Here’s Your 15 Minute Summary - A Potential Explanation For Current Events

Longer if you watch the videos, which I strongly suggest...

OK, here’s your 15 minute summary:

Our continued wealth and power is dependent on economic growth - and exponential increase in GDP. Recession is defined as slowing of growth, and depression is defined as stopping of growth or even negative growth - also known as contraction. Economic growth is a proxy for increase in use of energy resources.

The lion’s share of the energy we use comes from fossil fuels which are non-renewable and subject to depletion, and once used, they are in a non-usable form - Second Law of Thermodynamics, there. This use of fossil fuels also includes food production - fertilizers, processing, storage, transportation. There are hard limits here.

At current rates of consumption, coal is forecast to run out in roughly 100 years, natural gas in 40 years, oil in 30 years. But that’s at current rates of consumption, which is dependent on no increase in consumption. Humans require 2000 calories per day in food energy to continue to exist - and that’s existing without much physical exertion. An active soldier requires twice that - same for agricultural workers and workers in physical labor dependent jobs. And that’s food energy alone - no heating or cooling or transportation. There’s a per capita requirement for energy to sustain life

In exponential growth, there’s something known as the Rule of 70 - if you divide 70 by the percentage growth of some quantity, you get the time in years for the doubling of that quantity. So if our current population of 8 billion grows at 1% per year - which it appears to be doing - in 70 years the population will be 16 billion - and in another 70 years the population will be 32 billion. If energy consumption - which is what economic growth is dependent upon - grows at 1% per year, then it doubles in 70 years. For details on the Rule of 70, see this:

But at current rates of consumption, coal is forecast to run out in roughly 100 years, natural gas in 40 years, oil in 30 years. That assumes no growth in population or energy use. To just keep pace, with our current 1% growth, we’d need to find the equivalent amounts of coal, oil, and natural gas to equal current reserves. So we have a problem here, and it isn’t “climate change”, it’s exponential population growth driving depletion of nonrenewable dense energy resources in an exponential fashion.

Fifty years ago, when I was 16, I read the newly produced book, Limits to Growth. At the time it was very persuasive. I figured that we’d end up following the “Business As Usual” scenario, because that’s just what people constrained by quarterly earnings reports do. My family was by no means middle class, and so my information horizon was a lot different than that of the average 16-year-old. I also decided to forgo having children at that point, figuring that any grandchildren would face a very grim future. And as it turned out, we have pretty closely followed the “Business As Usual” scenario - with its consequences looming ahead.

and this:

and finally, this:

and a recent update:

OK, now I’ve set the stage with that preliminary material, I can get on to the meat of the thing - and that will wind up in just two more pages - this is for 15 minutes of reading, after all. I could teach a college course in this and put that PhD in physical/organic/computational chemistry to work - but I’ll forego that. Of course, if there’s a need for facts, figures, and background, I can supply it. Just try me...

As I mentioned before, at current rates of consumption, we’re set to be out of fossil fuels other than coal by 2060 or so. We could perhaps somehow double the amount of known reserves and push that date out to 2100 or so, but then we hit a brick wall - the end of mechanized agriculture and the end of industrial civilization. Full stop, period. Civilizational collapse and mass starvation, resource wars over food - not just oil. Exponential population growth - even at 1% per year - just brings those dates closer.

The problem is, at root, an unsustainable population, a population in overshoot. The solution is to decrease the population, and to limit growth in the remaining population to those limits set out by adopting truly regenerative agriculture - farming which turns a yearly solar energy budget into food and stays within that budget. Obviously, globalism is finished, and so is highly centralized energy-intensive governance - and server farms and bitcoin mining and the rest of that. It would be intensive localism. But the existing population has to be decreased to a sustainable level first. Here’s a bit about overshoot and carrying capacity:

And that’s the problem - how do you get people to commit mass suicide, worldwide - or at least dramatically reduce their life expectancy? And get people to sterilize themselves en masse, to put a cap on population growth - and do both of these before we hit the brick wall mentioned above?

A number of ways turn out to be possible: Suppose our annual flu epidemic is an entirely novel kind of flu, a flu that infects billions and causes great lethality - and can only be stopped with a vaccine - like no flu in history ever has been stopped... The vaccine manufacturers and providers demand and get full immunity for any bad effects their products may cause, because this is such a great emergency - after all, social and legacy media and governments tell the whole world in a coordinated manner that it is so. Of course, a social panic is generated, people can’t stop it, and many die - as they do for most flu epidemics, but this one is somehow different, or so we’re told. And calling something a name makes it so in real life - all five year olds know that. So a vaccine is miraculously found in quick order, not tested for very long for safety or effectiveness, because this is such a great emergency, and is spread out to the public, and various coercive means are used to ensure its uptake - social pressure, ostracism, isolation - both informal and through legal means, vaccine passports, requirements that the vaccine be taken before continuing employment, before going to school or college, before engaging in the activities one does ordinarily, such as going to the grocery store, to church, places where you meet other people... and your vaccination protects others, including Granny, not just yourself. Weaponized compassion is the rule of the day. A year down the road, it is revealed that the vaccinations accelerate cancer growth and lethality, cause sterility, cause medical syndromes which either kill outright or reduce life expectancy sharply. And they don’t stop infection with the terrible flu - which many seem to survive on their own - nor do they prevent its transmission. And the vaccinated find that they get sick with various flu variants and other diseases far more often and for longer, in some cases resulting in debility and death - as compared to the naturally recovered, who often go for years without a trace of any of the flu’s variants, and if they get ill, recovery is within a few days. And this is true no matter how many “booster shots” are taken, in fact, the more vaccine shots taken, the worse the outcome. 

If you take a cynical view of this, it appears that the main effects of the vaccines are premature (or short term) death, and sterility - precisely the effects which are needed to stop population growth and reduce population - and that helps solve the problem mentioned on the first page - exponential population growth driving depletion of nonrenewable dense energy resources in an exponential fashion. And there was a concerted worldwide push by all governments to get all of their people vaccinated - and this includes Russia and China. Countries like some in Africa that didn’t go along with the program had a change in leadership - one of them, Tanzania, had a leader who ridiculed the vaccine and the testing - and he ended up dead from “natural causes” and replaced by a more pliable and compliant leader. Some countries ended up with a 90% compliance rate, others a lot less, and for those countries, other solutions appear to have been applied.

Take, for example, Ukraine, which had a relatively low uptake rate. In 2022, a WEF member, Vladimir Putin invaded, and Volodymyr Zelensky, another WEF member, fought back with assistance from other countries run by WEF members. The chief effect on the Russian troops has been their slaughter - about 200,000 so far - and potentially the same for Ukraine. If the West had provided Ukraine with sufficient resources to win the war, it could have been wound up within six months of the original invasion, and a lot less dead on both sides - but despite the numerous pledges of aid, a lot of it never materialized and the war has continued on for nearly two years, with no end in sight. The war has been a success in terms of population reduction, though. The Gaza war looks like another exercise in population reduction, too. Israel “let down its guard” and Hamas found out and took full advantage. And the slaughter in Gaza is the result. In terms of warfighting, a disaster, in terms of population reduction, a success. Other wars could easily be set off, too, and populations shot to pieces - and if the actual intent is population reduction rather than stated war aims, they could be quite useful. And war-torn and mined farm fields tend to be a lot less productive leading to more death, by famine...

 I can’t fail to mention the transgender thing especially here in the US. It’s a social contagion for kids in school - if they make the mistake of pretending that they’re the other sex by saying something about it, they can be subjected by the public schools to drug therapies - especially puberty blockers, which will sterilize them for life. It’s either social justice or a mass sterilization campaign, or both, but the result is sterility - before any children are born - and for some, that’s a socially useful result.

As for who’s behind this, you can make some pretty good guesses, but anyone or any group, which has political power and money, and are aware of exponential population growth driving depletion of nonrenewable dense energy resources in an exponential fashion, is probably a good bet.