The Post-Partisan Emporium

How Vulnerable Is Your Personal Supply Chain? Charles Hugh Smith How vulnerable is your personal supply chain? For the average American, the answer is: very. Americans consider abundance and ready availability as birthrights so basic they're like the air we breathe.  The idea that shelves could become bare and stay bare is incomprehensible. yet that is the world we're entering, for a number of complex reasons. One is that the world added not just another billion humans (now 7.9 billion), but one billion middle-class consumers, consumers who use about 100 times more energy per person than poor people.  These additional billion middle-class consumers doubled the number of high-energy consuming humans in a few decades, and this enormous expansion of demand has consumed all the easy-to-extract resources of the planet. There are no cheap, easy-to-extract resources left; all that's left is expensive to reach, extract, transport, etc., and since energy is the master resource, as i...

Thanks to Starfire for recommending this article... Is it possible that the world is approaching end times?   Gail Tverberg I frequently write that the world economy is, in physics terms, a dissipative structure that is powered by energy. It can grow for a time, but eventually it reaches limits of many kinds. Ultimately, it can be expected to stop growing and collapse. It seems to me that the world economy is showing signs that it has reached a turning point. Economic growth stopped in 2020 and is having trouble restarting in 2021. Fossil fuel energy of all types (oil, coal and natural gas) is  in short supply , relative to the world’s huge population. Ultimately, this inadequate energy supply can be expected to pull the world economy toward collapse. The world economy doesn’t behave the way most people would expect. Standard modeling approaches miss the point that economies require adequate supplies of energy products of the right kinds, provided at the right times of day and...