Our planet-sized Gordian knot

We cannot live without modernity, nor do we want to. Yet somehow we must.

Preface: This was originally intended as a refresher to open Part 4 of 5: Bargaining with, but it quickly grew into its own stand-alone post.

I recommend that new readers start at Part 1 of 5: Denial. It’s less dark, as I must ease you into the gloomy doomy abyss lest you instinctively recoil in abject horror.

I’m kidding (kinda). It’s all for a good cause. Promise.

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Claim: Modern industrial civilisation is fundamentally unsustainable for a host of reasons and will soon collapse.

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There is no replacement for fossil fuels. The lie in the sky called renewables won’t save us¹ for several fundamental, compounding reasons:

1. Immutable physical laws regarding energy density.

2. Fossil fuels are required to produce, transport, and install them.

3. They don’t solve the base-load problem.

4. Rising environmental destruction & energy costs of their production are too steep.

5. The dwindling finite stocks of mineral and rare metals needed for production.

6. Finite life spans mean they all need replacing every 25-30 years.

7. The sheer and utterly absurd scale of global needs.

8. The unfortunate empirical fact that their juice is just added to our ever-rising consumption.

And then there’s the little issue of our global system of governance: Capitalism, currently morphing into something even worse that one might call Technofeudalism.

Capitalists are agnostic about which resources they extract. Materials, labour, our will to live — it’s all the same to them, numbers to be crunched in spreadsheets where human values do not compute. ROI. Ditto regarding externalities, the unfortunate but unavoidable cost of doing good business.

Their offspring are discounted at an even steeper rate than their long-term assets, so there’s really nothing in the way of perpetuating the Grandest Ponzi scheme of all: intergenerational theft of life itself. It all makes perfect logical sense as long as you’re dead inside. Drill baby drill.

“I don't know what word in the English language — I can't find one — applies to people who are willing to sacrifice the literal existence of organised human life so they can put a few more dollars into highly stuffed pockets. The word 'evil' doesn't even begin to approach it.” - Noam Chomsky

If renewables were humanity’s savior and thus priceless, don’t you think they would be all in on them? They need the consumers alive. Capitalists leaving value unextracted would be like superpowers not fighting proxy wars for resources. It’s unthinkable.

Governments fully understand that renewables don’t cut it and keep subsidising the fossil fuel industry to keep things afloat and stave off the sacrifices nobody wants to make — not before, and certainly not now. Capitalists took charge of all the industries fueling consumerism long ago because the ROI of these investments is off the charts. Ditto politics. Meanwhile, the Devil is grinning ear to ear; it’s all just so beautiful.

Stephanie McMillan

Despite decades of our best efforts, renewables replaceables contribute a puny part of our growing global energy consumption, and anyone not high on hopium can see they’re ultimately a dead end. Meanwhile, we keep digging the hole deeper for our children as we pursue the both logically flawed and deeply unethical strategy of party now with no down payment called carbon budget Overshoot². (Excellent podcast interview with its authors).

Face it. The renewable revolution failed.

Fossil fuels provide about 81% of our total energy and are fundamentally irreplaceable in several crucial aspects of modern industrial civilisation, incl. energy production, heating, agriculture, manufacturing and transportation.

But they won’t last forever, and Peak Oil, the rate of declining EROEIs, how we might pre-slurp the downslope of the Hubbert Curve or how long we can run modernity on literal fumes will end up as footnotes to our civilisation.

Unfortunately, for all life on Earth, not least ourselves, the truth about “renewables” simply doesn’t penetrate, as people embrace wilful ignorance, motivated reasoning and wishful thinking to believe Bright Green Lies in classic Denial of Death³. God forbid they overcame their reluctance to open a proper book.

And so, in what seems like a principled disregard for Life, we continue Business As Usual (BAU), tacitly accepting the guaranteed consequences. Nobody wants to make any real sacrifices. It’s not worth it. It’s not profitable. It’s not fun.

We just don’t care that BAU accelerates Collapse. Not as long as it’s not our end. As regards to all our virtue signalling, ignore our blah blah blah and just look at what we do.

Future generations will curse us and all our bullshit as they try to eke out a primitive existence as scavangers in a collapsed, burned, flooded, unbearably hot, near-dead, radioactive world full of non-degrading toxins, depleted of the precious magic juice we shamelessly squandered in some kind of mad race to The End.

The hidden cost of living is killing our children

The actual costs of our fossil fuel bonanza are what economists like to call “unavoidable” externalities: endless amounts of waste and pollution our environment simply cannot absorb, not least ever-rising CO2 levels that have already committed us to civilisational collapse followed by the Holocene extinction running its due course in full. It’s a shame, but it can’t be helped, for CEOs are legally obliged to maximise profits for shareholders.

Runaway positive feedback loops will obliterate us and all our infrastructure and supply chains as they trigger cataclysmic planetary tipping points one after the other in a series of deathly dominos, such as the melting of the permafrost⁴, a foul burp by Earth that its cancerous parasites will be lucky to survive. We’re rapidly approaching a host of cataclysmic “externalities”, like when ocean acidification kills all phytoplankton — that’s 40% of our carbon sink and half the planet’s oxygen production gone right there. Oops.

Ever-rising temperatures are locked-in for at least centuries, sea levels for millennia. Taken along with a plethora of other predicaments, our trajectory is dead-on for a biologically Uninhabitable Earth for Homo Economicus Stupiditus.

Even as our game of collapse dominos is arguably already unfolding, all we talk about is how we might kick the can one last time. Leaders keep the Ponzi scheme going by peddling hopium like Net Zero and pragmatically impossible carbon capture nonsense, serving us reassuring lies and a carte blanche to keep pushing beyond planetary boundaries until we eventually trigger the mother of all tipping points and end up in Hothouse Earth.

Reality-tethered observers of this zombie lemmings death march remain powerless to penetrate people’s mental deflector shields and eventually end up “depressed on a scale that is unique to our time”.

What can one even say any more? It is what it is? Not even that, for climate scientists don’t even understand what’s happening any more as things keep breaking Faster Than Expected.

We cannot biologically survive modernity

Other externalities include how “the plastic revolution” has turned out to be the plastic nightmare, as its pushers chose not to share with us what happens when one introduces mind-boggling amounts of non-decaying products to the biosphere. Too enamoured by the effortlessness of living a throw-away life, we gobbled it all down.

There’s that profit motive again.

Plastics become microplastics become nanoplastics pulsing through all veins of life on Earth, so unless we somehow figure out a way to create an organism or nanobot that eats plastics with zero unintended consequences, our litter will literally be one of the few signs we ever existed.

Add to this an ocean of unnatural chemicals and it’s clear why we labour so under a litany of adverse health effects, not least male fertility rates that, after literally eons of smooth sailing, are dropping towards zero in the blink of an eye.

Speaking of Oceans, don’t get me started on them. It’s too much. It’s too dark.

Welcome to Overshoot, an unsolvable predicament

Nature is hammering us harder and harder with wake-up calls as Earth reacts to our ecological Overshoot, i.e. overconsumption due to overpopulation with its associated waste and pollution. Still, in what feels more and more like locked-in syndrome, we just watch it happen.

For example, as we glide right on by +1.5C and must necessarily withdraw from The Paris Climate Agreement to appease our cognitive dissonance, we somehow struggle to comprehend that +1.6C — the irreversible tipping point for Greenland’s glaciers that will trigger further tipping points such as AMOC collapse, the Amazon turning into a savannah and so on — must be even worse to glide past, so we should be even more willing to pull the handbrake in abject horror. Every incremental increase in temperature rise is exponentially worse! Scientists tell us:

“We must apply the precautionary principle. This is a disaster we must avoid at all costs.” - Prof. Rahmstorf

Doesn’t matter. Doesn’t penetrate. He must not mean must.

We simply don’t intuitively get exponential growth or slow-moving, distant threats of such infinite proportions and consequences one might call them entities of temporal and spatial dimensions so vast that they defeat traditional ideas about what a thing even is.

So, we just mumble amongst ourselves for a fortnight and come up with the brilliant plan of reorienting ourselves towards an arbitrarily round number of degrees or years comfortably far in the future so as not to have to hit the breaks juuuust yet, exactly like our cursed forefathers did. Do you see the problem?

Pogo

Eventually we will have stalled long enough to go directly from denial into despair. Indeed, some of us are already there.

The damage is already done. It’s over.

The cancerous perma-toxins are already out of the bottle and now permeate all life on Earth; they’re found in everything from our brains and reproductive organs to raindrops on Antarctica. Animal populations are down 70% over the last fifty years, including insects, absolutely vital to Earth’s life cycle. There’s some irony in how we ourselves are applying Earth its necessary chemotherapy.

All manners of finite resources are running out, including but not limited to topsoil, freshwater, sand, minerals, rare metals, fossil fuels, and our sanity. No wonder despondency about future prospects of a happy life is so prevalent among our youth.

Credit: Tommy Siegel

Even ignoring how our ironclad commitment to BAU is guaranteeing the worst possible final outcome, rising temperatures are already baked in for centuries. Ocean heat lag will slap us silly. All ice will melt, resulting in sea levels 140 meters above today’s⁵. Extreme weather events will grow increasingly worse for all humans’ lifespans from here on out. Biodiversity loss will take eons to recover evolutionarily, and a Hothouse Earth could end all mammalian life.

Civilisation is causing the sixth mass extinction of life on Earth.

I deem it likely that, within the lifetimes of many people alive today, widespread breadbasket and supply chain failures will rapidly cause horrific famines and migrational chaos for billions, rapidly leading to societal and cultural breakdown (violent rule, dystopia, cannibalism — all sorts of fun things)⁶.

“There are only nine meals between mankind and anarchy” - Alfred Henry Lewis

Preppers’ stocks will be instantly gobbled up by anyone they don’t kill and self-sustaining communities will be completely overrun, their learned wisdoms ignored by the madness of crowds entire populations who did zero prep work for collapse, neither pragmatical nor spiritual. Can you imagine the mental health crisis our already fragile, smartphone-addicted youth will suffer watching it all unfold?

All the while, cataclysmic planetary tipping points loom over us like planet-sized dominoes (PDF) ready to crush us like the stupid little gnats we are right as our precarious card house simultaneously collapses from below.

It cannot hold for much longer. We won’t go out with a fizzle, either, but with a bang: a Termination Shock as we choose to conclusively destroy the biosphere with the ultimate foolishness, desperate geoengineering in sheer desperation; a few scant protestors will be quashed and squashed as necessary.

The Earth, of course, did not celebrate. It simply persisted. It had no need for memory, no use for elegies. Humanity’s reign was reduced to a geological hiccup, a fossilised sneeze in the strata. When a comet streaked overhead one night, its tail rippling like a banner, the planet barely noticed. It was too busy spinning new life forms. The Earth had folded mankind into its tapestry, as indifferent to their absence as it had been to their chaos. And somewhere, in the molten core, it might have hummed—a low, tectonic chuckle—at the sheer audacity of their belief that they’d ever mattered at all. Humans? A mere rash she’d scratched. Their epitaphs were written in isotopes, their Eden a compost layer. — Jan 28th 2025 post on Collapse of Industrial Civilization

The flaws of our minds, cultures and capitalism

But for now, nobody wants to face reality, either because they can’t comprehend it or find it “too depressing”, so BAU it is. Maybe it’s some form of species-level self-hate. It’s hard to find words to explain the insanity. People try:

"Three great forces rule the world: stupidity, fear and greed" - Albert Einstein

I hold that our suicidally maladaptive behaviour stems from how our plethora of brain bugs have culminated in cultures and societies that were doomed the moment we added irresistible fossil fuels to the mix.

Even if we finally both understand it and want to change, there is no escape, as

1. We can no longer survive without fossil fuels.

2. Capitalism requires growth to function or it collapses (taking most of us with it), and its externalities destroy the environment.

3. The damage is already done.

The worst part? Alternatives to Capitalism haven’t worked very well, either; no -ism does. The most profound thinkers can’t even imagine utopian solutions for living sustainably in these numbers, as there are too many unsolvables for what has been called a permacrisis, polycrisis, and a meta-crisis. Going above carrying capacity is a predicament that ends with collapse, period.

There are no words anyone could write to inspire action, no action any continent could take, nothing even a perfectly unified humanity could do that will avoid the inevitable outcome of ecological realities and physical laws. All our arguments about it are purely academic, and reality is indifferent to mammalian musings.

In a case of apes scratching each other’s backs gone vastly too far, our collaborative quest for efficiency has evolved our once simple tribes into an impossibly complex, interconnected, codependent and fragile globalised world that cannot stand post fossil fuels nor keep using them without it ending in total devastation. It’s a catch-22 of can’t live with ‘em, can’t live without ‘em.

Something’s gotta give, and that something is the population count. The struggle to hang on a little longer will grow increasingly desperate for our tribalised world, and studying history paints a grim picture for everyone alive today.

One can only pray that we collaborate as best we can and that nobody presses the big red button, like, ever. Good luck with that! Oh, and make sure you solve The Alignment Problem before the AI arms race leads to Artificial General Intelligence. You might wanna hurry.

All cultures relying on modernity are a form of local equilibriums that last until larger realities come crashing down, as if Earth itself shudders to cast off a pest. Civilisations come and go, and few of them ever saw it coming. Post-apocalypse, a few survivors may scatter in search of higher ground where the process can repeat itself.

It’s deeper than just capitalism and culture

Human beings have plenty of good traits. Unfortunately, they are sabotaged by us also being inherently irrational, selfish, apathetic, greedy, scared, and self-deceiving.

Our traits and cognitive malfunctions are hardwired into our very DNA because they were evolutionarily profitable for so long in palaeolithic environments — cue the classic E.O. Wilson quote⁷ from Part 1 of 5: Denial.

Fuel our cognitive biases with fossil fuels, and… well, FAFO.

Take normalcy bias, for example. Being born into an era of relative stability and seemingly unending progress causes us to naively assume it to be everlasting, sort of like a dumb ass free-range turkey that feels life is pretty great right until its head gets chopped off. Unless you’re already fighting for your lives, that is: Collapse is already here, it’s just not evenly distributed.

Even if humanity could miraculously develop the courage to pull the ultimate trolley lever to lob all the fools in the world⁸ into the sun in order to build a peaceful paradise without them, unless we figured out a way to outsource our agency, power and authority to a bigger power, a whole new crop of them would be reborn in a few decades and tear it all down again from the inside.

All organisms evolutionarily programmed with an insatiable appetite for growth will inevitably follow boom & bust cycles as they just can’t help themselves from going into overshoot. It’s simply not in our nature to avoid it. The snag regarding this particular civilisational collapse is that we’re taking much of the biosphere with us and may soon all be gone for good. One can hope.

People increasingly aware of the absurdity of infinite growth are forced to watch in suicide-inducing horror as nobody does anything about it and our populations just keep growing anyway. The collapse-aware among us excuse ourselves to the toilet to bury our heads in our hands for the newly-minted parents whose eyes are positively beaming with pride and joy, as it’s just too tragic to kill the last pockets of blissful ignorance there will ever be in this world.

It’s scant comfort that the ruling class who forsook their ethical duties will be torn apart in increasingly colourful ways as per the traditions of collapsing civilisations. Pathologically insane billionaires who couldn’t for the life of them figure out how to ensure their guards’ loyalty in a post-money world, unilaterally bereft of human virtues as they are, will likely suffer the most heinous torture, and Schadenfreude will light a brief glimmer of joy in onlookers’ eyes before cannibalisation commences.

Remember, post cultural collapse it’s back to the lowest of Maslow’s hierarchy of needs: Erst komst die Fressen, dann kommst die moral.

Infuriatingly, the original architects of our ultimate demise went scott-free, laughing all their way into oblivion as eternal damnation in Hell is, disappointingly, just another fable. Their final act? Instead of donating their ill-gotten riches back to the serfs post-mortem, these [censored] [censored] made sure to perpetuate their pathological behaviour posthumously via their heirs.

Everyone sees it

One doesn’t necessarily have to understand the mechanisms of all of this, or even agree on them. One can just look.

The curve’s steepness matters in the short term, but not regarding the fate of civilisation. +3C is hellish, in case you were wondering and we’re well on track for much worse than that.

We desperately need to conserve the precious fossil fuels that have no substitute; instead, we use them to fuel rushed vacations and produce fast fashion and other garbage.

We should be doing everything we can to transition to whatever new sustainable infrastructure might theoretically be feasible after fossil fuels inevitably run out and modernity grinds to a complete halt. We should reject untruths about renewables, plastics and everything else, and pivot BAU by 180 degrees.

Unfortunately, capitalism has taken on a life of its own and is in complete control, and it dictates that we continue BAU. By the time it finally self-implodes it will be too late to do anything but live as scavengers on its scraps until we can’t even do that any more.

Our efforts to curb The Superorganism have proved useless, and none of them have made the slightest dent in our GDP-correlated global emissions. We all know it by now, and a growing sense of despair and apathy fosters as more and more people give up hope that we will ever veer even slightly from BAU.

As if it all wasn’t bad enough, the sooner-or-later guarantee of repeatedly rolling the dice on nuclear armageddon looms larger and larger as stressors mount in an increasingly strained world already begun on its long, uneven and unjust self-cannibalising catabolic Descent into neo-Dark Ages.

Whatever I feel in the moments before I vapourise in a nuclear blastwave, surprise won’t be part of it. Maybe relief.

Sloshing around in the five stages of grief

Sometimes I feel like the only way to win is to not play the game. The fact that there’s no way out but the sweet release of death raises deep philosophical questions; maybe it would have been Better Never To Have Been. Unfortunately, pure survival instinct and ethical obligations to our children trap us in the torment of existence.

“There is but one truly serious philosophical problem and that is suicide.” - Albert Camus

I’m not even on the most worried end of the collapse spectrum. A so-called climate alarmist predicts two billion dead by 2035, backing it up with science. This book puts the over/under line of human extinction at 2047. A slew of people have similar opinions; I listed a few websites with considerable content here.

I can only pray that the scariest outlooks are a case of the prophets falling victim to naive realism or catastrophising (example), but that could well be my own deflector shield at work.

As you can tell from me and other collapse aware people, it can be difficult for us to remain calm about this, and the frustrations of people running away from the subject like their sanity depends on it are immense. It’s hard to reach radical acceptance about our refusal to acknowledge, let alone slow, civilisation’s inevitable demise. This book is about how to deal with knowing what is coming.

I’m still struggling to even find the right words to describe just how screwed we are, but there are some strong, wise and colourful writers out there and I recommend drinking deeply from their collapse cups. I have listed some suggestions here.

Sociologists seriously need to step up to the task

Just like witnessing the suffering of factory farming can make people go vegan in a heartbeat, a more effective method is probably a presentation of something close and visceral, such as vanishing glaciers or literal mountains of waste.

But I’m trying with my words, because it’s all I’ve got from where I am in life. Others are contributing infinitely more, including studying powers of persuasion:

Pink suits me. Substack source

I’m trying to amplify the same message given out by so many others in a desperate attempt to raise awareness enough that we eventually, sooner or later, one way or another finally accept reality and begin using our so-called intelligence to minimise suffering in the near-term as well as ensure a livable future for someone down the line.

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Imho Collapse is, by any measure, the most relevant subject for all of humanity, fully dwarfing questions regarding the fates of entire nations.

Even if it isn’t set in stone, the precautionary principle alone demands that it be fully explored to such a degree that it should employ millions of our best and brightest. I know this is the boringly rational utilitarian in me speaking, but lowering the risk of astronomical suffering is, by far, one of the most contributing and noble endeavors I can imagine.

I’d like to inspire my readers to explore this topic more for themselves, and approach people around them about it. If you do, it’s essential to do it as slowly and carefully as possible, for you will run smack into the deflector shield and be categorically rejected and ignored. In fact, ostracisation is all but guaranteed.

But as responses to our horrific predicament range from sensible damage-control to downright suicidal, I believe we are morally obligated to do what we can (it may be nothing - take care of yourself first) to at least push in the right direction; anything else is freeriding on the rest of humanity and selling out our future. It’s to be complicitly guilty of our Downfall. (PDF)

It all starts with collapse awareness, but a cursory glance around the world makes it seem like there is very little.

People want hope that everything will be alright. But it won’t, so hoping for that is delusional. People want lies, but I don’t lie.

Contrary to popular belief, you have
ONE LIFE in ONE UNIVERSE.

What do you want to do with it?

Either way, and whoever you are, I hope you’re absolutely loving life and the state of the world right now, because it’s all downhill from here. Admit it, you can feel it in your bones. Your soul might already be in shutdown mode.

The true cost of modern industrial civilisation was long deferred to discounted future generations.

That’s us.

It’s time to pay the piper.

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Begin at Part 1 of 5: Denial or check out other resources

1. Attempted rebuked here.

2. Not to be confused with William Catton’s seminal work on ecological Overshoot.

3. The 1974 Pulitzer Prize winner whose central premise is that human civilisation is a psychological defence mechanism against the knowledge of our mortality.

4. “It is estimated that the world’s permafrost contains up to 1,700 billion tonnes of carbon, which is almost double the amount of carbon in the Earth’s atmosphere, and four times more than what has already been emitted by humans since the Industrial Revolution.” - The Arctic Institute

5. Or about 108 flamingos.

6. See The Five Stages of Collapse for some case studies.

7. “The real problem of humanity is the following: We have Palaeolithic emotions, medieval institutions and godlike technology.” — E. O. Wilson

8. Of course, we can’t agree who the fools are, but just imagine we somehow could.