link), will occasionally flood regions across the world, further crippling large-scale farming.

Every 1°C of warming leads to 7% increase in water vapor. These events will get worse and more intense.

By the mid-2030s, major food-exporting countries turn inward to protect their own dwindling supplies, leaving food-importing nations completely cut off. The global food supply will shrink, and many countries will find that they can no longer rely on outside sources to feed their population. Even if food is available (unlikely), there will be no way to transport it. The decline of oil will cripple global trade, leaving countries without the means to acquire what they need.

Without the means to grow, import, or even transport food, the world will experience a brutal wake-up call, realizing too late that no amount of wealth or infrastructure can protect them from the consequences of their own neglect.

As the world’s resources dwindle, international agreements, like those governing river water usage from rivers like the Nile, Danube, Indus, Rio Grande, and Mekong, will be abandoned. Countries controlling vital water sources will face a brutal choice: keep what little water is left for themselves to have a chance of survival or let it flow downstream to others, risking their own collapse. It’s not hard to predict how that will play out.

The scramble for resources will trigger conflicts, and cooperation will fall apart in favor of self-preservation.

Extreme weather events, including floods, atmospheric rivers, and cyclones, will intensify to catastrophic levels, wiping out entire cities. Areas once thought to be safe, will face the kind of destruction seen in Hurricane Katrina, but on a larger, more frequent scale. With infrastructure flattened, critical resources depleted, there will be no rebuilding. Entire regions will simply be abandoned.

By the 2040’s, heat waves reaching wet-bulb temperatures of 35°C, where the combination of heat and humidity overwhelms the human body’s ability to cool itself, causing death within hours, will trigger mass die-offs across vast regions. Without energy to power air conditioning or cooling systems, millions die overnight. The scale of devastation will be unimaginable, wiping out entire populations as survival becomes physically impossible.

With prolonged and intense heat waves and droughts, wildfires will become more frequent and larger, spreading with relentless intensity. Entire ecosystems: forests, peatlands, grasslands, will burn, turning what were once carbon sinks into carbon sources. The world’s ability to fight these fires will be nonexistent, and we’ll be forced to choke on the smoke.

Many parts of the world will become uninhabitable due to extreme heat and water scarcity, much sooner than people think. Land-locked desert cities like Cairo, Lima, Madrid, Mexico City, Las Vegas and Phoenix, will be abandoned in the 2030’s as net energy declines, temperatures soar and water sources dry up. There is no viable path forward for these areas.

The ice caps will continue to melt faster than expected, reducing albedo, accelerating sea level rise and triggering the collapse of the AMOC, plunging Europe and North America into complete climate chaos. Now who’s the refugee?

This will not be a gradual process; it will happen faster than we can prepare for, sweeping away entire coastal cities and reshaping the planet.

By 2050, entire nations, like Bangladesh, will begin to be submerged. Asia will suffer greatly, with Vietnam’s Mekong Delta flooded with saltwater, wiping out 40% of its food supply. Major cities like Shanghai, Bangkok and Jakarta, home to tens of millions, will experience catastrophic saltwater intrusion, destroying freshwater sources and farmland. Many coastal cities across the world, from Miami to Mumbai, will face similar fates. There are too many to list.

Speaking of Miami, much of Florida will become uninhabitable and abandoned as rising sea levels and extreme weather events escalate. The exodus will probably not be peaceful; desperate, angry, and armed groups will flood out. Expect chaos and conflict as displaced populations move northward.

Meanwhile, the permafrost will continue to thaw at an accelerating rate, releasing vast amounts of greenhouse gases into the atmosphere. What was once frozen will become a volatile ticking time bomb, accelerating global warming and ensuring that there will be no "turning back" once it's gone. Like the melting ice caps, the permafrost will vanish entirely releasing 1,700 billion metric tons of carbon, including methane and carbon dioxide.

Absolute chaos will erupt as large masses of people try to relocate. The few places still livable will resist large influxes of refugees desperate to survive.

Picture millions trying to flee Mexico or Florida, heading toward the Great Lakes where there’s water, not by car, since there’s no fuel, but on foot. Most won’t make it. They’ll die from violence, dehydration, or starvation along the way.

Biosphere Collapse

If you think humanity is in for a rough ride, the destruction of nature will be just as unforgiving.

The remaining forests will wither, succumb to wildfires, or be cleared for firewood and converted into agricultural land. As these last ecosystems disappear, biodiversity will collapse even further, with countless species struggling to survive amid extreme heat and rapidly shifting habitats.

Insects, the often-overlooked foundation of nearly every ecosystem, will be hit hardest. Without them, plants won’t be pollinated, and the delicate balance that sustains life will fall apart. Without insects, other creatures, like birds and small mammals, will starve, triggering a domino effect through food webs.

As insect populations plummet (already down 75% since 1950s and accelerating), entire ecosystems will begin to disintegrate. From bees to butterflies, the loss of pollinators will not only kill food production but will dismantle ecosystems that depend on them for survival.

The vital oxygen that plants produce will plummet, creating a feedback loop where the biosphere continues to unravel. Without plants to filter carbon and produce oxygen, the entire system of life as we know it will break down.

The oceans are also headed for disaster. Coral reefs, which provide shelter and food for a quarter of all marine species, are already dying from warming waters and acidification and will be functionally extinct by 2050. Without phytoplankton, marine food chains will collapse, and fish populations will vanish. As ocean life dwindles, oxygen production from the seas will also decrease, further suffocating life on Earth.

We’re heading for a world where life itself is hanging by a thread, and the tipping points for our biosphere’s collapse are already in motion.

It’s a grim picture, and it doesn’t have to get this bad. Yet, it could, and that’s the terrifying part. I’m sure there are many things I missed and in the end it will all play out very differently. I don’t have a time machine.

So, what now? How do you live knowing what’s ahead?

First, don’t feel bad about the end of modern civilization. It’s been a disaster for the planet and for most of humanity. It was not sustainable to begin with and was always destined to end. Yes, we’ve achieved material wealth and longer lifespans in secure societies, like animals in a zoo, where survival needs are met, but it hasn’t brought true happiness, because it’s not how we’re meant to live.

Instead, you should feel a sense of relief, the human zoo is collapsing, and we can finally be freed from our cages, and begin our journey back to our origins and to reality.

Second, while you could die at any moment for countless reasons, you probably don’t dwell on that thought too much. In a way, this is no different. So, don’t let it bring you down. Sometimes it’s tough, and it’s easy to bury your head in the sand, but understanding what’s coming has its upsides.

Clarity replaces confusion. Most people today are deeply confused about what’s happening in the world, either blaming others or clinging to solutions that will ultimately fail, with wasted efforts leading to disappointment. With this awareness, compassion replaces blame and guilt, giving you a deeper sense of connection and purpose in a world that’s rapidly changing.

This also brings a shift in priorities. You’ll find yourself less consumed by distractions and more focused on what really matters: nature, health, family, and community. Things that don’t matter, like jobs, status, gadgets, and a big bank account, will become largely irrelevant, as they should. You might even decide to quit your job if you have the option. It’s a chance to free your mind and, in a way, liberate yourself from this human zoo we’ve created.

Back to that first question, but let’s change it a bit:

If you knew there was a 99% chance the world as you know it would end before 2050, would you change anything about your life today?

I bet you would. If not, that’s fine too.

Does it make sense to waste our precious time on this planet in jobs we don’t like, jobs that actually contribute to the problem? Does it make sense to save for retirement when that’s increasingly unlikely to happen?

Don’t wait for the government to tell you when it’s time. Live your life and take action now.

If you have the means, consider quitting your job and cashing out next year to join forces with others in preparing for what's ahead. What does that look like? It means building a community that’s self-sufficient in food, water, and basic needs. It will look different for everyone. I might write a more detailed article on this later.

If you’re right, you’ll have spent your life with purpose, more free time, and the freedom to live on your own terms, while potentially improving your chances of survival.

If you’re wrong, and civilization somehow keeps limping along, you’ll still be alive, with a fresh perspective and a life lived differently. You can always start over.

Let’s imagine an ant colony in an isolated environment, perhaps the size of a bedroom. Let’s apply the following assumptions:

1. There’s no escape from the isolated environment.

2. There’s enough ambient moisture (water) and sufficient oxygen in the environment for survival.

3. There are no predators or competing species.

4. There are some plants that produce a total of 1000 mg of food (energy) per day.

5. There’s a 1 kg pile of sugar in the middle of the room.

We introduce 10 worker ants and 1 queen to the environment. We shall call this ant colony Antropolis: starting population, 11.

Do you think the ants will eat the sugar or leave it untouched?

I think we all know the answer to that. Of course they’re going to eat the sugar, why wouldn’t they? They are programmed to do it. It’s irresistible. It’s going to be a bonanza!

With no checks on their population growth, the ant population will double every 8 days, leading to a population of;

• 22 ants at day 8

• 44 ants at day 16

• 350 ants at day 40

• 5,600 ants at day 72

• 11,200 ants at day 80

It would look like this:

On day 80, the 1 kg pile of sugar is shrinking faster and faster as a growing number of ants consume it. But there’s still almost half of the sugar pile left, so nobody is worried or paying attention.

With a colony of 11,200 ants, they are now consuming 3.3% of the original pile of sugar every day.

Maybe they can keep growing for another 80 days?

“We can grow forever!” says Antlon Musk, the loudest ant of them all, who claims he can create food (energy) from nothing.

That’s because Antlon doesn’t understand biophysical limits and thermodynamics, where the First Law states: “Energy cannot be created or destroyed in an isolated system. It can only be transformed from one form to another or transferred between systems.”

On day 100, we come back to check, and the ant colony has collapsed!

What happened? This isn’t some big secret; it’s just math. The long-term sustainable carrying capacity (the red line) of the environment was 333 ants, supported by the plants (regenerative resources) providing 1000 mg of energy per day (3 mg per ant / day).

But the ants fell into the trap and ate the sugar, a finite resource, causing their population to grow exponentially. They overshot their carrying capacity on day 40.

By day 80, they were on the brink. After that, they ran out of sugar in just 10 days (one generation) by day 90. Their population peaked at around 22,000.

When the sugar ran out at day 90, most of the ants starved to death within a few days.

The ants even devoured the leaves and seeds of the plants, causing them to die as well, further reducing the long-term carrying capacity of their environment.

In the end, the ants resorted to eating each other in desperation when food was no longer available.

What a terrible outcome, and it all happened so fast.

What if they had stopped growing when they noticed only half the sugar was left? They would have lasted a bit longer, an extra seven days, delaying the collapse to day 97.

If you’re an ant expert and think my simulation is wrong because of doubling time, how much energy ants require, or some other ant related detail, you missed the entire point.

If that doesn’t ring any alarm bells, let me show you a few graphs.

The human population over the past 2,000 years:

Notice how since the early 18th century our growth rate increased and really took off in the 1950’s, kind of like the ants of Antropolis.

How? Did we also discover a large pile of sugar (energy)?

We sure did! Fossil fuels i.e. oil, coal and natural gas are energy. They allowed us to rapidly plunder the Earth’s resources and grow our population. And they are finite resources, just like that large pile of sugar.

We’ve been living in the carbon pulse, and it’s about to peak.

We’ve already burned through about half of the world’s known fossil fuel reserves, and most of the easy-to-reach, cheap stuff is gone.

Remember when we checked on the ants on day 80? They still had almost half their sugar pile left but only 10 days (1 generation) of consumption remaining. Even if they had stopped growing, they would have lasted just an extra 7 days.

Don’t worry, our situation is not as dire as that of Antropolis, yet. At least not in terms of food. We could still change our entire way of life and have a better outcome than they did.

I know what some of you are thinking: “This guy is so dumb, we have green energy!”

Let me remind you: nuclear, hydro, wind, and solar energy all require fossil fuels and raw materials to build, maintain, and replace infrastructure. In other words, they are still dependent on fossil fuels and finite materials. Biomass, while renewable without human input or fossil fuels, provides only a limited amount of energy per year, constrained by natural forces.

And don’t forget, we also need a lot of fossil fuels to feed our current population, for fetilizers, planting, harvesting, transportation etc.

But it’s actually worse than that. This is no longer just about running out of energy. If that were our only problem, I’d be relieved, although I think all this excess energy has made our culture and society insane.

Let’s review the Antropolis assumptions and contrast with our situation:

1. There’s no escape from the isolated environment

   1. The same applies to us. We can’t escape and survive outside Earth.

2. There’s enough ambient moisture (water) and sufficient oxygen in the environment for survival.

   1. For now there’s enough oxygen and water. We’re good.

3. There are no predators or competing species

   1. We’re at the top of the food chain, with no predators or competitors to seriously worry about, except viruses and our fellow humans.

4. There are some plants that produce a total of 1000 mg of food (energy) per day

   1. This would be our biosphere. It created us. Without it, we wouldn’t exist. It provides the food, water, shelter and air that we need, for free. This represents the long-term sustainable carrying capacity. If you’re religious, think of the biosphere as our actual god, not that bearded white guy in a robe. The biosphere is quite literally our creator.

5. There’s a 1 kg pile of sugar (energy) in the middle of the room

   1. This represent various resources, most of them finite on human time scales;

      1. Fossil fuels: Take millions of years to form but are depleting in centuries.

      2. Topsoil: Takes 500–1,000 years per inch to form. We are depleting it 10–100 times faster than it can regenerate.

      3. Aquifers and groundwater: Dependent on water cycles, but in many places, we’re depleting these sources 100–200 times faster than they can replenish.

      4. Materials and minerals: Forests, iron, copper, lithium, sand, to name a few. Some regenerate faster than others, but there are limits and we’re hitting the limits at lightning speed.

Our overshoot is so extreme that it has led to several existential threats to us and life on this planet. These include global warming (or climate change), ocean acidification, and even the destruction of our creator: the biosphere1.

So, what do you think we should do? What would be the smart thing to do?

Should we:

• Focus only on climate change, at the cost of the environment, and keep searching for more energy to prolong this unsustainable growth for maybe a few decades?

• Face reality, stop the nonsense, and drastically reduce our consumption of energy and materials as quickly as possible?

I think most of you would choose option 2. Of course it’s much more complicated than that.

Unfortunately, it’s unlikely to happen voluntarily. But one way or another, it will happen, because nature doesn’t negotiate.

“It ain’t what you don’t know that gets you into trouble. It’s what you know for sure that just ain’t so.“ – Mark Twain

I didn’t set out to be an alarmist or a pessimist. But when I started reading about global warming, energy, resource depletion, biodiversity loss, and beyond, the world I thought I understood began to unravel. The deeper I went, the clearer it became: this isn’t just a collection of isolated issues; it’s an entire system falling apart at every level.

At first, I tried to disprove what I was uncovering, thinking I might have fallen for a conspiracy theory. I tried to debunk all the books and articles that made me uncomfortable. I tried to find evidence that we could avoid this crisis. Surely, there must be a plan and some viable solutions. But under scrutiny, most plans turned out to be wishful thinking, and the solutions proved to be surface-level fixes aimed at extending our unsustainable lifestyles rather than addressing their core contradictions. Many aren’t even viable given the time constraints, energy, and materials they would require.

The more I learned, the more questions surfaced, and the more unsettling the answers became. The things I once took for granted, such as progress, technology, the promise of a better future, started to seem like a façade, propped up by temporary abundance and a collective denial of our ecological limits.

The world no longer made any sense.

My journey started in economics, that’s what I studied at university (B.Sc. and M.Sc.) and, let’s be honest, most of us are obsessed with money. The most important thing to understand about our current economic system is that it has a growth imperative. It’s either grow or die, thanks to how money, debt, and interest work, and how our societies are structured.

This raised two big questions:

1. Can we keep growing forever?

2. What drives our economic growth in the first place?

With our current system, for the economy to keep growing, we need a growing population consuming roughly the same every year, or a lower number of people consuming more per capita. The bottom line is that overall consumption must grow. To fuel that consumption, we need a lot of materials (resources), and a lot of energy that’s cheap, abundant, and constantly increasing. Without cheap energy and abundant resources, economic growth would grind to a halt, businesses would go bust, unemployment would rise, and the economic system would implode.

A closer look at energy and climate

Because energy is so fundamental to economic growth, I felt it was important to dive deeper into the topic, and climate change stood out to me as the biggest threat to humanity and a massive disruptor of our growth, so I wanted to understand what we’re truly up against. At the same time, I thought we were in the middle of a green transition aimed at avoiding the worst impacts of this crisis, so I wanted to understand what that transition really involves.

Studying the science behind climate change and reading the latest scientific papers was when I realized that the situation is much worse than I had thought. It’s far worse than what you’ll read on most news websites or hear on TV. Wet bulb temperatures, food shortages, water scarcity, mass migrations, the civil unrest that would follow, it terrified me. But the real horror lies in the tipping points and feedback loops. You can read my summary of the science in this article.

Studying energy unraveled another blind spot. Fossil fuels aren’t just our primary energy source, they’re the foundation of modern civilization. They’re not only fuels for transportation, heating, and electricity. Everything from steel, cement, plastics, and fertilizers depends on them. Fossil fuels power the machines that build our cities, the ships and trucks that move goods, and the farms that feed billions. They also power the entire green transition, every bit of mining and transportation is run on and subsidized by cheap fossil fuels.

With the declining Energy Return on Investment (EROI), this foundation is eroding much faster than most realize. As fossil fuels become more energy-intensive to extract, the cost of everything will rise, and eventually it will halt everything, including our so-called transition, far sooner than we’re prepared for.

But we have solutions to climate change, don’t we?

Reading the IEA1 and IPCC2 energy transition reports, the plan goes something like this:

• electrify transportation (EV’s)

• use blue/green hydrogen for parts that are difficult to electrify (such as heavy industry, long-haul transportation i.e. trucks, ships and planes)

• use carbon capture to remove CO2

• rely on renewable energy and energy storage to power our civilization.

Sounds like a plan.

Needless to say, I had some serious concerns about how realistic this actually is, and since we’re betting our very existence on it, I felt I needed to dig deeper to understand it to put my mind at ease, because clearly, climate change is accelerating, and we don’t have an endless amount of time to make this work.

What about nuclear?

Not really part of the official plan, but worth reviewing because I know someone will bring it up.

Nuclear seems like a clean, efficient alternative, but it’s not that simple. It requires vast amounts of water for cooling, making it vulnerable to water availability, extreme weather events and rising sea levels. We would need thousands of new reactors to meet global energy needs, but building and maintaining them requires a lot of time and resources. Uranium is a finite resource, meaning we can’t rely on nuclear forever.

Perhaps most importantly, if, for some reason, nuclear plants are abandoned, it becomes a ticking time bomb. Cooling systems fail, radioactive waste is left unmanaged, and contamination risks soar.

Nuclear is not a straightforward solution and it is a risky bet that we will be around to decommission them safely.

Do we have the materials and minerals to build out the green transition?

Nobody really knows, and to be fair, how could we possibly know. The Earth is massive, and there’s no clear answer on exactly how many EV’s, solar panels, wind turbines, or energy storage systems we’ll need in the future. But we will definitely need a lot of copper, lithium, cobalt, nickel, manganese, graphite, rare earth elements, aluminum, silicon, iridium, zinc, steel and cement. Do we have enough of the materials?

This report says we do, this report says we don’t. I guess there’s a lot of uncertainty.

What is clear from both reports is that this is a long shot. It would require ramping up mining for all key minerals very quickly and in some cases by up to 40 times what we’re extracting today. And remember, we always start with the easy stuff, so it’s only going to get harder, more energy-intensive, and more expensive.

Mining, refining, and building all this green infrastructure depends entirely on fossil fuels, which, as mentioned earlier, are becoming harder and more expensive to extract due to declining EROI. Fossil fuels aren’t just needed for the first wave; they’re needed for maintaining and replacing everything.

EVs, wind turbines, and solar panels wear out in decades, requiring extensive spare parts and eventually complete replacement. We might scrape together enough for round one, but round two? Not happening. Declining EROI will choke the system.

Executing this plan would also require a global effort, and that means politics, the global economy, supply chains, and our climate system would need to remain stable. We’re in a race against time, and politically, things aren’t looking great.

But let’s not give up hope yet. Let’s look at some of the solutions.

Blue and green hydrogen – for trucks, aviation, shipping and industry

I don’t think most people really know what hydrogen is (I didn’t), so let’s start there. Hydrogen is a gas that can store and transport energy, but we still have to create the energy from heat or electricity. Think of hydrogen as a battery in gas form.

Today, 99% of hydrogen is created from fossil fuels (natural gas) through a process called steam methane reforming (SMR), this is fairly cheap to do but creates a lot of CO2. If that CO2 is stored i.e. carbon capture and storage (CCS), we call it blue hydrogen. Where do we store the CO2? In underground geological formations, such as depleted oil and gas fields, and deep saline aquifers.

Another method, called electrolysis, splits water (H2O) into hydrogen and oxygen using electricity. If that electricity comes from renewables, we call it green hydrogen. This is expensive and energy intensive. Only 1% of hydrogen today is green. I guess it’s not very profitable.

Then there are some serious challenges with hydrogen. It’s so light, that it can leak out of tanks, and storing it requires either high-pressure tanks or cooling it to super low temperatures, which takes a lot of energy. Sounds very sustainable.

Also, the process of creating hydrogen itself isn’t very energy-efficient. To make 1 kg of hydrogen, requires around 50 kWh of energy. Enough to power a home for a few days. But that 1 kg of hydrogen only contains about 33 kWh of usable energy. We lose 30-40% of the energy in the conversion process.

According to the IEA, by 2050, we need close to 400 million tons of hydrogen per year to replace fossil fuels in the industries and heavy transport that can’t be electrified. That’s a massive increase from what we produce today, and scaling up would require a huge increase in renewable energy capacity just to make green hydrogen. Right now, we’re nowhere near close to making that much blue and green hydrogen.

“Hydrogen production reached 97 Mt in 2023, of which less than 1% was low-emissions.”

So, we produced 1 million tons of blue and green hydrogen in 2023, and we need 400 million tons of it by 2050. It should be no surprise that a lot of these blue and green hydrogen plans are being abandoned by energy companies and governments.

And what about carbon capture?

The IPCC is pinning their hopes on direct air capture (DAC) and bioenergy with carbon capture and storage (BECCS). Let’s take a closer look at both.

A single DAC machine captures 1,000 to 4,000 tons of CO2 per year, while we’re emitting 40 000 000 000 tons annually. Even if we built millions of these machines, they wouldn’t make much of a dent and they obviously wouldn’t stop climate change. With over 2.5 trillion tons of excess CO2 already in the atmosphere, relying on DAC for a meaningful impact on climate change is ridiculous.

And DAC doesn’t run on air, they need a huge amount of energy. The machines are built using fossil fuel-powered equipment and require metals, rare earth elements, and chemicals. So scaling up would hit resource limits fast. Then there’s the cost of storing the captured CO2, which ranges from $100–$600 per ton. And where would we store it? We’re still working out those details.

BECCS works like this. Basically we grow plants (they sequester CO2) and burn them for fuel (bioenergy), but we capture the emissions when we burn the biomass and store the CO2…somewhere to be determined.

The IPCC says there’s a potential to sequester 11 gigatons of CO2 per year by 2050 with BECCS. Reminder that we have already emitted 2500 gigatons of CO2.

From IPCC:

“The climate change mitigation potential for bioenergy and BECCS is large (up to 11 GtCO2 yr–1); however, the effects of bioenergy production on land degradation, food insecurity, water scarcity, greenhouse gas (GHG) emissions, and other environmental goals are scale- and context-specific (high confidence). These effects depend on the scale of deployment, initial land use, land type, bioenergy feedstock, initial carbon stocks, climatic region and management regime (high confidence). Large areas of monoculture bioenergy crops that displace other land uses can result in land competition, with adverse effects for food production, food consumption, and thus food security, as well as adverse effects for land degradation, biodiversity, and water scarcity (medium confidence).”

In other words, we have a slim chance of potentially sequestering around 25% of our current annual emissions by 2050, if everything goes perfectly. Achieving this would come at a significant cost to our environment, including impacts on soil, food production, and water resources, with no guarantee it can be executed effectively. Even if it works, where we would store such massive amounts of CO2 remains unclear, and the risk of it leaking back into the atmosphere is a serious concern.

What a mess. I don’t see how we can avert climate change, and I certainly can’t see how we could keep growing while dealing with it.

It didn’t take long before I found myself reading Limits to Growth by the Club of Rome (1972) and Overshoot by William Catton Jr. (1980), among other related literature. These books completely shifted my perspective. I realized that the so-called solutions we’re chasing don’t even address the root cause of the problem, they’re just desperate attempts to keep our growth trajectory going, even though it's fundamentally unsustainable.

Our obsession with growth has caused all these issues and wrecked our planet. The last thing we should be doing is trying to maintain this growth.

What are we really trying to preserve, our lifestyles, or our future?

When I delved into biology and ecology, I started to understand how off track we are as a species. It introduced me to overshoot, the concept of consuming more than ecosystems can regenerate, which eventually leads to a die-off when resources run out. All species are bound to overshoot if the conditions allow. This isn’t some abstract theory; it’s a biological and ecological fact.

When you think in terms of millennia, it’s obvious that our current way of life is utterly unsustainable and hasn’t been vetted by evolution. Ecology teaches us that every species must live within the limits of its environment if it wants to survive on longer time scales, and humanity is no exception. The only way we could have lived for millions of years into the future as a species was how we did for most of our existence: in balance with nature. Everything since then has been a detour. We threw a big party and drove ourselves off the cliff.

Biodiversity loss, deforestation, and ecosystem collapse aren’t distant threats. They’re unfolding now. And it’s not about saving nature for its own sake, it’s about survival. We are part of these systems, not separate from them.

Studying history and anthropology, it's clear this isn’t the first time we’ve overshot our resources and collapsed. All civilizations made the same mistake, overusing their resources until they ran out, because civilization itself goes against the very ecological principles that have kept life on Earth in balance for millions of years. But this time, the stakes are way higher, and there’s no new frontier to escape to.

Studying paleoclimatology and extinction events made it even clearer how utterly hopeless our situation is. Yes, Earth has recovered from catastrophic events in the past, but not quickly, and never while supporting civilizations that rely on stability like ours. Once you understand how fragile Earth's systems are, it’s like watching a slow-motion car crash you’re powerless to stop. We’re living through the fastest mass extinction event in history, and it’s entirely caused by us.

Collapse is here, whether we’re ready for it or not.

And most people are dead asleep. We’re arguing over trivialities while the foundations of our existence crumble. People stress over minor inconveniences, oblivious to the cascading crises around them. It’s surreal.

It’s a lot to take in. The systems we depend on are failing, and the solutions we cling to are blind to energy, materials, and ecology. And the way we’re wired, dopamine-driven, short-term focused, makes meaningful change almost impossible without external forces forcing our hand.

Once you see it, you can’t unsee it. We’re hurtling toward what may be the ugliest and most devastating chapter in human history. Accepting this is not easy, but it’s inevitable once you understand the full scope of our predicament. The discomfort lies in realizing that there are no real solutions to this crisis, only outcomes.

Some have been predicting collapse for decades, yet, we’re still here. But life is not the same is it? Collapse has been going on for quite some time, I just hadn’t realized it.

If there’s any good news it’s that we likely won’t need to build out all that renewable energy infrastructure, EV’s, and so on, because collapse is already underway, and our population is set to decline. We’ll keep building until we can’t, and then we’ll be left to cope with what we’ve built. This may ease some of the pressure on Earth’s systems and the climate, unless, of course, we manage to nuke ourselves, trigger abrupt climate change, or collapse the biosphere before it can begin to recover.

I believe the reason so few are aware of these realities is that it takes real effort. Not only is it about reading a lot, it’s also about analyzing the solutions from a systems perspective, looking at how all the pieces fit together and questioning their long-term viability. It means stepping beyond the narrow confines of our own experiences, challenging deeply held assumptions, and considering the far-reaching, interconnected impacts of every decision. Even among scientists, many stay focused on their specialties and never broaden their view to see the bigger picture.

I’ve recommended articles and books to friends that could open their eyes to these realities. But the usual response is some variation of, “I don’t have time to read” or “It’s too depressing”. And that’s okay. Most people avoid this kind of knowledge because it threatens their sense of security. But occasionally, someone takes the plunge. They confront the uncomfortable truths, and when they do, it’s transformative. It’s as if they’ve unlocked a new way of seeing the world and that is when real change can start to happen.

That’s why I write these articles, it forces me to dig through the information in those reports, dive into unfamiliar fields, and engage with others who are willing to do the same. I’m not here to depress anyone. I just want to understand what’s happening, keep learning, and figure out how to navigate what’s coming. It’s not about optimism or pessimism. It’s about facing reality, however bleak, and trying to make sense of it all.

I’m not an expert. I’d love to be wrong about all of this. There’s a lot I don’t know, and even more I don’t know I don’t know.

My first thoughts are this: a declining population and shrinking consumption could be a blessing, if we actually plan for it and have a complete system change. If we don’t plan for it, it will be another disaster.

If you look at the chart below, all those lines need to come down. But since we're too delusional, stubborn, and ignorant to fix this voluntarily, when our population declines, the rest might follow. It’s probably too slow to save the planet, but it's something to think about.

Civilizations have always collapsed due to overshoot. They overuse essential resources like water, farmland, and forests, until they have nothing left to sustain them. Even relatively small climate shifts, such as droughts or cooling periods, were enough to bring empires down, because they disrupted water and food systems.

When the food and water are gone, it’s game over. That’s really all it takes.

“As a historian, you have to be conscious of the fact that every civilization that has ever existed has ultimately collapsed.”

-Henry Kissinger – Washington, October 6, 1974 (source)

Previously, when a civilization declined or collapsed, the population usually took a big hit, but not always. Some collapses, like the Mayans and Rapa Nui, experienced massive die-offs where people starved, died from disease, and killed each other. But the Romans were more of a slow decline where people shifted to rural living, because;

1. they had the skills to do it – most people today do not

2. that was still possible with a stable climate – we don’t have a stable climate anymore

Today, we are clearly in the midst of civilizational decline, at the same time as we face the fastest ever mass extinction event causing climate havoc, on an already heavily degraded planet from environmental destruction and pollution. This is a result of our overshoot from overpopulation and overconsumption.

Things actually started falling apart centuries ago for many western countries, but we managed to delay the inevitable by climbing even higher, ensuring a more catastrophic fall. The reason industrial civilization lasted this long is because we expanded our unsustainable practices around the world, by colonizing and stealing lands, while hitting the geological lottery with massive fossil fuel reserves: coal, oil, and natural gas.

We burned through those winnings in just a few generations, pushing food production, resource extraction, and population growth to levels never seen before, driving us deeper into overshoot.

However, compared to previous collapses, our civilization seems to be doing something different. Populations are already starting to decline in developed nations, but it’s not because we’re running out of food or water. In fact, people are fatter than ever, spending most of their lives trying to lose weight. Birth rates are actually dropping everywhere, with developed countries leading the decline, but even high-birth-rate countries have been declining for a long time.

There’s no reason to believe this trend will reverse. Despite pathetic government attempts to boost fertility rates, that’s simply one thing they can’t control (or maybe they will try to). I will get back to why fertility rates are dropping later in this article.

The fertility rate is the average number of children a woman has in her lifetime. A rate of 2.1 is called the replacement rate, meaning it’s enough to keep a steady population, accounting for child mortality. If the fertility rate drops below 2.1, the population starts to shrink over time, if it’s above 2.1, the population grows.

What happens if the fertility rate drops to 1? That means the population would be halved each generation. In just 50-60 years, the population could shrink by around 75%. That’s a pretty big deal.

We’ve never seen a population bust of this scale or speed in modern history, and the economic disruption ahead will be unlike anything we've experienced. So, what's the solution? More babies? That’s what a demographer or economist might suggest, but we all know it’s way more complicated than that. This is just one problem, and in fact, a shrinking population would help us tackle much bigger, existential issues.

Population trends and the reality we live in

South Korea is very interesting. It has a population of 51.6 million and a fertility rate of 0.73. This is the lowest fertility rate in the world.

Here are the forecasts up to the year 2050:

Two things to note here:

1. The forecast assumes fertility rates will recover back to 1.03 by 2050, which, while an improvement, is still well below replacement level. But the reality is that the fertility rate was 0.73 in 2024. Perhaps they are counting on immigration.

2. The model projects a median age of 56.7 by 2050, assuming people will continue to live long and healthy lives. This completely overlooks the realities of declining health, resource shortages, and the economic crisis that will hit older populations especially hard.

Even if the optimistic scenario holds, the population is expected to shrink to 45 million with a median age of 56.7. That’s already an unsustainable situation.

And this trend isn’t unique to South Korea. Nearly every country has already hit or is approaching the peak of population growth, and many are already in decline.

China is in big trouble, and that’s bad news for the global economy (good news for the planet). A lot of what we consume, from electronics to clothing to industrial goods, comes from China. If their economy crumbles, it will ripple through global supply chains, disrupt production and drive up prices.

Leaders are trying to save their economies by bringing in more immigrants, but that’s just a temporary fix, and there’s a lot of pushback against it. The reality is, immigration isn’t going to solve the bigger issues at play and in many cases, it’s making societies even more polarized.

By the way, I’m not against immigration, I’m an immigrant myself.

World population projections

The world population is currently around 8.2 billion and is projected to peak at about 10 billion by 2080, according to the average model. Typically it looks something like this:

Okay, great, that’s a lot of humans.

Below is a graph showing 70 year trends in fertility rates, and the global average.

This is 4 year old data, but the key takeaway is that fertility rates are declining in all countries, and globally we are barely above replacement rate (2.25 in 2024). Most developed countries have been under 2.1 for decades.

In my opinion, all of the official forecasts are bullshit. The people making these forecasts have fallen into the trap of reductionist thinking, which ignores how everything is interconnected and oversimplifies complex systems. To be fair, they’re working with unknowns that are nearly impossible to predict, but that doesn’t excuse their lack of nuance.

Avoiding the trap of reductionist thinking

The solutions that our experts and leaders push are more about wishful thinking than actual reality. For example, proposed solutions to climate change assume that the entire issue exists in a vacuum and everything else in our societies will just carry on as usual. They ignore the economic and geopolitical realities, as well as the accelerating depletion of critical resources and global warming disruption, assuming everything will stay exactly the same up until 2050, allowing them to execute their net-zero plans without disruption.

But we all know that’s nonsense, and it’s the kind of thinking that leads to ridiculous ideas like green growth, deploying 500 000 drones to counteract melting ice sheets, and building a massive wall to hold back the Antarctic glaciers.

Economists are some of the worst offenders when it comes to reductionist thinking. Much of mainstream economic theory is built on the assumption that energy, resources, and productivity will always be abundant, interchangeable, and available at a reasonable price. This framework ignores physical limits, treating resources as infinite and assumes endless population growth and consumption can continue indefinitely. It’s wishful thinking disguised as theory.

Unfortunately most leaders blindly follow these misguided ideas.

Take for example William Nordhaus1, who won the Nobel Prize in 2018 for his work on the economic impacts of climate change. His conclusions are laughable. Nordhaus argued that a 6°C rise in global temperatures would only reduce global GDP by about 8.5%. This is one of the most absurd things I’ve ever heard. At 6°C, we’re all pretty much dead. There is no economy.

Why did he come to such a conclusion? It’s all because of reductionist thinking. His model completely overlooks the chain reactions that would destroy agriculture, energy systems, supply chains, and pretty much everything else. It assumes the economy keeps chugging along while ecosystems collapse, food production tanks, and billions of people can’t live where they are. In reality, these shocks wouldn’t just shrink the economy, they’d tear society apart.

Long range forecasts

Most projections conveniently stop at 2100, often assuming higher fertility rates than the data suggests and showing a peak around 10 billion. But they almost never show what happens after that.

This study2 attempted to make some long range forecasts:

The lines reflect different fertility rate scenarios. We’re currently tracking the green line at 2.25, but it’s trending downward, and I suspect we would soon follow the red (1.75) or purple lines (1.5) on a global level if no other issues existed.

Taking an even longer perspective on population dynamics, this study showed what population overshoot could look like if current fertility trends continue:

Quite a spectacular fall. Reality could be ever worse.

Why fertility rates are declining

There are some obvious reasons, and some far more unsettling ones.

Ask young people today if they want kids, and many will say no. They don’t want kids. They can’t afford kids. They can’t get a job. They can’t even afford their own lives. They’re anxious about the future. For many, the idea of bringing a child into an increasingly uncertain world feels overwhelming and impractical. That’s unlikely to change as things get even worse.

Then there are those who want children but can’t have them. Decades of exposure to plastics, chemicals, and endocrine-disrupting substances have infiltrated our bodies, leading to a significant decline in fertility, not just in humans but other species too. It’s a quiet but brutal consequence of modern life, something we don’t notice much but are definitely feeling more and more.

If this trend continues, it’s actually within the realm of possibility that we (and other species) could become infertile within a few decades due to the plastics, chemicals, and other pollutants that have infiltrated our bodies. That of course means complete extinction.

But that’s only fertility. We will likely see a rapid increase in deaths too when food, water and livable climate become more scarce. So those projections regarding average life-spans are most certainly going to be off by quite a lot and our population could be dramatically lower in just a few decades.

What does all of this mean?

In isolation, it means economic contraction, which would have all sorts of consequences for society and could bring the entire system down. But we can't ignore the other crises piling up i.e. global warming, an impending energy crunch, escalating geopolitical tensions, biodiversity loss, and resource depletion (topsoil, fresh water, forest cover, metals, minerals, fossil fuels etc.).

But let’s indulge in some reductionist thinking for a moment.

Imagine a country with 10 million working-age people supporting 2.5 million retirees. That works. Now, imagine if the country only had 4 million working-age people and 8 million retirees. The system would likely collapse, and society would start to unravel. Most of our current pension systems are based on the idea that the workforce will keep growing to support an ever-expanding pool of retirees. A ponzi scheme that demands growth to function.

When the number of workers shrinks and the number of retirees rises, the adjustment will be tough. Pensions will have to be cut, retirement age pushed higher, and contributions will need to increase. People won’t like that, especially if they’ve been sold the fantasy of endless growth. Older generations will vote for whoever promises to keep pensions flowing, while younger generations will vote for the opposite.

Now, imagine a city of 10,000 people shrinking to 5,000. Services would shrink. Schools, healthcare, and businesses would close or scale back, adjusting to the smaller population. Government revenue would plummet, and infrastructure would fall into disrepair. Society would slowly start to disintegrate.

Apple won’t be selling as many iPhones, iPads, and MacBooks when the population shrinks, even if they roll out tons of robots. The same goes for every business. That means the stock market will either correct or implode, because it’s still pricing in growing future cash flows and consumption.

Of course, companies aren’t just going to sit back and take the hit. They’ll raise prices to maintain revenue and profit margins as long as they can. If their costs rise due to resource scarcity or climate change impacts, they’ll still add their usual 50% margin on top and pass it on. That’s what they’re designed to do, maximize shareholder value. To be honest, they really have no choice. It's either that, or go out of business. Take your pick.

But eventually, people will be priced out, and demand for non-essential goods will vanish. So even in a scenario where stocks keep rising with inflation, eventually the music stops, and it all comes crashing down.

Is this good news?

Like I said at the beginning, we need to get ALL of the lines down and we need to do it fast.

Our population will decline, whether we like it or not. For that to be a good thing, we need a complete system change. This is not about making small adjustments to the current system. That won’t cut it. I’m talking about radical transformation of society, one where we rethink everything from our economic models to our relationship with nature.

Fewer people would mean less consumption overall, which would cut down emissions and ease the pressure on climate change and slow down environmental damage. With less demand for energy, metals, and raw materials, we’d have fewer mines, factories, and supply chains polluting the land, air, and water.

This could delay the worst impacts from climate change, opening the door to regenerative practices, where we focus on healing and restoring ecosystems instead of exploiting them. If we shift away from extracting resources and move toward regenerative farming, we could help restore the land, trap carbon, and build stronger, more resilient communities.

Do I think that’s likely to happen? No. But it’s possible, so I can’t completely rule it out. I’d put the chances at under 1%.

If we keep ignoring the coming population bust, or avoid discussing it openly, then yes, it will be a disaster. But it’s going to happen either way. Just like climate change, the trends are already set in motion. So why not start preparing for it?

At first glance, it seems we’re completely doomed. But if you look closer, you’ll realize that we are indeed doomed as a civilization, but maybe we’re not finished as a species. Why do I say that? Because there’s a slim chance for that red line to start bending in the coming decades and centuries, potentially opening a narrow window for future humans, and other species, to move into the next phase of the Anthropocene.

How can we bend?

It’s time we start being brutally honest about where we’re at and where we’re headed.

Since the 1970s, scientists have been sounding the alarm about a fundamental truth: infinite growth on a finite planet is impossible12. Ignoring this reality has brought us to the edge, with disastrous consequences now unfolding across our societies, the biosphere, and the climate system.

The evidence is clear and staring us in the face. But even with all the evidence piling up, talking about decline is still off the table in most circles. People write it off as irrational pessimism.

The more obvious the crisis becomes, the less people seem able to imagine a different way of living. Instead of scaling back our unsustainable consumption, reducing energy demands, and focusing on conservation, we keep doubling down on growth as if that’s the only way forward.

Even the environmental movement has been hijacked by this growth delusion. There’s a push to massively expand renewable energy, not so we can live within our ecological limits, but to maintain our unsustainable high-consumption lifestyles.

We’re burning through precious and finite resources building millions3 of EV’s (14 million in 2023) to keep car culture alive. We’re covering landscapes with solar panels and wind turbines—made from plastic, steel, copper, concrete, aluminum and mined minerals—to maintain our energy-hungry lifestyles. Mining for some key materials would have to increase 40-fold to meet the demands of this so-called transition. These minerals are not evenly spread out across nations4, far from it, think about the geopolitical implications in the next 10-20 years. We don’t even have all the minerals to do round one5. None of this is grounded in ecological reality, it’s nowhere near sustainable, and it certainly won’t save us from the mess we’re in. I’m not saying don’t build any, but we need to stop pretending as if it’s going to save us.

If what I just said sounds crazy to you, I get it. There was a time when I would’ve dismissed anyone making these claims too. But maybe you should check out my article on the end of growth6, which is based on biophysical reality and why infinite growth is impossible.

Believing in endless growth isn’t rooted in facts or reality, it’s just a belief. It’s faith, based on the assumption that what’s been happening for the last 200-300 years will continue forever. This blind faith comes from the fact that, for the last century or two, human life has steadily improved, wealth has grown, standards of living have risen. But have you ever stopped to think about why that happened?

Political reality

When it comes to our overshoot crisis, denial is everywhere, not because the science is uncertain, but because the reality is too uncomfortable and inconvenient. Rather than face up to the severity of the crisis, many choose to label anyone who speaks bluntly about it as an alarmist or a doomer.

As far as I’m aware, not a single world leader is willing to face the harsh truth, but even worse, the general public is mostly not willing to accept the uncomfortable steps that would need to be taken. Instead, we're seeing people cling to fascist ideas and delusional fantasies that offer false hope, all to maintain their unsustainable lifestyles.

Think about it. If a world leader actually tried to implement the policies that are needed, they would be kicked out before they could even get started, and it’s not difficult to understand why. The only way to tackle this would be to slash consumption across the board, several industries would need to be effectively banned, completely tanking the economy. A nonstarter. It would lead to mass unemployment, riots on the streets and societal collapse. A terrible outcome. No politician will ever do that voluntarily.

But that’s not all, this is not a problem any one country can fix on its own. It has to be a global effort. Every country would need to be on the same page. Let’s be real, there is zero chance of that happening. Just look at the latest COP meetings, they’re basically proof that global consensus is a pipe dream.

And what do the people want? These were the most important issues for voters in the US, and let me tell you, it’s more or less the same in every other country. I don’t see this changing.

So we won’t solve this politically, there is no realistic path for that, and people would vote against it. Most likely, things will keep piling up, the disconnect from reality will get worse. We will keep doubling down on denial, distractions, and self-destruction. The superstructures built on endless growth and exploitation will keep pushing us further into chaos until they finally collapse under their own weight.

The only way forward is through collapse, where the illusions we hold on to are shattered, forcing us to face the harsh reality.

It’s already happening

If you've been paying attention, you’ve probably noticed things have been getting weird and worse for quite some time, and it’s happening fast now.

Brexit and Trump were the warning shots that the systems we’ve built aren’t working and are falling apart. The COVID-19 pandemic exposed how fragile our global supply chain really is, with shortages in many essential goods. Governments fumbled their responses and made decisions that left people questioning everything.

Politics have turned into a complete farce, with people more polarized and disillusioned than ever, not just in the US, but across the entire world. The UK can’t seem keep a prime minister in office longer than a year. France and Germany are stuck in a loop of political instability, constantly calling new elections as extremist parties rise and fight for control. COP meetings are a joke. Billionaires are building doomsday bunkers7. Israel is committing genocide in Gaza. Ukraine is caught in a war with no end in sight.

Our leaders and economies are chasing growth by piling on more debt while inflation continues to spiral. Growth won’t just stop, it’s headed for a cliff. Populations in developed countries are already shrinking, quite rapidly in Japan, South Korea, and China, leading to increased dependency ratios and decreased aggregate demand (consumption). This trend alone, would trigger a breakdown of the economic system within the next two to three decades, depending on the severity of the demographic decline.8.

On top of that, climate change is accelerating, with 2024 seeing record-breaking temperatures, failed crops, disastrous weather events, wildfires, and floods. FEMA's administrator declared that "a major disaster every two days is the new normal." But this isn't the new normal, it's a temporary blip on our way to even worse crises.

And that’s just the tip of the iceberg.

The division is getting worse, and collaboration between political parties and between nations has become impossible. There’s no going back to “normal”.

The cracks are everywhere. Things aren’t working.

Seriously, when was the last time we heard any good news?

The unraveling of industrial civilization

Some countries have already largely fallen apart, like Palestine, Yemen, Sudan, Cuba, Myanmar, Syria, and Venezuela. Others are teetering on the edge, like Pakistan, South Africa, Argentina, and Ukraine. Meanwhile, places like the US, UK, France, and Germany are clearly in economic decline, politically broken and experiencing riots.

So, it seems the party is over, and this civilization has an expiration date. The end of industrial civilization isn’t going to look like the ones you read about in history books, but there will be some familiar patterns in how society crumbles. All empires and civilizations have fallen, but this time, the stakes are much higher.

The climate is changing faster than anything Earth has seen since the worst mass extinctions, and our civilization's total dependence on technology and cheap energy only makes us more vulnerable. Add to that several nuclear-armed nations, armed to the teeth with advanced military tech, ready to fight over what’s left of the planet’s resources in the coming decades.

Why do I think this could bend the curve? There’s no reason to believe that emissions and deforestation would stop just because some countries fall apart. Most countries will definitely keep burning through their fossil fuel reserves, while countries without access to fossil fuels will likely burn more biomass, cutting down forests and releasing more CO₂. However, in the long run, as societies break down, populations decline, institutions fail, and overall consumption declines, emissions will drop significantly.

I won’t speculate too much about how things will unravel, because the decline won’t hit everyone equally or at the same time, and it will probably be a very long process. Several decades or a century. But I’ll say a few things.

Unlike past collapses, where people could fall back on smaller, self-sustaining systems, we’re living in a hyper-connected world, with global supply chains and fragile infrastructure, which leaves almost no room for adaptability. Back then, people knew how to grow food and take care of their basic needs. This time, we’re all specialized in our respective fields, and completely unprepared.

In my view, one of the biggest issues is the culture of individualism. We’ve been sold this idea that we can do everything on our own, that we’re somehow “self-sufficient”. But that couldn’t be further from the truth, and it’s a dangerous illusion and it’s built on the assumption that money can solve everything.

We’ve outsourced our basic needs to a global supply chain, thinking it’ll always keep running smoothly. When the systems we rely on crumble, people will panic. Water, food, and healthcare, things most take for granted, will be disrupted.

In addition to that, we’ve outsourced our memory and knowledge to the internet, assuming it’ll always be there when we need it. The internet will eventually go down, and it could happen quite suddenly in some places. People will be left helpless, scrambling for resources with no clue how to get by.

I hope the collapse unfolds slowly enough for people to learn the skills they’ll need. I don’t think most will act until it hits them personally.

Climate chaos – A bottleneck

As I’ve laid out in this article, we are in civilizational decline, and will experience a great simplification in the coming decades, driven by our full-blown overshoot9, and I believe that this simplification will ultimately bend the curve.

I also believe we’re guaranteed to pass a few tipping points, as I laid out in my article on climate change10, and this will most likely bring us up to 3-5°C eventually. And it seems like 77% of climate experts at the IPCC believe we will see a rise of at least 2.5°C by the end of this century11, probably more.

At the Potsdam Institute for Climate Impact Research some researches believe we will collapse before reaching 3°C, as Stefan Rahmstorf reveals in this interview.

Paleocene-Eocene Thermal Maximum (PETM)

Earth has been through five major mass extinction events and several rapid warming periods, and most of them had one thing in common: a huge amount of CO₂ and other greenhouse gases getting dumped into the atmosphere. How? From massive volcanic eruptions.

Then there’s another unlikely way it could happen. A species digging up millions of years worth of buried carbon and torching it, releasing an insane amount of CO₂ into the atmosphere.

Let’s go back to that first chart.

There are studies suggesting that a PETM-like scenario is the best-case outcome of our current trajectory of global warming12, so it’s worth digging into what that looked like.

PETM took place 56 million years and the scientific consensus is that it was triggered by massive volcanic activity in the North Atlantic, releasing a total of around 10,000 gigatons of CO₂ over several thousand years, with an average rate of 1.7-2.0 gigatons CO₂ per year13, much slower than our current pace. We don’t know if this was released at a steady pace, or in several large pulses.

The planet was ice free and the Drake Passage (Panama) was still open, meaning ocean currents flowed differently, impacting the climate. Average temperatures are believed to have increased by 5-8°C, with this warming period lasting for about 200,000 years, before returning back to previous levels.14.

Now let’s look at today. We’ve released 2,500 gigatons of CO₂ in total since the industrial revolution, only 25% of the PETM total. That is one massive carbon pulse. Our current pace is still around 40 gigatons of CO₂ per year, more than 15 times faster than PETM average.

How did life cope with the extreme warming during the PETM?

• Oceans: between 30-50% of key microscopic marine organisms went extinct due ocean acidification triggered. This caused disruption in marine ecosystems, especially in the deep ocean15

• Terrestrial animals seem to have mostly adapted. This study found that some mammals shrank by 30%16

• Plants: notable disruption in forest ecosystems, but no catastrophic extinctions. Plants migrated in response to changing climates, but overall, the diversity of plant life adapted1718

Despite a lot of research on the PETM, we still don’t have clear data on the extinction rates of terrestrial animals. That’s probably a good thing. It suggests that while some species may have struggled with the rapid warming, there were no massive die-offs like in the oceans. Instead, many species likely adapted or migrated in response to changing conditions.

A 30% reduction in size suggests a competitive advantage for smaller individuals, allowing them to survive and reproduce over time. What could that mean? Smaller creatures have lower metabolic rates and require less energy (food) to sustain themselves. For example, a mouse needs far less food than an elephant. When food is scarce, having a smaller appetite significantly increases your chances of survival.

Maybe that gives you some hope, depending on what your outlook was. Maybe in a few thousand years, humans will be hobbits, surrounded by the ruins of today’s world and making up stories about them.

So, what can we do?

We can do nothing. And by “nothing”, I don’t mean making no lifestyle changes at all, sitting around in despair, or partying like it’s the end of the world. I mean consuming less. You don’t need that trip to Japan. You don’t need that shiny new gadget. You don’t need to upgrade your car. It’s time to seriously think about decreasing our consumption. It doesn’t have to be extreme, all at once, but slowly.

At the same time, it could be good to start preparing a bit for the unraveling of industrial civilization. But not by hoarding food, water, and weapons and running off to some remote cabin. That’s a survivalist fantasy and at best it might buy you a few extra months, maybe a year. You would be an easy target. Having said that, it's good to have some emergency preparedness (1-week supply).

Preparation starts with facing reality. Accept that life is probably going to get harder, more expensive, with less energy, less stability, and the possibility of conflict.