Great article, thank you.

Recently i was thinking about Thomas Malthus, Limits to Growth and The Zero-Sum Society.

And what I was reflecting on was that one thing they all have in common was the observation that economic growth all by itself solves a lot of human-centric problems that we otherwise have never figured out how to solve.

When growth slows or goes away, our systems have major shortcomings and that becomes suddenly exposed.

So, if you take a look at the departure that the 3rd movie 28yrs took moving away from the first two movies, the 4th movie felt like the same size step taken again from the 3rd. We are now untethered to anything that has ever happened in the real world or the lunatic world of #3. You just have to let the movie wash over you without trying to believe anything at all. Just surrender.

You cant even call it “unrealistic” or “unbelievable”, its just like dream logic nonsense.

Have you seen some of the other film adaptations? Or read the novels?

• All the Pretty Horses
• No Country for Old Men
• The Counselor
• Child of God

The movie is an adaptation of the book by Cormac McCarthy. The book won the Pulitzer and the James Tait Memorial Prize.

“Depression Porn without substance” is a funny way to characterize the movie.

I really enjoyed the first two movies. The story, the filming style, the music and everything came together in a kind of way that seemed real. I still think they are pretty good zombie apocalypse movies.

The third movie for me was less believable in every single element. Just slightly. But the whole movie took on a faint whiff of Wes Anderson’s eccentricity or some magic realism - from the island, to the the social structure, to the story, and on and on. Everything seemed unrealistic and uncanny. I guess none of that makes the movie a bad movie, but it was definitely an unequal sequel of the series.

A lot of people are still judging today’s leaders against the backdrop of an expired world: surplus energy, cheap materials, deep trust in institutions, and enough cooperation to negotiate trade-offs without everything turning existential. That period is over. The old playbook assumed there was slack in the system. Now there isn’t.

I’ve shared this same insight. A lot of people I speak to in person have not really been aware that growth is over globally, and are not considering what that *might mean * for the future.

People correctly see all these systems resetting and the way they assimilate the change is to layer a couple of cognitive biases on top of the analysis. For example, they believe the changes are reversible. Or they see the changes as bad but think some of the civilization goals from years ago are still possible. Or they think we can overcome a small bottleneck and get back to growth.

The old system has a mental inertia and there is a conservatism bias that kicks in when people are being confronted with new information that should challenge their beliefs. I think a lot of people are starting to build their lives on a foundation of sand.

I look back and think that there are a lot of problems we have right now that economic growth didn’t solve, prevent or reduce, and that even when we threw growth at those problems it was not the easy fix we wanted it to be…

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Netflix hasn’t had anything I’ve wanted to watch in years

If they start the first season of dozens of new shows and then cancel the run immediately, would that change your opinion?

I thought this was another interesting documentary on this channel.

The take away / nugget for me is that after exposing the schlock and cheese of all these jarhead sequels, the final chapter at 43m brings it all home and makes you really sit up and think about why he made this right now.

This study actually kind of shifts back and forth between a couple of ideas.

YIELD is the amount of crop per area of land. That’s the intensity/ efficiency / resources / technology getting the highest output on this amount of space.

PRODUCTION is the total output. That’s the YIELD times the AREA. Area can go up and down as a second major variable.

Farmers abandon land or change crops to grazing etc when the soil or water falls. So you can have great technology for getting the most corn yield per hectare, but the amount of viable hectares can be going down.

The facts and figures mingle these ideas together in the paper and make it hard to track what’s being said.

Original paper is here :

https://www.nature.com/articles/s41586-025-09085-w

Total food production is going down 4.4% per degree of warming (from today’s levels).

It’s confusing because they say corn will lose 40% of production but 6% of yields. Just to be clear, production is the net food coming out. So basically reading between the lines, we lose the crop land in that example.

You can get a Bluray for $1-2 at thrift stores.

They have so little value in the resale / used market that a local store sells 250lbs of unsorted discs for $75 (a 4’ cube grocery Gaylord).

This is my current attempt to contextualize the paper:

If this study is correct, the hypothesis that “less aerosol pollution” isn’t what caused an increase in the rate of temperature increase. (That is, increasing rate doesn’t come from a decrease in “dimming”). This hypothesis is that there was an unofficial geoengineering cooling going on from all the aerosols we put into the atmosphere from human economic activity, ships, fuel burning etc.

Instead, the main driver is that atmospheric air circulation patterns have already responded to climate change (albedo and temperature changes) and the new wind pattern makes more heat-trapping kinds of cloud patterns.

https://phys.org/news/2025-06-global-cloud-patterns.html

So what is bad news is that humans don’t control that in any direct sense. We cant simply add sulphur back into ship fuel and get this to go into reverse. This is an accelerating positive feedback loop running by itself.

From a cause-effect standpoint, that’s a pretty big shift of understanding about what’s happening and what drives the system.

= = =

That said, its a bit difficult to know if this study is double-counting an effect that’s already accounted for in the global dimming hypothesis. The paper about global dimming has a " fingerprint " section that seems to say dimming is regional and not global, and that the global models have some flawed methods.

This current paper uses a global method and the same “flawed” models for the reanalysis. So it could be that this is a reaction already anticipated by the dimming paper. Would love to see some expert takes.

Not disagreeing, just adding some further context.

According to Joseph Tainter’s work on collapses of civilizations, each civilization is in a kind of race condition where problems from growth of the population is against the drive to get new technology that can support and amplify the problem solving needed.

He did a couple of papers looking at Patents and Research Publications and he was able to show that there was a severe drop off in results starting in 1970. This was coupled with increasingly large lists of authors. The basic idea here is that research and development are well into a senescent decline. It isnt the case that we aren’t developing new tech, its the return on investment isn’t there. It now costs so much to maintain staffs of scientists and researchers that it costs more than the benefit to society.

Once you reach that stage where the “answers” are not easy (and not cheap) to find, GROWTH is only possible in a zero-sum sense. In order to bolster R+D efforts, you need to REDUCE some other uses of resources. That could be maintaining schools and hospitals, food production, etc. You are only going to fund science at the expense of something else in the society.

This is a hidden tax on the society.

I mention this as someone who respects and values science: nothing about the “business as usual” for science research is sustainable for the civilization.

In many ways we are propping up a tradition of science that failed 50 years ago. Our civilization has a secular religion built around “progress”, but progress is so complicated that we gave over from a progressing civilization to a collapsing civilization that is a "cargo cult " of the facade of what gave us progress in the past.

We need a come to Jesus moment about a true way forward into the future.

As a thought experiment, consider what a HUGE new paradigm shifting technology would bring to the world. Let’s say that we get fusion power or something. Now imagine the costs to actually scale and deploy this, and consider the timeline needed to make this fundamental change to our world. Do we even have time and resources available at this stage? Like if you build a new fusion power plant every couple of days starting today, the world would STILL face a miserable energy shortage from declining fossil fuels even faster than you can replace the energy…

Our future decline became baked into the cake because we didn’t get the answers in 1970 and went into overshoot.

Fascists gain power if we attempt to gaslight people with fake hope.

This paper seems like a response to this past paper:

https://www.tandfonline.com/doi/full/10.1080/00139157.2025.2434494#abstract

" Global Warming Has Accelerated: Are the United Nations and the Public Well-Informed? "

Yep, this is me.

I was assessed as a student and became slightly collapse aware around age 14/15.

I for sure remember attending a lecture by Andrew Nikiforuk about peak oil in or around around the year 2001 but I was definitely already into the idea before that time. [*]

This goes back for my entire life, I simple couldn’t avoid noticing all this naturally, it’s in my personal make up.

Interesting detail is that I know some other super smart people who TOTALLY don’t see collapse AT ALL. But quite a few people I know with strong Neurodivergency traits DO.

[*] A lot of the talk was pretty much an intro to the idea of fossil fuels being finite and some pretty sage foresight about the conventional oil peak that happened around 2006, but he said one other thing that was super memorable, which was that oil was so extremely useful that it could become majorly more expensive and people would be paying for it. He then did some back of the envelope calculations and showed that most people’s household math would hold up at $36/ gallon gas. Like it would still be worth driving to work from a micro-economic standpoint. Therefore there was nothing going to happen to signal us to stop burning oil until it was all gone. To me this meant that in a laissez faire liberal economy only a global policy shift would save us… And we don’t have any political structures up to that task.

There is a YouTube video here that has an interesting thought about how the role of the state works. [Starts at 9 min]

Basically the state taxes and invests in “whatever” and these investments actually make it easier for individuals to get resources for the economy, so growth is faster than otherwise.

But then it causes a faster rate of collapse, than otherwise, also.

It is interesting to think about how elites can “cash out” (for themselves) by brokering the deals and arranging who gets a place at the money trough.

In your view is the cause from human factors (such as policy, planning, economics) or is it structural (energy resource depletion, dependency on imports, not enough energy supply)?

The study points out that resources decline, causing industrial production to decline, causing food production to decline causing population to decline.

So food production loss triggers the population loss.

It is even weirder / worse.

Changes in the temperature and salinity of the spawning areas off the west and south coasts of South Africa made spawning in the historically important west coast spawning areas less successful, and spawning off the south coast more successful,” said Dr Sherley.

“However, due to the historical structures of the industry, most fishing remained to the west of Cape Agulhas, which led to high exploitation rates in that region in the early to mid 2000s.”

So breaking this down, climate change moved the sardines from the west to the south. The penguins are in the south.

The fishing fleet kept going out in the west and they heavily damaged the fish stock leaving too few survivors to breed the next generations.

The losses to the fish stock in the west is a problem that has now spread out to where the Penguins live.

Think cascading collapse of a complex system.

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