18,99 €
Mehr erfahren.
- Herausgeber: John Wiley & Sons
- Kategorie: Fachliteratur
- Sprache: Englisch
Discover how and why the world's crises are interconnected and what you can do to prepare for the next one The world is experiencing a series of crises. In The Crash Course: An Honest Approach to Facing the Future of Our Economy, Energy, and Environment, Revised Edition, veteran executive and strategist Chris Martenson delivers an incisive and eye-opening exploration that explains why the reader needs to understand that it is the interconnectedness of the various crises that matters most. From energy shortages to climate instability, financial crises, supply chain disruptions, pandemics, war, and crop failures, you'll discover the common factor that is driving them all and how to adapt to volatile new realities and safeguard your own personal wealth, health, and community. In the book, you'll find effective solutions for living with unpredictability and change, as well as: * A workable framework for understanding the "how" and "why" of dramatic societal, environmental, and economic transformation * A rich set of solutions, complete with examples, you can use to draw inspiration and motivation to act in your own life * An expansive amount of new material, fully updated since the last edition A transformative and thought-provoking strategic playbook for managing increasingly unexpected events, crises, and revolutions, The Crash Course, Revised Edition is an essential resource for anyone concerned about their retirement savings, the world's environment, as well as anyone hoping to become more independent and self-reliant.
Sie lesen das E-Book in den Legimi-Apps auf:
Seitenzahl: 580
Veröffentlichungsjahr: 2023
Ähnliche
Table of Contents
Cover
Title Page
Copyright
Acknowledgments
Introduction
PART I: How to Approach the Next Twenty Years
CHAPTER 1: The Coming Storm
CHAPTER 2: The Lens
CHAPTER 3: A World Worth Inheriting
CHAPTER 4: Trust Yourself
Conflicts of Interest
You Are the Ultimate Truth‐Teller
Instincts Can Save You
Head and Heart
PART II: Foundation
CHAPTER 5: Dangerous Exponentials
More on the Concept of Exponential Growth
Speeding Up
Making It Real
Surrounded by Exponentials
The Rule of 70
Your Exponential World
Notes
CHAPTER 6: Problems versus Predicaments
Note
CHAPTER 7: An Inconvenient Lie
Notes
CHAPTER 8: Complex Systems
Systems—Open versus Closed
Economists—Closed Minds
Our Complex World
Notes
CHAPTER 9: Our Money System
Full Faith and Credit
How Hyperinflation Happens
Money Creation
The Fed
Two Kinds of Money—One Exponential System
Notes
CHAPTER 10: What Is Wealth?
The Hierarchy of Wealth
Money and Wealth
The Nature of Wealth
Notes
PART III: Economy
CHAPTER 11: Debt
What Is Debt?
The Crisis Explained in One Table
Notes
CHAPTER 12: The Great Credit Bubble
What Is a Bubble?
Withering Heights
Note
CHAPTER 13: Like a Moth to Flame
The Moths
The Flame
Quantitative Easing
The Central Bank's Reign of Error
Notes
CHAPTER 14: Fuzzy Numbers
Administrative Bias
Inflation
Gross Domestic Product (GDP)
And All the Rest
Notes
CHAPTER 15: Crumbling Before Our Eyes
The Story of … Concrete?
Summing It Up
Notes
PART IV: Energy
CHAPTER 16: Energy and the Economy
The
Master Resource
Energy Budgeting
Net Energy
The Economy and Energy
We Live Like Gods
Notes
CHAPTER 17: Peak Oil
Petro‐Realities
Bombshell! Saudi Arabia Fesses Up to Peak Oil
It's Not “Running Out”
Find First,
Then
Pump
A Global Peak?
Oil and GDP
The Oil Production Output Gap
Peak Exports
The Ugly Power of Reverse Compounding
Notes
CHAPTER 18: Shale Oil
Shale Oil—Amazing Technology, but Expensive Oil
Shale Oil—Game Changer or Retirement Party?
Fledged on a Cliff
International Shale
Notes
CHAPTER 19: Necessary but Insufficient
Simple Math
The European Energy Disaster of 2022
The Reality—Time, Scale, Cost, Limits
The Nuclear Option
The Coal Story
The Alternatives—Solar and Wind
Biofuels
Natural Gas
Hydrogen
Conclusion
Notes
CHAPTER 20: Why Technology Can't Fix This
Fact 1: Technology Does Not Create Energy
Fact 2: Transforming Energy Is Expensive
Fact 3: Energy Transitions Take Time
Why Technology Can't Fix This
Note
PART V: Environment
CHAPTER 21: Minerals
Quantity and Quality (Again)
Economic Growth and Minerals
The End of an Era
Reduce, Reuse, Recycle
Gone with the Wind
Notes
CHAPTER 22: Soil
Do We Heat or Do We Eat?
The Important Difference Between Soil and Dirt
Exporting Nutrients
The High (Energy) Cost of Low‐Cost Fertilizers
Soil Erosion and Desertification
Conclusion
Notes
CHAPTER 23: Parched
Running Dry
What Lies Beneath
Exporting Water—The Food Story
The Food Bubble
Energy and Water
The Future of Water
Notes
CHAPTER 24: All Fished Out
The Oxygen You Breathe
The Great Thiamine (B
1
) Mystery
The Bottom Line
Notes
CHAPTER 25: What Do You Mean We're Running Out of Sand?
PART VI: Convergence
CHAPTER 26: Where Have All the Insects Gone?
CHAPTER 27: The Bumpy Path to 2030
The Foundation
“Unsustainable”
Convergence: The Timeline
This Time
Is
Different
Notes
PART VII: What Should I Do?
CHAPTER 28: The Good News
Technology
Food
Energy
Economy and Money
Population
A New Narrative
The Good News …
Notes
CHAPTER 29: Closing the Book on Growth
Note
CHAPTER 30: What Should I Do?
Simpler, Harder, and More Expensive
Becoming Resilient
The Bare Minimum
Where to Live
Insufficient, but Necessary
Set Targets
Being in Service
Step 0
The Importance of Community
What's the First Thing I Should Do?
CHAPTER 31: Build Up Your Capital!
Home
Health
The Spiritual Side
Wealth
The Great Wealth Transfer
Community Capital
Conclusion
Appendix
Index
End User License Agreement
List of Illustrations
Chapter 5
FIGURE 5.1 Linear Growth Compared to Exponential Growth
FIGURE 5.2 World Population
FIGURE 5.3 World Population
FIGURE 5.4 World Population
FIGURE 5.5 Population Growth Example
FIGURE 5.6 Total Energy Consumption
FIGURE 5.7 Total Credit Market Debt
Chapter 6
FIGURE 6.1 A Problem at the Cliff
FIGURE 6.2 A Predicament at the Cliff
Chapter 9
FIGURE 9.1 Total Credit Market Debt
Chapter 11
FIGURE 11.1 Debt DoublingsTime between complete doublings of debt in quart...
FIGURE 11.2 Debt Growth to GDPTable of three different eras of debt use in...
Chapter 12
FIGURE 12.1 Price to Income, Housing Top 18 Cities, 2022Table of the top 1...
FIGURE 12.2 Dow Jones Industrial Average, 1922–1935
FIGURE 12.3 Stock Prices: GM and Intel
FIGURE 12.4 U.S. Treasury 10‐Year Yield
Chapter 13
FIGURE 13.1 The U.S. Money Supply (M2)
FIGURE 13.2 The Federal Reserve Balance Sheet
Chapter 14
FIGURE 14.1 The Fed's Dismal Track Record
FIGURE 14.2 Owner's Equivalent Rent
Chapter 16
FIGURE 16.1 Global GDP
FIGURE 16.2 Energy Budgeting
FIGURE 16.3 The Energy Cliff: Energy Returned on Energy Invested
FIGURE 16.4 The Energy Cliff (2) and Oil
FIGURE 16.5 The Energy Cliff (3)
FIGURE 16.6 The Energy Cliff (4): Net Energy from Renewables
FIGURE 16.7 The Energy Cliff (5): Trying to Live on Alcohol Alone
FIGURE 16.8 Global GDP plotted Against Total Global Energy Use
FIGURE 16.9 What Energy Decoupling Would Look Like If It Were Happening
FIGURE 16.10 Energy SlavesThe energy services provided to humanity in 2019...
Chapter 17
FIGURE 17.1 Juice Box vs. Frozen Margarita Model
FIGURE 17.2 Basic Extraction Profile
FIGURE 17.3 Table of Oil ProducersThe top three oil producers completely d...
FIGURE 17.4 U.S. Crude Oil Production, 1900 to 2019
FIGURE 17.5 List of All Oil‐Producing Countries or Regions and Year of Maxim...
FIGURE 17.6 China's Oil Imports
FIGURE 17.7 Net Importers and Exporters, 2021
FIGURE 17.8 Global Oil Discoveries Peaked in 1964
FIGURE 17.9 Yearly World Crude Oil Production
FIGURE 17.10 Global GDP Growth and Oil Production
FIGURE 17.11 Global Oil Production on a 4,000‐Year Timeline
Chapter 18
FIGURE 18.1 Shale Basins of the World
Chapter 19
FIGURE 19.1 China's Total Energy Consumption
FIGURE 19.2 Global Primary Energy Consumption by Source
FIGURE 19.3 Coal Use
FIGURE 19.4 Coal Production by Grade
FIGURE 19.5 Plot of Coal Tonnage versus Coal Energy
FIGURE 19.6 Energy Flow Diagram for the United States, 2021
FIGURE 19.7 Zoomed‐in Energy Flow Diagram for the United States, 2021
FIGURE 19.8 Global Energy Mix in 2021
FIGURE 19.9 Fossil Fuel Use as a Percentage of Total
Chapter 20
FIGURE 20.1 Energy Transitions Take Time
Chapter 21
FIGURE 21.1 Ratios of Mined Ore to Produce One Pound of Mineral or Metal
FIGURE 21.2 Pounds of Ore to Create One Pound of Refined Mineral
FIGURE 21.3 Types of Metal or Element (by Weight) in a Typical Automobile...
Chapter 31
FIGURE 31.1 The Four Forms of Capital
FIGURE 31.2 Broad (M2) Money Supply in the United States
1
FIGURE A.1 Minerals Fully or Partially Imported by the United States
Guide
Cover Page
Title Page
Copyright
Acknowledgments
Introduction
Table of Contents
Begin Reading
Appendix
Index
Wiley End User License Agreement
Pages
iii
iv
vii
ix
x
xi
1
3
4
5
6
7
8
9
10
11
12
13
14
15
16
17
18
19
21
23
24
25
26
27
28
29
30
31
32
33
34
35
36
37
38
39
40
41
42
43
44
45
46
47
48
49
50
51
52
53
54
55
56
57
58
59
60
61
62
63
64
65
66
67
68
69
70
71
72
73
74
75
77
78
79
80
81
82
83
84
85
86
87
88
89
90
91
92
93
94
95
96
97
98
99
100
101
102
103
104
105
106
107
108
109
110
111
112
113
114
115
116
117
118
119
120
121
122
123
125
126
127
128
129
130
131
132
133
134
135
136
137
138
139
140
141
142
143
144
145
146
147
148
149
150
151
152
153
154
155
156
157
158
159
160
161
162
163
164
165
166
167
168
169
170
171
172
173
174
175
176
177
178
179
180
181
182
183
184
185
186
187
188
189
190
191
192
193
194
195
196
197
199
201
202
203
204
205
206
207
208
209
210
211
212
213
214
215
216
217
218
219
220
221
222
223
224
225
226
227
228
229
230
231
232
233
235
236
237
238
239
240
241
242
243
244
245
246
247
249
250
251
252
253
254
255
256
257
258
259
260
261
262
263
264
265
266
267
268
269
270
271
272
273
274
275
276
277
278
279
280
281
282
283
284
285
286
287
288
289
291
303
304
305
306
307
308
309
310
311
312
313
314
315
316
317
318
319
CHRIS MARTENSON, PhD
THE CRASH COURSE
REVISED EDITION
AN HONEST APPROACH TO FACING THE FUTURE OF OUR ECONOMY, ENERGY, AND ENVIRONMENT
Copyright © 2023 by Chris Martenson. All rights reserved.
Published by John Wiley & Sons, Inc., Hoboken, New Jersey.
Published simultaneously in Canada.
No part of this publication may be reproduced, stored in a retrieval system, or transmitted in any form or by any means, electronic, mechanical, photocopying, recording, scanning, or otherwise, except as permitted under Section 107 or 108 of the 1976 United States Copyright Act, without either the prior written permission of the Publisher, or authorization through payment of the appropriate per‐copy fee to the Copyright Clearance Center, Inc., 222 Rosewood Drive, Danvers, MA 01923, (978) 750‐8400, fax (978) 750‐4470, or on the web at www.copyright.com. Requests to the Publisher for permission should be addressed to the Permissions Department, John Wiley & Sons, Inc., 111 River Street, Hoboken, NJ 07030, (201) 748‐6011, fax (201) 748‐6008, or online at http://www.wiley.com/go/permission.
Trademarks: Wiley and the Wiley logo are trademarks or registered trademarks of John Wiley & Sons, Inc. and/or its affiliates in the United States and other countries and may not be used without written permission. All other trademarks are the property of their respective owners. John Wiley & Sons, Inc. is not associated with any product or vendor mentioned in this book.
Limit of Liability/Disclaimer of Warranty: While the publisher and author have used their best efforts in preparing this book, they make no representations or warranties with respect to the accuracy or completeness of the contents of this book and specifically disclaim any implied warranties of merchantability or fitness for a particular purpose. No warranty may be created or extended by sales representatives or written sales materials. The advice and strategies contained herein may not be suitable for your situation. You should consult with a professional where appropriate. Further, readers should be aware that websites listed in this work may have changed or disappeared between when this work was written and when it is read. Neither the publisher nor authors shall be liable for any loss of profit or any other commercial damages, including but not limited to special, incidental, consequential, or other damages.
For general information on our other products and services or for technical support, please contact our Customer Care Department within the United States at (800) 762‐2974, outside the United States at (317) 572‐3993 or fax (317) 572‐4002.
Wiley also publishes its books in a variety of electronic formats. Some content that appears in print may not be available in electronic formats. For more information about Wiley products, visit our web site at www.wiley.com.
Library of Congress Cataloging‐in‐Publication Data is Available:
ISBN 9781394168866 (cloth)
ISBN 9781394168873 (ePub)
ISBN 9781394168880 (ePDF)
Cover Design: Wiley
Cover Images: © Harvepino/iStock/Getty Images, © alexsl/iStock/Getty Images
Acknowledgments
This book is dedicated to Evie Botelho, without whom my life would be far less vibrant and who has been teaching me about the healing nature of love. And to my children, Erica, Simon, and Grace, who provide me with all the reasons any father could want to leave behind a better world. I love them all dearly.
I'd also like to recognize and thank my entire team at Peak Prosperity, who are as dedicated and as tireless a team as any: Aaron McKeon, Michael Congero, and Ryan Tiefen, with a very special shout‐out to Morgan Stewart for his copyediting and “proofing under pressure.”
I would also like to acknowledge a few of the people who have helped me get through these past few years with my energy and soul intact: Jeff Hanson for being a great ally and friend, Paul Marik and Pierre Kory for their incredible and inspiring integrity, and Joyce Kamen and Kelly Bauman for their unwavering focus on helping people. Dan Edwards for helping out around the farm while I was otherwise occupied, and Jason Yost for holding down a huge project. Dave Pare and Pete Smith for endless hours of talking as we puzzled through all the subjects herein and many more besides. Jason Feldman for being a fantastic friend and critical mind who helped enormously with our special Brookside project and for bringing incredible subjects to my attention. Ted Cleary for levity, good food, puzzling out the world, and making us all laugh.
Finally, a huge and boisterous shout‐out goes to my many followers and supporters, many of whom have been with me every step of the way over the years, been faithful advocates for truth, and who contribute daily to making Peak Prosperity what it is. None of it could have or would have been possible without you. My instinct is to list the hundreds of deserving names here, but space won't allow it and I fear accidentally leaving someone out. This book is for each and every one of you. Thank you from the bottom of my heart for allowing me to do what I do best—be your faithful information scout.
Introduction
We are at peak prosperity—a golden moment in human history when human creativity, industrial systems and know‐how, and abundant energy supplies have happily coincided to create the highest standards of living for the most people in all of history. It's all coming to an end. But that's not necessarily a bad thing and for those who are prepared, the future could be even more fulfilling and entertaining than the past.
This book will help you foresee the future, but not by invoking spooky divinations. It simply provides a framework for seeing the world as it actually is, not as we might wish it to be. It offers a view usually relegated to the dusty edges of inquiry, where a few wild‐haired professors and rebel intellectuals have gathered for years. One that dares to suggest that limits exist and that humans are not actually all that different from any other organism on the planet when it comes to exploiting resources. Over here on the fringe, it's a lot less lonely than it used to be as millions of people are waking up to the many troubles we face and are beginning to ask the right questions.
My perspective comes from being a devoted outsider after being a deep insider. My PhD in Pathology from Duke, my MBA from Cornell, and my successful stints working in a couple of Fortune 300 companies mean I understand the current game and how it's played. But over the past 15 years, I have been a deep outsider, too. I've spent years in relative isolation thinking and researching and writing and then researching some more. I inhabit all corners of the internet, from the mainstream to quirky intellectual outposts. Psychology tests indicate that my highest personal values are freedom of thought, intellectual curiosity, and integrity. In other words, I am not afraid to run against the crowd and come to unpopular conclusions.
Where has all that fiercely independent research brought me? To this one big insight: Our entire way of life is completely and hopelessly unsustainable. It's nothing personal, it's just basic math. Our monetary system and our economic model are both based on perpetual exponential growth, which are impossibilities on a finite planet. Fashioned at a time when the world seemed bountiful without end, those ideas are now completely due for a top‐to‐bottom overhaul. If we don't do it at this time, the end is easily predicted; we'll carry on until some sort of a massive calamity brings it all to a sudden and painful crash. This book is written with the hope that there's still time to grab the steering wheel and wrestle this car safely to the side of the road. In that sense, it is optimistic.
Digging a bit deeper into the why, virtually all of our economic abundance and growth were fueled, quite literally, by fossil fuels, oil in particular. And they still are; the only problem is that the end of the age of oil is now staring us squarely in the face. Worse, our ecosystems on planet Earth are flashing urgent warning signals, yet our global leadership seems unable to do more than fly themselves in private jets to fancy locations to present PowerPoint slide decks to each other and then tell the rest of us that maybe we should take cold showers and entertain the idea of eating crickets.
Which means the time has come for all of us to undertake the project of becoming more resilient. There's no white knight riding to the rescue, and realistically there's nothing that can be done at this late stage besides brace for the inevitable and jarring changes that are on the way.
The good news? I truly believe that this is a necessary transition for humanity and that a better future awaits. One where our relationships to each other and the earth are once again back on solid (not Facebook) footings, and where our jobs and lives are filled with purpose and meaning. At its heart, this is actually a very optimistic book, because I believe in people; I believe in you and your ability to decide what's best for you and your loved ones, and I know that humanity has managed to perform some heroic feats when it's got a big idea lodged in its cultural soul. The pyramids of Cheops, the Temple at Angkor Wat, and the Cathedral of Chartres come to mind.
We're between stories and that is an uncomfortable place to be. The old story of endless growth on a finite planet is winding down, while the new story has not yet been written so nobody yet knows what it is. Will that new story be one of prosperity and abundance? Or will it be some dystopian nightmare created by psychotic leaders unable or unwilling to engage with reality? The outcome is both in doubt and up to us.
But the data we have says that the easy times are over, and things generally get a bit harder from here on out. Ever‐increasing quantities of oil brought us extremely rapid and comprehensive complexity and abundance. As that process winds down, we'll experience the opposite of it, hopefully gradually and slowly, because a sudden loss of complexity means a collapse of our economy and its many support systems. It may be many years or even decades before things truly settle into a new equilibrium (of sorts—there really isn't any such thing in this ever‐changing universe).
Because I steep myself daily in being a guide to this unknown territory, I am acutely aware of the degree to which people are already frazzled by it all. Covid really sucked a lot of energy from everybody and regrettably diverted much‐needed time and attention away from critical projects. Worst of all, it frayed and even destroyed many people's trust in government institutions and so‐called experts, and really dented the reputation of my much‐beloved arena of science. Trust is something we need more of, not less, but it was lost in spades because truly the wrong people were allowed to get their hands on the reins of power.
Yet despite those negatives, there's much to be positive about. There is much that can be done that will contribute to a more resilient future for you and the world. But first we have to know where we are. To orient properly, you must be aware of the idea that the Age of Growth is over. It's a new era. Our task now is to settle into a very different existence—one that will be filled both with fewer things and less stuff, but also with more meaning and legitimately worthy challenges. If we approach things correctly, that is.
These challenges are ones that may well rescue you from a dull life of passing the time while waiting for … something.
Like any good adventure, a little danger will be involved. But nothing quite so profoundly dangerous as wasting your entire life on trivial pursuits. This book is an invitation—and hopefully an encouragement—to join the millions of people who are no longer content to live in the old story and have begun to quietly, and sometimes noisily, push off in new directions.
Whether you end up planting a garden or banging a pot on the streets of Buenos Aries in protest or helping people become healthier by employing evidence‐based approaches, or doing any of a thousand other things in support of resilience and change, you will be in great company.
It is my sincere hope that this book helps in some small way to encourage you to begin or advance your contributions to creating a world worth inheriting.
Let's write that new story together. It all begins by having a clear view of the actual world in which we live and the true drivers of our predicaments, and comes into being with every new seed planted in the ground and every new idea brought up and considered.
PART IHow to Approach the Next Twenty Years
CHAPTER 1The Coming Storm
In 2008 and 2009, economic activity in the United States and most other developed nations tumbled off a cliff. At several points, there was real panic in the air. Stock markets around the world fell to levels that wiped out more than a decade of gains. Trillions evaporated in the housing market, and global trade plummeted.
In 2020, Covid struck and suddenly everything seemed to become chaotic all at once. Supply chains broke down and only very slowly recovered; central banks printed up roughly 20 trillion new dollars and distributed them into economies that were hardly growing, unleashing massive inflation not seen on the world stage for a half a century and a profound wealth gap without any historical parallel.
Later, in 2022, Europe was plunged into a historically unique energy crisis. Never before had a continent of 400 million people and complex manufacturing and supply chains been starved for energy. A lot of history is being made these days.
Why did these things happen—and will they happen again?
In truth, we face many predicaments that run far deeper than even these recent, disquieting economic events might suggest. It's time to face the facts: A dangerous convergence of unsustainable trends in the economy, energy, and the environment will make the next few years and decades the most challenging for the most people ever.
The Crash Course offers a framework for understanding this predicament and provides sufficient context to support the idea that it is well past time to begin preparing for a very different future.
Everybody in power either believes or pretends to believe the future will simply be like the present, only bigger and with better technology. The Crash Course asks the question What if this assumption is untrue? and provides both data and ideas to support the conclusion that the economic status quo cannot be taken for granted, at least not in the form to which we've become accustomed.
The big story is this: The world has physical limits we are already encountering, but our economy operates as if no physical limits exist. Our economy requires growth. I don't mean that growth is “required” as if it's written in a legal document somewhere, but it is “required” in the sense that our economy only functions well when it's growing. With growth, jobs are created and debts can be serviced. Without growth, jobs, opportunities, and the ability to repay past debts simply and mysteriously disappear, causing economic pain and confusion.
In the near future, humanity as a species will have to grapple with a condition that it has never faced before: less and less energy available each year. In the past, there was always another continent brimming with energy resources to tap; another well that could be drilled; more hydrocarbon wealth that could be brought up from the depths. We have always had access to increased resources when we wanted them, and during that long run of history, we have fashioned an enormously complicated society and global economic model around the idea that there always would be more. This was a bad assumption, and it should have been more rigorously challenged and kept front and center of our national and global attention. It was mostly forgotten, when it wasn't being actively ridiculed.
Along the way, we moved from burning wood to burning coal, then to whale oil, and then to petroleum. The unanswered question is this: After oil, what comes next? What is the next source of energy? Nobody has a truly viable answer as we cross the threshold of Peak Oil, a geological concept that represents the moment after which slightly less and less oil comes up out of the ground no matter how much money we spend or how hard we try.
Many hold out hope that technology will ride to the rescue, perhaps in the form of nuclear power, natural gas, or alternative sources of energy. But the issues of time, scale, and cost loom large, because we have taken too long to finally recognize the imminence and severity of the petroleum predicament. Every analysis that looks into the resource issue concludes there isn't enough left in the ground to build out the clean energy future so many are hoping for.
With a peak in energy extraction, a host of environmental issues suddenly come into play. Agricultural soils that were forced to produce higher yields via the continuous application of fertilizers derived from fossil fuels will turn out to have been fundamentally depleted. Minerals of increasingly dilute concentrations that require more and more energy to produce will suddenly cost exponentially more each year to extract and process. Where markets once allocated our energy resources according to ability to pay, true scarcity will soon form the dividing line between economic progress and decline for the world's various nations. How soon will all of this happen? If not this year, then within 10–20 years, which is the blink of an eye given the scale and scope of the potential disruptions implied by this structural shift.
It is only when we assemble the challenges we find in the economy, energy, and the environment—what I call “the three Es”—into one spot that we can fully appreciate the true dimensions of our predicament. The next 20 years are going to be shaped by fundamental resource scarcity in ways we never experienced in history. The developed world is entering this race economically handicapped, with no one to blame but itself.
Once I truly understood the role of net energy in delivering all of the miraculous abundance I see and experience, and I then familiarized myself with the inevitable decline of fossil fuels, I came to a startling conclusion: These are the good old days.
This is it. Today, things are as easy and wonderful as they've ever been for the average human on earth over the past few thousand years, and someday we'll look back on today and reminisce about just how great we had it.
“Remember when you could just hop on a plane and go anywhere in the world for the cost of just a day or two of your income?”
“Or how about walking into a grocery store, any time of the year, and buying whatever fresh veggies you wanted at any time of the day or night, without regard to season? Remember that?”
The daily miracle of life is insanely good. Simply click a mouse button and a day or two later the big, brown truck of happiness rolls up your driveway delivering goodies. Or, get knocked out for a painless surgical procedure. Maybe use GPS to navigate the worst Boston commute as you smoothly glide in a well‐engineered personal chariot with 150 horses under the hood.
In truth, you have it better than true royalty did just 100 years ago. And it won't last. It can't. The flows of energy required to maintain the complexity of our current system simply aren't there.
Happiness is not having what you want, it is wanting what you have.
—Sheryl Crow
Having gratitude for what you do have is infinitely better for your mental well‐being than worrying about what you don't, or won't, have. When I fly somewhere I am grateful for the magical speed and ease of the technology. When I fill up my gas tank on my car, I am grateful for the incredibly complex supply chains and financial systems in place for that to happen.
But none of this can last. The energy systems that make it all possible are still 80.4% reliant on fossil fuels, and alternative energy systems are mined, refined, built and installed using fossil fuels. There are exactly zero full‐cycle alternative energy systems that can be rebuilt using their own energy output. As the prolific and incredibly insightful energy and systems author Nate Hagens wisely says, they are not renewable energy systems, they are rebuildable energy systems.
We could and we should be doing things very differently here at this moment in human history, but we're acting like we always have: ignoring problems until they cannot be ignored any longer. This was a workable approach during most of human history, but it's simply insane here with nearly eight billion people, heading towards 10 billion, and no comprehensive plan for weaning ourselves off of fossil fuels.
Heck, there's no plan at all that I have seen.
The primary question is whether we want our future to be shaped by disaster or by design. The set of predicaments and problems we now face are very different from the conditions of the past 20 years, and therefore present a solid challenge to the existing status quo. Those currently wielding power and influence are most likely to defend the status quo, raising the risk that our future will consist more of disaster than design.
Further, abrupt changes have the unfortunate tendency of escaping notice by the majority of people, who have been conditioned to expect that the future will resemble the past. This is a perfectly valid assumption for ordinary moments, but it is a liability during extraordinary times.
From time to time, it may seem that this book is delivering a doom‐and‐gloom message. But truthfully, I consider myself to be an optimist. The spirit and intent of The Crash Course 2.0 are to help you see the options and opportunities in this story of change. I have created a better life for myself and my family through the insights developed from this work. You can, too.
There's a storm coming, and it's time to batten down the hatches.
CHAPTER 2The Lens: How to See the Future
I would like to share with you the method of thinking that led me to buy an irresponsible quantity of gold and silver in 2001, allowed me to skirt the worst of the 2008 financial crisis, and why I now live on a farm in rural Massachusetts. When I am not working at my desk to serve the community assembled at PeakProsperity.com, my partner Evie and I work daily to increase our resilience so that we cannot just survive the coming years and decades, but thrive while we help others do the same.
This method is a “lens” through which the world can be viewed. It combines the economy, energy, and the environment—which I introduced in Chapter 1 (The Coming Storm) as the three Es—into a single, comprehensive whole. It is a systems‐level approach, but one founded on common sense instead of complicated math. If you want to make any sense of the world at all, then the deep expertise of the narrow specialists dominating the mainstream media must be set aside in favor of a generalist's panoramic view. If you find it compelling, then it might change your life and how you see the world, as it has for thousands of other people. If it's not your cup of tea, then that's perfectly fine, too; we need lots of different viewpoints to get through these next few trying years.
The first E, the economy, is founded on a workable understanding of how our money system actually operates, as well as basic economic information about debt, savings, and inflation. Not too much information; just enough to allow you to assess the sustainability of our current trajectory so you can undertake new actions and make new decisions.
Much of this analysis springs from the observation that our particular style of economy is hooked on growth. It needs growth the way some sharks must keep swimming because without constant movement, they'll die. Our financial system isn't addicted to just any kind of growth, but perpetual exponential growth, which is a peculiar thing because that's an impossibility; nothing grows exponentially forever. Or even for all that long.
As you may have noticed, world events seem to be speeding up and becoming ever more chaotic, if not urgent. I believe a thorough understanding of exponential growth helps to explain what's happening. If you are interested in peering into the future with the intent of predicting how it will unfold, you must learn this concept, and how and why it relates to our system of money and, by extension, economy.
Even if we were to limit ourselves to examining just the economy while completely ignoring energy and the environment (as most professional economists do), I could make a compelling case that after the past 50 years our accumulated debts and fiscal mismanagement now comprise the most daunting structural challenges ever in history. As well, there are demographic issues to factor (such as aging populations cashing in and checking out) that make the whole thing look like a rather poorly designed pyramid scheme. The developed world made a collective and colossal bet that the future economy will be a lot larger to pay it all back. But will it?
That's a good question. When we bring in the second E, energy, the story quickly falls apart. Our economy is dependent on growth, and petroleum—oil—is the undisputed king of fuels that drives economic expansion. It has no substitutes, no replacements waiting in the wings, and it is indisputably depleting. As of this writing, there are simply zero credible plans for how alternative or “clean” energy will move from interesting side shows to being the main act. The European natural gas crisis of 2022 revealed that for all of Germany's hundreds of billions of dollars of investments in wind and solar, those technologies were not even remotely close to being able to power the country.
Further, there is growing alignment between various government and private institutions on when Peak Oil will arrive, after which the irreversible decline in oil production will start and last … forever. This does not mean we'll “run out of oil” all at once; it means that despite our best and even heroic efforts, gradually less and less oil will be extracted each year, at higher and higher costs. If oil is depleting but our debt loads and economic system require more oil to fund more growth in order to avoid collapsing, then how does this “pencil out,” as they say? It doesn't. And that's why I wrote this book: to alert you to a quite obvious, but little appreciated, systems‐level impossibility.
Oil is not the only critical resource that will be in shorter‐than‐hoped‐for supply in the future.
Literally dozens of essential minerals and other natural resources found in the third E, the environment (such as silver, copper, cobalt, lithium, and phosphorus) will peak right alongside oil. Many hold out hope that perhaps Elon Musk's electric cars will help save the day, but even the most rudimentary of calculations reveal that getting enough cobalt—an irreplaceable battery component—will be a huge problem. The known reserves simply don't exist.
Again, this is not a story of “running out;” this is a story of resources not being available in sufficient reserves or remaining concentrations to simply step in and take over all the heavy lifting oil provides so perfectly. We'll have to make other arrangements. That's not necessarily a bad thing, but if all your retirement dreams and hopes for your offspring are rooted in the idea that things will carry on as they have, you will be unpleasantly surprised by what the future holds. Forewarned is forearmed.
As fewer and fewer resources are wrested out of the earth to sustain the economy, it will begin to shudder and then shrink.
Will all economic activity cease with the depletion of a few key elements? No, of course not. But neither can our economy continue to operate in precisely the same way that it did when demand alone dictated supply—a system that was based on exponential growth. When that stops, our debt‐based financial system will cease to function as it has for the past few hundred years. Perhaps it won't operate at all and, to be honest, nobody really knows for sure what's going to happen.
It's a really big change and I'm not at all confident anybody in power has any sort of a workable plan. The fact that so many of them have built bunker properties on island nations of late should tell you they don't have full confidence in their plans either.
More worryingly, we are in the midst of several ecosystem collapses and species losses happening with staggering speed. The insect apocalypse is terrifying, with bees and butterflies getting a lot of the attention, but countless smaller and less flashy insect species are also in steep declines. We're busily overseeing the dismantling of a 450‐million‐year‐old food chain, and nobody has the slightest clue what the impacts might be. Worst of all, practically nobody seems to know the cause and even fewer are trying to figure out what it might be.
Droughts and floods now plague our living and agricultural areas with increasing frequency and intensity, raising fears that we might be entering a new era of climate chaos.
A wealth of data suggests a period of profound change is already upon us that warrants the attention of every serious long‐term investor and prudent adult with an eye on the future. We can no longer constrain our thinking to just one E, the economy; we must include the other two Es, energy and the environment. Each of the three Es depends on the other two. They are utterly intertwined and interdependent, and that's why we need to consider them together, all at once.
For far too long, economists behaved as if the economy was an independent system. It is not. It is a subset of the larger world. I attribute all of my success at predicting the unfolding events to the fact that I hold this larger, more complete, and therefore more useful and even predictive view of the world. To understand the economy, we have to understand energy and the environment. Once we see the role of energy in promoting economic growth and complexity (which we'll get into in some detail later) we will be in a position to assess future prospects that might inhibit or reverse the growth.
When we do, we are using what I call “the lens.” The critical insight achieved from using this tool brings the understanding that continued economic growth is absolutely essential for our financial system to avoid collapsing, but is also an impossibility. This is the primary tension of our times. The implications are both profound and numerous.
Once I adopted this lens, I found myself unable to put it completely aside. It shapes my thinking and my decisions and is the primary means by which I make sense of new information when it becomes available.
As a scientist, I have constantly sought evidence that this view, this lens, might be wrong, but the data continues to pile up in its favor.
Of course, if new information comes along and proves this lens to be mistaken or misleading I would change my thinking. But as the information has rolled in over the past several years, the validity of this view has only been confirmed and reinforced.
My big picture conclusion: The next few years and decades will be shaped by Resource Wars.
In 2008, when the video from of The Crash Course first was freely offered to the world, I said the next 20 years are going to be completely unlike the last 20 years. When a sharp corner lies ahead, you have to know it's coming and then steer carefully through the bend. How will the world look in 2030? What will change and why? The lens of the three Es offers some answers and hopefully some comfort, because not knowing why something is happening is its own source of anxiety.
CHAPTER 3A World Worth Inheriting
My mission, and the mission of my company and team, is to create a world worth inheriting. I have three children, and every expectation of having grandchildren someday. I fervently wish to leave them a world as good as the one I was born into. I want them to have the same opportunities that I enjoyed.
This mission extends well beyond my own small clan. I want your children and grandchildren to have access to an abundant world filled with interesting critters, meaningful relationships, purposeful activities, and ample career choices where they can apply their gifts and talents. I believe a world in which everyone enjoys a good measure of prosperity enriches us all.
I am concerned, however, that our current path and trajectory will deliver the exact opposite of these hopes and dreams. My worry is that the cultural inertia of those in power will guide us toward a series of wasted efforts to sustain the unsustainable. The social forces always conspire to keep the status quo chugging along but it is that very trajectory that will deliver us into a future of completely avoidable crisis and shortages. If we allow this to happen, what we will face is a future of scarcity, conflict, and diminished opportunities.
I cannot accept those outcomes and so I have spent nearly every day of the past 15 years building and operating the website PeakProsperity.com. Beyond being a repository of articles, videos, and data, Peak Prosperity is a vibrant community of people such as yourself who are curious, open‐minded, and care deeply about the world they are leaving behind. They understand it's time to begin making arrangements for a very different world than the one they were born into.
To meet the future, as with any great undertaking, we begin by educating ourselves. This means steeling ourselves to take an unflinching look at our many predicaments and facing them squarely and bravely. No more kicking the can down the road for the next generation to deal with, and no more pretending that somehow someone will think of something and fix the unfixable. Education is our first step, taking action comprise the second step, and finding and building community is the third step.
The measure of any generation is what it does with what it has. Luckily, we still have abundant natural resources, and we have all the information we need to make a better future. But our window of opportunity is closing rapidly. Solutions are becoming fewer, and the more time we waste the fewer the options will remain. Someday our windows of opportunity will close entirely; our proactive options will have been permanently squandered. We will be left to choose among an unpleasant palette of meager choices. That's grim, right? So, let's not do that and decide to take a different path.
A world worth inheriting is one whose citizens are living within their economic and natural budgets. It's a place of clean air and clear water, packed with birds and insects and animals living in lush bioregions rooted in vibrant soils. It is a stable world where people and businesses can plan for the future because they know what will be there when it arrives. It is a world in which the brittle architecture of our just‐in‐time food systems and businesses are replaced by robust, sustainable, locally‐focused operations. In this world worth inheriting, communities take on more responsibility for their destinies, and stronger and more fulfilling relationships develop among neighbors.
Right now, sadly, we cannot even count on our money, the sacred contract that binds us all, to be managed well. Perhaps it will be worth less; perhaps it will be worthless. These are both possible and even likely outcomes given our current economic trajectory, and both are unacceptable.
If we humans cannot even manage something as simple as not creating too much money, which is a very simple thing to do by comparison, what hope do we have of figuring out which combination of the 500,000 environmental chemical contaminants we've released are causing insect populations to collapse? The answer is “none.”
I know we can do better and, frankly, we deserve better.
What will it take to do better? The answer I have is both simple and devilishly hard: We have to change the stories we tell ourselves. We're an oral species. Stories and mythologies actually run the show, as those are hooked straight into our emotions and systems of belief. The narratives that we run at the individual, national, and even global levels define the actions we take and what we prioritize. Therefore, the stories are destiny. This is basic brainwashing, when you get down to it. The more we tell ourselves we are A or B, the more we believe it.
Here is an example: Up until about 2006, the entire developed world perpetuated an ongoing story that went like this: Houses always go up in price.
As we all know, the tale was not true, but it was a deeply embedded belief that shaped individual decisions and led even the most sophisticated investors in the world astray. That's the power of a story.
The right narrative can save the world, while the wrong one can lead us straight to personal and/or collective hell. This means we should take the time to examine our current stories and assess whether they are truly the right ones for our era and our set of circumstances.
Some of the stories we might want to reevaluate include:
Economic growth is essential (and good).
The rest of the world needs the United States more than the United States needs the rest of the world.
Technology will always meet our energy needs.
Alternative energy can easily replace fossil fuels.
The experts know best and are both competent and have our best interests in mind.
There is a very strong chance that some or all of these stories (and many more) will prove to be wrong, and, like any false narrative, highly destructive to hopes, dreams, and prosperity.
We are at an absolutely unique time in humanity's history, where the steps we take, or don't take, today are going to have incredibly lasting impacts on the future. Which means we'd better be sure we have the right data in hand and the right stories steering the ship. We need to locate any false stories and change them, while at the same time supplanting them with realistic, positive visions that will guide the transformations that we need to see.
In most stories of change, there are winners and losers. I want to give you the opportunity to be among the winners. I also want to set the stage for building a more prosperous future for everyone. I believe it can be done. We don't need new technologies, or revolutions, or dramatic breakthroughs in thoughts or ideas; we already have everything we need, save one thing: political will.
But that, too, can be overcome. It begins here between us, in this book, starting with a proper and honest assessment of the situation in which we find ourselves.
I am confident that together we can indeed create a world worth inheriting.
CHAPTER 4Trust Yourself
To enhance your use of the lens described in Chapter 2, I invite you to adopt the technique of trusting yourself. Somehow, in some countries, the idea of doing your own research has been demonized in some circles. Related to that would be the derivative of forming your own opinions or trusting yourself. I think you should do all of these things.
If the recent past has taught us anything, it's that many so‐called experts cannot be trusted. Far too many are blinded by their investment in a given school of thought, dogma or ideology, while others are compromised by conflicts of interest.
I now go through a process of vetting every expert and have them on probation from the get‐go, requiring them to prove themselves first before I will absorb their data or ideas.
Like many others, my faith in nearly all major public institutions has been eroded, and in some cases it's gone. The Federal Reserve lost it when its leaders kept talking about “price stability” and “full employment” but their actions only ever did one thing reliably: widen the wealth gap.
The Centers for Disease Control (CDC) proved during the Covid pandemic that its leaders made decisions about public health only after it had first aligned with political and pharmaceutical interests. Often this meant public health never really influenced the decisions and the United States suffered many more unnecessary deaths than in other countries, such as Sweden and India.
The U.S. Food and Drug Administration (FDA) similarly seems to be completely owned by pharmaceutical interests, while the U.S. Energy Information Administration (EIA) has still never managed to publicly mention or explore the concept of Peak Oil. How is this even possible?
Each of these represents a profound individual failure of mission (and other countries have eerily parallel stories to tell about their own equivalent public entities). Collectively, they clearly say something very close to “You're on your own!”
So, the invitation being made here is to give yourself permission to rely on your own intuition, research, and experience regarding what is best for you and your family. Go with what you just know to be right. Trust your gut. Trust yourself.
If something doesn't seem right, it probably isn't. If you wait for authorities, even trusted professionals, to offer a clear signal that it's time to take different actions and make different decisions, you will almost certainly be late to the game and disappointed with the results. It may not sound easy, but if you learn to trust yourself first and foremost, it will greatly improve your chances of future success.
It took me a while to come to this realization, but I finally figured out that my interests were only accidentally and occasionally aligned with those of Wall Street and the numerous purveyors of their products. Ditto for the FDA, whose conflicts of interest are transparently tilted in favor of pharmaceutical companies. Same for the Federal Reserve, which cares a lot more about “the financial system” and bank profitability than it does the welfare of the general public.
Conflicts of Interest
Conflicts of interest are a part of life (and always have been), but today they are usually carefully hidden, so it's important to remember to bring them consciously to mind.
Once the conflicts of interest are worked out, one conclusion that emerges is that it often makes sense to do the exact opposite of what Wall Street recommends. Wall Street can be 100% counted on to always seek to make a profit for itself. That's all it cares about, that's all it does, and it does it really well. If there aren't sufficient options for both itself and its many customers to earn a profit, then Wall Street will ensure that it is the winner.
Similarly, politicians deal in a form of profits, too, but their currency is power. It took me a while to see the game for what it was, but I now know that waiting for the political class to inform us about any issues of real or pressing urgency is not wise, especially when the issues do not have any clear political advantage. Take Peak Oil (discussed in Chapter 17), for example—there's no “win” in that story for any politician in office, which results in nothing being said at all. They simply don't talk about it … publicly, anyway. They will speak earnestly if not endlessly about climate change but not do anything about it except possibly tinker with the tax code at the margins or spend more money they haven't got, effectively stealing from the future. Buckle down and ask people to sacrifice today (via higher taxes and/or lower economic growth) to carry out a well‐considered plan for the future? It hasn't happened once in the 15 years I've been closely tracking the issue.
Where Wall Street has misinformed us and politicians have chosen not to inform us at all, the mainstream media has also dropped the ball, failing to counteract these transgressions by failing to provide necessary oversight and essential context. The media, our “fourth pillar of democracy,” has largely failed in its investigative duties, and now mainly provides interesting but generally unhelpful post‐mortems on accidents after they've happened. And that's on a good day. Mainstream media is now mostly in the business of reinforcing the main narratives of the political and financial power structures. They are indisputably the greatest purveyors of misinformation.
You Are the Ultimate Truth‐Teller
The way to counteract these conflicts of interest is to simply trust yourself, decide for yourself what makes sense, and act accordingly. When it comes to great moments in history, where enormous departures from “how things were” violently swerve off the road and into new territory, early movers have the biggest advantage.
Do not wait to read about a looming issue in your local newspaper or hear about it on television from a politician, because by then it will be too late.
In a nutshell, if something seems wrong, it probably is. I have lost count of the number of people who have told me that they “knew something wasn't right” as their portfolios shed 40% or more in 2008 and 2009. Many did not fully trust the placating explanations offered by their stockbrokers, but they didn't act on those feelings, and they subsequently lost money.
The critical thing about trusting yourself is that it often means acting on incomplete information, relying on what you might call a “gut hunch” or intuition. Our bodies will often “know” something is wrong well before our minds can fully process the situation.
In the future that I anticipate, where colliding trends in the economy, energy, and the environment are going to deliver extremely large and fast‐paced changes, the ability to make rapid decisions will be essential. This is the sort of landscape where trusting yourself becomes a vital skill.
Instincts Can Save You
A second aspect of trusting yourself is that quite often your instincts will lead you to do what very few other people seem to be doing. Surprisingly often, your gut sense will tell you to buck the conventional wisdom, ignore your broker, or override a past decision. I am now extremely glad I trust myself to make decisions that run counter to conventional wisdom and sometimes cut across the social grain.
I benefited greatly from trusting my gut feelings that led to responses such as buying gold when it was generally reviled as an investment back in 2003, selling my house before the housing collapse, and dumping all of my stocks before the big rundown into 2008. I fought my broker and withstood smirks from knowing friends and even some family members who were sure that I was making enormous mistakes. After all, nobody else seemed to be doing these things, so how could they make any sense?
