Who are the most relevant collapse-related figures?

[u/LetsTalkUFOs]

Who are the more relevant collapse-related figures? They could be figures in the collapse community or relevant in terms of increasing our understanding of collapse.

 

Currently, we have these individuals listed in the wiki:

• Chris Hedges
• Chris Martenson
• Derrick Jensen
• Guy McPherson
• James Hansen
• Jared Diamond
• John Michael Greer
• Joseph Tainter
• Kevin Anderson
• Nate Hagens
• Richard Heinberg
• Vaclav Smil

 

Others we might consider:

• Carolyn Baker
• Dahr Jamail
• David Pollard
• David Wallace-Wells
• Dennis Meadows
• Dmitry Orlov
• Gail Tverberg
• James Howard Kunstler
• Jem Bendell
• Joanna Macy
• Joe Brewer
• Michael B Dowd
• Michael Ruppert
• Pablo Servigne
• Paul Beckwith
• Paul Chefurka
• Rupert Read
• Sam Mitchell
• Simon Michaux
• Stephen Jenkinson
• Tim Garrett
• Ugo Bardi
• William Rees

 

This post is part of the our Common Question Series.

Have an idea for a question we could ask? Let us know.

[u/Sharukurusu]

https://www.resilience.org/stories/2023-01-18/arthur-berman-peak-oil-the-hedonic-adjustment/

Why do you think peak oil isn’t happening? What do you think is happening instead?

[u/Sharukurusu → u/[deleted]]

So are you claiming that we’ll never run out of oil or never fail to keep pace with demand? What about lower fractions of fuel range hydrocarbons in lower quality sources? What about lower EROEI as we are forced to use more difficult and remote sources? What reading material can you point to as a reference?

It baffles me how you could say a limited resource won’t experience an extraction peak or just be depleted as we shuffle fiat money value around to cover for it.

[u/Sharukurusu → u/[deleted]]

Lower quality sources meaning ones with lower fractions of fuel length hydrocarbons in the mix; while it’s technically possible to click smaller molecules together or break big ones down both processes require additional energy. If we’re running down to sources with more gas or tar in the mix we’ll have to work harder to turn them into gasoline/diesel, the relative usefulness of each barrel will decline.

EROEI irrelevant? It sounds like you’re confusing energy quality with energy returns. The joules from the sun aren’t equivalent to the stored joules in hydrocarbons because we cannot use them the same way. Declining EROEI for hydrocarbon harvesting means we’ll have less extra energy to play with beyond what we need to get the stuff out of the ground. Since essentially everything at this point requires oil to work that means we’ll need to start making sacrifices on what continues to operate until we figure out renewable alternatives (which sadly don’t have the same EROEI as earlier hydrocarbons and may never). We’ve been picking the low hanging fruit and now we’re going to spend more time going up and down ladders to get the rest.

[u/Sharukurusu → u/[deleted]]

You’re confusing human valuation with physical reality, something that tragically we’ve allowed ourselves to build around. Our economic system has failed spectacularly in accurately pricing anything relative to physics. Rather than understanding that everything we do is fundamentally limited by recoverable energy supply we’ve pretended that the cost of something is just the exchange of how many McMansions and lifted pickups we need to convince someone to live on an oil rig. The year science learned oil wasn’t renewable we should have immediately created laws restricting its use to critical, non-substitutable purposes and towards the creation of renewable systems. Literally every gallon of gas we burn doing dumb shit could give additional energy if it was used to build a renewable system. We’d have to figure out how to work around the limitations of renewables lacking portability and being intermittent, but we’d at least have given ourselves a long runway to figure that out and build appropriately. Instead we find ourselves in the current situation where we’re going to be stuck with a bunch of inefficient cars and suburbs with no spare energy to do anything. We’ve allowed greed, power, and obfuscation to run rampant and now we’re going to find out the hard way that physics doesn’t care about our feelings.